it has been on his wall for a day or so, having appeared sometime at night, he thought; a wound, he would have called it, but more so from water-damage splitting through the wall into the sign of some exit or entrance than anything else, though he could not have said which or what. he had thought to invite others to see it, observe it with him, produce deductions, but then it was a damaged wall, nothing more. if, still, he hoped for more, it was maybe to the end that amidst causal assessment there may have emerged, “how does such a thing really appear?”, “is it a sign?”, “what does it mean?” but, then, it meant nothing; and that was of interest—did that nothing have something to do with the world? he couldn’t have said what, and he knew most would remain dumbfounded at what was not beyond description owing to how it had remained obscured, not flat and truly empty as it was; no, there simply was no description for it at all. he stared at it, its browning edges, the crowning hole, protruding inward, a mix really of exposed studs, wiring, rusty pipes, and drywall. “that isn’t it,” he thought. it was something else, he was convinced, in itself, and he still did not know what to do about it or how he could go about explaining to anyone what it was that had happened, what it was he needed dealing with, or what it was there was to see. he could have had it filled, and so he imagined thereby forgotten, but he knew better that his mind would see it through the wall where is eyes either dared not or would not, and he could see himself already wondering about it at night, just as he did now, staring at it without any conscience for it was. “what am I even wondering about?” he asked himself: what was there to wonder on? he thought, again, of some game he might have had in inviting others to speculate; he knew as well this would lead toward some mania of its own, when, dissatisfied, the answers piling in, each selfish in his possession of his own interpretation, who could have done anything to say who was right? and what would it have meant to have been right? it looked like a mouth, he thought, now beginning to count his guesses. where was the throat? he thought. and the spine? eyeless, the wound appeared like a perfect human being, he thought further, but for all the missing parts, not that that would have changed anything. “was a mouthless human not still human?” it did not appear to him, however, as something that had either happened or had happened, as it were, to something else. it was there, if one could say that, and this made it seem, again, if one could say this, as if it was not, in fact, there. in the frankness in which it was there, it demanded attention, of course; it was perfectly unusual to see. but, then, it was not as if one could say what one was attending to, or, say, which precise edge made it what it was or gave evidence as to what exactly had occurred. one suspected, if anything, that it had really been there, beneath the wall, and had only re-appeared—but was this likely? again, for all its frankness, this subdued it; it was so there that it defied the simple expectation one confided in description, for then so expectant was the description that all attempts simply failed. it being so special, so out of the ordinary, it defied any simple account of where it was meant to fit amidst the other parts, first, of his flat, then of anywhere else he felt inclined to compare it to. indeed, it became even vague, sunk into the wall, of which it could hardly have been part, either so exceptional it was, or so dumbfoundedly irrelevant, so that one did not really notice it after a certain point—again, it almost seemed to ask the question itself, of what here can be noticed? it was not then that it had appeared or had not appeared, but that it even this was too much of an assumption. it resolved one either to the distress of thinking that something had happened which had not, or, worse yet, that whatever had happened was not something of which one could take notice. even this, however, resolved nothing. was it an indifferent nothing that had happened or something still more obscure? he thought. and if nothing had happened, was it this that was the real nothing, either that nothing had happened and it was this not-having-happened which was nothing or was the nothing, not even the flick in the ointment of reality that had led one towards noticing something that was not there, but simply nothing—an unequivocal nothing, which could not ever be noticed no matter how hard one tried to? he suffered thinking about it, caught in the vicissitudes as much of his thinking as of the parched presence of the wound. ‘but, does not a wound imply too much?’ he thought. he could no more say, however, here was simply nothing; it was after all some nothing which was there, or, again, if not, then it was some true nothing, which made his mind blank upon each observation, defied him in his attendance of it. ‘did this not still occur?’ he thought. ‘like a trick of light, yes, it is really nothing, but then absence leaves something to be desired which cannot simply ever fill in.’ his blank mind, so it seemed to him, was the most interesting thing in the room besides the wound itself. it was the possibility of such blankness which astonished him, and to think that it was there, though, of course, it made no sense to say no, as if his mind was piecing together what it thought was nothing, so as to experience it, he presumed; and what experience did he gather? it was not that that blankness lent itself to thought, for it seemed to simply to be there, somehow with him, somehow not. it was some perfect blankness, which, again he could muddy thinking it was absence, or render it still more absent in thinking, such as he could, by imagining that it was not even there at all, that when he had seen it, the wound, it was there only ever in the corner of his eye; only in the lie of the perfect shadow of his blinded vision could he form an image of it, as if it were advancing nearer to him whenever he took his eyes away from him. where else could it be, he thought, but that wherever I am not, there it is, and wherever it is, I am not. he gave himself this corner-of-his-eye view of it, even as he never saw it, but then it succeeded that he saw it only when he could not see it, only when some kind of vanishing, which his mind could only just barely conceive, substituted for this vanishing the presence of something else which could never be directly looked at, not even as having vanished. it was never there, this nothing, he thought, but then, even now, I am not really thinking about it, and he knew, if only in his heart, how it was then that he saw it, if only with the corner of his eyes, this nothing, the wound, which had never been there to begin with. this did not explain the hole in his wall, which he came to regard contemptuously, feeling as he did that he seemed to discredit something which was ‘there’ only in proposing there was a simpler way in which it might be nothing. “it was nothing,” he explained to a few friends, who had come to visit him and observe it, “but it was more special in that one must imagine it really is nothing.” his friends looked at him incredulously, uncertain either of the difference or of what it was, then, which was to explain whatever it was that was in front of them. “it’s being there is not entirely the point. if it is there as nothing, then we cannot, in any case, observe it.” “so, what remains then?” “either it is nothing that remains or something we can only call not-only nothing.” “no,” interjected one of the friends, “it seems that if it is this blank thing, as you suggest, then we are not even looking at it, and it is this which is like a spot inside our minds. we place something there, which cannot be there.” “but, then how does the blankness enter into it at all?” he added. his friends looked at him confusedly, relenting only slightly to the mad premise. “it seems,” wagered another, “that what we have here is something that is not beyond description because it has exceeded it, but it never even arrived at it. but then this serves as a description. to say then that one has not really described it only muddies one further.” “one must imagine a perfectly blank spot in one’s mind,” he replied. “not even,” began one, final other, “not even, because this nothing is not here, then this is, well, nothing.” “but, that’s just the paradox,” he exclaimed now to all of them at once, “for there must be something there, stranger still than the simple fact that this here, following our observations, should remain nothing, and that is nothing short of the fact that it is, one could say less than nothing, though I would hazard the stranger phrase that it is nothing so truly rendered it defies description, not because it lacks it, but because it is impossible to describe.” “and you’re suggestion,” continued one of his friends, as if this were the natural conclusion of what he had said himself, “is that it is this which is before us? pray, then, how can we see it?” “but, you cannot see it!” he shouted, now rudely, so that his friends began to stir amongst themselves like some rattled heard. “what do you mean, we can’t see it? it is plain as day before us.” “no, no,” he continued to exclaim, “what you can see is nothing, sure, yes, triviality, great, but, no, the thing of which I am speaking of cannot be seen at all, not because it simply cannot be seen, but because it not able to be seen. there is simply, gentleman, quite literally nothing to see.” “then why speak of it all?” asked one of his friends exhaustedly. “because it would seem that this nothing which cannot ever be seen, lacking all depth, colour, anything, is not something of which we can even speak of as seeing or not seeing. even that fails. our mind conjures something up, which we confirm with the notion that it is whatever is absent from the world.” “I still cannot consent to whatever it is you say,” said one of them, he knew not which, so preoccupied had he become with staring at the wound, “because I do not understand why it has appeared at all then?” “it hasn’t,” he replied without looking at them, “there is quite literally nothing to see here.” he had invited a doctor, or rather a doctor had been invited over for him. it had been decided that he must have been suffering from some peculiar illness related to his fixation with the hole in his wall, or wound as he referred to it. “why is it wound?” asked the doctor, “seems like an odd choice of a word, suggests something got wounded.” “maybe, it did,” he replied shortly. the doctor sat beside him, having no other choice, for if he had attempted to place himself