Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made...
Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny...
-- Thomas Nashe, In Time of Plague
The complicity between art, revolution and high finance have never been more literally demonstrated than the new 500 peso banknote issued by the Mexican state
Conspiracy Theory
Rich men, trust not in wealth,
Gold cannot buy you health;
Physic himself must fade.
All things to end are made...
Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny...
-- Thomas Nashe, In Time of Plague
‘“Life after work is still work”, she said'
(A Chinese clerk in Zambia)
'Describing the morning commute to work as
“going from a small prison to a large prison”'
(some of them half-jokingly
described themselves as ‘higher-class
migrant workers')
‘Boredom is always counter-revolutionary’
(The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you bored)
‘It is boredom which eventually
overtakes a man who seeks for excitement
instead of understanding’
(The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you excited)
‘Both men are in search of intense feeling;
neither is in search of just feeling,
of feeling
properly motivated’
(Images of sex sell even sexless aspects
of the spectacle.
Even sexless images that promise sex
sell submission to the spectacle
as a whole.
The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you happy.
The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you miserable.
The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you feel
happy under miserable
conditions
by making you feel
misery is sexy.
The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you horny.)
‘climax is catharsis, but such paroxysms
often amount to oblivious ways
of releasing pent up energies
not invested in the real context;
since mature communities
devote more energy
to the real context, there is relatively less
need for these
release valves. Sometimes climaxes
are appropriate (as in sex),
but the use of such gushes of feeling
in Western movies,
music, and literature,
stands out as strange:
they often have nothing
whatsoever
to do with the
real context’
(The spectacle is a conspiracy
to make you feel
excited about precisely
nothing:
the socially enforced nullity of the daily grind
the consumption of whose products is as alienated,
debilitating, useless and stupid
as the drudgery that precedes it
['They relish the convenience of company-
managed systems of collective consumption,
and the time and money they save'];
the reduction of irretrievable effervescent possibility
to a grey commute through dead space and dead time
[‘No well-intentioned person
could journey in an underground tube-train
full of wan faces coming in to work
in the mornings from the suburbs,
reading their Daily Express,
or returning from work
in the evenings towards the suburbs,
reading their Evening Standard,
without feeling homicidal’];
a conspiracy
to glorify vacuity,
justify the unjustifiable
for the sake of the powerful,
instill a senseless, unnecessary, evil waste of human treasure
with an unjustified, immoral sense of necessity and grandeur
['Clearly, someone who cannot verbally
express negative emotions
will have trouble
discharging and neutralizing these emotions,
physiologically as well as psychically’];
a conspiracy
to implant
a false sentiment
of excitement
by way of a false consciousness
of reality:
the spectacle is a conspiracy to excite your appetite
and inhibit your faculty of judgment,
['With almost wilful perversity,
I am going to Denmark for a week, a country
that is often found to be
the “happiest” in the world, which is another way to say
its population is the blindest and most
conformist of all’];
a conspiracy
to denude totally your sense-ability
and cripple your moral fibre
through aesthetic poverty
[‘The aesthetic is the opposite
of the anaesthetic’],
to reduce you to the stature
of an emotional pygmy
['there is strong empirical support
for alexithymia being a stable personality trait
rather than just a consequence
of psychological distress’];
a conspiracy
to strike blind the poverty-striken
to the cheap confines of their common prison
and the common wealth that they deny
through petty lives frittered away
in a sordid frenzy
of miserly sensuality
with all the paltry passion
of a mastabatory orgy
a ceaseless circle-jerk
of global proportions
['the statistical paradox of so many
future suicidal people
declaring that they are quite
satisfied with their lot’];
a conspiracy
to promote the pursuit by poor people
of pure sensation
for it’s own sake, as capital seeks
propagation for it’s own sake
[‘I was completely amazed by the discovery
of alexithymia, which,
in the light of the knowledge that you have provided,
appears to be the link that was,
until now, missing
in the contemporary exposition
of the end of everything’];
the spectacle is
a sensational pean
to commodities and their passions
[‘Cutting cost and production targets
are subjects of intense and emotional
verbal exchange in meetings’],
a commercial promotion
of improper motivation,
an advertisement for insensate banality,
a campaign to propagate emotion improperly felt,
disguised delirium,
inanity publicised as passionate intensity,
the systematic estrangement of the senses,
a sensibility founded on plastic surgery,
virile passion based on sterile delusion,
tireless publicity on behalf of secret insanity,
hidden intentions
in the hearts of men and women
[‘Let us have madness openly, O men of my generation’]
as on the surface of all the earth,
[‘and within the head, A rotting bog of huge lean graves’];
a hymn in veneration
of excrement,
human feelings given nourishment through the degradation
of human beings
[‘The inability to express emotions verbally
implies a deficient interior life.
