identity

Do Not Mock the Debris

“Identikon has convinced its customers that their egos and bodies are the properties and agents of the brand. A synthetic identity may or may not have a use-value that coincides with its natural characteristics, but in any case ego and body can only take action within the stated framework for ‘owning identity’. That is, as the Identikon corporation develops and markets its products and identifies commercial territories and targets for its own profit.” — Lilian Lioski, The Identikon Files

Education was data, and bureaucracy hedonism. Information was knowledge, love was pornography, and philosophy software. The purpose of Art was to remove suffering by becoming an adjunct of pseudoscience. The blockhead office clerk was a religious icon, the snake oil salesman an intellectual genius.

All the characters in the fiction processed language to let imagination breathe within the confines of a novel strategy in which the arc of Nasrul was a trivial pursuit with no winners or losers. Nas had been invented by an unacknowledged legislator of the world for their own amusement.

Scholars whose chosen subject matter was the political ambience of the environment in which they lived, moved and had their being, were writing about politicians as if describing the structural preconditions which had produced such creatures would cause a revolution.

(more…)

Idolator, Where the Moral Is

“If money be the food of love, trade on.” — Trade On, The Racket, The Racket

The media psychotherapists sold voyeurism as catharsis, captive and readily available (bloodshot) eyes, wet lips, tongues and strong thighs.

The anti-narrative negated non-fiction by poetic delirium, at once contemplative and explosive. Violence ideations were burned into the fabric of the novel. Right or wrong were never declared, only the violence of beauty.

Anikulapo-Kuti took the last turning off the dirt road and drove straight into Idolator. After checking in at the Idolator Commercial Motel he unpacked the emblems he’d swiped from Nepenthe. Observing the unobserved, he absorbed the received impressions transmitted from where the emblems began, both at root cause and surface, and once they were decoded he found they attached to whichever vessel was fitting.

[Anent their significance, the attributes of the emblems would be addressed some minutes later in this appraisal, albeit using another terminology.]

(more…)

Statement

[>>> Statement]

_State.1

The spectral sign of imagination is superfluous and profane. It is an anti-consumerist luxury, an antidote against the poison of quantification.

It is an anti-artefact, not a psychological reflection of whatever data assigns it an author or creator. It is not a metaphor.

The material out of which this play emerges is by magic ritual and sheer chance. As the reader or viewer you are complicit in the transmission of this play.

And it is play.

The intention is not to make ‘art’ so that it becomes ‘work’ for a political or personal ideology. It is not to fulfill the purpose of an identity. In offering the ultimate, nothing needs to be qualified.

Against self-surveillance and identification, the astonishment of presence is always inconclusive.

(more…)