before who was now the patient, him, the patient, him, would have simply moved himself a foot closer to return to his unobscured vantage. “you say it is not really there.” “no, it cannot be there. it’s entirely the wrong word.” “but, then you’ve used the word wound. why? is it somehow there to your mind? is there something you can see, that we cannot?” “no, doctor,” he said blithely now, “I can see nothing neither more nor less than you. if it is a wound it is because, well, what else can you call it? it is not a wound like you or I might have, it is simply that, a wound. do you not imagine that something, when it is missing, should be called a wound of some kind?” “it is a wound of what then, young man?” “it is precisely its not being there which is the wound.” “so, what,” said the doctor, exasperated, “after all of this time are you staring at?” “you presume I stare because there is some sense to it. no, no. I am staring at nothing, that is entirely the point. there is nothing to be stared at, the more you point that out, the more I succeed at what I am doing.” “but, then it is there!” shouted the doctor. smiling, then, as if he had got the better of the older doctor, he said, at last, “you see, herr doctor, that’s the rub. it is precisely its not being so that makes it so.” in time, after much dispute and heavy wordiness, the patient now became confessor, or parishioner to the more reformation-minded, and the whole town which surrounded his flat had joined up in a great convocation, like one of old, to decide upon the fretting case of the young man gone mad staring at a hole in the wall. indeed, by way of some interjection, the case was eventually presented to the young man himself, so that he might, in contradicting it, make some acknowledgement of the matter of that of which he was meant to be mad. it had been agreed, after all, that unless the whole town was itself to accuse itself, of find itself accused of, being mad, it had to have the offending party, as he eventually became known, to acknowledge some sense in which he was, or as it might have happened, was also not, involved in such dispute as would warrant any kind of civilian extradition. even this he refused, however, in as petulant a way as he had done with all previous attempts to ensnare him to declare that the nothing was simply there, this having become the chief object of argument for, as it happened, both witness and defence, the offending party having no part in either side, as he had declared it an impossibility. his refusal to acknowledge of course rested upon the fact that there could be no acknowledgement, again, that the nothing was there, “for, my dear jurors, doctors, civilians, judges, lawyers, friends, family, and all others present,” indeed this last affection became the only credible part of his speech to which he himself made what was considered sensical reference, “all others present,” it being deemed at the very least a fair admission of sanity; though this was, it was argued, hardly what they were trying to prove. indeed, his refusal to acknowledge rested equally upon the affectation that, whenever they should ask him if it was really there, the nothing, he would respond, “I say to you and all others present,” the various front and back benches tended to lean in at this point, “it is precisely its not being so which makes it so.” this last part could, of course, have become as obdurate, and obdurately-viewed, an affectation as the others, but seeing as it was this principal argumentation, though it was refused to be called that, and therefore to be even entered into evidence, which had stumped all those around him. eventually, however, the priest was made to enter, it being duly conceived that only the graver suspicions, and therefore the graver methods, could now be conceived as explanation for whatever it was that was “afoot”. it was this which became, it must be said, among, admittedly, many others, the affectation of “those present” to the end that the business, it had to be said, could simply not be described in any simple parlance and so had to be referred to as that which was simply “afoot”, underscored, on occasion, by the more detail-minded, as “the business afoot concerning the nothing that is there”, with some occasionally opting for the laconic rendering of “the nothing that is not there,” this being, in point of fact, technically the central objection of those on the side of the defence, the town having been split between these two nothings, one which was not there and one which was. when this was presented to the offending party, he nodded his head, as if in agreement, and therefore seemingly joining in the general consensus that he was, after all, surely, speaking of a nothing that was not there, but, then, just as he was meant, so they thought, to give his hearty consent to this formulation, he replied with the old affectation, “ it is precisely its not being so that makes it so.” the priest, learned in theology, took this as his starting point. “so, then, son, the negation would imply that it is the first nothing, the nothing that is there, which is, it must be said, the view of the greater half of the town, which is that there is a certain nothing you are staring at, but that it is no more than nothing.” “I cannot consent to say that it is no more than nothing, only that it is certainly not there.” “but, you are on record saying it is its being the negation which makes it so. what can the negation here be but that it is the nothing which is there?” “I mean to say that the negation of it being the nothing which is not there is that it is not there, which is precisely that it not being so is what makes it so.” “because you mean to say it is neither.” “the negation of what is not so is not what is so, not when what is not so is not simply not what is so. there is neither the nothing that is there, nor the nothing that is not there. in one sense, they are exactly the same thing, nothing. which is why it is only when one has the negation that one can get to the point that it is its not being so that makes it so.” the priest did not understand this last formulation in the slightest and so opted for a more human approach, “can you tell me, why, then, you look at it?” “look at what? I’m not looking at anything.” the priest sensed a slip-up here. “if you aren’t looking at anything, are you not looking at the something you are not looking at.” he smiled at the priest, and said, “can you, of all people, not imagine such a thing as a perfect nothing, something so blank it cannot even be contradicted. do you think that you could say you see it or not?” “I would think that if such thing existed you would be carrying it with you all around whereever you went. you would not be able to say when it was not with you.” “and, yet, if you ever said it was, it would be nothing. the question, of course, then, is of this nothing which is really nothing. that’s the question.” “my son,” said the priest, “it is not a question.” with that the priest too left. it was not until a great deal of time had passed that an unassuming person in the town was passing, having driven in totally unaware of the circumstances that had befallen it, the entire place being, after all, in disarray and suspension, all business having come to a halt, as all that remained were those who remained within the disputing halls debating, and who largely hung upon a faded transcript of this last conversation between the offending party, though he was now generally himself referred to rather ambiguously, and conflatingly, as the wound, and the priest. this stranger, though unprovoked, took it upon himself to speak to everyone so as to gain a measure of what had happened, inclined towards the notion he might be able to help, and it was he went into the flat, having spoken already to every other occupant at that point, meeting there where what must have been the singularly sane person to whom the obvious design of this spectacle must be owed. he was not disappointed, but found in the man the perfect expert of whatever dialectical sore had erupted into the scene, the man having even had occasion to drill, so he imagined, into the wall a perfect representation of what was to be the hopeless wound. following some hours with the man in which he heard each line of dispute, he asked him, at last, how he had come by this knowledge, and why he, out of all of them, seemed to know it so perfectly. he did not inquire, it must be noted, as to the question of the wound itself, satisfied as he was with the pure demonstration, after all, that it was not, in any case, to be found. the man to whom he spoke eventually replied to his question, saying, “I could not tell you who first mentioned the wound to me, for it is not the kind of thing that can be mentioned. I certainly cannot tell you who first saw it, for it is not the kind of thing to be seen. but, then, as I have often said, it’s not being there is precisely what makes it so. those who say, what is there is not there, but this is but a philosopher’s trick. it makes no difference how you are content to formulate what you cannot formulate.” “yes, I wondered this myself,” said the stranger, “and it seems to me that the townspeople have, so I imagine by your design, missed a crucial discursive move here. they were inclined to say that, then, there must be some formulation which is adequate, but there isn’t, is there? if I am correct in understanding what has gone on, the wound does indeed exist. one could even say it exists more than anything else, and that everything else is rather a fiction of its formulation. but, here, one must go a step further. if we were to imagine the wound in the world as like this hole here in the wall,” and he pointed to the wound rather scholastically, “then we might ask of it, is it an entrance or an exit, thinking it must be one or the other. is it not, however, that what all others have missed is that, it is in its impossibility, which makes it there. what is, finally, there, is not, as all others had thought, nothing, but what was impossible. nothing, for any interlocutor, was a category, like any other, to be overcome. what was there, finally, was what was impossible. and once one admits to that, that that impossibility is there, one accomplishes that very disorientation which is the problem of the wound itself. one must not, after all, ask, what is that thing we call the wound which is there in the world, but what is the world which is there in the wound?” and when the stranger had finished speaking and his eyes flushed with a sense of strange epiphany, he turned towards the man with whom he had been speaking to find he was no longer listening.

