viz.

A compelling essay on the current money mess by Charles Eisenstein at the eclectic and ambitious web magazine, Reality Sandwich, offers the following perspective on the larger meaning of “meltdown”:

In ancient times entertainment was also a free, participatory function. Everyone played an instrument, sang, participated in drama. Even 75 years ago in America, every small town had its own marching band and baseball team. Now we pay for those services. The economy has grown. Hooray.

The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the “developed” world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

What I found most insightful here is the claim about the looting of “[o]ur cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons.” German filmmaker Werner Herzog once said much the same thing in an interview. The director of such stunning features as Aguirre the Wrath of God, a narrative of conquistadors suffering their fates on the Orinoco, Fitzcarraldo, in which a barge famously is carried over a mountain in the Amazon, and Stroszek, the bleakly tender portrait of German outcasts adrift on the intercontinental loam of Wisconsin, claims that contemporary culture’s knowledge of the image is impoverished. In this 1979 interview, Herzog speaks with Roger Ebert, saying:

At the present time, I think that we do not know very much about the process of vision itself. This kind of knowledge is precisely what we need. We need it very urgently because we live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It’s as simple as that! We have already recognized that problems like the energy shortage or the overpopulation of the world or the environmental crisis are great dangers for our society and for our kind of civilization, but I think it has not yet been understood widely enough that we also need new images.

While it’s terribly unfashionable to bring the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung into polite academic conversation, his arguments about the collective archetypes of the imagination remain provocative for my thinking about how we often identify with certain public images. Jung’s notion of a reservoir of images circulating within a collective unconscious is, if nothing else, stimulating and useful for understanding what Eisenstein and Herzog are getting at in their perspectives. In a period when images are frequently manipulated to persuade consumers to make purchases or for voters to make decisions on election day, it’s important to think about what else images are capable of provoking in us—or what knowledge they can perhaps lead us—or mislead us—into. The weight of Herzog and Eisenstein’s claims is apparent in our current geopolitical context of sinking fortunes—whether or not we believe in the existence of shared imagery and icons of a collective imagination. We inhabit a cultural milieu where the proliferation of images via print and digital technologies both preserve and confuse the historical record of our visual codes of perception and intelligence. In recovering the image by placing it in meaningful contexts we can begin to see the possibilities inherent in a world. A visual rhetoric might take as its first mission the contextualization of imagery more generally absorbed into the copia of contemporary cultural viewing habits.