It seems a new era has been started. An era in which the imagination is no longer intimately horrified by the idea of thousands of people being murdered as if they were mere objects. The image of Auschwitz, to speak with Adorno, has become a consumable heritage, an inherent part of our culture -as if it were no abomination that could and should not have been.
No, the large part of society no longer has primal emotions concerned with this. Of course: we do feel perplexity, unbelief, shame and disgust to a certain extent, but not fully. This change has come about simultaneously with the more and more individualized cultural developments. What grips our guts (and cunts) most, is not the image of a pile of bodies, seen from a distance, but the image of one body being tortured in most horrible ways. One can imagine this because the body could be one's own, the feeling could be one's own. The most sacred thing is one's own life. This, I must confess, is also what I tend to lean toward to. It is not an uncriticizable tendency, though. One that, perhaps, we should fight in order to save some sort of civilization. The piled bodies are lifes that are lost already, people that have passed through life and cannot suffer anymore. It doesn't seem to matter why they ended, as long as we don't have to see their individual suffering. Horror movies of past -and probably coming- decades perfectly depict the grandest horror of modern times. Movies about World War II have become things about heroism, blunt suffering and unspeakable grief. But all that is unspeakable, has been reduced to this: the hollow phrase "unspeakable". We speak of it, but do not know what it means. It is a luxury we should be more careful with. But, when looking at popular culture, the emptiness seems prevalent and hard to fight: "Mass murder, that is sooo 1940's!" Just a bit less weight, and the lightness becomes unbearable.
No comments:
Post a Comment