Inspired by the non-shitty shitstorm here at Superfani called ‘twitter philosophy’ [->], I’m spinning the discussion off from lelangir’s epigram:

nihilism is knowledge/power; in most cases, it can only be realized/actualized within capitalist institutions, thus materialism is the means towards idealism, towards the construction of contingent truths, towards a philosophical happiness that grants material happiness.

Responses to this by the commenters abound, but I’ll get to them later. Meanwhile I greeted an important guest that invited himself into my media consumption schedule. I don’t mind because he’s a favorite of mine: the novelist and semiotician, Umberto Eco. He told me to tell lelangir,

“Listen to the fags that contributed to this supposedly non-shitty shitstorm first.”

So I was like, “uh, okay.” Let us then to the relevant responses:

Kaiserpingvin says:

23 March 2009 at 11:42 am

So, in capitalist society nihilism will arise more frequently. This will lead to idealism, since we can scribble what we want on the empty canvas of Everything. Since it has been brought about by knowledge and power, we will be able to realize our ideals, leading to idealism, in it’s own turn leading to material wealth (for… everyone? The nihilists?).

The ‘Empty Canvas of Everything’ Kaiser is talking about refers to my claiming nihilism as a powerful state wherein creation is possible rather than a bleak wasteland of no possibility. I try to build on Kaiser’s point…

ghostlightning says:

23 March 2009 at 8:57 pm

Most people are ‘trapped’ in constructs that they hold to be absolute truths. Nihilism holds none of these ‘truths’ privileged, and allows for power and freedom to create. Deconstructions: Capital/money is not necessarily morally repugnant. We can build a bigger needle within whose eye camels can saunter through – or just genetically engineer nanocamels.

Ideals can be constructed/pastiched/invented – and will not suffer from the hegemony of accepted traditions. Capital, which is coveted by the institutions that foment the accepted traditions is a great leveler.

But I don’t think I can establish a complete causal framework between nihilism and capitalism.

I didn’t think I could, but somebody else sure did:

animekritik says:

23 March 2009 at 11:19 pm

i think that causal connection between capitalism and nihilism is there. simply stated, money buys everything which means it destroys boundaries including boundaries of meanings. For example, last year my wife and I went to Germany and Greece. Let me say that again: last year, I, a simple islander and my thai wife visited GERMANY and GREECE. Our ancestors 100 years ago, not to mention 200 or 500, would have never been able to do so. And what happens? my wife says: oh, I want to go to Egypt next, and so on. The world becomes totally flat, totally accessible. There are no boundaries, and thus we start to realize that all of those amazing “constructs”, cultures are on the same plane. If i can have have anything i want with money, how i can put things and places on pedestals??? I visited Napoleon’s Tomb about 3 years ago. I!! What’s Napoleon now. Nothing. Then nihilism creeps in..

That’s clear enough, and I could totally get behind it after reading the ouvre of Thomas L. Friedman, particularly The World is Flat (2005) [->]. To reduce the points of the novel and consider animekritik’s, it boils down to capital provides access to the exotic and mystic, removing their mythological veneer (for some) — by extension, all the way to nothing (empty and meaningless), as with the artifacts of history that animekritik mentioned. Now lelangir steps in:

lelangir says:

24 March 2009 at 12:48 am

A psychological privilege such as Nihilism can only be enacted/actualized within capitalist institutions (universities) once you’ve accumulated the knowledge necessary to reconstruct your perception of the world. Maybe the pseudo-intelligent believe that there really is such an absolute truth as “equality”, but then why on earth does racism persist to this day?

The relationship between discourses is not hierarchical. A discourse of absolute truths (i.e. rich people are evil) cannot be so easily overturned by a discourse of contingent truths (i.e. rich people are not always evil). It’s amplified here because the discourse of contingent truths is situated in the very substance of the discourse of absolute truths. It’s like a patient in a straight jacket: you think you’re sane, and in your straight jacket, you say “I’m sane! Let me free! I’m sane!” – and the doctors look and say “of course someone in a straight jacket would say they’re sane!”. Thus, a rich person who has the education to say that rich people are not always evil says to a poor person “rich people are not always evil” will surely get some murderous glares from poor people who think that all rich people are evil.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Money and capital, while not the only enabler of education, is very powerful.

