Image and Capital

Prometheus

We desire illusions -- because we desire revelation. When we have faith, our energy inverts itself from within: the world is suddenly magically transformed, us along with it. Illusions! More like liaisons. Economy is the same way: a magic power grasps hold, a flow of energy spontaneously rearranging the underlying order of the universe. Capital is a specter and a spectacle: universal miracle machine, superego-substitute and hyper-sexual idol all-in-one. From images branded onto faces, tasks onto hands, and illusions onto gazes-- somehow money is produced. Capital is the illusion; for money-as-signifier is dead, dead since capitalism declared its global aim, to include all within its dream. Capital is a pure power retreated into its own image -- which has just as quickly plunged the earth right into the depths of the Virtual.

The image only is sovereign -- the sovereign is imaginary. Ideal for a complex bureaucracy -- where we are ruled by no one. The spectacle is again the most ancient epic, the many against the one, the story of power’s evolution: until finally machines have taken responsibility over our imagination! Once, timid and easily frightened away or turned back, now the Image has truly come into its own virtual domain. Spaces for interpretation of any kind are now entirely produced as images. There is no love but for a machine; all else is war, a war against the order of things... Hope is an image, fear a symbol; both are faces, branded onto images more deeply than their contents or design. Yet we know we can affect images -- because images affect us! Micropolitics is not just local subversion, but molecular involution: unfolding, reconvergence, diffusion.

Ideology is not a dream, nor can we abandon concepts for functions: for it is our very existence in question and on trial as a false image of life... Conscience demands that we must move beyond ontology towards a new dimension, on the other sides of images -- in sohrt, towards a material ethics of conviviality. Which is not to say of justice per se, but more explicitly of cohumanity, control and creativity. Never has it been clearer than in our time the essential disunity of human existence: that is, that necessity is not opposed to free will. We are not total by ourselves; our potential is only unlocked in the energy and power of a group. And as soon as a group has definite aims, a goal and an identity, it is already a war-machine. It seems we cannot escape answering some call or another; the lesson is not only that we ought to distinguish between imaginary ideals and real dreams, but even that the real image we follow has only virtual substance, one we are choosing and desiring to experience.

Fiction and Politics

Characters are instruments and not just images or words.

The story as (spiritual) machine-inside-a-machine, endlessly. Thus character as frame for a meta-fiction, not the story within a story, but the story of the story. The character opens a new critical place within a narrative reality for the entrance of nomad elements from larger worlds.

The plot-as-frame yields a micro-fictional world, while the character-as-frame yields a macro-fictional juncture between interior and exterior: the book and the world.

A character is an ambiguous trace of reality-image.

The message within the message is not as important as the message around the (fake) message. Invert the desire for a self-directed message; and by revolutionizing this we acquire fictional individuation, a reading, a character, a hijacker-thought which leaps between the reader and the work backwards in time to create a thinking-subject which would always have been.

This retroactive infinity (of probability) is the actual materiality of the universe, which is all that exists.

Ourselves-as-characters is merely an illusion, an emptiness, a false signal, a meaningless trace. But characters-as-ourselves, however, is a towering and impossibly stable feeling, enormous, mythical, and deeply inspiring.

Most important, though, is that this fictional inversion turns out to be functionally or fundamentally true in a way which is difficult either to dismiss or explain. The political inversion retroactively founds all of human reality identically, but in reverse. To think politically is to conjure subjectivity into existence only so that it may be subjugated.