Excerpts from Ralph Cintron: Hyperbolic culture

 

The hyperbolic hypermodern occurs where and when the limits of modernity confront their rupture, and this is a source of exuberance and optimism.

In a more negative vein, the notion of modernity as an accelerated present captures an underlying disquiet: Has late capitalism or late modernity rushed too fast and too far, leaving behind all former moorings including codes of decency and social justice; has the very notion of limit been discarded so that modernity, unchecked and headless, continues to absorb even more of the world's energia without guidance? From this perspective, as so many have argued, the promised utopia of modernity has devolved into dystopia, and the vision of an enlightened, rationalized social order has become global disorder. If these are the conditions that our times have hurtled into (and not all would agree, particularly the keepers of wealth and power who profit from modernity), it is understandable that we would convert events into signs and read the experiences of the last century — the world wars, the various forms of holocausts and ethnic cleansings, the large scale environmental stresses, the endless threats of different kinds of mass destruction, the vast and unequal distribution of global capital — as brilliant spectacles of a bankrupt modernity playing itself out with increasing rapidity on the largest stage possible, the entire planet. It seems reasonable to say, then, that hyperbolic material productivity has generated hyperbolic omens, or at least hyperbolic interpretations of insignificant signs. For hyperbole, in the sense being described here, is not so much a figure of speech, or a rhetorical descriptor of a particular kind of verbal act. Rather, it names the danger that was always there in the teachings and ethos of modernity — that is, that the wide scale realization of human and material capacity might distort the communal bond. Hyperbole, then, as the naming of excess and the making of astonishment points to and produces the large gap between actions that revel in their assertion of power as opposed to more mundane actions that sustain the communal and the ecological.

Of course, hyperbole also occurs in more conservative contexts and communities, and this too must be delineated in order to deliver a capacious understanding of the operations of hyperbole. Often it names a kind of comic buffoonery performed with exaggeration and excess that satirizes the pretension of an individual as a way of calling such a person back to community. Fairly clear in these instances is the difference between what is being hyperbolically satirized and the restraining norm that is being reinforced. Hyperbole here, then, serves normative values that someone’s excess threatens. Part of the difficulty of modernity, however, is the extent to which innovation, originality, individuality, creativity, and dynamism, which sanction rupturing, become heralded values; they cultivate an aspiration to go beyond. In this sense, excess becomes part of the structure of modernity, eroding the force of a prior normative by, for instance, labeling it, as postmoderns do, "arbitrary." What might have once been considered unseemly is now released. In simplest of terms, a conversion of energy occurs: the pent up potential of the unseemly, which had been under restraint, is now sanctioned, hence, released; or a change of place occurs: what was peripheral (unseemly) is ready to move to the center. To repeat, in late modernity and late capitalism, hyperbole ceases to be a figure of speech marking the boundary of the probable and the improbable or a critical judgment determining the unseemly as against the proper; rather, it becomes part of the motor of what it means to be. "Out with the old, in with the new," goes the American saying — and given what I have been arguing thus far, I can't help but note its strange exuberance and innocence..

By inventing a future and imagining even more of it, late modernity derives its special energia, its rapid pace, all of which helps to postpone the arrival of that strange apocalyptic moment of no more future.

Much of the fantasy life of late modernity tracks between the following hyperbolic images: on the one hand, human inventiveness/innovativeness will solve all problems, and so there is no natural cap to growth, no limit to an ever expanding future; on the other, apocalyptic malevolence is nipping at the human project because our very own inventions/innovations are linked to some innate perversity or blindness in the human condition. Even if the malevolence comes in the form of a meteor, which is an impending apocalypse not of our own doing, the apocalyptic signature remains — something much larger than ourselves is threatening to do us in. In short, limit, finally, is going to exert itself over the hyperbolic condition called humanity. Much of the iconography, then, that tell us something about the meanings and directions of late modernity vacillates between the poles of optimism and doom, between limitlessness and limit. Each pole hyperbolically answers the other's excess, and, according to my analysis, it is their pairing that functions as part of the dialogical structure of late modernity.

The towers represented architectural excess and engineering innovation, but also an excess of urban political clout, that is, the ability of political will when fused to the will of capital to dismantle competing wills and shift the geography of power in a city that arguably represents the greatest concentration of the world's wealth.

In short, the WTC represented a rhetoric of excess — that is, the hyperbolic hypermodern — across a number of planes: urban politics, architecture and engineering, and most especially as one of the world's major nodes for organizing vaster and more nimble forms of wealth making.

The greater the hyperbole and symbolic quotient, the stronger the political message. The goal that underlies the sort of hyperbolic action described in this essay is that of domination without reply. In order to understand this effect with some accuracy, we might pay attention to the idea of astonishment. What does it mean, this desire to astonish? I would suggest that the goal is to break down the reigning logics of the viewer, to cast the viewer somewhere else, toward, perhaps, stupefaction and speechlessness where the mind, albeit momentarily, is stripped of available meanings and explanatory narratives. To the extent that the viewer does not know what to say, does not understand, the normative structures have been overthrown. The collapsing WTC towers literally instilled those kinds of reactions, as we will see shortly. But the psychosocial motive behind the creation of an astonishment that overwhelms speech and comprehension is the desire for a power that enacts a kind of cleansing that washes out the known and never replaces it. Apocalyptic malevolence in so far as it aspires to or achieves this kind of astonishment is, in the end, an enactment of brutal purity.

It is difficult to know whether Al Queda expected literally to topple the WTC towers, but as television showed us the second plane and later as each tower collapsed we were guided into successive levels of astonishment. It was at this moment that we can understand how astonishment can produce silence or speechlessness, and the point here is not just a symbolic or theoretical point. It is a point about human corporality. The following quotation from Fire Chief Walter Kowalczyk recounting his experience of 9/11 summarizes my analysis:

As soon as we came through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, the devastation was almost immediate. In my career, I have managed many multiple-casualty incidents from plane crashes to severe train derailments, so managing high-scale incidents never scared me. However, as you're driving down West Street and you have to maneuver the vehicle to avoid driving over what appeared to be body parts as well as debris, my mouth went dry. I had the sensation that I had a job to do. I had to ensure the safety of the E.M.S. (Emergency Medical Service) work force. But how do I do this if I can't talk?

Kowalczyk, an experienced emergency officer, someone accustomed to dealing with the hyperbolic, encountered a scene whose proportion reduced him to near silence. His condition is what astonishment intends. Perhaps what his example suggests is that when mind and emotions are in normative conditions the body functions as expected, but when astonishment washes over mind and emotions, it takes the body with it.

Al Queda — and by extension the Arab states — cannot be imagined as somehow backward or outside the orbit of late modernity and the West, for if it were profoundly outside the reach of global capitalism and modernity, it would be no enemy at all. Being firmly inside their reach, however, is to be subject to their unequal distributions, for late modernity and capitalism are disorganized and fissured. And one common response to unequal distribution is to fight for the local determination of global modernity and capital as opposed to being determined by them from afar. In this special, richer sense, then, the face-off is completely from within late modernity, and it concerns the unresolved disturbances that are always there. To view Al Queda this way is to understand that the apocalyptic madness of fundamentalism, despite its archaic origins, has meshed without much difficulty to that other apocalyptic madness, namely, late modernity’s hyperbolic self-doubt. This self-doubt is, in effect, an empty slot ready to be filled by any number of golems lurking behind the shining, technological surfaces of late modernity: fear of nuclear holocaust, global warming, DNA engineering, over consumption of natural resources, super resistant disease strains, and so on.

 

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