**

**

In the opening section to The Ticklish Subject, Zizek points out that the relationship between the ontic and ontological in the field of ideology is far from obvious.  As he says, ideology is that system which refuses to declare itself as such, and so it can never reveal its own ontological premises—its operation must remain hidden behind the ontic, behind that which is imposed on being as being, rather than Being itself.  This has the consequence of limiting the strategies that can be used effectively in the fight against any ideology.

**

**

One should never fight phantoms.  There is a difference, however, between fighting what a ghost is, and a ghost per se,  or rather, between fighting an apparition and making others aware of its manufactured quality.

**

** 

In the political fight over global warming, and its possible solutions, the environmentalist “side” has proposed a set of technological solutions—renewable energy replacing old fossil fuel technologies, technical improvements to the existing energy grid, better carbon disposal methods, etc.—but in doing so, the supposedly “progressive” activists in the debate are contributing to the further development of technology as an answer to problems created by technology.  Of course, this will only lead to increased production, and increased energy demand, thus intensifying the cycle that produced the problem to begin with.  (This is why one of the most effective and most serious counter-arguments from industry is that of carbon reduction cost-analysis—how, for instance, the production of ethanol consumes more energy than it saves.)  Here we have what appears to be two opposed positions, when in fact there is an underlying situation on the ontological plain that ties the two together in ways both more complex and more contradictory than the level of the ontic, of rhetorical-political confrontation, would suggest.

**

**

In the same sense as the environmentalist activists in the above, we must beware our own entanglements with corporatism even while we criticize and fight against it.  And this does not primarily refer to the level of personal engagement, but rather to the ontic-ontological split driven into our own rhetoric and action.  Capitalism is, after all, as Zizek, Badiou and others have pointed out, the system that engineers revolutions from within itself, causing ruptures and changes in its own structure, which at first appear to represent a radical break with the system of production and control, only to feed back into the same systemic.  And since, as we’ve said, this is already a failed system, a system that constantly breaks down and begs us to repair it, we must be wary that our own efforts don’t simply lead to the maintenance of what we are trying to end.

**

**

One of the strategies that is useful is what we are engaged in right here—by revealing to others the subtle retracings and reconstitutions of capital, we may be able to encourage those interested in interrupting the power structure to concentrate on more vital areas.  For instance, the concentration on the governmental side of the equation, rather than on the corporate side more directly, is one area where we should try to affect a mutative response.  The corporation is the issue, after all.  Concentrating on the government bureaucracy often provides a distraction for the corporate power centers.  Recent examples of this tendency are quite dramatic.  While all eyes were focused on the struggle over the 2000 presidential election results in America, the foundations of the financial structures and practices that led to the worldwide banking collapse, were busily being erected by large banks and their ratings firms.

**

**

This movement to distract the public with politics also obscures the underlying interconnectedness between the government bureaucracy and the corporate bureaucracy—which have largely become one seamless structure.  And since it is through the construction of regulatory institutions, and their revolving door policy between the corporate and government sectors, that this connection has been built up, the “progressive” argument that increased regulation will “solve” the problem, and prevent future crises, should be viewed with deep skepticism.  The intermediate institutions used to regulate financial markets and their dependent currencies—the U.S. Federal Reserve, the World Bank, the European Central Bank—already provide for enormous control.  What would increased control do exactly? 

**

**

It is not the degree of control or regulation that is the real issue—it is how these powers are used.  Since the financial agents who manage the system only represent the interests of the ruling class, there is no hope of improvement.  The entire debate over “financial reform,” in Europe as well as America, is happening at the level of the ontic.  What is missing, as always, is the singularly most crucial ontological fact: exploitation. 

**

**

Only a radical departure from the system of capital itself will rid us of exploitation, and the destructiveness of its resulting crises.

**

**

Reuse, retro, re-cut, repeat—this is a useful mantra.

