The state, market and the last of such crisis

Artan Sadiku

The coronavirus epidemics has brought up many social and political issues which, even during the extreme times we are living through now, cannot be simply ignored. They are important because many of them, to a varying degree, determine how we are dealing with this epidemic and how will we live after it fades away. One of the most visible political aspects of this crisis is the re-appearance of the state as the ultimate agency of delivering the response to the coronavirus epidemics.

And from the very beginning I want to make it clear that this is not the appropriate time, for those of us who lean to more anarchic tendencies, to fight the state. Instead we must admit that we need the state now and this should be the last ‘service‘ that we accept from it. Even though we might analyse on how many levels the state response to the epidemic crisis is wrong, we need its service because it must eat its own poisonous soup that it has been cooking for the society. Thus, pushing it to its suicide which, is a call to all of us to organise our own autonomous actions paralleling those of the state. In doing so, we should not limit our collective efforts in only filling the void left by the state but work to find creative and innovative ways of substituting the existing dysfunctional system of services destroyed by the state-market alliance.

We need thus neither downscale neither exaggerate the present epidemic situation, but rather analyse the real material conditions which unfold in the midst of this crisis and build strategies for action without fetishizing or immediately discarding any of the many theories and practices for building new communities of solidarity and care.

The current global coronavirus crisis has enabled a truth to be manifested, the truth of the community. This truth is becoming more present not because of its own actualisation – it has always been actual, but because the failing actions of the of the state have brought us if front of a vast space of new possibilities. And even in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, the state is drastically increasing its mobilisation to prevent us from actualising the truth of community. One which has the best chances to win the fight with the virus. Lock-downs, quarantines and curfews are methods that vary in the degree of confining people, thus effectively locking down the potential of the society for mobilising and mutual help. Yet, the truth of the community still brings forth its characteristics: solidarity, care, sharing, and sense of common belonging.

Overwhelming the broken system

Instead of having a fast and massive training of millions of people worldwide to help build a massive supporting infrastructure for treating the sick and other affected groups from the virus, we are confronted with the state’s intervention to legitimize itself as the ultimate caretaker. No matter that this would result in more deaths and other consequences, from economic, to social and political. If this prerogative is taken away from the state, what will remain is only the display of brute force.

The act of nationalising of private hospitals under the pretext of the coronavirus will surely increase the state’s capacity in handling the epidemics in a short period of time, but it will also help it maintain its anti-social character – monopolising health-care while not being able to deliver.

The problem with overwhelming the intentionally broken-down healthcare system comes as a result of the long-lasting concessions made to the healthcare market. Confinement and policing of the freedom of movement of the people is a continuation of the policy of protecting of those concessions. For as long as people keep on dying in the hospitals and not in the streets, the state can transfer the blame on the medical science and not on its own limitations. The ‘flattening the curve’ policy which gained universal legitimacy overnight is meant to perform the function of the maintenance of the monopoly of death confined within the state institutions. The moment death would spill massively on the streets it would amount to the death of the state itself. No matter that the streets, if not emptied of trained people, could actually save many lives.

The argument of state inefficiency in delivering services that was used for privatising many of its sectors it true, but now we know that the private market services are even worse. Facing new upcoming catastrophes, resulting from the state and capitalist market bond, will require collective horizontal organisation for disseminating of knowledge and technologies released from patents and monopolies. One of the most immediate steps at this point is to generate a global collective call for a general intellect freed from particular interests of markets and national states. We all remember Aaron Shwartz who released tons of scientific materials online for free, and who is now dead because the state imprisoned him. His fate is a reminder of the function of the state-market bond, to confine knowledge which is essential in fighting common dangers.

Maintaining of the policed society

While we witness a sudden shift to authoritarianism in societies that have embraced free individualism as the highest value, we might slip into the seemingly logical argument of the necessary evil. This might seem the answer to the question of how the same society of free individuals now demands something collective, a collective lockdown. But, the necessity of the state to intervene in preventing wrongdoers, those who by not limiting their social movement might harm many other, comes as a result of the lack of the sense of community belonging and responsibility. It is free individualism, as opposed to the community, the one which is always susceptible of authoritarianism and policing.

