WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Alienist Broadsheet #6 (June 2018) download pdf

“In political economy, law is determined by the absence of law. The true law of political economy is chance…” (Marx, on Mill & Ricardo; 1844)

GUIDING PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE

A sense of terrible urgency paralyses our thinking: we only want to know what to do. For example, putting on one shoe before putting on the other, taking the first step before taking the second. Is this how the thought of emancipation lives – neurotically conditional? If the first forays are so problematic, how is a revolt against cultural habits by minds utterly overwhelmed by them even imaginable? Minds steeped in the quotidian violence of merely permitted actions? Please, mummydaddy, tell us how to defeat you. They’ve codified the algorithms of dissent, transforming enactment to anxiety tended by infantile pleasures: museum, TV, gamespace. Day-care centres of co-opted subjectivism. Vocational guidance counsellors are on hand to sell instalment plans. Knowing you’ll always settle for less, they tell you ART IS MORE THAN ENOUGH. In an economy run on the logic of pure surplus, there still has to be something to point a finger at. Is this the only way to be authentic? A parasite hates nothing more than whatever throws its unadorned image back at it (capitalism’s Anti-Oedipus complex). But the parasite’s hatred of the “parasite” is only as substantive as the mirror’s influence over the image it transmits: a mere reflex-effect. For the parasite, there’s no “outside” of this parasitic relation – WHICH EVERYTHING EXISTS TO FEED. Like the God-illusion, it’s the Ideal Signified because it’s an ideal totalitarianism. Do nothing, it benignly says, because anything you do will only confirm your place in the system. It knows an idiot when it sees one.