(Something–)
someone approaches, turns away,
is seen through a display window,
a flicker of signs on the window pane:
nobody’s name, names for nothing (–transparency
adds nothing but weight here, where the glass is very weak, too: the reflection
seen from inside shatters under a great weight)
The name shines out on you in neon
writing, but it is literally forced
out of you. Is desire to sometime be able to disappear?
There are various types of animals on
the shields. A blind animal with dilated pupils. An eyeless animal that can
still see.
Consum (Lat.) 1. be together/with, coexist; 2.
be, happen. Thoughts about consumption, I am consumed by these thoughts, consuming
thoughts about the excess that has to be squandered. Lack and desire: lack of
money, lack of time, lack of desire, desire for money, desire for time, desire
for lack. The torrent of capital, goods, prices, discounts, receipts, inexplicable
objects, objects with shelf lives, objects with large price tags indicating cheapness.
The positioning of cash registers, carparks, shopping trolleys. Rows of
shopping trolleys chained together, coins for shopping-trolley locks, locking
chains that rattle and trolleys that break loose. How someone pushes a shopping
trolley in front of them across the carpark, their body’s uneven steps amid the
rattle of the shopping trolley. The plastic child’s seat, how the child swings
its legs surrounded by shiny, yellow bags. The plastic bag as an undesirable, rejected
object. The same object epitomizing the properties that have made plastic an emblematic
material of late capitalism: flexibility, compliance, multi-facetedness. How these
properties together constitute the form through which capital transforms itself:
capital as the interplay between form and itself. Capital not as a procedure for
economic profit, but for the production of forms. Plastic capital containing
form and itself; capable of both receiving and giving form.[1] The form
of a plastic proclamation (hollowing out) as the form of an abandonment.
How the shopping trolley with the child
is once again set in motion, slowly rolls across the carpark, suddenly turns
and slips into the shadow of a tree near the escalator, like the runaway pram
on the Odessa Steps. The random absoluteness of this movement, its
self-sculpting effect. Being in that movement: is that what it means to wake up?
What we wake up from. What we wake up to: the deep reversing sleep of earlier
stages and of things. The body’s history is the history of how that body has
absorbed and immobilized every movement that seemed to threaten its existence.
The
history of every movement is simultaneously the history of how this body has
carved its automation into the slightest gesture, the slightest breath. Every
movement transforms itself into a totality that reproduces the conditions for
its own forgetting: the ahistoric telos of history.
The laws of life are wonderfully simple:
permission to suffer, command to enjoy.
(Your voice is never just your own.) T.J. Maxx, the name of the store chain, written
in the air in red plastic letters, spoken in a voice vaguely my own. A social
hieroglyph: from here it looks like the letters are cracking. Marx talking to T.J.
Maxx, emphasizing the commodity’s alluring fetish-character: “Later on, we try
to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social
products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a
social product as language.”[2]To fetishize what you really are, to be yourself all the time, to become one
with that persona. Once again, thoughts on consumption, consuming thoughts
about language, the idea of consuming language. Consumption’s language, language
as consumption, magnificently squandering. Meaning production and overproduction:
the permanent crisis of semio-capitalism. Signs manufactured on an assembly
line, the surplus value of words accumulated through their deadly actions, think
dragonflies, bark beetles, Sargasso Sea. Diversifications of meaning-generating
mechanisms, and by meaning we mean the process in which matter is
dematerialized at one place and recreated at another. Commodified syllables, feebly
pulsating currents of repetition, abjectly teeming bodies. Everything is counted.
Recounted. Seven receipts as seven receipts. Six plastic bags as six plastic
bags. Five checkouts as five checkouts. Four shopping trolleys as four shopping
trolleys. Three prams as three prams. Two discounts as two discounts. One lock
as one lock. Everything is counted. Including what has been lost. The need to
lose things. That which is lost through new, loss-making tallies, new transactions.
Check counts, reconsideration, blackouts. Turn off the light and count again, count
as far as possible and then all these movements once again: how many losses
remain and what is that in words?
[1] Cf. the exposition of neural plasticity in Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel:
Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic (London: Routledge, 2015), 56-78.
[2] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy (London: Penguin, 1981), 223.