Differing from previous ‘socialist’ authoritarianisms that practised repression in the name of the community, the urgent ones we see these days tent to repress the community in the name of individuals. The ‘socialist’ regimes targeted individuals. The current lock-down practices target communities. While both are antisocial in their own state-ideological matrices, the current repression comes as a ‘natural’ necessity, one which does not display any ideological pretension. Albeit, it is a direct result and necessity of the proclaimed market ideology of free consuming individuals.

A community is always the antidote to the police. Individualism builds the case for the necessity of the police. If after this crisis we return to the ‘normal’ of the free individualism of the market, we will need endless police interventions in the upcoming crises that await us. Thus, if chosen the same path, we should ready ourselves to face an increasing tendency of erasing of a wide spectre of rights and freedoms.

If the return to normal, after the crises fades away, means the continuity with the lack of self-organising than everything will succumb to hierarchy of the state.  And again, the state, instead of serving the society, it will make decisions for it. In such a global emergency, how come the state, which historically is an accidental occurrence, claims the legitimacy to monopolise efforts to deal with the crisis which requires massive popular efforts. And all this happens after decades of the state protracting from its services in the favour of the profit-making market.

While almost no struggle in the history of mankind has not been won by staying at home, the current lock-downs which are propagates as the most effective action, display a staggering lack of alternatives which proves how much limited we are in finding solutions when left to the mercy of the state.

Normalising destructive markets

The two major directions of action of the political elites and the states in their hands, in tackling the economic disturbances by the pandemic have been to either keep the production process ongoing either to stop it for a short period of time in order to rescue its resources – workforce, for a swift restart afterwards.

The aspect of time is probably the most important factor in decisions made by the states in tackling the epidemic and in their continuous service to the capitalist market. The fact that no single serious restrictive measure like the ones we see now was taken to tackle the environment and pollution crisis that also kills millions, tells us that states and markets are fine with a prolonged time of long-lasting destruction. A sudden massive sickening of workers can seriously harm the production process, thus it is better to have a short break from the production process, and borrow a little time from the future which will be paid with massive bailouts for corporations that we see unrolling all over the world. The lockdowns, quarantines and curfews imposed under the current circumstances,  are thus measures to protect workers as assets of the capital and not to protect them in their bodies as healthy individuals, bodies that are increasingly exposed to technologically extended working hours, living in polluted cities, increased precarity and decreased healthcare protection.

The current measures taken by the government are nothing but attempts to normalise the same markets that with their operations degraded the collective capacities for managing crisis. And what they are attempting to normalise is a global market that was already heading to collapse. The WTO already by 2019 declared the global trade growth was the lowest in a decade. The current crisis only pushed it faster to its inevitable collapse.

While there is a genuine concern about millions of workers being fired as a result of the economic crisis of the pandemic, this can also be seen as a big potential to mobilise global self-organised workers in non-profit driven production processes. The relevance of those workers who will be fired is now higher than in any other time in the recent history. Doctors, nurses, firefighters, grocery workers, delivery workers, truck drivers and others are the professions that we really need in order to be prepared better for the future challenges and not the corrupt bankers and politicians. Even in the midst of this epidemics, the class war and its dynamics in the society never ceases to shape the ways on which we deal with it.

We see now how the doctors and nurses, the heroes of these times, are being sacrificed by the state because of its intentional shrinking of the public health sector. But, the concentration and localisation of victimised workers is not at all a new strategy of market capitalism and the state. Through their actions, millions of workers worldwide are being sacrifices every day through producing toxic materials for the gadgets we use in our everyday life. The epidemic only revealed the doctors as a mere example that speak for a general tendency. Thus, instead of praising the heroism of the doctors and nurses, we should fight for saving anyone from being put to work in similar conditions anywhere. The fight which through engaging against the state and the capitalist market finds enough motivation in the fact that they are both out of ideas for the present and less for the future. We see how states, given all logical assessments and empirical data proving the contrary, continue to pump endless money in saving the capitalist market from the collapse towards which it was heading anyway.

