Sunday, April 5, 2009

195

comprised of events that recur perpetually, the going over what
is already finished is all that is left to entrepreneurs. Wham bam
technology is about the retrieval and exploitation of the past, it has
nothing to do with either progress of the future. Under present
conditions there is no future. When we see a gaggle of African
children gathered about a news reporter and wearing logo
emblazoned t-shirts we do not think, imperialism but anarchonism.
This be-calming and stain-spreading out of capitalism, called
globalization, is a bringing into line, a synchronization of all present
factors, it is happening, as all floods happen, because there is
nothing else for it to do, there is no way forward, the curse is one
of repetition not uncontrolled advance -- no social order ever
perishes before all productive forces for which there is room in
it have developed). Pop music has declined in value like all
reproduced commodities do over time but it does not follow that
when it was intense it was an expression of a revolutionary force.
There is a natural hierarchy between mouth and ear but in the
capitalist economy, the organization is in place to make sure that
when there is speaking then there will be listening, and you can't
get more ecological than that.

Capital's maximizing of the role of subjective enthusiasm in the
production process of pop, and in all similarly maximized products,
has actualized a formulaic structuralization of enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm is becoming, in the everyday functioning of the
multipack individual, a serial array of disconnected, incandescent
jolts of pleasure and rapid fallings away -- the highs to be had from
portable super-technologies are of lesser duration than from the
inhaling of crack and this is because gadgets are not products for
consumption at all but products waiting for additional labor to
finish them, they come to us on a conveyor belt, we do not have
long before the next one and like in Modern Times, the belt is
speeding up. Our grandfather was a handyman, he fixed things
because everything, from toys to cars, in the forties and fifties was
fixable and a spanner, now there is only Superglue; nothing can be
mended anymore only returned via statutory rights; rag and bone
men, the last of the paid finishers, disappeared in the Seventies
but many everyday economies in Africa are based upon the reuse
of tin cans (more systematically, but going unrecognized, the first
purchasers of any new fangled invention (Windows 95 etc ) are its
low cost testers and finishers, it is up to them to discover the
glitches and flaws, to make the complaints).

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