Umberto Eco would agree with this, it seems. He wrote (speaking about some functions of literature):

What use is this intangible power we call literature? The obvious reply is the one I have already made, namely, that it is consumed for its own sake and therefore does not have to serve any purpose. But such a disembodied view of the pleasure of literature risks reducing it to the status of jogging or doing crossword puzzles–both of which primarily serve some purpose, the former the health of the body, the latter the expansion of one’s vocabulary. What I intend to discuss is therefore a series of roles that literature plays in bout our individual and our social lives.

Above all, literature keeps language alive as our collective heritage. By definition language goes its own way; no decree from on high, emanating either from politicians or from the academy, can stop its progress and divert it toward situations that they claim are for the best. The Fascists triid to make Italians say mescita instead of bar, coda di gallo  instead of cocktail, rete instead of goal, auto publicca instead of taxi, and our language paid no attention. Then it suggested a lexical monstrosity, an unacceptable archaism like autista instead of chauffeur, and the language accepted it. Maybe because it avoided a sound unknown to Italian. It kept taxi, but gradually, at least in the spoken language, turned this into tassì.

Language goes where it wants to but is sensitive to the suggestions of literature. Without Dante there would have been on unified Italian language. When, in his  De Vulgari Eloquentia (On Vernacular Eloquence), Dante condemns the various Italian dialects and decides to forge a new “illustrious vernacular.”

Twenty years of Fascist talk of “Rome’s fated hills” and “ineluctable destinies,” of “unavoidable events” and “plows tracing furrows in the ground,” have in the end left no trace in contemporary Italian, whereas traces have been left by certain virtuoso experiments of futurist prose, which were unacceptable at the time. And while I often hear people complain about the victory of a middle Italian that has been popularized by television, let us not forget that the appeal to a middle Italian, in its noblest form, came through the plain and perfectly acceptable prose of Manzoni, and later Svevo or Moravia.

By helping to create language, literature creates a sense of identity and community. I spoke initially of Dante, but we might also think of what Greek civilization would have been like without Homer, German identity without Luther’s translation of the Bible, the Russian language without Pushkin, or Indian civilization without its foundation epics.

And literature keeps the individual’s language alive as well. these days many lament the birth of a new “telegraphese,” which is being foisted on us through email and mobil-phone text messages, where one can even say “I love you” with short-message symbols; but let us not forget that the youngsters who send messages in this new form of shorthand are, at least in part, the same young people who crowd those new cathedrals of the book, the multistory bookstores, and who, even when they flick through a book without buying it, come into contact with the cultivated and the elaborate literary styles to which their parents, and certainly their grandparents, had never been exposed.

Although there are more of them compared with the readers of previous generations, these young people clearly are a minority of the six billion inhabitants of this planet; nor am I idealistic enough to believe that literature can offer relief to the vast number of people who lack basic food and medicine. But I would like to make one point: the wretches who roam around aimlessly in gangs and kill people by throwing stones from a highway bridge or setting fire to a child–whoever these people are–turn out this way not because they have been corrupted by computer “new-speak” (they don’t even have access to a computer) but rather because they are excluded from the universe of literature and from those places where, through education and discussion, they might be reached by a glimmer from the world of values that stems from and sends us back again to books.

From on literature, (2002)

Did you get that lelangir? Professor Eco seconds your assertion! He used a lot more words, but he said it pretty so I blockquoted him. This post is less about nihilism, than the utility of media/literature/cultural production, which actually means nothing in absolute terms (but not in contingent terms) anyway, so I guess nihilism stands.

I extend Eco’s point to our preferred medium, anime. I daresay that it’s changing people’s behavior outside of Japan, creating sub-sub-sub-cultures that we don’t wholly know or are even aware of. The distribution of anime internationally is never limited to the university setting, but the intellectualization of it, and most media occurs there. Intellectual activity can be located in the universities,  and it is through capital that this is possible: capital pays for labor, that is supplied by the intellectuals by either creating content for books, journals, and other media or teaching the students who can afford the tuition.

On a personal level, I’ve come to realize that I’m no longer in this center ergo my own thinking and work is far from where the ‘action’ is. It is through weblogs, particularly this one where I get an opportunity to intellectualize and reflect. It bears note that the proponents of Superfani are academics to some degree, and some of its participants are still of university/graduate school age. So I take this in and appreciate my good fortune.

My ability to participate is enabled by the university system of which I am a product of, paid for by the compensation for my parents’ labor in a capitalist system.

So with this ability to participate, knowing fully the ultimate meaninglessness of this effort and caring little for that ultimacy, I look at this captured frame:

…and derive that god is dead [->], at least in this image.