Implementing social austerity through populism

Throughout the social networks we see how locked out individuals are inventing senseless ways to spend their time at home. Instead of inventing methods to help the sick and those in need while this pandemic last, the state keeps us away from realizing this collective potential. Instead of helping our neighbours, we are being locked away and pushed to become spies of their potential risky behaviour. The danger posed by this pandemic to the health and living standard of millions of people is too big now to be left to be managed by the states alone.

This sort of social austerity, its nothing else but a version of the austerity implemented after the 2008/09 financial crash. The post 2008 data tell us clearly that austerities cause social and economic misery and numerous deaths. While the previous austerity was implemented through financial measures, the current one is being implemented through the police and in some cases, ridiculously – the army. This only speaks of the extent of the dedication of the state to deploy its hierarchical supremacy through a combination of methods depending on the situation.

In its capture of the horizon of the collective possibilities and subsequent repression, the state is generating an inverted form of populism. A bottom up populism that reflect the condition of the society under the present instant (re)appearance of the state as the sole legitimate authority to deal with the epidemic crisis. This status of the state, combined with the element of panic and hysteria, pushes the masses to demand all sorts of things from the state, like more stricter lock-downs, longer hours of curfews and even to stockpile medicines that have not yet been proven to fight the coronavirus. To all these demands, the state responds by delivering as much as it can on them, providing the masses with a sense of (false) safety in vulnerable times.

Thus, this situation provides a perfect populist moment for the state, which while locking down more people, becomes even more popular as a structure. This is why in the public appearances of politicians of the state they focus on policing measures and not on the dynamics of the virus, because simply we know very little about it. Even with so little knowledge, the policing measures undertaken are not being confronted on logical bases, but rather supported on the abstract idea that the state knows what it does. In a different social organisation, it would be the doctors that take the front stage – they who also enjoy a higher trust among the people. Then their expertise would be much more effective in the fight against the virus if it weren’t confronted by the populist mediation of the politics of the state.

There are also a range of questions on the effectiveness of science under the present model of market driven interests in research and innovation. The issue is not to question the findings of science, but rather what use we make today of our scientific potential and what drives innovation. In which spaces is technology planned and produced and to which purposes? For as long as profit drives all of these, we should take science as e mere teleological tool in the hands of those who own the resources of its development.

The nature of this crisis and other future catastrophes, such as the environmental one, is highly complex and needs a joining of collective forces through the current and possible new technologies. Archaic methods of coercion and exercise of power are not fit for addressing the challenges we face today. A well-equipped army of people with technology and proper training can save much more lives than the police and army currently deployed on our streets.

Building future resilient communities

The current epidemics has helped us come to terms with our fragility and also understand that this fragility is a result of a system which cannot be maintained anymore. We simply cannot move forward to the unknown and increasing dangers of the future with a state and market system that claim that we were not prepared for something like this. It is exactly the unpreparedness that is to be taken to the forefront of the debate on the epidemic crisis. We were not prepared because our states and capitalist markets are not designed to prepare and plan for the future. Because they don’t see the future as a prospect for a collective well-being of the people. Rather they see it as a bank to borrow time from, as a potential to be exploited for profit.

To become resilient for the future, we must build resilient communities which are the sole barrier of the maximum of our collective potentials. The future challenges which are spread through different locations in a global space filled with multiple factors that interplay to generate the overall situation, call for a local self-management of our potentials and a global sharing of knowledge and innovation beyond the limitations posed by global interests of capital. The knowledge and resources for resolving pertinent dangers in the future are too valuable for our health and environment to be allowed to have a market price.

The way in which we entered in this crisis can largely determine the way we get out of it. The lessons we learned after the 2008 crisis tell us that there cannot be a return to “the normal” without a massive price paid by millions of workers and other repressed peoples. In 2008 we entered the crisis with a huge gap in the class division and the solution to it was an open was a class war performed through austerity measures for the poor and bailouts for the rich.

The dynamics of this epidemic’s crisis in the interplay of state and the capitalist market is not an uncharted territory. It is rather defined by the power dynamics that decide on the way out of it. The deployment of police by the state is a measure to secure the decisions are made in the name of the capitalist market. But it also shows the limitations of the two, limitations which are being policed and financed to hold off the potential of mass dereliction of their space of speculation.

