Perhaps the only really moving speech in
the twenty first century was given by Greta Thunberg, who characterized the
official rhetoric around climate change – way around, whilst making as much
money and as little change as possible – as bla bla bla. “Build better bla bla bla.
Green economy bla bla bla.” And, as she
acutely said, we are drowning in the bla.
Not only is Thunberg correct about every speech
by every politician in the past twenty to thirty years – in America from Mr.Bring
it on to Mr. Hope to Ms. Break the glass ceiling (symbolically of course) to American
first and Mr. Build Back Better, and
every one elsewhere, because frankly, the political class is the blab la bla
class, leading us to the zombie apocalypse – but she was also obviously
referencing Friedrich Kittler’s famous essay on Lacan, Dracula’s Legacy.
Well, who knows? But Kittler’s essay, which
I decided to exercise my brain on – instead of crunching the news of the war in
Ukraine, which is like eating shit every morning – does enter, crucially, into
the nexus between the recording of the voice and what is brought by the voice –
the signifier. Brought into our all too organic ear.
"If even Freud’s fundamental
rule prescribes speaking at random [ins Blaue], if, further, the most directr
way to the pleasure principle, without all those chin-ups “into higher spheres,
as laid down by aristotelian ethics” leads to such bla bla , then nothing else
will do. In order to tape blabla, magnetic tape, tv cameras and radio
microsphones were invented.”
This is a harsh
judgment, since we have long fancied that we are a society of facts, when all
is said and done, a society that could not have invented magnetic tape or any
of the rest of it if we had not a firmer foundation than bla bla. Or, as the
first generation of Anglo analytic philosophers used to say, before digging
into their disgusting English cuisine at the table in Oxford, nonsense.
Nonsense, the magic wand.
Well, Greta and
Kittler, I think, see through the nonsense crap. It is the sense, the infinite
sensemaking and infinite denial, that is blabla. The most nonsensical of all
events – the creating of an earth that will be hostile to the very lives of all
the sensemakers – which is fully underway. In our imagination, the rich – who have
been credited, with more blabla than even was accorded the apotheosis of Roman
emperors, with being “creators”, when their only creation was administration
and investment built on other people’s labor – get away. They build spaceships
and get away. Or they will all go to Peter Thiel’s Treasure Island and eat
lobster.
But will they catch
the lobsters? And make the pots they boil them in? I don’t think so. Bla bla then will eat like a cancer through
their bones. And all our bonery, as even
a child, or teenager, can see. The pleasure principle, whip in hand, will take
off its mask, then.
Such a price to pay - the nobel prize in economics was awarded to a special specimen of bla, William Nordhaus, who calculated that the extinction of the human race would be a loss of precisely 100 trillion dollars, although who exactly would lose that money, or what money means when there are no exchangers, is not a question for a University of Chicago raree show - and such ignobility and nonsense on our stumbling out of the exit.