Can we escape the never-ending election mode now that the US elections are over? I’ll try, nonetheless. Exploring pop culture’s relation with alienation and belonging in an era of perpetual crisis.

I was in college when Björk released Homogenic, her third studio album, in 1997. I remember watching the video clip of the album’s first single, Jóga, and thinking about its lyrics.

Those dramatic natural landscapes had little to do with the highly urbanized suburban environment outside Barcelona that I called home. However, they resonated in me as a meditation of the real meaning of highly-politicized terms such as nature, homeland and belonging in a world that lacked a cohesive meaning: old ideologies seemed to be dying, whereas ecology was an ethereal concept to get behind, and the nationalism I saw around was inbred and exclusionary in a time when so many issues were becoming transnational.

In the nineties, industries were closing, business schools were teaching the managers of tomorrow how to increase stockholders’ returns by firing people and producing overseas. Warren Buffet (or Charles Munger) and Jack Welch were the heroes then, and Steve Jobs had just returned to Apple. I was destined to be a local professional shaping a comfortable, cynical existence in a peripheral society.

Escapism and return to a world when words had meaning

We don’t think much about the intricacies of language and the etymology of words, which shape our way of being in the world. In Romance languages, we identify our homeland with a Latin construction derived from Greek (Πατρίς, Patrís, “fatherland”) that emphasizes lineage and familial belonging to a place, for “patria” literally means “fatherland“ (“patrie” in French, “patria” in Italian and Spanish, etc.).

(The fact that the idea of homeland is identical in Spain as a whole and in Catalonia didn’t prevent a clash of nationalisms during the last decade, spearheaded by misleading assumptions and essentialisms. Such contradictions got me puzzled during my formative years, especially in a moment of European construction.)

Reading Nietzsche, I began to understand that words and narratives can be powerful but also easily distorted (after all, the German philosopher was among the first to talk about a pan-European sentiment, and also used by the “blood and soil” nazi propaganda through her sister’s controversial addendums).

The German term “heimat” isn’t prejudiced and exclusionary despite some people’s intent to make it so. It means both home and homeland, and gathers deep cultural dimensions, deriving from the Old German word for home (heim) and a suffix (-ōti) that concretizes it, implying a place or state of being. Heimat isn’t only a physical dwelling but also a broader environment where one feels a familiarity and emotional connection.

Interregnum

Many of us feel a deep connection with the natural surroundings that we want to relate to “home” as well. We’d love to have in our languages a similar concept capable of describing “home” and “familiar landscape” at once without the need to relate it to our lineage (“fatherland,” “motherland,” etc.), because sometimes we choose the place we want to call home, and we have the right to emancipate ourselves from the choices of our ancestors (isn’t this what countries created by former immigrants like the US are, after all?).

Those were, of course, pre-smartphone, pre-streaming days (which didn’t deter us youngsters from feeling postmodernity’s dread and alienation in urban non-places, as another haunting video clip from 1996, Orbital’s The Box, expressed). In those days, today’s politics would have been less likely to get the same outcomes.

Back then, I watched both video clips, Jóga and The Box, on TV, as there were local equivalents to the then young-culture juggernaut MTV; that today MTV is irrelevant tells us how the internet has transformed us. I liked the lyrics right away. Björk’s expressive, peculiar way of singing, blending high teenage-like tones with deep, lower notes, turns many of her songs into “experiences,” and I could feel the “emotional landscapes” she talked about in the song as aerial shots of dramatic landscapes from the Far North (Iceland, I must have guessed) went through, a very drone-like experience before the popularization of drone-like aerial shots.

The postmodern landscape of The Box was more like a poetical representation of my personal experience, feeling detached from a technical society lacking any meaningful backbone. And I wasn’t alone, as I have argued when talking about novels/movies such as Trainspotting and Fight Club.

It’s Antonio Gramsci all over again.

Internal and external landscapes

Back to Jóga: As the music progressed, you could feel why they “puzzled her,” for they were so beautiful and so fragile at once. Then she sang about a supposed “state of emergency,” a mental and physical place at once. I didn’t know what the lyrics meant, but I imagined that they connected nature (the macro, the world) and feelings (introspection, us): emotions flow in the song like a natural disaster because there are events we can’t plan or prevent. A sense of home and belonging, of healing and suffering at once.

Derived from Old Norse, Icelandic keeps similarities with Old German. Another Icelandic pop group, Sigur Rós, released the documentary and song Heima (“home”) in 2007, a film combining stunning shots of the island’s dramatic natural landscapes with the intimacy of the group’s acoustic shows in intimate settings, blending nature with introspection and personal healing.