what is it I am able to do? I mean, there must be something I can do—or do I presume too much already? am I ever able or unable? what would either consist in? and that either, what is it? what is our politics? and where do we press it? is there a specific subjective disorder which motivates us over others? surely not. for that would presume the very thing we are missing. call it standing or position or reputation, there is something, like good nourishment, we lack, which leaves us starved—of what? we would like to say we understand it, but then we know as well that our problem is not that we don’t either understand or know what we want, but that when we say it out loud no one seems to understand. to an extent, this resolves us: we imagine that if the question alone confounds then we must be on the right track, if only we were not interested, in the end, in being understood. what, then, are we to do? should we accept that then our task is not one of persuasion, for that would presume there was something to being understood we considered, on first principles, to be either productive or desirable. indeed, this not being understood seems to us productive in another way insofar as it may testify to some letter we are pushing, which now forces our adversaries to accuse us of obscurity or worse of a vague indeliberate dreaming. what is clear, however, is that while we have our conditions on the one hand, those circumstances (“not of his choosing”), which make a man and ourselves in our resolve, on the other, lacking all objective account and understanding, but in any case seeking subjective demonstration. our not being understood for our question therefore allows for something understanding, and even acceptance, of our answer. as we have realised, there is a more agreeable compromise to many to accept, if not our terms, then the exception that is the answer—so long as we never ask again. if we could be understood, however, we could lose that very resolve which allows us to act as we do: we doubt ourselves, and in doubting, submit, if not clarity to ourselves, than forthright commitment. even still, we have learned to become interested in this subjective demonstration of ours over and above any objective persuasion. largely because all that that objective knowledge, we are convinced, will ever consist in is the demand, based upon a more general assessment of its conditions, of that subjective demonstration. this, of course, is paradox: we would not really seek to be understood subjectively, but merely to put aside the notion of either simple persuasion or indeed of some possible account of the facts, which sufficiently complete would supposedly render immediate agreement. this fantasy we are happy to forego, not least because our demonstration is not of the facts, but being, we believe, necessarily subjective, therefore concerns what cannot ever be, in any case, explained—objectively. to our mind, we return to our two eventualities: the conditions, arbitrary, and the pure resolve of someone, who neither understands himself, nor can claim the honour or shame of not and so must stand his ground, legitimately or illegitimately—he knows neither. his capacity is one, ultimately, of subjective wariness. now, however, this is itself but a demonstration of what cannot be overcome with any appeal to what is “really going on”—one must instead insist upon the intersection of what is missing with what is not; they collaborate: the question, when it is understood, is no more understood with what is imagined to be understandable itself; rather the true paradox of the subject is that nothing is missing from his explanation, except that that impossible examines itself, which finally renders it a fact. in short, when you do understand, you can’t explain it. this poses a problem for politics, which reinvites our split: consent, then, to manipulate the conditions as if therein lies the hidden letter of your persuasion or force a confoundment of every person until they hold their ground before what they do not understand. how to escape this antimony of persuasion and fanaticism? perhaps, again, by asserting that what is not understood is not a testament to something missing, but that there is a pure missing; an absence, which is rather just silence. you cannot understand—before you do. even then, avoid the eucharistic trap: there is no revelation to come. you will never just understand; that recognition which appears is retroactive: when it happens, everything is already different. how do we measure the difference? some say the subject is the difference. it would seem, however, that the position is far stranger. the change that occurs is not a change (in substance), but an understanding appears, itself a synthetic product of our recognition, and there is then only radical acceptance left. does this mean, in the end, we do present a sequence of synthetic facts? no, because one traverses even this synthesis to the point that this very synthesis itself is one of the facts to be accepted. you accept the antinomy; but, as what? not as a simple stutter or disruption; you accept it as the dialectical point itself of traversion: you install, not persuasion, but critique; and this satisfies your subjective demonstration. you are invited to break down whatever proposes itself into the antinomy of its recognition.—and then, you propose to accept something; it is the revolutionary scansion itself: you cannot convince people, because there is nothing of which to convince them. how do you accept the world as it is? try to do something and see what happens. then you accept. like a doctor diagnosing through treatment: there is human society, and our project. “what is really there?”: be prepared to see antinomies themselves, and then when the treatment fails, you try again. what is the revolutionary doctor but one who revolts over nothing, and in doing so finds the diagnosis for a different illness. there is no sense, dialectically, to diagnose, then treat; but, only, to treat, even when, if not most especially, nothing appears wrong, and then find the diagnosis. if we revolt over nothing because the diagnosis does not ultimately interest us, only the treatment.

it would seem that a culture of polemical letters is agreed to be beyond us. we need not try to contradict each other in writing, our despair at the thoughts’ of others having dissipated, or we have simply become comfortable with, and so have in a sense relented to, our various inner seethings. whatever the case, we are anticipated by a more serious issue related to human polemics, one seemingly independent of whether we should engage with them or not. to some extent, the problem is where, or perhaps more ambiguously, to whom, we are meant to send these letters. we ask ourselves with what ink or on what paper, convinced that the question of under which candle’s light or within which dingy attic we should write is soon to follow next. must we all become raskolnikov to believe in the writing of ironic letters? to those familiar with their history, the answer would be a resounding no. the russian version, after all, can hardly be called a simple intellectual culture of exchange on the issues of the day. still, does our sense of loss, or having lost, find its origin in a lack of culture? lacking institutions, we come to lack both issues about which to discuss and the language in which to discuss them. the topic of ironic letters would also seem to contradict the more sincere formations of our generation, though irony is hardly the opposite of sincerity, but its most astonishing companion. it lends acidity to sincere points, which may, without its influence, appear far more insincere, lacking the depth and self-distance necessary to promote any kind of serious understanding, either of oneself or the world. it would seem, however, that all of these explanations fall short. we are left with the question of the candlelight and the attic, for what else can explain our poor intellectual habitation than that, at base, we somehow lack materials? a dialectical suggestion presents itself: what we have too much of is an expectation of a certain material hardiness, one which only actually succeeds at ever, and therefore merely, ideologically supplementing our effort. it is this effort, which is forced to degenerate into what we may only call the unresolved enjoyment of our own participation in the matter at hand. how to understand this? we publish, and, in doing so, we make our lives harder. this is not the 19th-century, and lacking as we do a real press culture, we can only produce frankly simulacra or otherwise pastiche versions of what came before—but without substance. indeed, in supplementing this substanceless ‘substance’, lacking as it also does any real content because it lacks any serious determination of what is around it, but merely operates in the bubble of boutique publishing, this ‘material hardiness’ shows its hand, of course: the ‘substance’ here is the operative achievement; we are not interested in publishing anything, but in publishing itself. we make it harder on ourselves because of an acknowledged enjoyment to this difficulty which serves to supplement the fact that, if we took the easy route, we would be faced with the more vicious and immediate crisis that we don't actually know what to write. the ‘easy route’ is then ironically actually the more defiant one. what defines this easy route? it is the digital. perhaps, not a very interesting or surprising answer, but more robust than you might imagine. after all, what we allow with respect to the present toxification of social media is nothing but a barely-restrained resentment which reveals itself in the fact that we let that spectacle take place as if there was no other option. we also conveniently ignore the ugliness of humans, and their thoughts, which surely should serve as the soil to the stalk of all serious opinion-making. in other words, we are content to let it self-destruct because it forces the derailment of the easy route and therefore the underlying crucible of having to face our own thoughts, or lack thereof. indeed, an interesting ideological irony appears here: the detritus of human expression that appears on social media is, in a curious way, preferred to the horror vaccui of our present deadlock with our own inner lives, to say nothing of the outer disintegration which naturally seems to follow it. furthermore, perhaps one should read the explosion of monstrous thoughts on social media as strangely anticipatory of, or otherwise parapractic with respect to, this void, above and over which these thoughts appear as hysterical expressions; desperate, overblown messages of the guilty to signal the guilt they feel at really being, or thinking, nothing. this lends them some temporary, or vanishing, truth, which is perhaps why they are ultimately so politically subversive, and not, at times, without insight. this enjoyment, as an unacknowledged phenomenon, concerns the suturing of our excessive, hard effort. it helps us get through it. at the same time, it is not acknowledged and this means it lacks the very signal-quality which defines serious enjoyment: its relationship to the impossible. one enjoys, after all, in view of, and