“The first city attacked by land is called Happiness.”
This is probably the first and last thing we need to be informed for by the press today. Nothing else is that important as the fact, that Happiness was attacked by land. It could be attacked by air, by sea, but it’s not, it’s attacked by land.
In case you wonder, Happiness (Щастие) is a city at the Lugansk region in Ukraine. A city that, as I already made clear, was attacked by land. Like the good old times — times in which the battlefield took place in the mode of reciprocity, of visible causation, of murder face to face. This is not entirely the case, of course, but there is nevertheless something significant, even signifying in this kind of “civility” — to look your victim in the eyes. The bombs, presumably, are not late. Their anonymity, like the quasi-anonymity of their victims, requires another mode, another regime of signification if we are to make sense of contemporary warfare. However, the image that the war is spreading throughout all of our present mediums is way more weird and problematic. If we are to understand it, we must first of all try to comprehend the initial character of war, it’s fundamental grounding.
For this specific purposes, we can reformulate a bit section 3 from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle:
The [war as a] spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a [quasi-]means of unification. As a[n internal] part of [capitalist] society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. [War-as-a-spectacle as crystalized sociality; as common denominator of an competitive mode of rationality and/or relationality.] But due to the very fact that this sector is [somehow] separate [from any other, not metaphorically], it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness[, of mediated dreams of domination]: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation [from our initial potentialities].
Within those limits one recognizes the mindboggling factuality of the un-Happines, the de-Happinessization of our contemporary existence. While happiness is by its very nature instantaneous, the world we find ourselves in has programmed us in a way that does not acknowledge its instantaneity, nor at all existence without happiness. It does not, more precisely, recognize existence without the pursuit of happiness — our primal imperative par excellence. Happiness, however, like most things our situation nudges us towards today, is more of an individualistic phenomenon. It is this primordial incommensurability between happiness and war, which particularly excites me. Where does one begin and end and where does the other? Are they in total opposition, or is it in war (be it metaphorical or at least virtual) that modern man seeks his happiness? Can we say that war and happiness are now more profoundly linked than ever before?
One can go even further, asking What’s Real? or even What’s Reality?, likewise confined within those boundaries of individual happiness? The Real and the Reality — both of which promised and desired at all costs, what exactly are they? What are they made of? Is there anything real in the Real, in Reality, or has man entirely evaporated, vanished irretrievably, while observing his own absence? Is there anything in war but the promise of happiness, the form and content of which come, as usual, descended from the heights of the knowing and the able, the powerful and the haves? And isn’t this happiness, this promised prosperity, the product of some primary exclusion that, while it has the potential to benefit, also has the potential to continue its exclusionary tendencies?
When Clausewitz states that “War is merely the continuation of politics with other means”, he undoubtedly treats politics through a very limited understanding, a very narrow refinement of what the political is. Indeed, in such a narrow definition of the political, war (the real kind) appears to be the only viable extension of (professional-)politics (in other words, of the virtual war). In a world where the happy are the powerful, the oppressors, the only unhappy are the oppressed. In that sense there’s a constant war waged by the former against the latter, be it often of the virtual kind. Its dimensions are themselves quite real, foreseeable and painful to the end. Throughout the history of thought this war kept it’s foundational notation, namely class war. But since this war isn’t waged by the state, but mostly through the state, in order to minimize its obviousness, recourse is often made to those means of manipulating and tuning people’s understanding, to those means of re-shaping their thinking, values and capacities in general that which would lead to a particular loss in the bowels of the reproduction of this same state, this same war and its unilateralism. The class war, at least for some time now, since the system became perfidious, has been waged solely by the rulers, solely by the oppressors. Just as any real war.
Everything is about to disappear, either dissolving in the spectacle of the digitalized images, an war of the image with itself in which the image is already death, murdered by its own representation, or in the operational efficiency of a force that has attained an all-embracing independence, far greater than man, both concretely and man as such. But in this war that we practice daily against ourselves, others, even nature as such, happiness alone is at constant war with itself, with the image we have built of the possibility of lasting happiness, even if it is only individual, solely personal. One-sided class war is a war of one class against the eventuality of the happiness of the other. But it is also a war for our minds, in which happiness takes the form of individual happiness; in which the focal point of all vision and all consciousness, of all visibility and comprehensibility, is lost in the unification of the self with the self, of point A with point A. The only actual collective happiness is that of the oppressors. They are also the only ones who recognize a non-Self that opposes them, namely the oppressed. Thus the spectacle is the only actual actuality, the only real reality, even though it is constantly collapsing all over itself, representation over representation over representation over… Ad nauseam.
It is happiness that was attacked by land, in the face, nobly, as the famous man-to-man fight of pre-bourgeois era, only to find that it was attacked by itself. Every war is a war of A against A, of one oppressed against another. Only the truly victorious are outside this vicious cycle of reciprocal sameness.
But somewhere there’s happiness to be pursued, I guess.