Re: Glass Bees

[Gary Kern <gkern@ucr.campus.mci.net>]

Thomas Friese wrote:
> 
 We've got a group in Vancouver reading the Glass Bees together once a
week and we're quite unable to satisfy ourselves on the nature of
Zapparoni's automatons and the film genre as it is visualized by Juenger
in this book. The uncertainty regards the tangible reality of these
creatures. On the explicit level Juenger is describing a level of
physical robot technology which we can only suppose at this point could
be possible in the future...
 
> If anyone would care to shed their own light on these questions we would be grateful  -  these do seem to be questions of importance, and not just to an isolated group in Vancouver or on the Internet. Actually we'd love to hear any thoughts on the Glass Bees at all.
> 
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The thing that impressed me about THE GLASS BEES was that while other
authors were projecting anti-utopias of the terrorist totalitarian type,
Jünger was concerned about the possibility of an entertainment
totalitarianism.  That is, a society controlled (or nullified) by
mesmerizing, mind-sapping movies, games, toys.  Only Aldous Huxley, in
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED, seemed also to be alert to the threat.  The
triumph of the visual entertainment industry as a realization of
Huxley's view (he said something like, "we under-estimated man's
insatiable appetite for entertainment") is best described in Neil
Postman's ENTERTAINING OURSELVES TO DEATH, written from a McLuhanesque
perspective.

Zapparoni is a Svengali, a master of illusions and a social force, but
he still has to deal with labor relations.  This makes him a different
sort of tyrant from Zamyatin and Orwell's Benefactor, based on Lenin and
Stalin respectively.  In J's terms, Zap is one of the Titans, a
powerhouse manipulating the minds and lives of the multitudes, while
still being entangled in social demands and responsibilities.  This
marked for J a new age, a new time, which is the theme that particularly
interested me:  J's ideas on time, both that which is lived individually
(the shock of war, the leisure of peace, walking in the forest, reading
in a room with an hourglass,etc.) and that which is lived by
generations, the ages of man.

I think it was very prescient of J, in the 1950's, to look beyond the
Stalinist threat of monolithic mind control, which was more prominent
and pressing, to the more seductive and ultimately more successful
threat of entertaining stultification.  The centrist Communist state
could not control the coming information revolution, miniaturization,
instantaneous world communication; the entertainment industry of the
pluralist West could absorb it, make it its own and nullify it for its
own purposes.  That is what has indeed happened.

J, of course, could not foresee the future, so I don't think it's worth
looking for what he really meant in today's technology and today's
technocrats.  But it is worthwhile to find what best confirms his
prophesy.  My candidate for the Zapparoni media-mogul would be someone
like Steven Spielberg, who pioneered special effects, boggled minds of
both young and old with flashes and explosions and colored lights, and
made millions or billions of dollars.  And yet he appears in jeans and
tennis shoes, discussing scenes with actors and technicians just like a
regular guy.  What are his politics and where are his investments?  Who
knows and who cares?  He entertains.  The public watching his movies,
just like the public watching television 8 or more hours everyday, is
actually watching NOTHING REAL:  rocket ships, extra-terrestrials, glass
bees.  The real, in the entertainment context, becomes no longer real or
important:  the news programs report murders because they are
sensational; Princess Di was the same as a soap-opera star over whom
viewers cry and with whom they identify.  A car chase live on the TV and
a car chase in a movie are the same thing.  The multimillionaire Titans
(we call them moguls) of the entertainment industry, which is
megacorporation and multinational, who can make more in a month (or
less) than we will make in a lifetime, have succeeded, not by a
conspiratorial plot, but from their own nature (cynical opportunism) in
robbing most of the world of its mind, its identity and its reality.

Commentators have remarked that the bees in Zapparoni's garden cannot
pollinate, a feature that J, as a naturalist, was careful to put in. 
The sterile quality of man's most intricate inventions, when they are
cut off from nature or attempt to replace it as a self-sufficient human
activity, is what J seems to see as the demonical and perhaps more
directly pernicious aspect of the process.  Here you have the military
applications, spying, little bombs, computer viruses even.  So J warns
both about media mesmerism and technological peril:  keep watching TV
and you'll not only lose your mind, soul and identity, but you may get
stung.

GK

PS/To answer your question:  I delivered my paper, "The Time of the
Glass Bees," at the Eaton Science Fiction conference, held on the Queen
Mary ship (permanently docked in port) at the end of June, but from
hastily typed and scribbled notes.  I have nothing finished to share. I
need to read DAS SANDUHRBUCH before I put the paper in order.  The
Jünger newsletter is helping to keep me on track.