Inevitably,
those who cannot match feelings to words
will live out that deficit
in their contacts with others’];
a conspiracy
to make you feel excited
about what would rightly
make you feel both disgusted and bored)
‘The poem as an exercise in just feeling
is an act of moral judgement’
(Only a radical situation
in the context of a world revolution
begun and advanced at each stage
by the direct-action and self-organisation
of the victims of modern slavery themselves
against the poverty of their miserable existence
that grinds them down every day of their lives
[despite and precisely because
of the immense accumulation
of spectacles, capital and toys
that smothers their world at all levels
under vast layers
of brilliantly glittering pollution];
against their affluent poverty,
their designer-label ennui,
[‘the golden chains
with which the bourgeoisie
drags them in its train’];
their plushly-padded prison cells,
their decapitated dawns,
[‘Three-fourths of philosophy
and literature is the talk
of people trying to convince themselves
that they really like the cage
they were tricked into entering’];
their disastrous acceptance
of the blackmail of utility
perpetrated by a useless society
[‘In the geology of lies known as
city planning, architecture
has as much to do with building places
to live well
as Coca-Cola has
to do with making satisfying drinks’];
their passive consumption
of the bourgeois idea of happiness,
their pseudo-rebellious ideologies
[‘This dissatisfaction is familiar
to students of romantic literature
under the name of ennui’];
against all their own illusions
and the conspiracy of duplicity
that censors reality
through the systematic organisation
of false appearances;
only a radical re-invention
in such a direction
of all history and the entirety
of human civilisation
by the free association of society’s producers
can truly turn everyday life into an exciting game
and so justify
that feeling of excitement
the universal pursuit of which
through hopelessly contradictory means
has turned everyday life into a boring purgatory)
‘The face of all the world is changed, I think,
Since first I heard the footsteps of thy soul
Move still, oh, still, beside me, as they stole
Betwixt me and the dreadful outer brink’
(The lens of the human eye
projects an upside-down picture
of the world;
the visual cortex of the human brain
turns it right-side up again)
‘At that moment the animal spirit,
that which lives in the high chamber
to which all the spirits of the senses
carry their perceptions,
began to wonder deeply at it,
and, speaking especially to the spirit of sight,
spoke these words: “Now your blessedness appears”’
(The cochlea of the human ear transmits a complex matrix composed of the interplay between various clusters of sound waves, each with a particular spectrum of frequencies produced from a unique source; the aural center of the brain sorts through all these, muting those which maintain a dull persistent presence over time)
‘Destruction was my Beatrice’
(A summary of Godel’s first incompleteness theorem can be stated as: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete; if certain basic mathematical proofs exist they can be manipulated to prove the opposite, and there is no logical way to resolve this contradiction; truth is a semantic concept, and is not equivalent to provability except in special cases)
‘From then on Eros ruled my soul...
And though her image,
which was continually with me,
was a device of Eros to govern me,
it was nevertheless of so noble a virtue
that it never allowed Eros to rule me
without the loyal counsel of reason
in all those things where such counsel was usefully heard.’
(It is possible to assign a finite value to an infinite series of natural numbers. The most difficult such series, the sum of all integers to infinity and beyond, has successfully been manipulated to produce a simple mathematical formula, counter-intuitive but logically coherent --
“1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + ... = -1/12”)
‘Value, as Marx shows in the opening pages of Capital, forcibly imposes equivalence upon things that are not equivalent. All the contradictions of the commodity, even its eventual crisis, are already contained in the "simple
commodity-form," namely, "20 yards of linen = 1 coat". But here we may go even further than Marx and, since the quantity has no significance, reduce the equation to "linen = coat". Linen is thus the same thing as a coat, or tea, or iron. In other words, "white = black". Obviously a society founded on such a principle is bound to come to a bad end’
(There once was a C with a sore;
B caused it. C fractured B’s jaw.
Then A took offense,
and in B’s defense,
reduced C to c with a saw)
‘The man stands. He has his legs. He has his feet. He is a man. He was a man. He becomes a tree. He has his arms. He stands because the maiden looks at him with the maiden's eye. The maiden looks, fastening him to the ground. And it is so. His legs are those of a man, but he is a tree. His arms are those of a man… He is a tree. He has his eyes, because he was a man. He has his head. He has his head-hair. He is a tree which is a man. He is a man. He is a tree. He has his feet. He is shod. He has his nails. He has his mouth. He has his nose. He has his ears. He is a tree. He is a man… He talks. He is a tree. He was a man who talked, and it is so that he talks while he is a tree. He waits standing on the mountain... He is a talking tree, one that talked standing there, for he was a man. The maiden looked at him, that is why he became a tree. It is true that he talks, for he was a man. And it is true that he became a tree which talked, for he was a tree. He looked and he talked. His mouth remained; his tongue remained to talk with. He is a tree that has his head-hair. He also has his eyes. He looks. He is a tree that looks. He is a tree.’
(Slavery is always inexcusable,
but there is some merit
in knowing that one is a slave;
and the most irreparable vice is
[‘clear signs of a fundamental delusion:
the notion that the masses,
proletarians, individuals, or subjects
are manipulated, seduced, corrupted, fooled --
that they can neither express themselves
or act autonomously’]
to put up with this
without knowing it)
‘The organisation of words that leads to discourse
transforms something in the world's order
through an effect on the consciousness
of those who express it and those who listen to it.
