The Core
http://www.alansondheim.org/core.mp4 If I could back it up, I'd back it up and move elsewhere and have a few moments of quiet; instead, this is the king and we are the subject; this is the object, and we are the citizen without rank; this is the noise, and we are the silence; this is the Core and we are the periphery. We try and make do and my neighbor smashed his laptop out of frustration and water's coming through the roof again into our place and I've lost time and space dealing with emptiness. I'm not complaining; I'd love to leave the planet and its Republican and ignorant horror, taking Azure and Ossi the cat with me, but instead, the Core is seeping into us at 75 or 80 db and there's no recourse; the Core is what controls the finance and the tearing-out of neighborhoods, replacing them with Dylan and Lady Gaga, and we keep functioning as if nothing is happening, while inside the body, there is the whirring and slaughter of knives, the bones sawed through, the tissues lubricated with high-speed fluid, the machines stopping for nothing. When the Coliseum was built, there were no complaints passed down to us, and ours are lost as well with clever puns and sleepless nights and rage replacing any gesture that might achieve something. This is the lesson of capital: It achieves, it marches forward, and nothing stops it; it is as inert, as obdurate, as idiotic, as Rosset's real, about which nothing can be said, because even with speech, there is no speech act, nothing left to be meant, nothing left of meaning. It is the differ- end of the differend, a second order effect that trans- forms capital into the very substance of the world, the hold-fast which gnaws at flesh, animal or otherwise, which develops for the sake of development. Our protests have been chimeras, have been in vain; they exist within the imaginary, not even uncanny, not even perturbations that demand the slightest bit of attention. Global capital moves at unbelievably high speed, past Virilio's dreamlands; it pays no attention to anything, not even flow or flux, not even the optics that carry it forward. But it's global capital that's the Core, that's tearing us up, permanently, and forever; accompanied by the seizures of eminent domain, declarations of blighted neighborhoods, corrupt rivers of multi-national capital that remains intrinsically nameless - there is nothing to be done, no way to move out. The flesh is dying here, the birds are disappearing, crime rises as desperate people search for remnants that might keep them alive for a while long; Ballard's world has come true, down to the smallest detail, as people who can afford to, enclave themselves and gather their money and weaponry around them. For us, we're already thrown under the tank treads of the machine; chaos reigns and grows as obdurate capital sits and gathers itself. No longer intensifications or strange attractors - instead, we have n-brane networks of surfaces that have no need to recognize the subject. Everything is object; everything is ground up; everything is slurry. We live to die, to be replaced, although that is no longer necessary. And these words, like any others, are surplus and redundant; new meaning accrues to the idea of erasure - for us - to annihilation - for us - th the differend - for us - to concentration - for us. Let's not forget the surface phenomenon of the arena exists - for us - for entertainment only, and perhaps a bit of the old wilding in the neighborhood - any thing to release tension, although in the long run, that doesn't matter as well. I think of these as dispatches from an occluded front, serving little purpose, gathered by google or facebook or some such, such a new way to connect. Just like the real, it's flat, connected in its disconnectedness: the distinction is, it appears clever, and takes up very little time. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
