Powers That Become

“What the fuck happens when shit happens” proclaims the narrator, a mute and hollow channel of higher orders.  Rebuking anticipated questions, giving answers forward, as if blows, rained down upon the head of the listener, the narrator becomes violence itself. Inviting retribution on the same level of his communication, denying his personhood in favor of larger systems of participation, the narrator has fully made himself the instrument of The Powers That Be.

As a song rather than a text, a larger trend in music is made visible. Violence comes from media as a flow of inspiration to act, in ways often determined by the music. The semi-comedic comments on the Kendrick Lamar song mAAd city speak of experiencing another, wanting to act out the part of a black gangster by one who speaks from the outside of this. Within the music, they temporarily become this by the actions of the music as they transmit through them, the listener becoming a conduit by which the music and its form pass.

Virtue ethics relies upon a linguistic schema of morality radically opposed to that proposed by Plato & company. Each virtue is not a quality applied downwards by epistemic access to some truth above the individual judged, but a verb held by performance of it. These virtues as verbs is interesting enough, but the language of them borrows from Plato into positing these virtues as being not only performed, but being performed vertically, as subjects captive to larger entities, these flows of action that capture one as they’re drawn along them. Performance, doing is here imagined as a whole becoming by external taking-up, like a rip current carrying the swimmer to the brine, a flow capturing, moving, and passing through the subject caught within.

Much mocked but never considered, the public has yet to fully consider the consequences of “only obeying orders”. Collective responsibility and collective consent imply each other by their shared core of collective being, all citizens under one collective imagined as a group larger than themselves. Rarely, does anyone fully recognize their own acceptance of this idea, as these collectives informing downwards and becoming ontologies of the individual (race, nationality), thus making that individual politically responsible for their collective, for good and ill. This has governed society in large part, even at the peak of individualist delusion. What also moves downwards upon individuals are flows of the collective, the collective imagined here as a self-contained entity with its own desires and motives, spreading those goals forth by coursing itself through the veins of the individuals caught beneath it. When the nazis claimed they were “only obeying orders” they were closer to the truth than expected. The higher entity they served (what this entity was is conflicting due to the schizophrenia of nazi politics) spread itself through them and animated their bodies to act for it, furthering its goals at the speartip of its being.

The intoxicating allure of nightriding, of bashing, of policing, the low class pastimes of dutifully carrying out the violent speartip of systemic oppressions, has often beguiled journalists and authors trying to find some rational motive in them. In all of these cases, the answer of what was occurring is obvious - there was no motive at all, at least none which could originate inside. When the nearly two dozen men of the Mississippi Burning case were arrested, with only a handful of them even involved in pulling the trigger, these men were arrayed and seen as they were, not criminals, but as servants, manifesting as if they emerged from the air to carry out the will of the land, carrying out with a fervor they could never hope to comprehend the source of. This is the power of the individual gripped in the throes of Powers That B, the power flowing through from beyond and for beyond, their body an empty conduit, someone else’s hand bringing their fist down in someone’s else violence.

The drivers of history have always been entities far larger than any individual will or life could ever hope to grasp the outer edges of. The wills of history have always been entities, never individuals, but processes, systems, organisms, existing in forms beyond any control and which move downward in verb-form to control the lives below them. Such is the true nature of the NPC - the countless masses of peoples whose existence is made solely as conduits, servants of passage for verbs from entities higher than they could ever hope to comprehend.