It is the breach
through which a glimpse of eternity rushes into a world
rolling darkly towards its ruin.’
(Adieu, farewell, earth’s wordlessness --
O miserable dumb persistence
That markets poverty as bliss --
Comrades, no more mercy on this!)
‘The victory will go to those who know how to create disorder without loving it. You'll see that I have no trouble explaining this crucial variation: the lyrical aspiration toward the end of the world and its subsequent retraction, owing to new facts. For example, the mind was threatened back then with coagulation, whereas today it is threatened with dissolution.’
(Silence and psychosis,
paralysis and passionlessness,
self-deception and cynicism,
dissolution and discipline,
all form an inseparable unity
under the domination
of unrestrained unconsciousness
to which an abject populace
is irrationally subjected
with predictably disastrous consequences:
Comrades,
it is necessary
to make the world more rational
as a first step to making it more exciting;
it is necessary
to disillusion desires and emotions
as a first step to revolutionising them:
Boredom is always counter-disillusionary)
‘Happier places have more suicides. Figure 1 provides the first and simplest evidence. It uses raw, unadjusted data on subjective well‐being rankings (from the World Values Survey) and suicide rates (from the World Health Organization). Although there are variations around the average (e.g., the Netherlands), the striking association in the scatter plot is the positive association between happiness ranking and suicide rate. This gradient is the opposite of that expected.’
(The explanations offered
by every hired expert
trained to apply their minds
like bullshit on the mud walls of a peasant hut
to the primary product
of modern civilisation – self-delusion –
remain as absurd
and inane as can be expected)
‘Above all he scorned the sentiment
which seeks to prolong enjoyment
by moderation’
(thus ‘the only man who lived dangerously’,
who also famously cast his prognosis
about a civilisation
founded from time immemorial
on the forced labour of the enormous majority
compelled to sell
the precious and priceless
time of their lives
to one master or another
to prostitute themselves
in order to survive
to prostrate themselves
body and soul
before whichever boss is kind enough to exploit them,
a civilisation
founded on physical and spiritual submission
-- whose oldest profession is its only profession --
and the complete separation
between headwork and manual labour,
condemning it as
‘an abomination
which will be destroyed’ by those among its own slaves
‘resolved to make their own politics’)
‘The evil that one suffers patiently as unavoidable seems intolerable as soon as one has the idea of getting rid of it. Everything abusive that one removes seems to better highlight what remains and renders the feeling bitterer: the evil has decreased, it is true, but the sensitivity to it is more vivid’
(meanwhile, back at the mines,
a survivor of the Marikana massacre demonstrates
the collusion that opposes
the eruption of Reason in history:
the spectacle is a conspiracy
to rationalise the irrational
the organisation of confusion
between reality and representation,
a conspiracy
always and everywhere enforced at the end of the day
by all the co-ordinated savagery
of the uniformed thug, the officious murderer, the armed bureaucrat, the decorated torturer,
and every other disgusting lackey
of authority:
the crisis of representation at the mines
threatened to make public the conspiracy
in such a way
as to create the practical conditions for its destruction)
‘we all agreed that the workers should go
to the employer and represent themselves
and not the unions,
because they are the very unions who never come back with anything logical,
all they ever say is feedback, feedback
all year long
but they never report anything rational
to the workers’
(Thus, from the start, the workers had the custom and taste for direct democracy, and if their demands weren’t particularly subversive at the beginning, the manner in which they formulated them certainly was. When the unions, which are schools for inculcating passivity, attempted once again to neutralise the miners’ struggle from above, they found themselves confronted with workers who had already been transformed and who had educated themselves in the organization of their struggles: they met in general assemblies and elected their own delegates and strike committees. The bureaucrats’ fear and hatred of this spontaneous movement was reflected in the remarks of NUM president Senzeni Zokwana who refused to attend the mass meeting on Wonderkop hill on the day of the massacre, declaring that those who remained on the hill were not NUM members but criminals -- exactly the same wording used by mine-boss Cyril Ramaphosa to the chief of police immediately before the forces of law imposed the boss's orders over the dead bodies of the strikers. This same ideological authoritarianism, which calls free discussion “criminality” and calls submission to rackets and their owners “disciplined socialist consciousness,” had already led COSATU secretary-general Zwelinzima Vavi to decry, regarding an earlier wildcat strike at Impala Platinum that was similarly organised outside and against the unions, the criminal fact that ‘miners are leading themselves’. One knows that this kind of interpretation is generally followed by its demonstration with gunshots, which is what happened not only at the Marikana massacre but before it, when the union fatcats shot their own members)
‘Everything they told us
about communism
was a lie...
The worst thing is,
everything they told us about capitalism
was true’
(An ex-citizen of the former bureaucratic-bloc after the fall of the
Berlin wall about his Beloved and Respected Comrade Leaders)
‘But eventually we must concede to our ignorance,
and to the manifest presence
of the things themselves,
their poignant signification of ancient concerns,
of loss,
of time that passes,
of their position
at the very beginning
of who we have become.’
