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Saturday, 7 May 2011

The Earth, Inherent Quality and Capitalist logic, Flow of Stupidiity


If the capitalist economy is indeed a war economy, only able to proceed by an always more advanced and intense colonization of terrestrial space, it must be recognized that this economy implies an administration of the prospective terror which radically modifies this space. In order to make fear reign a space of fear must be created; the earth must therefore be rendered uninhabitable. The appearance of habitats was a defense, a first form of resistance to colonization. Their current destruction no longer leaves them with more thantheir function as a refuge, a hiding place. Now, it is not solely by means of "flows of stupidity" that the State produces this fear with regard to space, but by rendering space truly, biologically uninhabitable.


The "flow of stupidity" in contemporary society consists in the translation of the "she" to the "we," of everywoman to everyone: a loss of the specifity of the landscape of fear. It is a re-virtualization of the already-actualized accident, its re-coinciding with its own variations. It is a retranslation, of content back into form. A commodity-form, of course: the media image in its perpetual self- turnover. The mass media, in their "normal" functioning, are specialized organs for the inculcation of stupidity. Stupidity is not a lack, of information or even of intelligence. Like fear, it is an objective condition of subjectivity: a posture. Stupidity is the affect proper to the media, the existential posture built into the technology of the broadcast apparatus and its current mode of social implantation. It is the inherence in the buying-viewing body of the despecification of intellectual content. A viewer is stupefied to the extent she or he fails to counteract that in-built posturing (through humor, cynicism, appropriation, anger, zapping ... ). Uncountered, the media's serial transmission of frightful images results in a loss of detail in the who? what?



The one who falls, becomes. The one who falls together, becomes singular. The one who falls together becomes singular, in global embrace of the other. The one who falls together becomes singular in global embrace of the other, under the shared momentum of an ethic of yearning. The equation to derive is one of reciprocal addition, replacing capitalist division. Or, in less binary language: it is the capitalist equation thrown off, so that it does not divide without changing in nature.


Massumi Everywhere you want to be...

the miistake again was correct

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