Darlings are you ready for the long winter's fall?
said the lady in her parlor said the butler in the hall.
Is there time for another? cried the drunkard in his sleep.
Not likely said the little child. What's done the Lord can keep.
And the vicar stands a-praying. And the television dies
as the white dot flickers and is gone and no-one stops to cry.
The big jet rumbles over runway miles that scar the patchwork green
where slick tycoons and rich buffoons have opened up the seam
of golden nights and champagne flights ad-man overkill
and in the haze consumer crazed we take the sugar pill.
Jagged fires mark the picket lines the politicians weep
and mealy-mouthed through corridors of power on tip-toe creep.
Come and see bureaucracy make its final heave
and let the new disorder through while senses take their leave.
Families screaming line the streets and put the windows through
in corner shops where keepers kept the country's life-blood blue.
Take their pick and try the trick with loaves and fishes shared
and the vicar shouts as the lights go out, and no-one really cares.
Dark Ages shaking the dead
Closed pages better not read
Cold rages burn in your head.– Jethro Tull, Dark Ages, 1976
The abstractive process only produces things because such things carry, or give shape to, ‘value’, which is capitalism’s true product. The things of this world are accidental, they relate nebulously to human need from which they derive some degree of objectivity, but which are fundamentally counterfeit, displaced from how they should be, hollow and unsatisfying.
Social relations are falsified through the mediation of such counterfeit objects and are thereby expropriated as relations-as-objects and thus further falsified. Where a relation first sets in motion objects as symbols of that relation, the objects feed back into the relations and transform them, truncating them, causing the symbols to supplant the relations and thus furthering the advance of the algebraic discourse of abstraction as the most appropriate discourse of relations. [...]
– suddenly, there is nothing that is not bought and sold.
All objects become pregnant with value, all objects and activities, from strawberries to songs, from water to medicine, from ideas to babies, from vistas to the patch of earth on which you stand, from everything to anything. Every separated object, and all of its components and attributes, is allocated a shifting but measurable ‘value’ which may be realised in the moment of exchange. At the level of interpersonal interaction the productive process realises the motor force, the process of abstraction, which drives it. Abstract generality is made to appear at the most intimate core, and in every detail, of material reality.
The establishment of capitalist production as the dominant social relation reversed the relation of production to the world. From the moment of capital’s formal domination, the world ceased to function as the source, frame and ground of all natural phenomena. This environmental function was supplanted by that of the productive system which increasingly became the life-support machine for all life, and the arbiter of what existed and what would be announced ‘extinct’.
[...]
The historical purpose of the proletariat, as discovered by Oscar Wilde, is to become quite useless. Its struggle is to channel the sensitivities of the corporeal body in opposition to the desensitisation and habituation process (i.e. the surplus reality principle) which is the fundamental prerequisite of world production based on concrete labour activity.
If this is the case, it would then seem feasible to hypothesise that somewhere along the line the metabolic process of recoding and containing the proletariat’s decomposition (the accumulated physical manifestations of disfunction amongst millions of individuals) will lose its own elasticity – and that it will become incoherent as a homeostatic system and thus begin to deteriorate more rapidly (the less capacity there is in the system for re-coding disfunction as containable, the more disfunction will be recorded as uncodable).
The individual’s innate and intimate struggle against social environment never decreases in either quantity or quality, but it does adapt itself in its expression to conditions and is thus manifested in innumerable forms. For example, at the present juncture there is a tendency amongst the proletariat to express the rejection of capitalist relations through prolonged sickness, depression, obsessions, fanaticism, drunkenness, interpersonal violence... rather than say by marching through the streets on ‘protest marches’.
For the left this recomposition of struggle into an intimate bodily response feels like a retreat. However, the affective turn of revolt is actually some sort of ‘advance’ – it is a step closer to the proper ordering of perspective and significance, a step closer to the de-ideologised nature of instinctive revolt.
Revolt is an intimate relatedness to the world, and therefore most real at the level of immediate feeling which functions to orientate the individual in a potentially toxic environment.
- Cruelty means eradicating by means of blood and until blood flows, god, the bestial accident of unconscious human animality, wherever one can find it.
- Man, when he is not restrained, is an erotic animal, he has in him an inspired shudder, a kind of pulsation that produces animals without number which are the form that the ancient tribes of the earth universally attributed to god. This created what is called a spirit.
Well, this spirit originating with the American Indians is reappearing all over the world today under scientific poses which merely accentuate its morbid infectuous power, the marked condition of vice, but a vice that pullulates with diseases, because, laugh if you like, what has been called microbes is god, and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms? They make them with the microbes of god. [...]
- I mean that I have found the way to put an end to this ape once and for all and that although nobody believes in god any more everybody believes more and more in man.
So it is man whom we must now make up our minds to emasculate.
- How's that?
- By placing him again, for the last time, on the autopsy table to remake his anatomy. I say, to remake his anatomy. Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs.
For you can tie me up if you wish, but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.
Then you will teach him again to dance wrong side out as in the frenzy of dance halls and this wrong side out will be his real place.– Antonin Artaud, To Have Done with the Judgement of God
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