Years after I listened to Björk’s work, I read somewhere that, in Jóga, the singer is trying to highlight the connection we may feel with all things (something we could call “biophilia,” a word coined by Edward O. Wilson) and the profound emotional connection we may have with another person —in this case, Björk’s friend, Jóga. The song expresses that when we feel vulnerable (confronting natural disasters or feeling vulnerable in front of another person), we feel most alive.

And it’s a song that could have been released in our decade of fragmentation and acceleration. When we perceive a decomposition of traditional media and narratives, it’s more difficult to give meaning to events, and natural disasters are more recurrent and have amplified effects. Björk’s Jóga recurring lines (“Emotional landscapes / They puzzle me,” is one; “State of emergency / How beautiful to be” is another, as well as the intonation rollercoaster that constitutes “…And you push me up to / This state of emergency”) are well suited for our times, which feel like a permanent “state of emergency.”

But here’s the catch: when conditions are created to make us feel that we live in a permanent state of emergency (permanent elections, permanent conflicts abroad, imminent extreme weather events), the concept of “state of emergency” itself loses its meaning, for the former “emergency” turns out to have muted into the new perceived reality.

Siege mentality

German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who died of suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou in 1940 as he tried to escape the Gestapo, knew a thing or two about the evolution of modern societies towards the constant mobilization of the masses through mechanisms like propaganda and an induced feeling of a permanent state of emergency. In an era of competition between two models of civilization, capitalism and communism, Benjamin argued that capitalist societies implemented the sense of being in a permanent existential threat to secure social order and control over a steady industrial production.

However, the risk of normalizing this state of alert was detrimental to social freedom and aimed at neutralizing dissent from workers, artists, and intellectuals. According to Benjamin, however, there was a way to override the control induced via propaganda and fear, transforming the permanent state of emergency into a catalyst for radical change.

Decades later, the old risk of totalitarianism envisioned by Benjamin vanished in advanced democracies, as it became clear that the mechanisms of social control were evolving towards a soft control ensured by leisure and what the French philosopher Michel Foucault called “biopolitics,” instead of active prosecution and punishment: modernity, suggested Neil Postman, was morphing into a dystopia that had way more things in common with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than George Orwell’s 1984: we’d lose many of our autonomy and abilities for self-realization by “amusing ourselves to death” using entertainment and substances (Brave New World’s happiness-inducing “soma” drug), and not by ending in the gulag.

Other philosophers have also noticed how interest groups try to induce fear in public opinion as an apparatus to control populations. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, one of the most quoted continental philosophers of our times, has written about the mechanism of “state of exception,” a moment in which the law is suspended to maintain order, blurring the line between legality and illegality.

What lays behind words

In today’s technical world, there’s a tension between individual autonomy and external control, though sometimes we might be wrong about what or who is controlling whom: conspiracy theories, for example, create a sense of disenfranchisement in those who believe that the world is conspiring against them, so in trying to be free or autonomous, the most vulnerable people are the first controlled by those wanting to take advantage of their indignation.

Agamben goes back to the Western etymology of the words related to “life” to develop his concept of living an authentic life, or what he calls “form-of-life.” He opens his book Means Without End with the following:

“The Ancient Greeks did not have only one term to express what we mean by the word life. They used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, humans, or gods), and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group. In modern languages this opposition has gradually disappeared from the lexicon (and where it is retained, as in biology and zoology, it no longer indicates any substantial difference); one term only—the opacity of which increases in proportion to the sacralization of its referent—designates that naked presupposed common element that it is always possible to iso- late in each of the numerous forms of life.”

“By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”

“A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life—human life—in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power. Each behavior and each form of human living is never prescribed by a specific biological vocation, nor is it assigned by whatever necessity; instead, no matter how customary, repeated, and socially compulsory, it always retains the character of a possibility; that is, it always puts at stake living itself. That is why human beings—as beings of power who can do or not do, succeed or fail, lose themselves or find themselves—are the only beings for whom happiness is always at stake in their living, the only beings whose life is irremediably and painfully assigned to happiness. But this immediately constitutes the form-of-life as political life.”

From “Means Without End,” chapter 1, Form-of-Life, Giorgio Agamben (originally published in 2000)

Peter Sloterdijk on the bubbles we build

When you stripe individuals of their rights, Agamben argues, people are transformed into controlled, inauthentic beings. Hence, they become bearers of a downgraded type of life close to the concept of “bare life” (zoe, in Greek etymology) because it’s regulated and controlled.

