Sure, the economy is to blame, but perhaps the greater threat is our increasing inability as a species to understand and appreciate aesthetic value. If there isn’t either a pragmatic component (what can I *get* out of this?) or a salacious one (oh my god, look at that!), we don’t know what to do. We no longer know how to pay attention.

Thanks very much for your comment, it’s always encouraging to know that the writing can find some use to people. All the best.

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at the same time, why can’t there be an eckhartian, even adorno-ian(?) approach to the question (indeed, “education after auschwitz” seems to me to be the absolute most appropriate response to virilio)? that is to say, a sensibility cognizant of limitations; a sensibility without illusions, but not in the sense that it is closer to “the truth” or some such ideal, but that it has no illusions of its own incompleteness; a thoroughly modern sensibility that can no longer transparently revel in the cruelty and absolute hypocrisy of warfare, but which recoils in horror and disgust; a sensibility which, indeed, finds that they only way to describe such a thing is to first and foremost realise that it is indescribable, “unsayable;” a sensibility which is nonetheless not a mere nihilistic postmodernism that revels in moral equivalence but which uses its timid, uncertain foundations as a point of strength, towards honesty and humility in a world where it is all to easy to succumb to “the banality of pseudo-self awareness,” as christopher lasch puts it…

“If barbarism itself is inscribed within the principle of civilization,” writes Adorno, “then there is something desperate in the attempt to rise up against it.” Art that exists in any accessible form is stuck in this paradigm, and it is an absolute dishonesty to the detriment of the art to imagine that it is not. But like I said, this does not conversely mean that art must be written all over with apocalypse–simply that it understands apocalypse as its progenitor and means for being. this yields, in all its abstraction and ambiguity, much more honest, much more telling, and indeed much more politically viable and impactful art than any realist could ever hope to achieve.

“In other words,” writes Adorno, “education must take seriously an idea in no wise unfamiliar to philosophy: that anxiety must not be repressed. When anxiety is not repressed, when one permits oneself to have, in fact, all the anxiety that this reality warrants, then precisely by doing that, much of the destructive effect of unconscious and displaced anxiety will probably disappear.”