Slippery Surfaces
By Tom Amarque
Maybe we don’t enter the world at birth. Maybe our life really begins by brushing against surfaces—leaving the amniotic sac of primordial fusion with the mother-womb behind and becoming surfaces ourselves, exposed to other surfaces. Skin onto skin. Our face and lips search for the breast; so much so that this sack of tissue and fat leaves such a deep imprint that it continues to exert its fascination even in the final stages of our life.
Culture worships surfaces: the gleaming sheen of young bodies, despite the fact that everyone knows that young people are—literally and figuratively—mostly full of shit. Even one of the earliest philosophical dramas, Plato’s Cave, would not have had such lasting impact if it had not unfolded on the luminous surface of the cave wall—a primordial screen onto which the conundrum of our existence was projected. Visual arts develop on surfaces and in the forms of dimensionality they depict. We understand the world through surfaces. It wasn’t that long ago that we understood the firmament to be the inside surface of a dome. Especially today, we cannot imagine life without screens and surfaces. Brands, luxury goods, and the performative surface of morality on social media hide our dirty secrets, just as the polished marble of Greek temples concealed the blood, sweat, and slavery that erected them.
Surfaces also structure our thinking. Every philosopher worth their salt knows that behind the polished surface of what we call “democracy” lurks an ungainly creature: a disorderly realm of lies, empty and broken promises, incompetence, corruption, and a promise of participation that in reality differs only marginally from that offered by other forms of government. (Living in Spain, I literally have no say whatsoever about what happens in Brussels.) There is a tension between the power of the populus and the recognition that you would not let the populus decide who flies the plane. Indeed, there is such a Grand Canyon between those in power and those who supposedly elect them that it barely registers in public discourse that the party pre-selects—through quasi-occult mechanisms—the candidates (and themes) in the first place, not the populus. This only becomes visible in instances where the nomination of a candidate is not justifiable except through internal power struggles (see Biden). Ours is—at best—a “managed democracy,” as renowned academics such as Sheldon Wolin have written: a form of governance fundamentally at odds with the ideals it advertises.
For all its incredible achievements, we sense that the sacred light of “feminism”—fueled by the still not fully understood civilizational shockwave of the contraceptive pill, perhaps as consequential as the nuclear bomb—has produced side effects that strain our economies, gender relations, and collective sense of meaning. We now have to come to terms with the reality that all developments, even the best ones, have unintended and sometimes difficult consequences. And we now recognize that indigenous societies—behind the romantic Western projection of purity and harmony—also bore tendencies toward genocide and slavery equal to those of the West, clearly not in scale but certainly in principle. Every screen needs a projection, and if you are in search of a psychological metaphor, here you have found one.
We orient ourselves through and with surfaces, and all too often we fall prey to what metamodern analyst Brent Cooper calls vicious abstractions. We still feel compelled to treat mainstream media as “news of the world,” as if it were the polished emissary of a secular world order that faithfully stands in truth to power and “reports it as it is.” And yet—ever since Chomsky and many other media theorists—we have known that news is by default bought, manufactured, shaped by vested interests, and guided by the will to power of the media class itself in order to manufacture consent.
Ah, Nietzsche. Poor, much-maligned Nietzsche—the one who warned us that every claim to truth hides a genealogy, a metabolism, a struggle; that behind every shining surface there is a machinery of drives grinding away; and that beneath the glossy ideals of leftists, conservatives, ecologists, media reporters, activists of all colours, and especially those folks who engage in “spirituality,” there works a will-to-power willing to use any means necessary to rise within its preferred status hierarchy. Or, in terms of Spiral Dynamics: no matter how idealistic your green or post-green empathetic, sensitive, global-justice values may be, you are still very much fuelled by the red will to power.
I would not call philosopher Curtis Yarvin metamodern in any way, shape, or form. But—like Agamben or Sloterdijk—he dares to critique our inherited understanding of democracy and invites us to look behind its carefully curated surface (“Save the democracy”). Perhaps, he suggests, we exported the democratic model across the world not because of its intrinsic value, but simply because we conquered the world (red-ho!). He asks whether we would have the iPhone if Apple were a democracy, and whether—beneath the glossy surface—fundamentally monarchic structures are still very much alive.
Aficionados of the aforementioned Spiral Dynamics know that “blue” traditional monarchic structures do not disappear with the rise of modernity; rather, modernity rests on top of older layers, just as religious architectures were transposed into the secular systems of schools, prisons, and factories. There is just a tiny sheen around the U.S. presidency that—“no-king” calls aside—only barely hides the fact that the British model of monarchy implicitely lives on. Successful businesses continue to run on monarchic codes, structures, and algorithms. So it is almost natural, then, that Yarvin—acknowledging that democracy tends to select for incompetence and inaction—proposes an “accountable monarch” as a model for the modern state, complete with quasi board meetings to hold the monarch accountable (and replaceable), but with the explicit goal of generating whatever profits are deemed worth striving for.
Of course, we respond to surfaces. And even the mere mention of the surface “monarchy” creates friction—and not a smooth one at that. For things to work, they must run smoothly. As the medieval German trickster Till Eulenspiegel said: Wer gut schmiert, der gut fährt—grease the wheels and things run smoothly. That’s how change is made.
Perhaps the real problem of our age—and the burden that Gen Z and Gen Alpha are forced to carry—is that our culture has thoroughly deconstructed the illusion of the shiny surface, the grand narratives of progress, democracy, and enlightenment, as Lyotard told us. Only reactionaries still believe that all religions like Chrsitianity, Buddhismn and Islam are the same, that Islam, compared to Jainism, is an actual “religion of peace,” that the Catholic Church doesn’t naturally attract sexual deviants, or that the extreme left and right are, by default, safe havens for ideologues, the poorly educated, and the neurodiverse or mentally unwell. The rest of us must come to terms with the fact that we live precisely in the tension between the polished surface and the disorderly mess of life underneath.