When I was in college, I could understand the subtleties of pop songs and appreciate a few of the central philosophical concepts I had been introduced to in college; however, up until then, philosophy was this dry, unimportant topic that had survived in college so universities could justify the livelihoods of a few obscure scholars in some even more obscure department of an unimportant university.

This changed quickly. Over the years, I came to appreciate philosophy and saw it more and more as something we can’t get rid of if we want to try to make sense of the world. I can understand why philosophy is undergoing a revival, and many technical people are coming back to college to learn about how ethics and philosophy can help us navigate today’s world and also build better relations, tools, art, you name it.

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk is another influential contemporary figure concerned about the rise of a permanent state of emergency or exception. Sloterdijk uses the metaphor of immunity when he argues that people in modern societies try to cluster around like-minded people to build the illusion of protective “spheres” or “bubbles” so they can guard themselves against perceived threats. When entire countries fall into the same immunological collective response, they become increasingly vulnerable and can spiral into totalitarianism, especially when the normalization of a perceived crisis is an excuse to control through fear.

Sloterdijk also talks of another permanent emergency of our time: the amplification of extreme weather phenomena. Natural disasters challenge our assumptions of control and stability, exposing our fragility and inability to accommodate the natural world to our needs. And, if traditionally we dealt with natural disasters through superstition, religion, ritual, and stories to prepare future generations, today we understand better how storms can get bigger with hotter sea surfaces and more moisture in the air, though we react with the same helplessness and impotence.

Ancient myths, today’s fears

There are myths about floods (including the Fertile Crescent ones that are the foundation of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis Flood), earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, storms and hurricanes, and also wildfires. Our myth today is believing that we can tame such disasters with prevention and knowledge while at the same time, our activity is making some of these events more frequent and powerful (and finding no contradiction in this enterprise).

Benjamin warned about the effort of totalitarian elites (or those with totalitarian leanings) to normalize crises, which neutralizes critical reactions and entrenches the deeper problems. Closer to us in time, Giorgio Agamben has argued that feeling we’re always in an emergency is an open door to having powerful people (social media companies, governments, etc.) control entire populations or their behavior through fear. And Peter Sloterdijk has warned about what creating “bubbles” to protect ourselves can do to society, increasing fragmentation and a fundamental lack of trust that undermines any democracy aspiring to nurture an open society.

Today, each of us can build a filtered reality due to polarization and the collapse of traditional media, so the way we may interpret the different crises of our time might differ based on our self-constructed bubble. But no matter how we interpret them, issues such as economic inequality, ecological devastation, political extremism, and high housing prices, among other problems, aren’t going away anytime soon. Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk, among others, have called from their time and place to rethink critically how these emergencies are constructed, perceived, and managed.

We may ask ourselves: is it too much to ask to end this feeling of living in a permanent election that prevents other problems from being a part of the public discourse?

Perhaps we need songs about our sense of impotence and alienation in postmodernity to escape from the fact that there are many things that we can’t fix as individuals. Many popular songs express the contemporary curse of having all the information one can think of at one’s fingertips, yet it’s hard to make any sense of it all.

A walk in the forest

Billie Eilish’s Everything I Wanted isn’t much different from the songs expressing similar feelings that I used to listen to when at college. The need to stay grounded powers this and other songs, and the way out of dread and alienation seems to be an old one: loyalty to the people we love, a sense of connection with things we care about, and ways to remain stoic no matter the circumstances.

To Eilish, “home” (her “heimat,” if we go to the beginning of the article) is a sense of connection with her brother and family, which translates into emotional support, creative collaboration, and a sense of safety no matter the circumstances. In the song’s video clip, she and her brother Finneas advance in a surreal journey, driving a car through the city at night.

Other musicians have expressed similar feelings in equally dire, sometimes worse, situations. In their song and video clip, Daydreaming (2016), Radiohead captures a similar feeling of disconnection to The Box, the techno video clip from the late nineties. The video, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, shows Thom Yorke, the British group’s singer, lost in a labyrinthine environment, from sterile halls and rooms to urban non-places to pristine natural settings, without the ability to connect or make sense of any of it.

Daydreaming is a search for meaning within a landscape that may lack authenticity and offers only surreal alienation. Behind the scenes, as one commenter points out below the video clip, Tom Yorke and his partner of 23 years split in 2015, and she died a year later of cancer. Yorke lacked a compass to navigate the world at that moment, and he expressed it in a way that can help others identify how much we crave a sense of belonging.

No matter how dreadful things may look sometimes, we all crave an authentic home, a “heimat” from where to build a world full of meaning, no matter the external conditions.