Rumours of his death were found to be exaggerations. Oscar Wilde. God bless us all and. Rumours of His death were found to be exaggerations. God. Oscar Wilde bless us all and all art is quite useless, except to name God. Who answers mess but – Oscar Wilde. God: Mess. So what’s the problem? No problem. No future. No present. And health is hard to come by since it became a commodity. No past. The past is unhealthy. The future is death. The present can’t decide: but whatever, it’s too expensive.
The Age of Illness. Or the Age of Psychosis. Can’t find a break, a crack where the break happened that let the light in. Is the light in? Can I finally close the door?
The Age of Illness to which something must endlessly be added, the addition of which must, according to the economic imperatives of the day, the free market imperative, be a market; that is, it must first be industrialised. Drugs must be manufactured. Doctors must be manufactured. Nurses must be tooled. The process must occur on a large scale. The scale must threaten the biosphere to sustain; the image must change to self-organisation: the market must be imagined as self-organising – or ecological. The process must now be ecological. The ecology of human health must now threaten the biosphere – but it must at all costs be sustained, since there must be sustainable health; the health industry of drugs, doctors and nurses must be sustainable. So it must be imagined as self-organised as a market. But the market must threaten the biosphere. There must be pathology. First there must be a pathology of the individual. Second there must be a pathology of the collective who belong to an epoch. The Age of Illness. Where health is not a given but the demand for doctors, drugs and nurses in no particular order is a given.
The psychosis takes hold in the middle of the process. It makes a solid and artificial structure out of the natural ecology of naturally occurring self-organising industrial health as a market, the agents of which are doctors and nurses and the capital of which is drugs. Now we can understand drugs as capital so therefore we can understand that a good outcome is measurable in terms of good health and well being. Well beings. But we must be presumed to be ill before we can be fixed and the fixing must be a psychotic reaction.
The market therefore mediates between illness and health in a way that sustains psychosis. Another name for this psychosis is the internet of things or object-orientated ontology – its parody in philosophical terms. The other name for either of these is the absence of any problem which is otherwise understood as the mess.
Object-orientated ontology holds that objects withdraw from us as soon as we get close – the internet of things holds that objects communicate with the internet and so truly they do have a virtual half. The real half withdraws, comedically. The mess has it that we can’t identify a problem because the problem is immanent, a fact of dwelling within it.
What if the answer to the mess were God? This is something fundamentalists should know something about. What if neoliberalism’s pretension to being atheistic and freeing us from the illusion of theism is simply an excuse for its perpetuation of health as God in which it mediates, opening a direct line, a hardwire from the ill body to the market-readied mind, weakened by the body’s illness, abrogating its sense of world to the medicalised nature of knowledge, open only to psychosis. General. All over. Like a system of the world.
