RE: Glass Bees

[Thomas Friese <tfriese@eumeswil.org>]

-----Original Message-----
From:	Gary Kern [SMTP:gkern@ucr.campus.mci.net]
Sent:	November 30, 1997 7:33 AM
To:	ernst-juenger-l@maillist.ox.ac.uk
Subject:	Re: Glass Bees

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.
> 
***********************************
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

Yes, you may but there are extremely positive possibilities. Richard's compares Zapparoni's use of media to create works of art with Greek tragedy's enhancement of the human body and Botticelli's creation of a new race. A moral judgement of Zapparoni is very difficult. The only clear aspect is his power - we aren't given a certain picture of the intentions behind the application of that power. In any case, I haven't yet perceived aspirations such as these in our film media, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Bill Gates included. Like Aladdin, we have the all-powerful lamp yet we only satisfy our lowest urges. Perhaps such a figure will emerge and the human race will be better off for it. Optimism
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.
The Jünger Newsletter?

<<< application/ms-tnef: EXCLUDED >>>