14/CHRONICLESnmalevolent in our own age. We have, in fact, institutionalizednall the famous old disaster syndromes and so assimilatednthem into our way of life and patterns of thought thatndisaster has become not only our central preoccupyingnexperience but our principal fantasy of salvation. If religionsnof the past offered promise of some form of transcendentalnredemption, disaster holds out the possibility of infinite andndeliciously horrible forms of damnation, the ultimatentitillation to orgasm of world holocaust, which in ournultimate boredom is one of the very few experiences leftnthat is likely to bring us to feeling.nWe now take it for granted—and the fact creates aroundnus a subliminal envelope of rehabilitating drama—that weninhabit a world in which violence of any and every kind cannerupt anywhere and everywhere at any time with or withoutnprovocation or meaning. This is a world that some few of usnexperience every day, but for the rest of us it exists as annabstraction projected and often seemingly created by thenreality-manufacturing and reality-fantasizing media of televisionnand film. Our direct experience is usually of anothernkind of abstraction, an urban or suburban noncommunitynin which we are perhaps most conscious of floating inndisconnection between business and home, passing andnbeing passed by strangers in the void. Home is the place ofnbrief refuge from the void, where family offers a substitutenfor community even as house functions as a frontiernstockade erected against the disorienting ambiguities ofnexistence in noncommunity. Business or profession pro-n’ides an illusion of connection with people whose onlynconnection with us and with one another is conterminousnactivity within the same “facility” or “structure.”nAt intervals, which have grown less and less frequentnwith the passage of time, the separately orbiting entities ofnbusiness and home may, for ceremonial reasons, be momentarilynjoined, and strangers from the one will benimported into the other, given food and enough to drink tonensure that they will not be able to notice that they havennothing to say to one another. Anesthesia is the onlynpossible means of coping with a situation in which nothingncan be communicated among people for whom the termsnand materials of communication, the shared histories andncommon assumptions of purpose and value, have ceased tonexist. Yet such a situation is only the microcosmic form ofnthe abstraction projected by the media, the vast unstructurednand dehistorified macrocosm composed of large andnportentous or trivial and meaningless happenings occurringnin some remote elsewhere and enacted upon strangers ornstranger-celebrities made recognizable by the regular appearancenof their faces on the screen but who are known tonus only because, and only so long as, they are there.nThe physical dislocation of the individual from directnrelation to his social and public experience has its correlativenin an ideological dislocation that has grown increasinglynvisible over the last 10 or 15 years. There has been andeepening and ever more obsessive preoccupation.duringnthis period with the nature and problems not so much of thenindividual life as of society as a whole’—or put another way,nthe individual life transvaluated into a projection of, and anvexation laid upon, society as a whole. It is from societynseen as a corporate entity that people now try to derive whatnsense they can of communal relationship and identity, andnnnthe effort has most often been made through declarations ofnallegiance to various political, sexual, racial, or ethnicngroups, membership in which is based scarcely at all uponnconcrete experiences and shared backgrounds (as was thencase with minority and subculture membership in the past)nbut rather upon problems that are conceived of in theoreticalnand statistical terms as being peculiar to a particularngroup.nEven as personal connection is sought through identificationnwith a group, the group becomes a collective abstractionnto which relationship cannot be directly achieved and,ntherefore, in which further abstraction is the inevitablenresult. If the loss of the older forms of community hasnprojected us into a formless sociological void, our need tonreplace community with group membership has projectednus even further into the void. For it causes us to seenourselves not as ourselves but as increments of suchnsubcultural categories as female, homosexual, Chicano, ornblack, with a further erosion of our sense of the integritynand uniqueness of the individual selfnIt follows from this that the currentiy obsessive quest for anpreformulated “role” in some collective has replaced to anlarge degree the personal quest for a purpose in life and, notnincidentally, is depriving the novel of one of its most vitalntraditional themes. For the search, in all its agony and greatnpotential for destructive risk, that once went on within thenprecincts of the individual’s concrete struggle with hisnenvironment tends now to be viewed as a problem belongingnto a general social category, a problem with which thenindividual cannot be expected to cope and, therefore,nwhich is to be projected upon an unjust and oppressivensociety or politicized into an “issue” which the technocraticnpowers of legislative reform operating somewhere out therenin the void will be required to engage.nThere inevitably emerges a state of mind having as itsnbase the belief that life in general is not an experience to benlived but a problem to be solved. The having of experience,nfrom which one may or may not eventually derive certainnpersonal answers, becomes a procedure for which methodsnof analysis and resolution have been scientifically formulated.nThis has led to a shift in the individual consciousnessnfrom a sense of being the subject of experience to a sense ofnbeing its object, so that one examines the experience ofnother objects in order to ease one’s own feeling of unrealitynat being seen as an object, as another laboratory specimennbeing acted upon rather than living actively. The displacementnof instinct by technological method, with all that itncontributes to a further deepening of the passive, dreamlikenquality of personal existence, is one of the most derangingnphenomena of contemporary life, and it is perhaps the mostnmorbid expression of our desire to die out of the hazards andnmistakes of personal existence and enter the nirvana ofnrisk-free problem-manipulation where all difficulties arenresolvable in a state of serenity which only death cannapproximate.nIt may be paradoxical that this displacement appears tonhave increased rather than lightened the burden of narcissismnthat has so heavied the atmosphere of the present time.nThe individual has not been freed by the view that life is anproblem to be solved by the right application of technologicalnmethod. Rather, he has been forced to become obsessedn