The opening for that potential is being provided by the state and the capitalist market themselves. The intended short break with production for profit, which would enable a fast restart, can be pushed to last longer. Given the populist interest of the state to fulfil popular demands at this moment, we can collectively demand a much longer period of this break. One that will perform the same role as a theatrical pause, instead of emptying the space, it increases the tension.

 

 

Absolute subsumtion: The political economy of the algorithmic sexuality

Sex is again liberated. It’s discursive dissemination through the social body generates always already outdated forms of its presentation. Its manifest image – a ‘framework in terms of which man encountered himself’ (Wilfrid Selars), allows for infinite irreducible discontinuity to remain the core of its conceptual machine. Sex appears now more than ever in the realm of the ever escaping ‘contingent- possibility-mechanism’ – a contradiction that maintains the basic flows within the sexuality market.

We have returned to the sex discourse of the classical era with a sexuality weaponized with an accelerating value-form. The bourgeois disciplining of sexual language and its practice, the domestication of sex for the purposes of reproduction, the medicalization and punishing of abnormal sexual behavior, all of these have been overcome for some time now. The ensuing encouragement of ‘the perverse’ with the aim of norming, controlling and keeping it into check, as described by Foucault in History of sexuality, is also over. What we experience today is the total mobilization of a variety of resources for the hyper-intensification of the sexual freedom. Neither the bourgeois putative morality, nor the disciplining apparatuses have any value-producing capacity for the Capital today. The exchanged value, the price that is paid in today’s market increasingly relates to a pure abstraction. Sexuality today represents the most sublime form of such an abstraction.

Contained in the form of the Young-girl – a cross-gender concept, the “living currency” (Klossowski) is the condensation of a set of advanced contemporary social relations managed by sexuality that is never there. The Tiqqun collective, almost a decade before the ‘social network’ came into being, in their “Raw materials for the theory of the Young-Girl” published in 2001, noted the rise of a new champion of the economy:

“Money is no longer the ultimate term of the economy. Its triumph has depreciated it. A naked king that has abandoned all metaphysical content, it has also lost all value. Nothing shows it respect anymore, in the biopolitical flock. Living currency has taken the place of money as a general equivalent; that which relative to which it is worth anything. It is its value and its concretion. The purchasing power of living currency, and a fortiori of the Young-Girl, has no limit; it extends over the whole of everything that exists, because in her, wealth enjoys itself doubly: as symbol and as fact”.

In their brilliant analysis of the process of commodification of the Young-girl, following Marx’s thoughts the process of differentiating in itself, they come to declare that the Young-Girl is absorbed by price, she is nothing beyond it. The centrality of the Young-Girl as the dictating order and locus of the relations of sexuality-distance/fixation and money-exchange/movement maintained a degree of operational sovereignty although remaining always already fully embedded in the territory of Capital.

Under the ‘eye of the algorithm’, the living currency does not live anymore. Instead, it has been fully integrated in the global datascape through the “despotic mega-machine of cognitive capitalism based on the accumulation of valorising information, extraction of surplus value of code and transformation of collective knowledge into the machinic intelligence of new apparatuses.” (Pasquinelli, 2014).

The Committee for the Abolition of the 21st Century

Recognizing that:

- This century has only brought for a politics of restoration of the old 
capitalism

- We are fighting for the things we won one hundred years ago

- The music has resorted to the outbreaks of the previous century, merely 
reproducing the forms and dramatically failing in generating a new content

-  Time has been accelerated only for the commodities, and we as humans remain 
deeply in the conditions of the past

- And this is why the experience of this discrepancy has resulted in 
psychological breakdown, anxiety, depression and suicide;

- Trump had become a president

- Our social spaces, as commons, have shrink beyond recognition, and we are 
thrown into the solitude of the private 

- As all is being privatized, we have privatized the guilt for the failures in 
our lives, ignoring the systemic failures of the contemporary politics  

- Eight people, in the 21st century, control wealth equal to half of the planet’s
 population

