junk thought

The social machine’s limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this, and has ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.

But capitalism doesn’t begin, the capitalist machine is not assembled, until capital directly appropriates production, and until financial capital and merchant capital are no longer anything but specific function corresponding to a division of labor in the capitalist mode of production in general. One then re-encounters the production of productions, the production of recordings, and the production of consumptions—but precisely in this conjunction of decoded flows that makes of capital the new social fully body, whereas commercial and financial capitalism in its primitive forms merely installed itself in the pores of the old socius without changing the old mode of production.

This is no longer the cruelty of life, the terror of one life brought to bear against another life, but a post-mortem despotism, the despot become anus and vampire: “Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Industrial capital thus offers a new new filiation that is a constituent part of the capitalist machine in relation to which commercial capital and financial capital will now take the form of a new alliance by assuming specific functions.

In one of his most ambitious suspended installations to date, artist Tomás Saraceno (previously) launches visitors at the K21 Staendehaus museum in Düsseldorf more than 65 feet (20 meters) above the main piazza with a taunt, multi-level web of netting. Titled In Orbit the giant interactive piece is constructed from three separate levels of safety nets accessible from various points in the museum separated by enormous PVC balls measuring almost 30 feet (8.5 meters) in diameter. The resulting aerial landscape is an interesting hybrid between science fiction, spider webs, neural pathways and cloud formations.

Racism is a practice of abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations within and between the planet’s sovereign and political territories…Indeed, the process of abstraction that signifies racism produces effects at the most intimately “sovereign” scale, insofar as particular kinds of bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always visibly) configured by racism into a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category of “human being.”