Research
Mechanistic Solidarity and the Diminution of Conscience
One of the main modes of other-directedness that has only been indirectly linked with anomie, and that is the technique and technology of the modern machine, both as a metaphor for mechanism in semi-conscious working states of affairs – the public life of our large and general social role as ‘one of the others’ and one of the mass, producer and consumer – but also the machine as a physical enabler, a force in the material world wherein it alleviates suffering with a view to assuaging anomie. The machine houses and promotes a new set of norms. It is never normless, although often mindless. It cannot suffer itself. It does not feel the wind chill, and though it breaks down it does not die. It represents, in its obliviousness to sorrow and to ennui, an ideal form for modern humanity. We would be as it is. Functional, able to work and nothing else, turned on and off in an instant.
Anxiety and the Death Imagery of Desire
The mockery that death seeks to wield over life is no better exemplified than in the risus sardonicus that seems to betray its own irrationality at the thought of being able to taunt us from beyond the grave. Such a grinning gripping looking awry seems to say to us, 'here too is your fate, you'll see, and the thought of your realization of it makes me mirthful!' The immediate reaction of the living is to pretend that we have not seen such a face, to ignore its remorseless stare, as one looks away from the portrait that follows us too closely-especially if the ancestor had a notorious reputation-perhaps the looking awry threatens us with the same historical fate through a contagious magic or action at a distance-or perhaps the woman in the painting is not as pretty as we might desire, or the man not as handsome, etc. But the face of death appears in many guises, and we must constantly attempt to think of something other than its presence, the elephant in the room that is as inconvenient as it is immovable: "We don't know how to deal with death, and so we ignore it as much and for us as long as possible. We concentrate on life