therefore not against, the impossible. it is enjoyment which is the difficult, and even paradoxically impossible, thing to remove. to ignore it is then to add some ‘surplus’ enjoyment typical of what is ultimately yet another repressed phenomenon of what I must regretfully call the dynamics of capital. before you dismiss me as a marxist, which I nevertheless am, consider this in the vein of a good, old-fashioned, leninist critique of the left itself, i.e. all of the leftist, posing, boutique publishers who rely, if anything, upon pastiches views of marx to match their pastiche view of the radical presses they shamelessly try to emulate: this enjoyment goes ‘surplus’ because, in being unacknowledged, it must go unconscious; it must submit itself to be surveilled elsewhere. this elsewhere-surveillance is precisely, however, what allows it to suture in such a compelling way, if only you don’t try to lift up the mask of its effort, or, in this case, turn over the cover: it is entirely ‘capitalist’ after all to promote a radical surveillance of what is meant to exist as unsurveilled; a ‘social phenomenon’ which has value, but no social meaning. this is one of the serious paradoxes marx did unveil. indeed, this awkward surveillance of ‘nothing’ conceals the horror of this intrusion of nothing in the first place; the horrifying nothing of the act of surveillance itself, which sutures ‘value’ through a reference to some suturing elsewhere. in short, a phenomenon can ‘exist’ so long as it is at least acknowledged ‘elsewhere’ by capital, which one should read as the unironic reference point, nevertheless hidden, which makes so much substanceless substance possible. consider, for instance, what literally, materially underpins the ‘hard way’ if not the funding-dump that defines the middle-class dreamers which typify this class of boutique publishers, though it also includes certain elite circles who generally hire this unskilled class of ‘workers’. but this in its own way misses the point. one must recognise, after all, how it is the obscuration of the impossible, typical of this repressed enjoyment, so that one enjoys in secret, forcing explosive symptomatic contradictions in time, which makes, once again, the one thing that is so crucial about enjoyment, its wagnerian core, if you will, disappear: one can face the impossible over and over again, if only one can still conceive to both enjoy and confront the enjoyment which emerges. those who pretend not to enjoy are repaid in surplus enjoyment, and this only really serves to obscure their relationship to the impossible, foreclosing any actually possible radicalisation. the ‘easy road’ by contrast is to confront the impossible and therefore to risk enjoying. perhaps this enjoyment is no less dangerous because one can properly go mad. there is no naive limit, but the interior excess really of the enjoyment to be found in ‘throwing the javelin into the void’ as beckett puts it. even still, the point is to be found in, actually, the underlying political economy which emerges with respect to the materially easier path—if only one can handle the impossible that comes with it. this impossible is, of course, ‘not knowing what to say, think, or write’. the political economy that should naively appear along with this uncertainty is of course precisely what emerges, if not to synthesise exactly our effort, for that is the very subject of marx’s kritik, then to underwrite a certain enjoyment, but also, strangely enough, political effort which we may exercise in en- and adjoining ourselves to what is impossible. it is therefore the digital which serves us as the polemical instrument par excellence precisely because it is the scene of our society’s letters. one should embrace the vengeful efficiency here of the digital, not as a business concept, but as something which engages us with the more immediate stakes of our political society as something within which we exist and about which we discuss. recall how the monsters of social media remained outlawed so that we will not detect the basic political subjectivity which underpins their, admittedly sometimes maddening, expressions. it is not, then, that our suggestion is to pair this rabble, or lumpenproletariat, if you will, with some bourgeoisie of digital publishers, more elegant in their expressions. on the contrary, one is far more interested in the leninist notion of the professional radical: someone who writes from within the basic political stance of this relationship to whatever it is we are not facing about our society, draws it out precisely, and ultimately follows it through to its end. in so many ways, this is the proper social task of society itself. we do not merely ‘produce’ and then understand our production to merely have left out certain subsections of society; we understand by the term production itself some material repression of our social concerns and relations as a society. we are not ever actually just producing. everything exists in some radical social context which expresses and underpins nothing short of its desire, enjoyment, and fundamental impossibility. the church, as it has existed, was not some entity of surplus authoritarian rule, which is only how it became portrayed in the post-reformation, enlightenment critiques, which had already gone some way to formalising the very term ‘production’, but rather a deeply integral ‘unit’ of social expression, without which society would have been blind as to its fundamental human, or, in this case, higher order commitments. one can, nevertheless, try and reduce the state to some realpolitik, material agent of social cohesion or stability, but this merely reacquaints one with ivan’s stunningly bitter story, the grand inquisitor, in which christ’s second coming has become unnecessary because he has done all that he was needed for and the church’s responsibility is to feed the masses, not to move them. the irony of ivan’s tale is, of course, contained in the fact that the inquisition priest who relates this cruel insight to Christ does so nevertheless in full acceptance of Christ's existence. one should impute a similar irony to contemporary critics of the church: you really believe, but you are either mad at God for disappointing you, a view you have likely gained in having supposed him to have been unfair in some naively liberal way as opposed to beginning with some dictum, like that of arvo part’s, “have you thanked God for this failure yet?”, or have similarly reduced His role to that of naive material benefactor. in any case, this is but a taste of the serious social task of the desire, enjoyment, and impossibility of civil society to which such professional radicals supplement as much as any ‘producer’ the means by which to affect, further, and membrate society’s existence. by means of a further detour into our ideologically polemical society, consider recent events in our fair city of montréal. anti-nato protests collaborated with pro-palestinian protests, driven likely by aimless professional anarchists, the kind of professional radical very much to be avoided, into some kind of civil disorder, resulting in a slew of conservative reactions to the effect of ‘montréal is burning’. to this, rather curiously, leftists online responded by seemingly wittily refusing this implication by describing themselves as going along with the usual business of their day, as if to say, ‘how can the city be burning when I’m just going to cinema?’ to this, of course, more self-conscious leftists responded with fury, likely out of shame, guilty, and embarrassment, that these leftists were stupid enough to have thought this an appropriate response when all it actually does is subvert the now seemingly intended civil disorder of which apparently leftists are meant to be proud. I don’t know who is worse. one should begin by insisting how there is, indeed, a liberal bias to be found in these less-committed leftists, but that it merely implicates the more radical leftists in the fact that their achievement is only readable within the very liberal horizon of law and order, of civil order or disorder. far from this liberal bias subverting the ardent, radical leftists, it reveals in what respect their so-called politics entirely lacks any actual program on the basis of which one might really say they are either radical or leftist. anti-capitalism is the terminological equivalent of bland dog food. it means nothing. anti-nato seems similarly misled. the only hysterical accomplishment, then, of this left was to produce an awkward rift within its own fierce members to the effect of exposing the showmanship of their leftist commitments. one should, after all, go to the end in the critique of even the radical left’s liberalism. their programmatic approach to representation, for instance, is the political equivalent of boutique publishing. they deny enjoying what they are doing, claiming they are taking the hard path, despite the effectively easier path of writing down one’s committed demands and following them through. to those who retort by saying, ‘but the institutions won’t allow it!’, ask yourself how it is possible that the left has become only definitively leftist insofar as it is really anti-right, or in some cases, anti-trump. this is liberalism by definition; it trades upon merely representational exchanges as opposed to questioning the entire paradigm of a given institution’s answer. to those who then suspect an inconsistency given my dismissal of anti-capitalist, anti-nato commitments, note that my point is their lack of specificity, betraying as I feel this does a serious lack of understanding of that which is demanded, implicating such ‘leftist’ programs yet again in the fact that they seem to have chosen the hard path of anarchist resistance and civil disorder because they wish to avoid the monstrosity of either not knowing what it is they think or what their plan is. is this not ultimately underscored by the vanity of believing that forms of solidarity and, indeed, actual civil disruption are reserved to, yet again, some 19th-century crowd pastiche, as if that was not itself a phenomenal example of an hysteria typical of the time, not to mention one contractually enforced, if one can put it that way, by the undiminished presence of the urban/agrarian divide which had come to specially designate industrial labour workers as really a class of un-landed farmers who had now been forced to sell their labour time, matched in its absurdity only by the image of some stinking cow-herd coming to fill the streets after being sent away from the dairy farms. it was not, in other words, an accidental assembly of people, let alone some liberal assertiveness in practice; it was entirely owing to the ‘necessary contingencies’ of the conditions of the time that people assembled in the way they did. one should no more however dismiss today’s leftists for assembling without direction or conscious purpose, but nevertheless criticise, if anything, the vanity of purpose which presents itself as if appearing were the only achievement of a march. such reductions to appearance accomplish what the false neutrality of surveillance does for capital: it obscures the proper impossible which makes enjoyment (and