- Art has become meaningless, its exhibiting doesn’t even represent the shame of
 its own presentation, it rather disseminates the general melancholy every time 
it appears

- Philosophers are only interpreting the disaster of capitalism, offering more 
grim scenarios, instead of messiahs, they became our scarecrows, often arrogantly
 disassociated from the people

-  Discipline and punish is not a function of the system anymore, and that we 
have internalized them as our autonomous instincts, we became living prisons,
 our own policemen, accountant, judge and fathers and mothers

-   What was rational, calculative, has meddled with our desire to the point of 
no difference, we can neither fully be satisfied with the positivity of our lives,
 neither enjoy the pleasures of its excesses





We declare our program towards the:

- ABOISHING THE 21ST CENTURY, in discourse and in action, recognize our material 
condition as not affected by the time that that passed, thus the urgency of the 
past century’s revolutions is still immanent

- Unlearning everything that has been instilled onto us by the experience of life 
under the generalized conditions of capitalist realism

- Destroying the means of production that only reproduce the conditions of our 
enslavement

- Generation of spaces of minimal intensities, linking them globally in a vision 
for of a desert of minimal freedoms with an unlimited potential for expansion

- The invention of a new production that will emerge from the desert on which a 
new community, defined by the absolute lack of heritage and privilege, will force 
the creation of new means of production, ones that will reproduce our freedom

- Thinking in terms of immediacy, of real non-fetishized conditions of our 
existence and immediate interests bound by collective material idealism

- Pursuing of a post-philosophical exchange of knowledge functional for a general
 emancipation of instincts through transformative practice    

- Reemerging of health-supporting senses of inter-individual communicational, 
sexual, cultural and political intercourse out of communized desire for the 
environment

- Enable a dreamer’s society freed from the calculative every-day dictate of 
capital

-  Bring the future into the present and shape it outside the double blackmail 
of acceleration and primitivism  

- Absolute negation of almost everything existing



The Committee

TOWARDS THE REBIRTH OF THE SOCIAL : A designated manual for a dialectical solution to the question of the space for art

A sustained and accelerated process of generalized depletion of meaning is taking place at present time. After Trump’s victory, politics can hardly claim any meaningful legitimacy for its processes bearing the affinity to result in such a tragedy. Austerity measures, dispossessing the most vulnerable of our societies in the name of a financial system run by banks, can hardy point to any economic principle worth maintaining a single day more. And what does art do when it does art in these times?

Historically, crisis in art have played the role of a warning for the upcoming political and social crisis. The current production of art, in the modes labeled contemporary, is not one presentation of art in crisis, it rather represents the most sophisticated material mechanism of the re-production of social crisis. Capitalism, the grindhouse of the social, still lacks behind in borrowing and adapting the tools for value extraction from contemporary art.

In the last days of the Welfare State we saw the birth of conceptualism as an attempt to gasp the upcoming problems of the virtual financial world and the dictatorship of the algorithm to come. This attempt to engage in social commentary and political activism was supposed to mark the developing tendencies for a deep general crisis we experience today.  In doing so it serviced the contemporary art production with its own crisis. This was the crisis of a location for art. The departure from the aesthetics was marked initially with strong acts of cursing its historical dominance. The idea, the machinic processes, manuals and theoretical frameworks gave art the access to new territories. The multiple fields of the social and political were to serve as a form of mediation towards the new location of the art-in-departure. Instead, the crisis of the location for art, became its praised quality, the lack was inaugurated as a positive charge. When Badiou, the living philosopher, attributes to art one of the locations for the procedures of truth, it is clearly not possible to maintain this attribution for the contemporary art. The potential for a truth procedure is always confined in a particular situation.

Instead of dealing with its own crisis, we saw the birth of a completely new phenomenon: the claiming of the crisis as a positive content. While the crisis of capitalism is in a constant state of demanding dispossession, the crisis of contemporary art works through extraction. Thus, contemporary art production relies on the combination of the key components of: crisis, the social, the political and extraction. The crisis, instead of being exposed to an array of attacks from all sides, has been normalized, internalized and finally positivized. The social and the political remain the ambiguous specific object of the beyond-aesthetical art process. The interaction of these three components resorts to extraction, as the only possible relation of art to social practice, given its base composition components.

