We are not concerned with the autonomy of the socalled work-of-art, but with its alien pathology.
Autonomy doesn’t refer to the unique social location of “art,” but to the aesthetic dislocation of society.
The great myth of capitalism is its “logic” of recuperation & self-renewal precomprehends every “‘naïve” insistence upon its discontinuity: “capitalism is dead, long live capitalism!”
Autonomy is not being an agent of this instalment scheme of critical dysfunction.
Under capitalism, the “individual” is the antithesis of an autonomous society.
There is only a “body politic” according to the Cartesianism of a system of capital, that places itself at the head of an inert social organism it alone is capable of animating, because it alone has created it.
“Aesthetic autonomy” IS the body-without-organs.
Just as, the body-without-organs is autonomous society without “individuals.”
To protest isn’t a transitive verb: the object of all politics is politics itself.
As surplus-value is to excess, so aesthetics is to insurrection.
The “voice of reason” is a hypnotist determined to mesmerise the “language of being.”
Still dreaming of a totally administered world in which the lightbulbs magically change themselves.
Culture is the anaesthetic of ideological consciousness.
Not a dialectics of aesthetic gratification, but gratification by dialectical aestheticism.
They have invented a poison more deadly than any “cure.”
Capitalism says there’s not enough, when it means there’s too much, & too much when there’s not enough.
“I” can’t get no satisfaction.
The aesthetics of hyperproduction aren’t simply an instrument of ideological control, they are the entire content of its social reality.
Nothing is determined by its position within the process of reification but the “mindset” of reification itself.
The “silence” of Martin Heidegger is overrated: all political ontology is negative dialects, signed by the aletheia of its disappearances, its erasures, its mass exterminations.
The illness is most deadly at the very moment when the crisis appears to have passed.
INTERIOR MINISTRY
FEBRUARY 2021
ALIENIST MANIFESTO 