politics) possible. after all, once you feel the purpose for what you are doing is declarable in advance, why meet up? this, of course, torpedoes such marches with a curious sense of guilt: is there not something else we could be doing? this furthermore embitters the undecided against them, who feel they really ‘mean what they say’, i.e. that there is no deeper message or movement to what they do. those who try to supplement this with greater and greater condemnations of western institutions only really seem to obscure the need for serious political stakes: rather than deepening the commitment, it only makes the message more reified and pre-chewed. this guilt emerges with an awareness of the naive efficiency of the easy path, so that, in the end, however, this guilt should actually be seen, if anything, as preferable to the suffering endemic to a relationship to the impossible. a polemical culture does not appear anymore then by accident, except for the accident of the impossible. if we are to have one, we must take the easy path. indeed, let us consider two other peculiar examples of the easy path. john adams, the american founding father, revolutionary, lawyer, statesman, and diplomat, only came to join the continental congress after having seen the effect that mob mentality would have upon what was to him the possibility of a serious political movement. far from him joining in the civil disorder, he actively tried to dissuade them from the hysteria. in doing so, he radicalised the movement. in such situations, it is moderation which serves to much more effectively gauge the stakes, precisely because the withdrawal one exercises in moderation acquaints one with the enjoyment that is often at stake. one cannot not enjoy, which is precisely why one invites the suggestion of it so as to expose the inconsistency of one’s actions. often people stop here, however. one must go further in suggesting that it is only this inconsistency which can then properly face one with what is impossible, with what one is not facing (as opposed to, say, what one is simply avoiding). in dissuading the mob, he forces them to confront the enjoyment that is latent in their politics. in doing so, he exposes the inconsistency of their political movement. he, himself, enjoys only to the extent that he does so warily, aware that the unavoidability of enjoyment taints any serious politics, but also therefore implicates it in whatever it is that is impossible. for instance, when one takes upon oneself a task that one does not know how to do, or for which there is no guideline, the only way, after a certain point, is to structure this engagement through enjoyment, through regimes of discipline or aesthetic, etc., which allow one to cross the boundary of what is not there over to whatever is on the other side. one must have the counterbalancing impossible so as to, in a sense, vindicate what are otherwise empty political or ethical acts of enjoyment. to do so, however, one must, again, face the enjoyment that is there and, again, vindicate this enjoyment with the impossible, with the invitation of the impossible that is there, the underside of enjoyment. the result is a certain wariness, in that one observes the inconsistency of the hysterical effort, but cannot turn one’s eyes away, aware that there is no simple, other option on the basis of which the hysteric might return to his or her place (in the impossible). the only option is then to get one’s hands dirty with moderation. the second example of the easy path is more dialectical; it is that of malcolm x and martin luther king jr. it is often argued now that king was preferred over malcolm x in that, together, they had put civil society into agreeing to choose the supposed lesser of two evils. one must reject this, in at least two ways. firstly, it is really king who is, in his moderation, more radical, precisely because he does not legitimise the hysteria as if it were a ‘consistent’ demand, whereas, of course, what makes it both legitimate and political is that it is inconsistent, and it is entirely arguable that one must risk inverting the order here: it was malcolm x who was ‘supported’ by established powers precisely because he would put at risk the effective legitimacy of the civil rights movement. do not underestimate in what respect malcolm x is fetishised ‘as if’ he would have proven decisive to extending the civil rights as far as it would go. the illegitimacy of trying to promote ‘legitimate’, however extreme, demands is countered only by the legitimacy of illegitimate demands, such as king’s speeches in the north and private correspondence, where he advocated anti-capitalism and viewed his struggle as foremost a class struggle. this ‘insight’ is not really proposed as a demand, ultimately, but really as something that cannot even be naively conceived, which once again demands a wariness with respect to what is asked. this provides the final twist which is that, rather than it having been a choice between king and malcolm x, it was a choice between two different versions of king: the one who could be confined to a demand that was not hysterical and the demand that was, in this case, underpinned by a more radical class hysteria and would, and, indeed, did, invite the wary moderateness which made martin luther king jr, in fact, such a professional radical. what is finally necessary to say, or repeat, is that any such culture of radical or otherwise polemical letters must be done, at least to begin with, digitally, because it is our easy path. we make our lives harder in the best sense by trying to publish in these bespoke aways, indulging anarchist politics, etc. we must, instead, opt to make our lives easier in the worse way.

the trees outside stood still, and he observed them uncertainly from within his flat. he had an appointment which he was meant to attend, but it was simply raining too much outside, he reasoned, that he could not possibly go out. if he went out, would it not endanger the very thing he was seeking to protect in going out for an appointment in the first place. what was the appointment, anyway, he thought further, having forgotten which of his many visitations to which of his many doctors he was meant to pay that day. as he did this, which is to say, reasoned, he sat in his small, but comfortable chair, fidgeting his hands, buried as he was, owing to his peculiarly small frame, within many blankets he had layered on the chair to either keep him warm or keep the cold away, he never knew which, for he never knew which he was, and he looked out the window, observing it as if in study of it, uncertain however what he was ever meant to be looking for, whether it had not already happened or was just about to. it sometimes occurred to him that he was not looking outside the window, or was not meant to be, but was looking, or was meant to be looking, directly at it, as if it was the principal object of focus, and this sometimes led him to the exciting, but equally paralysing thought, that since we had in our short lives had occasion to observe others looking out windows, we had always concluded the thing they were looking at, for, or upon must be outside it, beyond it, when indeed, it seemed just as possible that the thin frame of foggy, yet clear nothing was of similar attraction, if for no other reason than it was, however impossibly, what people at the end of the day had been really looking at all this time. he was, perhaps, in his early thirties, and if he had forgotten the number it was only because he spent so many of his days inside, cloistered away, unoccupied utterly with any business, that while he had counted the days since his birth with an astonishing exactness, it was possible that one day had melded into the next, or indeed that a whole year or so had passed, when, in a similar attitude as to today, as all other days, he was only ever to be found in his living room, looking out the window, reasoning. it was not then for him to say which age he was, and no one having appeared in his life for a very long time meant it didn’t seem to be anyone else’s task either. his doctors had tried to come to some agreement of the number, but whether through his having misled one, who, then, in consultation with another, either similarly, or correctly, but self-doubtingly, misled him, there was no consensus among them. the result was that he had had to schedule appointments in order to rectify endlessly mismatched consultations, figures which had no place in any objective medical history, entire episodes of his admittedly daunting, but rich, medical life which were either central to prevailing theories of his doctor’s of his condition, or, indeed, as it was yet to be determined, conditions in the plural, or had never been mentioned to or heard of by one of his doctor’s, which had then been either brought up as if they had been historical benchmarks or else had been forgotten entirely, even by him who was meant to be the possessor of the only reliant memory of such things upon which everyone, likely very mistakenly, but unavoidably, was relying. this left him in such a confusion that his own answers began to contradict themselves, not on the basis of any intuition of knowing better, nor indeed any inkling of what may have really happened, but simply out of the shear reflexivity of his own encounters with the details, as if he were a perfect stranger to them. this led him to then invent, or supply factually, things which appeared to him to be sensible or possibly accurate, owing as he felt he did, though this was in some way, shape or form, likely related to whatever was at bottom wrong with him, some responsibility to uncovering what the general picture in the end was meant to be, or indeed what particular things he was meant to be suffering from, had suffered from, or worse yet, as it was always part of any serious pathological diagnosis, would suffer from, thereby encompassing the whole of possible human illness. he fully had the expectation now that he had, in any case, missed whatever appointment he was meant to attend. of course, it was very likely he already had another one, at this exact moment, and it was just as possible, if not downright likely, that it may have in actual fact been this appointment he had remembered he was to attend today, having only misrecalled the time, while the previous one was, in fact, the one had actually forgotten, though was, nevertheless, prepare to attend. in fact, it was possible that the entire day was full of appointments and he only had to step outside and go to one of them at any hour, or indeed at any of his clinics, and he would find someone waiting for him, though it was just as possible that the entire was wrong, that this was one of the days in which he had no appointments at all and was now sitting here worrying himself needlessly. he was sure though he had the right one, and if it would only stop raining he might be able to reach the doctor and, even if he had had no appointment, mention to him having either forgotten it, if it turned out he had arrived to it too late, or, again, there being no actual appointment in point of fact, mentioning this latest bout of worry and mismanagement to the doctor as perhaps formatively