OPULENT NOTHINGNESS
The metropolis is a vast architecture of obligation. We are the subjects of a management that precedes us, a management that constitutes the very fabric of our social being. The spectacle is the social bond itself, the mediation of our presence by the frozen light of the image. Belonging is a medium of discipline. Inclusion is the modality of our own surveillance. We are the producers of our own enclosure, enacting the moral rituals that the apparatus demands of us.
The subject is thus a point of intersection between the Imaginary and the Symbolic; the Symbolic is the grammar of the police. Power is the fragmentation of our vital force into the recognizable figures of the social order that manifests the Other as the gaze of the apparatus within our own skulls. We are the lenses through which the norms of the desert view themselves, whose existence is the continuous adjustment of the self to the network of signifiers that define the territory. Life as such is a succession of intensities, whereby Jouissance engenders the corporeal evidence of a being that overflows the code. Yet even this excess is already priced into the circuit: the body’s interruption is the spectacle’s renewal. Presence is the interruption of the spectacle’s circulation. It is the investment of the body in the here and now. Intensity is the proof of a life that persists through the collapse—only to be recaptured as data, as content, as renewed demand.
Equality is the formal mask of management. It is the leveling of every singularity into an equivalent image. This symmetry sustains the vertical structures of power. Desire is the product of the lack that the Symbolic order requires for its operation. It is the perpetual generation of a surplus that escapes the quantification of the economy, and it is within this excess we find the traces of a joy that resists the norms—until that joy is branded, monetized, and fed back into the machine as the very proof of its liberality. The orchestration of desire is the performance of the citizen. We negotiate our presence with the Other’s demands. Commitment is the alignment of our skin with the ideals of the ego. The objet petit a is the motor of our frantic circulation within the signifiers of the market. We are left with withdrawal and resilience as the embodied practices through which we may endure the pressure of so-called norms. Yet withdrawal itself becomes the premium content of the age, and resilience the ideological glue of precarity. We are the subjects of a bio-power that speaks through our own voices, including the voice that claims to denounce it.
Loneliness is the spatial result of the city. It is the gap between our identifications and the law. Care is the administration of our exhaustion. It is the enactment of the Superego’s command. The Superego is the voice of power that speaks beyond our conscious intention. Relationality is a modality through which the spectacle ensures its own continuity—every “connection” a node in the total grid. The self is a framework of endurance. It is the integration of desire with the codes of conduct that shape the social desert. Every breath is an adjustment to the internal and external demands of the apparatus. Liberation is the secession from the justifications of the spectacle. It is the disentanglement of our joy from the obligations of the wage. Transcendence is the refusal to validate the self through the categories of the machine—yet even this refusal is the machine’s most sophisticated self-validation, the final commodity: authenticity.
- Debord: Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet‑Chastel, 1967.
- Lacan: Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.