Wednesday, November 6, 2013

if you can read this, capitalism, if you can understand this, flip a coin

“Is there another preliminary to the elaboration of play between forms-of-life, to communism?” (This Is Not a Program, 51)

Even the production of living knowledge is contained and managed within the system of capitalist relations, the capitalorganism desiring only to reproduce itself ad infinitum. In the production of its own desire as well as sustenance it devours spatial and temporal autonomy in the forms-of-life, limits and composes, concretely and dramatically, their behaviors, inter- and even intra-actions: that which exists will have no function other than that of auto-reiteration within frameworks it is coerced into. Our consent and self-application within this system of relationships only serves the interests of alienation, manipulation, and exploitation. Acceptance of this constructed reality is the preliminary movement toward a revolution of and for the commons. The recollaboration upon the commons is concretely and decisively celebrated in the actions of individuals and groups, who choose to engage in the world differently, collectively. The collectivity is not a parliament, nor is it a shareholders’ meeting; rather it is an intentional space in which people choose to discuss the production of life, and each voice is given equal weight. These creative dynamics are integral in the struggle against authoritarian capitalism.

There is everywhere a crisis of representation, which is also a crisis of participation - it is almost a Pavlovian crisis, because we condition ourselves to it even as it occurs. The failure to act is rooted in an epistemological uncertainty, a loss of faith in ourselves, so to speak, because what has been given to us is not quite what was promised, like a serious game getting out of hand. Yet it remains unquestionably ours, being here and doing it as we tend to do, perhaps waiting just for someone else to start doing something. We forget that this is nothing but us, and consequently we are nothing but it, and it reflects our image in grotesque, necrotic characteristics, outlandish juxtapositions, fearful proportions. It is a dream of ourselves which upon us exerts maniacal control. Selling our labor, we sell our minds and our bodies, our lives themselves, employed in the project of our own negation.

Consumption is a complexity, a web of equations both nurtured and whipped by other equations. Primitive accumulation, along with all the socio-cultural conditions accompanying this formatting of the distribution of wealth, is the economic inauguration of this event, the beginning of the revolution in the mode of production into which we have deposited our faith, to which we have consented and been made to genuflect.

Play adapts to the diversity of environments in which it is a possibility; this is all environments. As immutable are the laws of mathematicians there are laws which exceed their spectrum of government: universal laws. And the law of the universe is concentrated auto-alteration, which is the constant, transformation of the relationships between the particulate systems who manifest themselves with such vivacity. Characteristic of these experiential shifts is the yearning for change, the song of the body, who is all bodies, gatherings of substantial, though relative matter into expressive compositions, resembling their creator inaccurately but acutely - that is to say in a manner expressing its own positivity, a reality controvertible only in its capacity for movement: shake and jive, samba, alternating rhythm and primal idiosyncratism.

We are bedecked in the spectacular desire-machine and its self-reproducing eschatology, as surely as babies are somewhere born every minute and less. We become witness to it only when we drop the charade, which seems a frightful monolith in its composure. It it hard to make it fade, a smoker’s blue halo, due to the fundamental conditions in and by which it was produced, capitalism and his phallus-pillars. Yet it flickers. And we may banish it like we’ve forgotten something, can’t quite remember...

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