Instead of providing a procedure of truth, the contemporary art hoovers over the society as an extraction drone. Nothing of the social practice escapes the extraction processes embedded within the contemporary conceptual art. The flesh of the society is the medium of extraction, and the exhibition space is the medium of its self-legitimation. Contemporary art legitimizes itself for its own purposes. If it had been embedded in the social practice, it would have eaten up itself until now. The process of the installation represents a report of the recording of the act of extraction. Its presentation exhibits the accumulated, appropriated value of the social practice. Without a location, art exploits endless autonomous motives, globalizes its thirst and hinders the very potential of the emergence of truth as an act of fidelity in a given situation – social practice. Everybody can be an artist now! If a democratic claim to concepts is the starting point of every egalitarian practice, then conceptual art is everywhere, it is everything. Everything that exists and that ever existed and will exist. Why can’t we simply call this an absolute realism? A capitalist realism.

The invention of the curator comes as a historic necessity of the gradually becoming visible of the act of social attrition performed by contemporary art. The duty of the curator is to perform the gesture of embedding of the act of contemporary art within the social practice. The curator, lacking a proper space of action, resorts to violating other’s actions. It (the curator) intervenes by way of re-affirming the extraction processes. It’s ambiguous questions, disturb and attempt to confuse the separate, still converging, social practices. It is neither an artist neither a social organizer. It deploys theory in a space of objects that are conceptually forced to reference a social or political issue. This is the inherent source of antagonism within the contemporary art process. Objects depleted of aesthetic design, in their muteness and failure to represent a design of theory, cling to textbook theoris in order to enter the realm of the social and the political.  So, these object’s necessity is one of marketing for theory. A curator is nothing else than a marketing agent.

After we have evaluated our experience with the contemporary art, we can claim the need for ‘A great leap forward’. The solution for the crisis of the art, that is one of location, is thus to be pursued in the domain of space. The space for art, not the space of art. A space for art is to be found in the very social practice. Living in the end times, the times of the depletion of meaning requires a new social practice. One that can be inaugurated from within the different locations of truth. We need a new political conception of actions in the society. A new valorization. The repetition of old models will only lend our societies in the realm of new dispossessions. In order for art to generate its own conditions of societal embedment it must deliver a definite break with its extraction machine. If the only successful break with the cancer is the dissolution of the body that maintains it, the only end to the crisis of contemporary art is its dissolution. Herein lies the very riddle. That is, lacking a concrete location, contemporary art has left us without means, inherent to situated locations, to deploy a sustained attack. We can only witness of its aerial exhibitionism over the material reality of the society. Its exhibitionism is nonetheless material in the effects it re-produces. Its objects deprive the latent objectivism of its materiality, of the invested labor. Objects that are used in contemporary art exhibitionism escape the materialist coding. They are forced to play the role of intermediary concepts. It is so because they mediate the access to real existing concepts in the domain of the social and political. The gesture of conceptualization by way of objects, inaugurates a historically novel perversion: the installation deterritorializes real objective materiality in order to exploit the space occurring in the locus of object presence/absence as a tool for extraction from the social practice. Therefore, the theorization on the irrelevance of the aesthetic value of the object completely misses the point. Kosuth’s claim that ‘an aesthetic consideration of an object existing in the realm of art means that the object’s existence or functioning in an art context is irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment’ only offers us a negative reference to an irrelevant position. The true inherent relation of an object is, and will always remain, its relation to the contradictions involved in the process of material condensation of un-manifested labor relations. Its latent exhibition is the manifest form of contemporary predicament of the labor. Nowadays art exhibition is built on the basis of absolute negation of this relation.

