dear diary, today I like this phrase “romantic materialism.” today I ordered Elizabeth Grosz’s The Incorporeal and John M. Harrison’s Viriconium. …today I am nervous. today I am suspended between two ideas: one is, against immaterial labour and semiocapitalism, the idea of the place of care, care of the body, its pleasures and needs; it is an idea of the palliative industry, in which all media participate; capital care functions to feed on an industrial scale those who can afford to live inside it; it functions to distract from the suffering and from the desire and from the passions of the body, with easy listening, predigested package language-worlds, of viewing, touching, tasting, light-comedic mediatised commodities, popularised pulp & pap, lubricated & comfort sex; it is the service culture of safety & health; its wealth is the investment in an aging population even as it is being born, being born into an aging population, a universal retirement village and hospice is where you will live, dance occasionally, nod off, eat, shit & fuck, if you are born as one of the lucky ones. The other idea is postmodernism. It comes after modernism because it defrags it into the universal agreement to believe in price without cost, in the nonsymbolic exchange of money as the value of all values. Where modernism left you looking at yourself looking, postmodernism recognises that look–priceless… so destroyed wisdom today is my subjectline, the umbilicus of deconstruction from which I hang
{ 2017 08 02 }