**

**

The destruction of the recording industry is a useful study in anti-corporate activism.  Of course, it didn’t start out that way.  And that is one of the most useful aspects of the whole story.  Created by a Swedish telecom operator and a Danish high-school dropout, Kazaa, the program that ended the ownership of music as we used to know it, quickly became the property of kids who were sick of being gouged by businesses that put out increasingly boring and lazy product.  And once the kids teamed up with embittered ex-rockers who couldn’t get a recording contract, the combination of consumer frustration and broken dreams was enough to bring an entire industry crashing down.  See, it doesn’t take a revolution.  Actually, it takes very little to destroy the top-heavy and clueless business model that has become the norm.  Marketing types are quite stupid, and can easily be convinced to accept the poison pill that will destroy their own company.  Working from the outside, or from within, it takes surprisingly little effort to collapse the whole junky project of today’s corporation.  Get to it. 

**

**

Television and the film industry are slowly being digested by the internet’s ability to slice and dice any medium, any form, any product.  There is no stopping it.  Changing formats only accelerates the inevitable.  Taking legal action only enrages the rank and file who are busy nibbling away.  The net is like an amoeba, and that is why those who work in centralized media cannot understand or control it.  There is no center to the net.  There is only more net. . .in every direction.  Eventually TV and movies will succumb.   This is taking a bit longer than it did with the recording industry, but then these are larger sectors to begin with.  Already TV has been wounded, and large parts of it have been annexed to the net.  Movies are available for free, but people have not quite gotten into the habit of watching them online.  The amoeba continues to chomp away.

**

**

The destruction of establishment organs like newspapers—which have largely become corporate newsletters—and TV news, is a great advancement.  The situation offers an opportunity for rapid advancement of any number of radical projects.  Publish, post, slice and dice away.  Keep it up.

**

**

The Underground Lady says, “We are living in the beginning of a small-press age.”  Indeed.

**

**

Despite my deep involvement in and commitment to all methods of resistance and corporatist-cultural cut-up, I am very traditional about writing.  I think that writers should publish books.  Fuck all the attempts to transfer old media to the online world.  None of them will succeed.  The net has its own dimensions, and its own potentialities.  It will only grow into those more, and further and further away from old models.

**

**

Writing online is not really writing at all.  It is something else, something to do with intertext and its outlines.  Writing online is more like graffiti than any other form of communication.  The time-lapses and inter-linkages make it quite different from a “conversation.”  Online interactions are never conversations, in any sense.  These are new mutations.

**

**

What are we doing here?  We are talking to no one.  What is the form?  We are leaving our tag on a virtual wall for others to come by and tag back if they want.  Why?  Because we require both anonymity and connection at the same time, and this is the perfect way to accomplish that—here is the real ontological reason for the internet, here is why it is what is.

**

**

Politics is a lot like chess.  Taking advantage of people who are earnest about it is quite easy, and making them look like fools to their peers is a healthy social exercise.  If we had more of this, we’d be in a better situation all around.

**

**

When political satire starts getting “serious,” it stops being useful to those opposed to power itself.  That’s when it joins, as a strategy, with all those other tried and true methods of gaining access and influence.  That’s when it becomes part of the problem.

**

**

Regression in language—the fact that words can only be defined by other words, and so on, ad infinitum—is not as frightening, or as paralyzing, as it seems.  It really is a rather bourgeois consideration.  It has  never fed anyone (even most Derrideans have to work at a real job), and it offers no purchase for useful criticism.  There are no positive concepts waiting in that direction.  Linguistic regression is a fact, but a dead one.

**

**

Regression is never infinite.  Only the universe is infinite.  Even language, by comparison, is a fragile and limited entity.  Again, we are entering the area of  mythology when we come into contact with claims over “infinite regression.”  All things human are quite temporary.  At its inevitable periphery, language simply peters out.  There is no great final act.  There never is.

**

**

The “retro” phenomenon is interesting.  It is an attempt to arrest culture, and by so doing, to control it.  As a contingent, but effective, strategy, it often has its greatest proponents amongst those who belong to oppressed classes.  Taking over, and reusing, something in a way that it was not intended to be used, especially when the new use runs counter to the viewpoint of wealth and ownership, are wonderful aims.

**

**

Conspiracy theories about the government are never helpful.  They simply refocus energy that should be targeted at the corporation.  But conspiracy theories about large corporations almost always turn out to be true.

**

**

The Underground Lady is always careful in her methods of resistance.  She wraps her Molotov cocktails in lace doilies before she lobs them over the high wall.

**

**

A fortune cookie in Valencia, Spain: “All your sins are blessed.”  Of course, it was supposed to read “suns,” which is nice, but the typo makes it beautiful.

**

**

Retro, reuse, typos, caution: these are just the beginning.  There are a thousand methods of resistance.  But what am I, a guide?  I’m no radical Virgil.  Get cracking.

**

**

The street life is the level of the real.  One’s first impressions are significant here.  There are very few second chances, and that’s a positive aspect of the arena.

**

**

The extent and depth of poverty in America, as well as in much of Europe, is so great as to deny even the most radical efforts to fix it—and those will never be applied due to ossified class systems.  This is a fact widely known to elites in these places, but they deny it because they have no alternative.  And because they do not know what to do about it, they are terrified.  America will probably fall completely apart first, with poor countries on the fringe of the EU following.  The present situation in Greece has long been exceeded by the many miles of hopeless ghetto in America’s inner cities, which have become “control zones” much like the “economic development zones” in Southeast Asia and Latin America.  There won’t be many riots, though, just a long slow century of suppurating rot.  This actually began thirty years ago, but it’s only now that the corporate media has taken any notice of it.  Here is the level of denial, an almost fantastic plateau of useless theory and garbage rhetoric, garbage being the perfect analogy, always, everywhere.

**

**

I am sick and tired of the plight of the bureaucrats.  We are always hearing in the news about how hard it is to be a government official, or a CEO (another brand of bureaucrat).  This sympathy for the most pathetic, and most boring, has spread everywhere, even to love.  And who wants to hear about the love life of a business person?  I would rather be locked in a cage with a wild tiger.  At least it would be enervating.

**

**

Ugliness has taken over everything.  Wilde was right—about everything, almost.

**

**

Some see a change in affairs coming, and they can’t jump in fast enough.  Others suspect that there might be something happening, and jump in barely in the knick of time.  And still others, well, others pick their noses and watch it sail on by.  Lately most people are enamored of this last type, as if to be recalcitrant had become appealing.  It should never be considered appealing.  The recalcitrant are the stuff of death.

**

**

The Underground Lady says:

“I am the rank amateur. . .busy creating a masterpiece.

“I am the street person. . .cooking a tin of soup over a barrel-fire in the winter night.

“I am the dusty newspaper. . .blowing against your leg.

“I am the lost and forsaken. . .knocking on the church door and being turned away.

“I am the lights on your computer. . .shining in the holy dark of the city.

“I am the dread.

“I am the A Bao A Qu.

“I am destruction.

“I am the new beginning.

“I am the Demon’s song.”

**

**

It is amazing how many people cannot stand not being put down.  These are often the same people whose conversation consists entirely of putting down others.  Silence causes them to go away. 

**

**

The wise-crack is the insult gone awry.  When you put down a friend, kiddingly, in front of others, it is a way of saying hello.  This is even truer with a lover.  Those who do it badly, or who are constantly misunderstood—their insults being taken seriously—make bad friends, and worse lovers.  There is no hope for them.  Such things can never be taught.

**

**

I like the idea of writing an ars erotica, composed of nothing but statements like the one above, developed over many pages, through many volumes.  But then I think, no, it’s too much damn work.  Better to leave it for someone younger.

**

**

It is the distrust of the people by the politicians that poses the most serious problem in the political divide.  They are terrified of us.  Probably, they are right.  The mob is near to bursting.  This is a positive development, but don’t expect them to see it this way.  Instead all the methods of surveillance will be increased.  To the deluded, the people represent the last great threat to the corporate takeover of life. 

**

**

“Infiltrate and fill every pore of the corporation,” the Underground Lady says, and then she smiles.  “We must find out everything we can about the enemy.”

**

**

There is no area of experience that is closed, blocked off, cut short by corporate decree, that cannot be unsealed, unblocked, and re-annexed by the roaming “I” of technology.  What contemporary Bohemianism represents, is a spider-web network of such resistance.  There are subterranean layers even to the subterranean layers.

**

**

I am as detached in the detailed, perplexing, engrossing work of deconstruction, as I am in every other task.  Leave anger to the large group effort, to the grand movements of resistance that are growing.  When you work alone, work under cover of the deepest, most impenetrable darkness.  Tell no one.

**

**

There are no ideologies that are free of corporatism: progressive as well as conservative, they are all just noise produced by the same machine.

**

**

It may be possible some day to create a wormhole and travel through it to another part of the universe.  And a wormhole is an event, an instantiation, or appearance, not of a thing but of an ongoing action, of phainesthai, to make appear, the middle voice of phainein, to show.  We will travel through an event that we bring into being—a unique event in the universe—and not merely in something we build and try to assign a non-contingent sense of permanence to.  Who knows how long this event will continue or what its continuance implies.  But it will not be lasting. We will get to the other side of the universe through ephemera.

**

**

Love is not revolutionary.  Perhaps once, but it has become rather reactionary.  When we started to believe in love without jealousy—which is like art without the immediate stink of experience—we entered into an age of corporatized love.  Love has been taken over by advertising.  It is, as a matter of fact, one of advertising’s main controlling terms.

**

**

As people grow old, they crave love more and more.   When they’re young, they’re impervious to it.

**

**

The human is at its best when comatose or in some other inactive state.  This is one reason why these are the times when people elicit the greatest sympathy from us.  As for the rest of the time, one should learn how to contemplate blank walls.

**

**

Really, I mean it, one should contemplate blank walls.

**

**

Studying calculus is frustrating to some, for when they need shapes to guide them the most, they are denied this comforting presence.  And when the figural actually interferes with understanding (with certain problems like Venn diagrams), it is allowed to reappear.  Much of mathematics involves the denial of one set of cognitive skills in order to encourage the advancement of others—this is its old attachment to the religious discipline of Pythagoras and the technical severity of Euclid.  But what does this selective exercise really signify, if not the attainment of a state of enlightened weakness?  The student is beaten down, is leveled, so that he may be lifted higher.  It is as much a spiritual aerobics as a becoming in logic.

**

**

I am not searching, in the above, for a psychological basis to mathematics, but for a meaning, other than futility, to the millenial struggle in intellect which has led to so many failed confrontations with the universe, a universe that is bound to end in darkness and ice anyway.

**

**

Lucretius knew.  Look—he knew.

**

**

Expansion, infinite expansion coupled with multi-staged acceleration, must become our new epistime.  We should seek to travel to distant parts of space and time.  Traversal is now a goal unto itself.  And this is nothing new for some.  Sir Hillory, for instance, in his famous quote about Everest, did not mean that the mountain was mocking him with its very existence, but that it represented a distance, and that like all distances, what one did with it was to traverse it.  That it happened to be a vertical distance simply suited his skills as a mountaineer.

**

**

Direction makes no difference.  The same can be said of Outer Space.  We should simply pick a direction, any direction, and determine the distance that we want to traverse.  And then we should dedicate all our energies to achieving that goal.  We have already done this, in a way, but with robots, and always with the excuse of gathering information in mind.  To hell with having a reason—it is reason enough to want to get off this dying rock.  We need a full-scale revival in the cult of exploration, a global revival, and space is the only medium that will do.

**

**

So far, in space exploration, we have chosen distances that have been too short, and so we suffer from a premature doubt and reluctance to continue, as a result even of our minor failings.  Any Himalayan climber will tell you that the really big summits are all long-term goals.  It is the “crumper” who gives up and goes home after a few weeks of storms on the mountain.  Space is a really big summit.  It is time for us to set our eyes on a distant star, literally; and then, getting to Mars, or to the moons of Jupiter, would seem much more probable.

**

**

We are not going to solve our ecological problems before our time runs out.  We have neither the political will nor the level of organization needed to do so.  We must redirect all our energies into Outer Space Exploration.  We must get off this doomed little rock, or we will certainly perish.

**

**

The corporatists, and their tiny-minded theories about how we should organize ourselves, and our resources, are what will turn out to be the last, and worst, obstacle in the way of our species’ survival, whether we achieve this through ecological regeneration or escape to another world.   This fact will become clearer with every passing decade.  Eventually we may have to exterminate the type completely, like a house pest that can no longer be tolerated.  Ah, well, then, good riddance. 

**

**

Let’s just come right out and say it: Scientists should replace politicians.  Eisenhower conceived of this form of society as being a nightmare—but then, he was a general, and a politician.  And he had no understanding of science.  That’s really why the Soviets beat the Americans to space, despite recent attempts at revisionism.

**

**

If we can wrest control of scientific discovery from the military, at all levels, in all countries, then it should be done.  Otherwise the militarists will join with the corporatists, and other politicians, and together they will choke off our only way out.  They are suicidal types, and nothing can change this.

**

**

We do not require (as we’ve said) a new mythology of outer space.  What we require is a new species-wide way in which to conceive of it.  We need to kick down the doors of the mathematicians and end the cult of Pythagoras, the cult of obscurantism and mystery, once and for all.  No equation should be seen as esoteric, no calculation should be considered a secret priority. 

**

**

Enough secrets.  Everyone, every individual on the planet, should be able to read a Venn diagram, and know how to build an atomic bomb.

**

**

The Underground Lady loves the taboo and the stereotypical.  “Give me a good stereotype I can sink my teeth into,” she says, and her eyes shine with diabolical glee.

**

**

The window that always rattles, finally being blown open by the wind in the night—this is death.

**

**

We are beat upon and beat upon, until finally we give in, and the universe takes its revenge upon us for denying it and being animate.

**

**

All the old mythologies are insufficient now.  Mythos itself is outmatched by the profound silence and heaviness of existence.  We are left bare, clueless before the real void.

**

**

The mythologists among us have become an intolerable danger.

**

**

Joseph Campbell was a great archivist and mythologist, and a terrible philosopher.  He said that we needed more myths, and more contemporary ones, as an afterthought near the end of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  And from then on he became the philosopher of choice for those who know nothing about philosophy and have none of their own.  We do not need more myths—after all, we have too many already.  The whole project of modernism can be described quite accurately as the deconstructing of myths, and this includes those grand mythological systems with which Campbell was so concerned.  We need to get rid of the myths, big and small, that hold us in their servitude, and try our best to prevent the accretion of more obscuring material onto the human. 

**

**

There is no such thing as an archetype.  There are similarities in stories from around the world because there are similarities driven into experience by the dimensions of necessity and the limitations of human action.  This does not mean that there is some kind of underlying substance that can be detected.  Such clap-trap is the basis of an unworldly philosophy which, however well motivated, leads inevitably to misunderstanding and exploitation, and eventually to disaster.  It obscures the violently imperialistic act of appointing what will and will not be privileged as an ”archetype.”  Of course, the emphasis in the West is always on the most Christian-like choice.  Campbell, for instance, calls Jesus Christ “our Lord.”  Enough said.

**

**

The Western capitalist-fascist intellectual, once completed as a type, will come wearing a sharp suit, with a tie done up in a crisp full Windsor knot.  Dollimore wears a full Windsor, doesn’t he?

**

**

The economist and sociologist of our time are nightmares.  They will be seen by history to be monsters—or worse yet, they won’t be.

**

**

In America they are only now beginning to realize that the whole world feared and hated both the Soviets and the U.S. throughout the Cold War.  Americans, up until recently, still lost in the fog of patriotic propaganda and false Cold War scholarship, thought that everyone should feel thankful towards them.  But it is rather hard to feel thankful for the threat of impending destruction, strung out over decades, and made even worse on the Americans’ part for their accompanying sociopathic cheerfulness.  The Soviets are almost regarded positively now, as having been the more brutally honest of the demonic pair.     

**

**

The grotesque abounds, and America is at the heart of much of it.

**

**

The point is not to hate anything, but only to point out what is.  If this is perceived as hatred, so be it.  This is what it means to be modern.

**

**

The difference between satire and seriousness is often one of mere style.  But for satire to work, it also has to mean what it “says,” on some level.

**

**

For the above reason, amongst others, satire is not the most effective means of critical expression.  Satire is the last recourse of those who regard themselves as powerless.  It is a life-line to sanity.

**

**

In an age when culture is universally bad, shallow, toxic—such as our own consumerist age—satire and other forms of broad criticism become immensely popular.  This is not only a measure of how powerless people feel themselves to be, but also an expression of a deep seated reluctance to change things.  In really bad times, when the situation has deteriorated so far that there appears to most people to be no option but to go on in the same way that they have been going, one always finds this subterranean attachment to power, almost a sentimentality for it.  Even the harshest critics of the power system today remain deferential to its functionaries.  This is a willing form of slavery, on some level, and, after all, this is one of the methodds by which the situation has been allowed to go this far to begin with.

**

**

It’s difficult to get excited about attaining any level of success in such a corrupt time.  And besides, there is a built-in disappointment to success.  The accomplishment of something, anything, fine and serious, is a great reward.  After that, having it recognized by others seems dull.  This is why so many writers lose interest in their work the moment they are finished with it. 

**

**

The craftsman is not the type of the artist, ever.  The craftsman rushes to show and to sell his work.  The artist is indifferent to its dissemination.  Writing is never a craft, and all such descriptions of it are false and ignorant.  Writing is an adumbration of freedom—a skeletal outline of it—and even in its execution, in its most technical moments, perhaps especially then, it is un-craftlike.

**

**

We have never known what it is like to be free.  In modern times we have lived for the most part under the constant threat of the jailer and the psychologist.  Most people, as a result, believe firmly that what it would really mean to be free approximates our definition of insanity: constantly depressed and ultimately alienated.  Of course, this doesn’t sound so bad, compared to the everyday alternative of life inside an advertisement.

**

**

Anarchism complicates morality, but not any more than contemporary life, with its incessant invitation to corruption and the exploitation of others.  The error that many status quo commentators make is to believe that by pointing out the impracticality of anarchism, its material and logistical difficulties, they can convince anyone against it.  That may have been true fifty or even thirty years ago, but today, in the West, and especially in the so-called rich countries, there are so many who have lived for so long under the conditions of abject poverty, both economic and spiritual, that this argument against the “absurdity of anarchism” holds no weight.  This misunderstanding between the top and bottom of society creates an extremely dangerous situation for everyone.  And anarchy grows.

**

**

Anarchy seems like freedom to slaves.  And to live in one of the control societies of today is a form of slavery so absolute, so crushing, it is hard to grasp.

**

**

I am convinced of this: If the forces of control, and the fragments of anarchy, really clash, Western civilization will end.  But I am pensive at the prospect.  What does it mean?  Haven’t we been living in a fragmented, junk-strewn society for generations now?  Only the upper classes will feel the difference.  Ah, well…too bad for them.

**

**

The Underground Lady says: It is too late to make an appeal to the intelligent youth in the West on the basis of humanity.  Any such attempt will simply be met with the suicide bomb and the Molotov cocktail.  The Bohemian knows this, she continues, and while he prepares for the worst, he tries to reduce the further escalation of the situation by the clueless forces of control. . .not to save authority, surely, but for the common good.

**

**

When I say, “Attack the corporation,” I am not in complete disagreement with the Lady.  It may be that using every means possible to attack and disrupt the growth of the corporation into a religious entity, is the most direct way to avert our collective imminent disaster.  Or perhaps I am just venting my own pent-up rage.  Again, I can hardly muster the will to care.

**

**  

Fighting against power in a control society—which uses all the art of mass psychology, advertising and critical theory, and all the science of surveillance, spying and reportage, to keep track of its own citizens—is not easy.  It is a subtle, and liquid, form of combat—like using acid to slowly melt steel manacles.

**

**

Lucretius made the atoms of Democritus “swerve.”  We must do nothing less in our overturning of all things past.

**

**

There is no real type for the writer today.  All the candidates—academic litterateur, contemporary diarist, elegist of the past, and even the time honored (and not too interesting) storyteller—fail to come up to the standard of  the writer.  They are all too busy making excuses.  It’s as if, in order to write at all today, one has to apologize in advance for it.  The author did not die by critical decree, but as a result of a lack of cash sales.

**

**

Of course, some literature still manages to get produced.  But there is no audience for it, critical or otherwise, since no one takes literature seriously anymore.  It is greeted with universal disdain and indifference, and put away with a strong dose of snarky dismissiveness.  And if you try to quote a serious contemporary author, all you get back is a blank stare, and perhaps a rehearsed response from a TV commercial.

**

**

We should re-engineer the age of the encyclopedists.  Fed on a steady diet of free information from good sources on the internet, and the last remaining public institutions, we could produce an updated version of the encyclopedists’ wonderful works of amateur astronomy, geography, cultural studies and naturalistic biology. . . the careful, painstakingly detailed descriptions of plants and animals filling volumes. . . the everyday theories about culture and politics, constructed relatively free from the suffocating constraints of professional associations and impotent academic in-fighting.  This work would probably become wildly popular, too, since it would be unfiltered and untouched by experts and the many other layers of abstractification used by consumer culture to discredit any intellectual achievement.  Who knows, it might even start a movement of amateur scholars, bringing back the armchair critic and workaday philologist.  All we have now in place of something like this kind of popular intellectual movement, are a million hack movie critics and pompous blow-hards on the internet, all talking about the same junk culture.

**

**

There is a certain wryness to all my proposals for a way out of the present predicament.  Ultimately I think that we will sink into corporatist slavery.  Still, it is worth making these suggestions.  One never knows.

**

**

In most popular discourse, the glib has replaced the modern.  And really, people whose primary mode is glibness are usually not too bright.  It is a rather pathetic defense.

**

**   

Modernism was a great movement to those capable of perceiving the profound, less satisfying and finally frustrating to the merely intelligent, and perplexing to the minds of those who made no real effort at development.  It gave no hints, after all, and offered no quarter to the mediocrity.  The movement that replaced it—consumerism—is absolute and hermetic.  And it is the same to everyone: banal, yet pleasing, in a disgusting, self-indulgent way.  No one who believes in it ever complains about it.  Modernism at least, for all its supposed obscurity, had several revolutions from within.

**

**

To write well now means to write in a certain way.  Individualism is strictly prohibited, or limited to the margins.  To write a novel today, for instance, means to write in the novelistic style—and everyone is sure they know what that means.  The great battles of the past—when a colon could put you in a critical prison from which you could never escape, when a poorly rhythmed sentence or paragraph could end your career—these have been forgotten by everyone but a handful of anachronists. 

**

**

Of course, the idea of an established style is ridiculous.  The novel is a formless form.  It could be one word—Borges entertained this notion, and he was being quite serious. 

**

**

Even now the novel is preparing its rebellion through multiple mutations: the serialized story on the internet, the “cellphone novella,” the “abstract novel.”  Anything, in short, that will drive the establishmentarians into a rage.

**

**

We should write novels in dozens of languages simultaneously.  Joyce has become the future, not the past.

**

**

Even the work you are reading right now could be considered a novel.  Why?  Because.

**

**

We should take the corporation at its word, and regard ourselves as our own masters even while we realize that we have been enslaved.  And a master has the right to free his slaves.  Therefore, I have found the one word in which is contained a novel that perfectly expresses our situation.  Mr. Borges, are you ready?  Here it is:

Self-manumission.

**

**

One shouldn’t mistake this state of indifference—which is perfectly human after all—with wisdom, or worldliness.  It is just what it is: indifference.

**

**

Dogs are noble creatures.  I think it was Caesar who said, “I’d rather trust my life to a dog than to any fickle creature such as man.”

**

**

Death should mean death in writing, nothing else—no metaphor or mythology is necessary.  Beckett gets it right.  For him death means the cessation of breathing.  This is simple enough, yet difficult to convey.

**

**

While playing chess once with a much older friend, I asked him what he thought of religion and the afterlife.  This was more to distract him and put him off his game than it was to elicit any sort of response.  But he looked up and thought very carefully, and then he said, “It seems kind of distant to me.”  Mistaking his meaning, I began to answer how yes it was a topic that was full of abstractions when it should be concrete, brutally so, when he shook his head to stop me.  “No, no,” he said, “I meant distant, like some people are distant.  And no matter how hard you try, you can never get close to them.”  I had to agree.  It was, and remains, one of the most insightful descriptions of death I have ever heard.  I forget who won the game.

**

**

Consumer culture, and the psychological types it produces, resemble fascist culture in superficial ways.  The type of consumerist culture—the marketing type—who is always concerned with appearing saleable, in their person as well their creations, is disturbingly arrested in its development, much like the fascist.  Infantilization runs between these two areas with ease.  Also, they both see any request for help as a sign of weakness, and equate individualism with an indifference to the suffering of others and a rank opportunism.  As such, they are both rather disgusting to be around for any length of time.  I once had the misfortune of meeting a neo-Nazi, and the overwhelming impression I had of him was one of wanting intensely to be liked.  He could have fit right in at any advertising firm, or been one of those people who is always trying to launch a new telemarketing scheme.

**

**

Intellect does not provide sufficient real counter-weight to authoritarianism.  People who believe don’t care about their reasons.  Look at the sloppy way in which they throw around the term “theory.”