pathological. unless, of course, he arrived at exactly when it was to start and then how would he mention to the doctor that he had worried with great anxiety about whether he was going to late, the appointment was scheduled, or, indeed, whether it even existed, when he had arrived entirely on time and to the right appointment. was he meant to sit there fidgeting then with that stunning knowledge of nothing, fighting the impulse to reveal to the doctor, who would scratch his scruffy beard and make surely a dozen observations just from the state of him alone, that he was really was quite sure he was going to be late or was going to arrive to an empty clinic, even as he was sitting there, perfectly in place at exactly the right time? would he then hesitate to mention even this, fearing it was somehow too absurd to mention how he had had a problem with arriving at exactly where he was supposed to arrive at, or would he then not find himself even more anxiously engaged at the thought that he ought to be mentioning this, and now wasn’t, making what was perhaps a curiosity of human folly into a detail, not only utterly indicting, but perhaps pivotal to his doctor’s evaluation of whichever critical stage of his formative pathology he found himself at? of course, this would have continued until he had mentioned that he already thought all of this through, but then he would also have to mention his having thought it all through here, and that he had never actually attended the meeting because he was too busy thinking about whether it was supposed to happen, or whether he had simply remembered wrong, which may have constituted an actual problem, if only for the fact that he would missed the appointment surely then and would have to go about the bother of rescheduling it then, knowing that, to even do so, and in so doing, find out the quality of his particular despair, he would have to scour his brain, yet again, in search of which appointment it may or may not have been and which doctor he was meant to have been relating the fact of how he had missed his appointment because he knew it was either going to happen or not. as it was still raining, however, it was in all actuality really owing to this that he found himself now perilously unable to move, even as it was possible that it was not raining, in fact, at all. this he doubted, not owing to the possibility he was hallucinating, which he had already considered, concluding that then this entire thing could have been a hallucination, not to mention this very train of thought, and resolving then that he might as well continue as if, even if it was a hallucination, it was a very problematic hallucination; one that did not seem up to scratch what a hallucination might be. indeed, his doubt regarding the rain hinged on whether or not the droplets he saw were not at any given point the last droplets of rain that were to fall, meaning that they it was in fact not raining, but had only just rained, while any other proceeding raindrops would have to be concluded as the beginning of a different rain, which while possibly contiguous to the previous rainfall, could not be confidently concluded as being so. he stood in this attitude of considering how it was all at once raining, not raining, about to rain, having just finished raining, and even had not ever rained, for it was either not part of the hallucination that it really was raining or it was a hallucination already, which, to establish, relied much more on the former point than on the self-evidence of the latter. of course, this led one down the possibility that at any given time there was some hallucinatory effect which one could doubt either as a hallucinatory effect itself or as a hallucination, never knowing the difference. though he had reasoned all of this according to the fact, however, that it was bad in some way or another that it was raining, and that therefore he could not attend his appointment, whereas it was perfectly possible the opposite was true, that the rain posed no impeident whatsoever to his condition. it was therefore impossible to say on the basis of whether it was or was not raining whether he should or should not go out, even as establishing whether it posed an impediment was as difficult as saying whether it was raining or not. this went so far in his mind that it led him to doubt whether he was in fact ill at all, and whether or not, in actual fact, however, this was not itself part of the illness, that he would not think himself ill, or that thinking himself not ill when he was in fact ill was not the exact illness itself, so much as it was uncertainty itself of saying which was which. was he ill because he doubted if he was or did he doubt because he was ill? it was possible then he had no appointments at all, and he mulled the terrifying possibility over that he had imagined all of his doctors and appointments in his own head. he also considered how it was possible that he had really gone to every doctor but had not really been ill, which, if it was an illness, was of such a kind that it seemed to be beyond the realm of any simple diagnosis. at this point, he came upon the truly fearful thought that whatever was wrong with him, if there was, was not something that could be diagnosed, that just as he had gone to all of his doctors without possibly being ill and led them to such and such conclusions, it was just possible that, if this was itself the illness, not the being ill as such, but the thinking one was ill when one was not, was precisely the kind of thing not even a doctor could succeed in recognising. this meant he was truly alone with his illness, and that even if this was part of the illness, to be alone, it was not something he could then mention to anyone for it was, after all, part of the illness that it should either be impossible to explain or explore, leading anyone sensible who would have heard him speak on it think that his real illness was in thinking that he had an illness which no one could actually diagnose because it was nothing but the illness of thinking you were ill. this would force him to diverge sharply from the world, concluding as he might that while some thought he was ill in thinking he was ill when he was not ill, he thought he was ill in thinking he was ill when he was not ill in a different way, for while they believed in the possibility of someone intervening into his case to point this out to him, he saw the more problematic fact of his illness being so involved in the illness itself of its being something which one merely thought of as ill when one was not ill that there was no longer any intervention possible. it was the very presumption of intervention, after all, which would, if anything, constitute itself another illness, namely the belief that one was not ill when one was ill, whereas his was that he knew he was ill, but that his illness was such he would think he was ill even while he was not. he would be alone precisely because he could point this out and would make people think he was the person who was ill who was not really ill, whereas he was the person who was not really ill who thought he was ill who was not really ill. if they did not choose to look into his heart at that point and see the difference between his being not ill in thinking he was ill when he was not ill, which meant that he was that ill person who was not really ill, but was ill in thinking they were ill, versus his thinking he was ill when he was not ill, which was such a person who might have either contented themselves with the lie or was delusional. but, they would have to have believed something was truly out of his control for them to think that he could twice over believe he was not ill and still think himself ill, and if they refused this, was it not because they feared to let a man exist who was truly not in control? who in the depths of his construction who could not have even been imagined as being so? with each additional illness, did he become more aware or less? was this great illness not really just the ache then of how far he might go in imagining he oversaw himself, and that ever further back lay the illness itself? those who suspended their reason did so because at some point they had to imagine he was himself, that he was not ill at some point—but that was the paradox; he was ill in the very thought that he was not, and one could not presume that this was the control when it was the very absence of all certainty as to who he was which finalised his illness beyond himself. it did not invite him with it, nor did he superseed it; he simply remained in his radical activity, utterly aware of his illness irreducibly, utterly ill in the fashion of that consciousness, which no illness anyone could name could ultimately contend with or explain. he wondered then which appointmemt could he have had for this, or had he already scheduled one? was there, indeed, an appointment just for this, and it was his illness, this inescapable illness, which had in fact succeeded in finally having itself observed and this was to be the appointment which would rectify all past despair? if this was the appointment, he reasoned, then all past appointments, the mirage or hallucination of them, of course were part of that last distraction which was to make this one appointment ultimately stand out among them. unless, this was the one appointment then he had forgotten, and the remaining vestiges of this illness had succeeded in making him forget it—or had it not yet happened? was it about to happen? but, then this was it, he reasoned. there could be no date or time for this appointment, because, of course, all appointments had already succeeded in blindly pointing to it, right up until the point of utter uselessness and now that he was staring at the trees and the rain and this was the appointment, wasn’t it, he thought, this was the appointment in which everything about this illness would be observed and there would be an end to all despair, he thought, because this appointment had to be happening now or not at all, and if not at all then it was because the appointment hadn’t yet happened, and if it had happened and he had missed it and it was the appointment he had missed while it was raining and not raining then he just had to find the doctor and call him up and find out which was the appointment he had missed which all the others had been pointing to and the appointment where his illness would finally be observed and an end to all past despair, he thought, and if the appointment had not yet happened then it was probably happening right now, because it was raining and not raining, and if that was a hallucination then it was either meant to be raining or not raining, and it was raining and not raining and so the appointment was happening now probably because if it had not yet happened already then it was the appointment he had been waiting for and had probably missed, but then he just had to call the doctor and find out which appointment it was he had missed and to which all his other appointments had been pointing to and the trees were swaying outside and were still and it was raining and not raining and then his illness would finally be observed and there would be an end to all despair.

