http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=225609&group=webcast
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The Future of Negativity By Adilkno "All advice is bad, but good advice is
fatal." Oscar Wilde The future has become completely predictable; a script
that is being worked through from A to Z. The Plan has finally prevailed.
There are merely some anomalies, corrections that have not yet been made.
All arguments are for the following of the prescribed route. It is true
that there are always a number of simultaneous scenarios that are partially
overlapping and partially mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in
common: they are all true. Will it be an ecological catastrophe or an atom
bomb? Whichever you request. Humanitarian disaster or military defeat? The
choice is yours. Will it be abstract or figurative? Whichever way the wind
blows. Brazil or China? All options have been thought through. All the
right specialists have been found and their reports are ready and waiting
to be implemented. The field of vision has narrowed to one perspective,
wherever you look. There are no surprises, only possibilities. Reread
Musil. Even the biggest problems (AIDS in Africa, Bin Laden in Afghanistan,
Milosevic in Belgrade, Clinton in Washington) will never be more than
entrances to new markets. At the moment they appear, all phenomena already
contain the structure of this model. All that remains to us is the dull
task of unravelling the software underneath. The number of programmes is
extremely limited. The hermeneutic and semiotic reading of the world puts
up a smokescreen which manages to enchant us again and again with its
wealth of shapes, turns and suggestions of depth, but alas, in fact it is
all a bit simpler than that. The theory of difference is no more than a
cloth for the bleeding in the "abimes superficiels." Unbearable (and
irresistible) simplicity is no longer really distinguishable from banality,
and this sends many a public intellectual fleeing to the safe haven of
interpretation. Through this mechanism, an originally critical practice
like cultural studies has slipped away into a safe, meaningless sketch of
image culture. "Visual culture" has degenerated into a profession with
prospects. This is how modelistic thinking works: once you get it, you can
apply it to anything. We locate this suprahistory when we train our gaze on
the sub-human level. The drama of micropolitics: the pension plan is in
place by the time you're 21. Try and get out from under that. A little
heli-skiing won't do it. Total burnout at 26 seems like it might help, but
it turns out later to have been just a sabbatical. RSI at 14? Just as
easily. What else is the future but paying off mortgages and life
insurance? The secret collective longing for a market crash, i.e. a world
war, remains a last, authentic expression of the longing to make a clean
sweep, to undergo an adventure and then start all over. The hippies
supplied this model. There's no running aground, lost ideals or middle-aged
cynicism in this case � that would have been the fall-of-man model.
Yesterday's hippies are today's crisis managers, guiding whole peoples at a
time through their dips. They work according to the dynamic model, which
uses resistance to get ahead by systematically improvising. In this model,
things must go wrong for one to become a success. This is in contrast to
the compulsory positivism that three-quarters of the world must disavow to
preserve its good humour. Hippie thinking is happy with any opposition and
derives its energy from it. Negativity rejects every model; that much is
clear. But is repudiation, however elegant or brutal, not itself also a
model? Negativity distinguishes itself rigorously from deconstructivism.
Deconstruction is an installation CD-ROM that always works. But the
software's ability to anticipate is nil. Something must be built up before
it can be taken apart, thus the orientation to the past. The nice thing
about this model, however, is its youthful elan in believing that the
future can be predicted. That is the game Soros plays. His theory of
reflectivity is based on a solid foundation of European negativity. This is
why he can stay "ahead of the wave" while legions of market analysts get
caught in their own sales speeches, whose nonsense they can never
understand, since belief in their spiels is precisely the product they're
selling. And non-monetary negativity, where is that? Who can enjoy the
certainty of decline, and benefit from it? What a riddle! But one thing is
sure: there will always be enough that can be destroyed. "As long as there
is death, there is hope." The future of thinking, the development of forms
of expression, planetary architecture, these are all projects of others.
Negativity is an experimental attitude, an exercise in remembering,
followed now and then by a short series of outbursts, and then a long
period of hiding inside normality. Optimism can turn into gloominess. On
the other hand, it is impossible for cheerfulness to neutralise negativity.
Negativity is itself a form of cheerfulness. There's no future for
negativity, a punk would say. The marketing department of negative.com (TM)
should really be at its wit's end, but that is not the case. Negativity
continues unexpectedly to do well, generation after generation, even as it
denies its own future. Translation: Laura Martz Adilkno's text archive:
http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet
