First Circle
"I AM WHAT I AM." This is the latest offering of the marketing world, the final stage in the evolution of advertising, ahead, so much ahead of all the exhortations to be different, to be yourself and to drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts to get there, the pure tautology. I = I. He's running on a treadmill before the mirror of his gym club. She's coming back from work driving her Smart. Will they meet? "I AM WHAT I AM. "My body belongs to me. I am me, you're you, and things are going bad. Mass customization. Individualization of all conditions - of living, of working, of trouble. Schizophrenia broadcasts. Depression's coming rampant. Atomization into fine paranoid particles. Contact's hysterization. The more I want to be me, the more I feel a void. The more I speak, the more I'm petering out. The more i'm running after myself, the more I am tired. I hold, you hold, we hold our "Self" as a wicket. We have became the representatives of ourselves - this strange business, the guarantors of a customization that has all the aspects, in the end, of an amputation...
The injunction everywhere to "be somebody" maintains the pathological condition that makes this society a need. The injunction to be strong produces the weakness by which society is maintaining itself, to the point where everything seems to be a therapeutic aspect, even work, even love. All the "Are you OK? " that are exchanged in a day are similar to many temperature measurements that are administered by us to each other in a society now constituted of patients. Sociability is made of a thousand little niches, thousands of small refuges where warmth is held. Where it is always better than the big bitter cold outside. Where everything is wrong, because everything is a pretext to keep warm. Where nothing can happen because everyone is surdingly busy shivering together. This society will soon stand only by the tension of all its social atoms toward an illusory healing. It is a plant of which turbine takes its energy from a huge retention of tears always on the verge of flooding.
"I AM WHAT I AM." Never domination has ever found a watchword that is so much beyond suspicion. Keeping ego in a state of semi-permanent disrepair, in semi-chronic failure is the best kept secret of the actual order of things. The weakened self, depressed, self-criticising, virtual, is in essence the matter indefinitely adaptable that is required by a production-based innovation, the rapid obsolescence of technology, the constant disruption of social norms, the general flexibility. It is both the most voracious consumers and, paradoxically, the most productive ego, who will throw itself onto any project with the greatest of energy and greed to return later on in its larval state of origin.
"WHAT I AM" then? traversed since the infancy by milk flows, smells, stories, sounds, affections, rhymes, substances, actions, ideas, impressions, looks, songs and nosh . What am I? Linked in all directions to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, lovers, events, languages, memories, all sorts of things that obviously are not me. Anything that links me to the world, all the links that constitutes me, all the strengths that inhabit me do not weave an identity, as some may encourage me to claim, but an existence, singular, common, alive, and of which emerges in places, at times, this being that say "I". Our sense of inconsistency is a byproduct of this stupid belief in the permanency of the ego, and the carelessness of what is making us.
There is a vertigo to see on a skyscraper in Shanghai the "I AM WHAT I AM" from Reebok. The Occident is advancing everywhere , as his favorite Trojan horse, this tedious discrepancy between the "self" and the world, the individual and the group, between commitment and freedom. Freedom is not the gesture of getting rid of our attachments, but the practical ability to operate on them, move inside them, to establish them or slice them. The family exists as family, that is to say as hell, only for the one who has renounced to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or doesn't know how to do that. The freedom to break away has always been the ghost of freedom. We do not get rid of what is hindering us without loosing at the same time that which our forces could be exercised on.
"I AM WHAT I AM", therefore, not a simple lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry against everything that is between people, against anything which circulates indistinctively, everything that binds invisibly, everything that impedes the perfect desolation, against everything that makes us exist and that the world doesn't look like a highway everywhere, an amusement park or a new city: pure boredom, dispassionate and orderly, empty space, glazed, inside of which circulate no more than registered bodies, molecules automobiles and ideal goods.
France isn't the homeland of anxiolytics, the antidepressants paradise, the mecca of neurosis without beeing simultaneously the european champion of hourly productivity. Illness, fatigue, depression, can be taken as individual symptoms of what is needed to be healed of. They then work to maintain the existing order, to tame my adjustment to deficient standards, modernization of my crutches. They include the selection of my inclinations timely, consistent, productive, and those I will have to gently mourn. "You have to change, you know." But, taken as facts, my failures can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They become acts of resistance in the ongoing war. They become rebellion and a center of energy against everything that conspires to standardize us, to amputate us. The ego is not what is in crisis inside ourselves, but the form that is attempted to be inprinted on us. Some want to make us well-defined "selves", well separated and identified by classifiable qualities in short, controllable, when we are creatures among creatures, oddities among our fellow, living flesh weaving the world's flesh. On contrary to what we are told since childhood, intelligence is not only beeeing able to adapt - or whether this is intelligence, it is that of slaves. Our inadequacy, our exhaustion, are problems only from the point of view of what is trying to submit us. Rather, they suggest a starting point, a junction for new complicities. They make us perceive a landscape far more dilapidated, but infinitely more shareable than all the fantasies that the society maintains on its account.
We're not depressed, we are on strike. For one who refuses to manage himself, "depression" is not a state but a passage, a goodbye, a step sideways towards polical disaffiliation. From there, there is no conciliation other than pharmaceutical or coercive . That's why this society is not afraid to impose "Ritalin" to the rowdy children, braid pharmaceutical loins dependencies and pretends to detect the "behavioral predispositions" on three years old kids. Because it is the assumption of the "self" that is cracking everywhere...
(to be continued...)
"I AM WHAT I AM." This is the latest offering of the marketing world, the final stage in the evolution of advertising, ahead, so much ahead of all the exhortations to be different, to be yourself and to drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts to get there, the pure tautology. I = I. He's running on a treadmill before the mirror of his gym club. She's coming back from work driving her Smart. Will they meet? "I AM WHAT I AM. "My body belongs to me. I am me, you're you, and things are going bad. Mass customization. Individualization of all conditions - of living, of working, of trouble. Schizophrenia broadcasts. Depression's coming rampant. Atomization into fine paranoid particles. Contact's hysterization. The more I want to be me, the more I feel a void. The more I speak, the more I'm petering out. The more i'm running after myself, the more I am tired. I hold, you hold, we hold our "Self" as a wicket. We have became the representatives of ourselves - this strange business, the guarantors of a customization that has all the aspects, in the end, of an amputation...
The injunction everywhere to "be somebody" maintains the pathological condition that makes this society a need. The injunction to be strong produces the weakness by which society is maintaining itself, to the point where everything seems to be a therapeutic aspect, even work, even love. All the "Are you OK? " that are exchanged in a day are similar to many temperature measurements that are administered by us to each other in a society now constituted of patients. Sociability is made of a thousand little niches, thousands of small refuges where warmth is held. Where it is always better than the big bitter cold outside. Where everything is wrong, because everything is a pretext to keep warm. Where nothing can happen because everyone is surdingly busy shivering together. This society will soon stand only by the tension of all its social atoms toward an illusory healing. It is a plant of which turbine takes its energy from a huge retention of tears always on the verge of flooding.
"I AM WHAT I AM." Never domination has ever found a watchword that is so much beyond suspicion. Keeping ego in a state of semi-permanent disrepair, in semi-chronic failure is the best kept secret of the actual order of things. The weakened self, depressed, self-criticising, virtual, is in essence the matter indefinitely adaptable that is required by a production-based innovation, the rapid obsolescence of technology, the constant disruption of social norms, the general flexibility. It is both the most voracious consumers and, paradoxically, the most productive ego, who will throw itself onto any project with the greatest of energy and greed to return later on in its larval state of origin.
"WHAT I AM" then? traversed since the infancy by milk flows, smells, stories, sounds, affections, rhymes, substances, actions, ideas, impressions, looks, songs and nosh . What am I? Linked in all directions to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, lovers, events, languages, memories, all sorts of things that obviously are not me. Anything that links me to the world, all the links that constitutes me, all the strengths that inhabit me do not weave an identity, as some may encourage me to claim, but an existence, singular, common, alive, and of which emerges in places, at times, this being that say "I". Our sense of inconsistency is a byproduct of this stupid belief in the permanency of the ego, and the carelessness of what is making us.
There is a vertigo to see on a skyscraper in Shanghai the "I AM WHAT I AM" from Reebok. The Occident is advancing everywhere , as his favorite Trojan horse, this tedious discrepancy between the "self" and the world, the individual and the group, between commitment and freedom. Freedom is not the gesture of getting rid of our attachments, but the practical ability to operate on them, move inside them, to establish them or slice them. The family exists as family, that is to say as hell, only for the one who has renounced to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or doesn't know how to do that. The freedom to break away has always been the ghost of freedom. We do not get rid of what is hindering us without loosing at the same time that which our forces could be exercised on.
"I AM WHAT I AM", therefore, not a simple lie, a simple advertising campaign, but a military campaign, a war cry against everything that is between people, against anything which circulates indistinctively, everything that binds invisibly, everything that impedes the perfect desolation, against everything that makes us exist and that the world doesn't look like a highway everywhere, an amusement park or a new city: pure boredom, dispassionate and orderly, empty space, glazed, inside of which circulate no more than registered bodies, molecules automobiles and ideal goods.
France isn't the homeland of anxiolytics, the antidepressants paradise, the mecca of neurosis without beeing simultaneously the european champion of hourly productivity. Illness, fatigue, depression, can be taken as individual symptoms of what is needed to be healed of. They then work to maintain the existing order, to tame my adjustment to deficient standards, modernization of my crutches. They include the selection of my inclinations timely, consistent, productive, and those I will have to gently mourn. "You have to change, you know." But, taken as facts, my failures can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They become acts of resistance in the ongoing war. They become rebellion and a center of energy against everything that conspires to standardize us, to amputate us. The ego is not what is in crisis inside ourselves, but the form that is attempted to be inprinted on us. Some want to make us well-defined "selves", well separated and identified by classifiable qualities in short, controllable, when we are creatures among creatures, oddities among our fellow, living flesh weaving the world's flesh. On contrary to what we are told since childhood, intelligence is not only beeeing able to adapt - or whether this is intelligence, it is that of slaves. Our inadequacy, our exhaustion, are problems only from the point of view of what is trying to submit us. Rather, they suggest a starting point, a junction for new complicities. They make us perceive a landscape far more dilapidated, but infinitely more shareable than all the fantasies that the society maintains on its account.
We're not depressed, we are on strike. For one who refuses to manage himself, "depression" is not a state but a passage, a goodbye, a step sideways towards polical disaffiliation. From there, there is no conciliation other than pharmaceutical or coercive . That's why this society is not afraid to impose "Ritalin" to the rowdy children, braid pharmaceutical loins dependencies and pretends to detect the "behavioral predispositions" on three years old kids. Because it is the assumption of the "self" that is cracking everywhere...
(to be continued...)
The Coming Insurrection