If you look at the range of social media influencers who today create a life that seems, for all intents and purposes, to be meant to be viewed, not, however, by others in any explicitly given social community, but simply by the Other, in effect, of capital itself, which in this case means views on instagram and tiktok reels, then you may ask yourselves how such a system has succeeded in asserting itself. What, for instance, are its logistics? It would seem that an influencer bankrolls their venture with their savings, terrifyingly aware as they are that they are not about to start paying their bills by building a cabin in the woods and then videotaping it, but who nonetheless do so in the hope that they might create what can only be called more debt on which basis they might find themselves integrated into the system of existing speculative capital or debt. And what is this pre-existing system? Mainly, it is the giant set of expectation with respect to market capitalisation and/or company performance, whether of the digital platforms which host these influencers themselves, or variously associated company brands, into which a venture influencer, so to speak, treads, not on the basis that they are doing anything socially or even ultimately logistically significant, but because they have succeeded, for one reason or another, in drawing viewership, that assists in the bolstering of the value of the speculative debt itself which underwrites the entire ‘economy’, though I regret to call it that, of social influencing and content curation. In short, what it really is, is an opportunity for viewership to, in affirming the value expectation placed upon some digital platform, provide some coherence to the debt-relationship which capital markets seek to set up. Capital markets are things like stock markets. It is obvious, for instance, that once you subtract the viewership numbers, there is nothing socially sustainable in the life under footage. Worse yet, the system it enhances has a generally paralysing effect on our society as a whole. In the usual course of things, society agrees to create debt. This debt is money. Our expectation is that that money will come back to us in some way, shape, or form: it will balance itself out by going out into the economy and generally helping, or otherwise sustaining, the relative value of money itself. The things we create with that money are not so much things which assist to naively create more money, though they may, in the long run, raise and improve the relative value of money through improving logistics, sustainability, shoring up industries, etc. What happens, however, when I have a market that creates, not new and efficient ways of doing things, but, instead, creates expected value in parallel to the creation of money/debt elsewhere in the economy, e.g. in public or national banks? We may reply: but, as a company’s market capitalisation rises it reflects a rise in real value in the economy. What is this so-called real value? Either it assists the relative value of money or not. You cannot create an expectation of value, which is based upon market willingness ultimately to trade at a certain price, and, independent of the collective creation of debt, which underwrites all money in an economy, effectively demand the enumeration of some debt-value because a single market has determined there to be an expected value, which must now be denominated. Indeed, while we may exercise the freedom to create value, we do so from within the debt that has been created. What we improve, if we have the luck to do so, is the value of money itself and, by extension, the sustainability of our common debt system. If we have a renegade market, however, that effectively creates what can only actually be called pseudo-debt, because it is not ‘yet’ debt denominated in our monetary system, even as actual money is being used to trade at a certain price, then it creates the conditions by which society actually owes something to capital markets, and by extension those who operate within them. To put this plainly: the moment a financial asset is valued from within a capital market at a certain price, it implicates society in an obligation to value it at that amount. We can naively find the money in order to confirm its value, but this is existing money that has now been commandeered for the sake of denominating something that does not, or better yet should not, exist in the obligatory form that it does. This is an inflation trap. It destroys the value of money when such a market exists with a wide enough pull on society, as it does today, that society actually goes there to create debt, or value, rather than either to the common debt system or from within it through social processes that raise the relative value of money. Once again, the standard course of things should involve companies seeking to enumerate themselves in capital markets on the basis that they may raise money, which involves sequestering a part of the money that exists in society in exchange for ownership of a company whose partial owners may then be entitled to some amount of the debt-obligations a given company manages to create. This market should be a very specific form of valuation, highly dependent upon something like real, and not just expected, value. Naturally, the system operationalises the opposite impulse: now that you can enumerate ‘new’ debt on the basis of a rise in stock price, you can do so without necessarily having done much of anything in the economy in which you are meant to create sustainably with the debt you have been offered. Venture influencers participate in this very system of expectation. What appears like a secondary element, in this case, viewership, is, in fact, regulative. More importantly, the social task involved in actually building a cabin in the woods is severely subverted by the other of this viewership as more genuine, and indeed practical, forms of social engagement are neglected out of disinterest. Who would seriously go and build a cabin in the woods who did not also do so with others or within the structure of a commune, etc.? There are endless social contracts that are nullified in effect by the dependence that one can have upon what we may generally term digital capitalisation. This ‘capital’, of course, goes nowhere, and certainly does not for one moment address the living situation of the cabin-makers, except insofar as they, as a general phenomenon, leverage the common debt of society to continuously re-enumerate their efforts in some form of practical value. How does this work? Again, even in our severely decoupled financial system, we continue to play servant to capital markets who seem to define for us our entire notion of economic value. Anyone who succeeds in joining themselves to that system of valuation may create for themselves some enumerable form of pseudo-debt which they must then only wait to have finally enumerated. This enumeration, of course, generally takes the form of a financial crisis, because, after a certain point, society cannot be on the hook for so much value, i.e. debt/money, not least when it is not ‘capitalisation’ or debt that in any sense goes into society in its form so as to affirm the processes of the economy. Instead, society is indentured into increasing forms of monetary or debt bondage, so that we can continue to maintain a system of value that we feel at least contents us with the expectation of producing ‘so much value’. The livid contradiction is to be found, as ever, in the eventual moment in which this ‘expected’ value must touch the ground, so to speak, and find its feet in a society that must politically consent to the creation of that value out of thin air. All of the market capitalisation in the world should not overwhelm the underlying principle of debt sovereignty, which must be respected for our societies to avoid severe debt-bondage. Institutional frameworks, which earlier had been considered essential to our notion of human production and progress, are nixed by a system of valuation that is disengaged from viewing its role in the creation and management of sustainable debt. In other words, it is disengaged from the social responsibility towards sustainable social obligations. Debt, in this case, is less the generalised, borrowed cost of doing something. On the contrary, debt is the proactive and primary input whose patrinomic creation we consider to be the founding gesture of collective society. Beyond that, we must confront in what respect we are expecting enormous amounts of money to just exist apolitically. There is a cost to money over and above the literally, interest-rate cost of money; it is a political cost. When we gain ‘money’ from digital platforms, live streaming, say, a job that involves us servicing people who pay us and whatever they have ordered with money that also has to have had some point of entry into society, we cannot for one moment think that that money just exists without the event of collective social intervention. Moreover, if the money we gain is the result of some payout on a regime of renegade capitalisation, meaning that it is paid to us on the basis of expected value, not ours, but of the platform which underwrites our activity, there is nothing more harmful to sustainable debt obligations than this. It liquidates any actual social effort and then expects, however, to be remunerated. Its remuneration is drawn from a larger system of value, which, as ever, is not remunerated in view of some real, collectively-consented debt, but through the financialised debt-enumeration typical of the macroeconomic stimulus we operate in a financial crisis. In other words, the money that exists to pay the streamer, or, indeed, to cover the cost of the service he performs, is not in a system of collective debt, but exists within a capitalisation phenomenon (that is nonetheless covered by society): a system of expected value underwrites their effort, but uses value/debt/money that society itself has not actually consented to create in order to repay them. If people want to know the one thing most aggressively undercutting their future in any sense, it is the paradigm in which social effort no longer exists, but a kind of capital surveillance does, one which illegitimately offers value it first receives from a society that has been placed under the duress of capital markets to give this value—or else risk the collapse of the global economy. In his well-known films, Michael Haneke exhibits the perversion latent in what was then modern, consumer surveillance technology: hand-held cameras, video tapes, etc. In the 1990s and early 2000s, when many of his films were shot, these technologies had become ubiquitous, but they had also been, in a sense, preceded by a phenomenon of virtual surveillance already endemic to the West at that point. While Haneke was keen to expose cultural hypocrisy, such as, for instance, in France, largely by exposing it to the repressed trauma of its past colonial history, it was also clear that the sense of feeling surveilled was nothing less than a complement to the daring of a newly and wholly financialised society that had coupled society to mass global markets. The end-effect of feeling watched was really the echo of a process of taking all that had had social meaning and worth and undermining it by linking it to its success in generating (or not generating) expected value in capital markets. Suddenly, it was as if nothing I did was of any significance, and yet I did not feel as if I was entirely alone: watched, because my actions were now the subject of a capitalisation that did not expect or require any notion of social obligation, seemingly untying me from the effort of having to exist, letting me go on my way as a consumer without the burden of social links, but which did expect nonetheless to include me in its project of turning everything into a virtual entity in and of capital. And it did this because it could offer to ‘capitalise’ upon every human act, independent of its content, so long as it was in some sense surveilled or recognised. This recognition worked, however, only insofar as, again, I stayed within the financialised platform that denominated my act, while society as whole continued to foot the bill of the use of so much debt to essentially do nothing but watch itself in perverse anticipation and attention. The surplus horror that emerges in Haneke’s films, whether in its more conceptual or historical varieties, not least in the most conceptual of acts, such as in the suicide in Caché, is the troubling output of a perverse society, which cannot help but produce acts of outrage, created as they are by people who are not trying to record themselves doing horrible things so much as it is the ‘neutral’ recording (or surveillance) itself which weirdly finalises the horror itself. It is the final twist which actually makes the horrifying act possible. In this respect, the martyrs of his films are those who do outright antagonist things in order to testify to some surplus violence that rests within the system of surveillance, which cannot otherwise naively come out. It is already