The space for art is crucial for the material practice of art itself. The birth of a new ideal of art, one that creates, through reorganization of references, its own space of action, is possible only through the dialectical act of destruction/creation from within the contemporary art processes of current times. The acceleration of suicidal, nerve wrecking, exploitative, anxious experiences of the contemporary artist can provide a path for the definitive break with the demands of the extraction processes. Not the self-subverting strategies, self-abolition method and the becoming its own inherent cure, but the total dispersion through the social and political to the point of becoming invisible, untraceable, inexistent. Only when we reach that point of dissolution, we can than embark on the process of valorization of the social practices that we decide to name as art practices. And this process of naming is not a definitive one. It depends on the potentiality of the given situation in which the naming will take place, whether the new space of art will be accommodated as a mode of social practice with its own location. The delimitation of the space is thus contingent on the success of this process of naming, identifying references and enabling (not extracting) of productive social value.

The end of the end of the twentieth century is near. The algorithmic processes have generated a new episteme. One that is concealed from the human access to it. It exists on its own, in its own self-generated territory of unlimited autonomy. The virtual process has generated a truth, beyond our common interpretative Nietzschean qualifications. Nietzche is dead. We need a social practice of art to break the limits of our understanding and knowledge. The reflective theory can only exhibit the limitations at hand struggling around the terrain of its own references like a mad dog inside a cage. The location of the new space for art, in its definitive break with theory, can be defined as a social practice that colonizes the terrain of the algorithm. Only after the colonization takes place, theory can be deployed to interpret the fluxes in the new domain of truth. Not the Art after philosophy, as Kosuth claims, but the philosophy after the artistic intervention through the society, can give birth to a new social.

~Brick Shithouse

You cannot ‘cure’ yourself from your Online Profile

The history of our economy is the main sickness we have encountered. And we cured ourselves with the emergence of  the Online Profile.

A change in the heritage of human profiles has emerged. And it is irreversible. Tattoos, leather accessories and hairstyles, all of them were all too fixed on the body. Online Profiles are fluid, manipulative, out-of-control of any fixed desire. They duplicate, replicate, mash, reinvent and pervert the virtual colossus of drives. You can desire to be a certain profile and assemble yourself to this aim, but later comes a new pro-vocation, a sharing of content without ownership, every share embodies a certain parameter of a profile. Instantaneous, tactical and strategic actions of profiles collapse into one monstrous conglomerate of endless possibilities. The very possibilities that are so generated return their attack. You start to desire all sorts of things. You become the shattered apparatus of aligning with all the different vectors of desire-calls.

The rate of production of commodities in the real economy against the rate of production of online content is extremely disproportionate. Obviously, we have all ceased to produce. All production now belongs to the machine of interconnected algorithms, souls and effects in the form of contents. It is the most advanced machine to have ever appeared in the course of human’s encounter with the history of capitalism. You cannot consume the online content in the traditional way of consumption, one that generates waste. In the machine, Online Profiles only serve as replicators of content in a process of stellar expansion of offer without demand. This is the new economy of the machine. Profiles cannot consume, cannot generate demand, thus cannot revoke, limit or regulate its production. In a limited number of profiles, the accelerating production desired more of them. Austerity cannot be imposed on the machine’s production processes.

A general mutation of the concept of economy has emerged in the mode of a future’s production within the present. Derivatives with endless potentials are exploding in the virtual of the future’s here and now. The emergence of Online Profiles made it possible for a definite and final break with the evolutionary social tendencies. They are the most revolutionary agency of the past. The future, which is no more something to aspire to, is plugged into us through the assemblage of the new One. It’s constant flows of production immediately correlated with the lived present.

The Online Profile has no tendency, neither location, it is so barred from any unionizing action within the machine’s assemblage. It is in radical difference with any kind of political register. Its agency within the economy of the machine is one of endless substitution and replication, with itself and with the production process. Traditional reproduction required discourse, property and hegemony. The Online Profile never reproduces itself within the assemblage of the machine’s economy. It only provides endless possibilities in the non-linear virtual environment. Its location is always already dislocated and the means of its production are fluid to the point of non-recognition. They can never be owned by anybody anywhere. The Online Profile is the new conception of freedom. It has resulted from the collapse of human’s difference with the machine. The machine is human, all too human. The Online Profile has taken the possession over ourselves by freeing us from our obsession with our own desire. The Online Profile is a vanished presence always already somewhere else, so we are finally free from anyself.