famous comment on the racing car. Hitler, too, applauded speed
for its own sake, gave money for land-speed record attempts, promoted road building, and supported the propaganda of speed
(one film made on his orders was called Roads Make Happiness).
Futurists of today include supporters of “The Singularity,”
which is a modern exemplar of the Politics of Artifice. The
Singularity involves futurists working for the coming
“Intellectual Revolution”—a term intended to invoke the massive
societal changes of the Industrial Revolution. The Singularity
supports genetic engineering and nanotechnology as well as
Artificial Intelligence and transhuman intelligence, speaking of
machine minds evolving “beyond human perspectives and emotional traits,” looking for “human-surpassing advances,” which
recalls Nietzsche’s Zarathustra contending that “man is something which ought to be overcome.” Like Marinetti and the
Italian Futurists, The Singularity is obsessed with acceleration;
Accelerating Times is the newsletter of the Acceleration Studies
Foundation, and there is an organization called Accelerating
Change, while the past is described as a “quick look through the
rear-view mirror.” (Where are we? In Marinetti’s racing car.)
Contrast this with the deft and subtle “future” of the Dreamtime
which knits an authentic eternity into the present.
There are conceptual hyperlinks between and among many of
the following things: the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition,
Francis Bacon, genetic engineering, Bush/Blair and their media
allies, the tortures at Guantánamo Bay, the Italian futurists’ fascism, the transhumans of the Artificers’ dreams, The Singularity,
a hatred of nature, the crushing of indigenous cultures and the
severity of climate collapse as a piece of geo-engineering at first
hapless but now deliberate. This is the Politics of Artifice.
What stands against this? The Politics of Pastoral. Against
the supermen are the common people on common land,
anti-enclosure. In Virgil’s first Eclogue, Meliboeus represents the
common people dispossessed of land and cattle. Philip Sidney
said of the Politics of the Pastoral that it “can show the misery of
people under hard lords and ravening soldiers.” (Nietzsche’s
term the “lords of the earth,” for a ruling race crushing ordinary
people, is a title uncomfortably close to Wall Street’s “Masters of
the Universe,” in a similar relationship.)
Why now, the pastoral? Look at its genealogy. Just as Bacon’s
cruel theoretical attacks on nature were in the ascendant, that
great metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell came to nature’s
defense, and used the pastoral to do so. Just as the Industrial
Revolution brought its own onslaught against nature, the
Romantics defiantly stepped forward on behalf of wild nature
and the Politics of Pastoral. Today, just as nature is under threat
in reality and conceptually from all aspects of artifice, so now
there are those who relish being modern Romantics
(Subcomandante Marcos. Poet. Revolutionary. Romantic), those
who speak in support of the people of the land, those who would
defend the pastoral as our home.
You may say that pastoral is “idealized” nature and therefore not
“realistic.” Of course. But pastoral’s ideal is far more realistic than
artifice. The whole purpose of artifice is to deny the real. The whole
purpose of pastoral’s idealization is to augment the real, as dreams
and art augment the everyday with deeper truths. The Inuit boy
playing Spyro was being denied all realities while his grandfather’s
stories o=ered enhanced realities, the Arctic fox chasing the horizon
in a story which yielded more meanings with each telling.
In the Arctic, language is melting with each elder’s death, every
one a word artist of a melting world. The younger generation knows
fewer and fewer terms and when the words for ice and snow melt
away, so the knowledge they contain melts too. (And indeed there is
more: the land itself, the ice to which those words referred, could
melt and vanish in the early e=ects of climate change.)
Against this sadness, note how The Singularity speaks
approvingly of a time “post language”—that sere idea, that barren concept made of asbestos and fiberglass. I already know I
cannot live there. The human spirit needs language, shimmering and liquid. The virtual world, the antinatural world, kills
metaphor. I couldn’t call language “shimmering” without knowledge of the natural world, light on water. I couldn’t call metaphor
“metaphor” where there is no carrying and no border to cross.
Language needs the natural world, each word has real “roots.”
Language is “fossil poetry,” but if you’ve never found a fossil,
held it in your real hand, given it to your real friend, you cannot
treasure Emerson’s remark. We are animated by the tutelary
genius of language.
While artifice refuses metaphor, pastoral delights in the radical
generosity of even the idea of similes. The daisy, that metaphor,
the day’s eye. To every garden, dozens of humble suns. Pastoral
swells with meanings, allusions, conjectures, modalities, connotations, it is washed with emotional color, it is myriad-minded,
allegorical, comic, symbolic, seasonal, sad, crescent with meanings and the reckless grace notes of plurality.
This meaning and no other, says artifice. No pluralities, no
connotations, no similes, no puns. Meaning, at its most totalitarian. One meaning. One Fake One. Like plastic, it will yield nothing to the touch of the mind. And suddenly then how bleak the
world, how untextured, how singular and how unminded.
The meanness of meaning in artifice has a pernicious political counterpoint: the rise of The One State, in e=ect. One
Singularity. One culture. Consider Peter Thiel, Facebook board
member and early investor, who describes himself as “way libertarian,” is heavily involved in The Singularity, and cowrote a book
