Five thousand miles west of London, where Milton dictated his story of the primordial wanderers, centuries of westward pilgrims, conquerors, expansionists, colonizers, covered wagons, outcasts, found the end of the world in California. But just as for the sailor in Goethe’s Meeresstille, for whom the calm, stillness of the sea brings not peace but dread, the Pacific tempered not the restlessness that drove these free spirits west. For the Appalachians, Great Plains, Rockies, Mojave, and Sierra Nevada had distilled the westward throng for centuries into the highest purity of rootlessness and restlessness. These are a people never satisfied, never still.
Where to go from this western terminus that is California? What lies west of The West? Like Dante passing through the depths of Hell to reach Paradise, Alan Watts pushed on and wound up transcending The West, arriving in the Orient. Conversely, Jack Kerouac fled California’s madness, back east, to New York, seeking home cooked meals and apple pie. But in the end, both Oriental religion and American bourgeoise family life were impotent in quelling the frenetic energy that stirred the souls which arrived at the edge of all things. And back in California, everything fell apart, with Joan Didion enduring to face what ensued, reporting on the violent neurosis that set in when all the old stories collapsed.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” is California’s mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Languishing at this western dead end, cutoff by time and space from millennia of robust and majestic heritage and tradition, the Californian soul was ground zero for disillusionment, the failure to satisfy a deep, human need: to be tricked. For the ancestral heritage and tradition of the Californian is an anti-heritage, an anti-tradition. California is too far gone, too far away. The magic of the old stories does not work in such a distant, permanently liminal realm.
Incipit Hollywood, whose imagery and illusion captivates the lost souls at the edge of the world and beyond. Incipit Silicon Valley, whose media technology facilitates the instant and boundaryless proliferation of Hollywood’s imagery. The machinations of these two cities of the plain secretes both the illness and its cure: the severing of the world from heritage and tradition, and the new, final culture to fill the void. This is a static culture, a well-ordered culture, a nostalgic culture, but above all it is a modular culture. It is a sum of its discrete parts. The illusion of newness may be manufactured by rearranging and reappropriating the existing quantum into new variations, but the underlying quality and quantity of source material is fixed at the precise array of previous modes, aesthetics, trends, artforms, languages, turned into historical objects by the new culture’s persistently backward gaze. The highest value of this culture is familiarity, the ability to be understood by reference to that which is already understood. That which is undeliverable by reference to the total network of integrated past historical quantum is unfamiliar, unintelligible, and therefore worthless and threatening to the increasingly ordered integration of culture. Mod 60s, 70s soul, 80s synthpop, country-western, 90s grunge, these are all symbols contrived ex post facto and disseminated through the network of final culture, which can be donned and shed as recognizable and comprehendible symbols. This is the last culture, the culture of the Last Man, and its emanation from California has thus made California the epicenter, no longer the edge, of an increasingly integrated global system that maintains the need for illusion by pulling the whole world west, filling the incipient void with the illusion the world now so desperately requires.
This global integration, this system of systems, demands the conformity of its parts to function. And its parts, weary of disorder and decay, are all too willing to acquiesce the machine’s demands to become calculatable, desirable, knowable, and thus controllable. Even in California, the “elite” engineers and programmers of the total integration are only superficially distinguishable from the rest of the herd, themselves partaking equally in the orgy of symbols and memes that saturate the new culture. They too, seek stability through submission to a higher power, following Ayn Rand’s ghost toward integration with a logical system to which to submit, to serve. Reason makes slaves of us all, and today, both the herd and its so-called masters yearn to be enslaved by the machine, enveloped in the comfortable embrace of its system.
Thus the machine will achieve what man has repeatedly failed, to unite the human race under one global culture, one total system. More and more, the world, led by California, democratically integrates with the grid, the first and the last watching the same sequels and reboots and reruns and bopping their heads to the same four on the floor drum which symbolize the new, universal, global heritage and tradition. To the extent never possible from Brussels or New York (because Brussels and New York–despite their best efforts–could never really change humanity), consensus and stability is being forged by the mass production and consumption of the culture of symbols emanating from California.
This hyperreality, though, is still illusion, just one more story. And just as with all the other stories which preceded it, it shatters in the face of reality. Outside this digital crystal palace, California remains the edge. Hyperreality is just as vulnerable as the old stories it replaced. It too, has no power beyond the borders of its own contrived dreamlands. Just a short walk outside dissolves the digital spectacle and reveals the squalor of downtown L.A. and the opulent tackiness of Silicon Valley, for those with eyes to see. Explore even further, and the illusion recedes, disillusion returns. Unbeknownst to the well-integrated, the Last Man, unknown by the machine, remain the unintegrated, the incalculable, the undesirable, the unknowable, the uncontrollable; the permanently disillusioned; the happy to be disillusioned; those who see the world lucidly, pushing out from its megalopolitan center to rediscover the edge that is California.
These, who can stand to be disillusioned by the preternatural stillness of the ocean beyond the surf at dawn, the looming Sierra Nevada along Highway 395, the desolation of the Mojave and Death Valley, the spooky shores of the Salton Sea and antediluvian bristlecone forests, without fleeing for the safe harbor of deception; able to then return to the paper-mâché and chicken-wire extraterrestrial artifice, the surgically enhanced aesthetics, the computer-generated simulation, and neither bemoan its superficiality nor succumb to succor of the dream; who instead affirm the dream, the illusion, the confusion, the mask and the nothingness behind it, as constituent of the world; a world of nothingness yet fecund with potentiality, infinite possibility: these are the Californians, who keep pushing west in secret at the end of the world.
West of The West 