everywhere: the ‘watching’ itself is the seemingly neutral, but otherwise absolutely perverse, act of radical intervention which subverts all naive human action. This is why the anti-heroes of his films, like Georges of Caché, who is blackmailed by one of those whom I have called the martyrs, are in a sense right to feel wronged, not just by the threat of some seemingly harmless surveillance, but by the deeper understanding that there is a larger, ongoing, and greatly harmful regime of surveillance. After all, they cannot act not innocently. Everything they do once they are surveilled is suddenly touched by the fear of surveillance and so undermined of all of its neutral content. Even if they do nothing differently, the perversion of being watched adds a surplus dimension that is ultimately expressed through a seemingly disconnected, vengeful, and arbitrary act of violence, which is of course not arbitrary. As another detour, though through the same period, La Double Vie de Véronique, centres on the existence of two women who are doppelgangers of each other, one who lives in Paris, the other in Poland. While it is ostensibly an analysis of the arbitrary divide of East/West under the auspices of the variously illegitimate systems which rule them and strange Zufall of human history, it is really an analysis of the pure phenomenon of a doubling itself which strangely represents the surplus existence of a human being under the effects of radical capitalisation. Lacking all naive or substantial content, the kind of which is generally mediated by human institutions and instructs our politics, the main character Véronique is really split into, or by, some surplus of herself, which allows her to see in what respect she is duplicated with no substantial differences under the effects of this surveillance. Far from adding anything to her life, it gives a pure and arbitrary point on the basis of which she understands herself as different, but without any difference, solidifying the vapid social imaginary of financialisation: we are all different in these non-negotiable, but nonetheless meaningless ways. The strange insight of her double is, of course, that under this surveillance or otherisation we are duplicated, but without any additional effect: we are replicated in a system of value that cannot ultimately guarantee our existence but through the surplus effect of watching us. The perversion of this is that our society exists on the basis of a promise of some abstract entity to ‘view us’, which it does, with all the horrific undertones therein implied, but furthermore as a means to sustain the value of our society itself. It is not so incestuous as we watch ourselves, so much as that act of watching is the only substantial addition which we technically add to our lives. No wonder then we seem as if we are condemned to a search for meaning that must nevertheless stupidly reproduce everything exactly as it is. We expect so much from ourselves, thinking our gestures are natural, when, in reality, we have had this stripped from us, and with it our lives dehumanised, by the guilt-inducing sense of being watched. This sense of guilt pervades, and it is the product of a system of valuation which can only have us ‘do things’ so long as there is some means of watching it. In our contemporary setting, we lack all interest in forms of social engagement that might actually lead us towards building a cabin in the woods together. We cannot imagine doing so on the basis of anything other than the perverse category of a pure doing that must nevertheless be watched to occur meaningfully. This is a horrifying view of the social. We must do things in an absolutely exposed way, even as the one thing we are meant to have to help us do this, which is some sense of a society, which has not predicted our efforts, but awaits them, is now gone. Again, Véronique is not doubled out of some trans-historical juncture: she exists in this way, because in an act of radical apathy, she has been doubled as an awkward slip of the tongue: she does not exist twice, but once in two different ways. These ways collaborate to awkwardly expose to her in what respect it is only as a pure phenomenon of being something observable that she actually exists socially, and so the only real way to actualise this is to have her really exist somehow in these multiplied ways. In one sense, she is a person, but in another she is the surplus itself of someone who has been seen and then is accidentally doubled, through a perfidious accounting error, so as to exist again in the mode of that which she already was (for or before capital). Most people just fade into obscurity. They do not notice, because they don’t ask the question: but, what happens when I get capitalised? What happens when I become an other in an operation of value which has me do what I do so it can be recorded? We have lost the sense that this is horrifying. The meaninglessness inherent to it is one thing, but, above all the destruction that it actually implies with respect to all other modes of living and guarantee is another, not least that all it really does leave us is with the bitter taste of the neutral in our mouths. The horror of it is the last thing we have, and it only ever appears awry through some shift in perspective which allows us to see that us doing all of these things as if they don’t matter, that is, the shear feat itself of meaninglessness, is the really the terrifying fact itself to be confronted, is really the neutralisation that has somehow snuck its way in and now appears, without wishing to, through the monstrous symptom of debt.

If there is a salient question to drive our generation’s, indeed our present humanity’s, internationalist workers union, it is surely whether or not there is any necessity to even work anymore. This may sound like a twisted view of the world, one driven by an ignorance of what is produced by the effort of others and only freely available because of a society, itself rendered secure and stable, that trusts its own citizens to contribute. Is this really the formula of today’s economic system, however? After 2008, can we even call it a system? Is our reality not one now of working simply because there is a significant amount of labour still demanded largely for the sake of capital, which is fed by massive amounts of debt our society must continue to underwrite? Work, if you can. That is, if you can call it effort. We worry about the word growth, about the word productivity, fearful of the fact that standards have undone our earth. They haven’t. It is productivity without impact which has, and growth without substance. In a similar vein, our labour is largely what it is because it is defined as an abstract input, necessary for the existence of a now largely permanent debt society which is required to exist as some fiction upon which it can be bet and, in short, expended. Where does any work come in here? Do we have an agriculture sector? Do we produce quality textiles or manufacture automobiles? What industry is not presently in the business of becoming, as its end goal, a virtual hedge fund? Marx’s prediction was not grounded upon a simplistic rejection of capitalism. It was, first and foremost, an analysis about the nature of human effort and its abstractions. He oriented his political theory around the belief that something in nature had come undone with the capitalist mode of production. It was not something he believed you could back, either. What he saw, and in a sense, foresaw, not unlike many capitalist industrialists, French socialists, Russian anarchists, etc., of his time, was that whatever human effort represented in this system was no longer a some necessary or unavoidable variable. This was the simple analysis he proposed: if human labour has become, under capitalism, a commodity like any other than, being so unlike the others, it is symptomatic of the fundamental way in which capitalist must work. Marxists have largely understood this negatively. But, Marx himself, while critical, not just of capitalism, but of the entire discipline, in fact, of political economy, which he called a bourgeois science, and deconstructed much in the same vein that Kant had critiqued reason in his famous Critiques, did not necessarily view this in a negative light. His point, if anything, was that the symptomatic nature of labour as a commodity means that something about labour has become unnecessary. It is no longer really, to put in slightly overbearing Marxian terms, the fetish of human production. That role has been replaced by capital. Human beings do not idolise their labour anymore. At least, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, when these predictions were first made and understood, if not from the end of the 18th century, when these claims were first formulated (if not from the early 16th century, when the subject of these claims first began), there has been an understanding that something about human labour, indeed the very abstraction that is labour, has undergone a serious revision. What many do not understand is that the agitation of all post-1848 leftists movements is not owed to some sudden sense of entitlement regarding what society produces and the idealised status of the human being within it. It is principally actually the result of the fact that their work had, in fact, by every economic standard, become irrelevant. It was no longer, actually, necessary. Far from it being the ruthless conditions of factories in industrialising nations that was the foregoing blight, it was really the unnecessity of the work that proved so violent. Indeed, this was the result itself of the capitalist system, not necessarily its overt antagonism. The question, of course, that was then posed by Marx and Engels was why this labour nevertheless had a kind of status, if not as a fetish exactly of human effort, than as one part in the formula of the surplus value of the production and reproduction of capital? Was it possible to fully get rid of it? Or was the danger that it was still actually necessary to have human beings now serve as commodities, having been degraded? Furthermore, was the entire formula here of surplus production really sustainable? Had it produced an unncessity which it nevertheless, paradoxically, had violent need of? These two basic questions formed the basis of the workers’ movements of all proceeding generations: why it is necessary to labour when production (of capital) is reducible to abstract inputs that do not require human effort in the traditional sense and why, if this is the case, labour remains, for which there is no suitable political address to the fact that, until capitalism achieves what it takes as its principle, people are forced to labour, not as humans, but as commodities? In Marx’s sense, alienation is a fundamental condition of human labour. It is only recouped in social systems which recognise this alienation and in a sense have occassion to express and even acknoweldge it elsewhere. It has social status. Human labour in capitalism does not. It is not a form of effort that a surplus, or debt, system like capitalism does not have any inclination to accept as, again, the fetish of human production. But, this was not the problem. The problem was, for Marx, actually how to advance through and out of capitalism. He would never have produced so naive a prophecy as he did had he not believed that this principle of capitalism was actually a necessary step out of human alienation writ large and the beginning of an era of workless production. Perhaps he was more than naive in this respect. The other problem, again, was how to mobilise the political will to see that capitalism, in much the same way as it did for labour, also produced an effectively exterior class of capital owners who could, if they wanted to, exercise extraordinary rights on those whom they had as inputs. Could society have chosen other ways to value and distribute this ownership? Once again, the socialists thought so. They also thought that the human being, even as, as a legal entity, it was born with capitalism, had been prepared to become something therefore for itself and so it no longer required the mirror, as it were, of human labour. What of effort? Like work, it had lost its status in human production. Does that mean that human beings under capitalism were not meant to do anything? It does mean that to be faithful to capitalism itself one had to face the stunning contradictions it would produce if it was not fully taken to its end. Labour, like any ‘capital’ input, could no longer be done by humans. That contradiction proved to be too severe. It was, to repeat, the unnecessity of work that capitalism itself had birthed vis-a-vis what happened to the categry of abstract human effort, i.e. labour, that removed the fundamentally social element that made it possible for the human to give their effort legibly. If the economy was to produce capital, this had to become the engine of how human effort would be either abstracted in a new way, not as labour, or, to borrow a Hegelianism, fully sublated. Is it really possible for a society to just manage capital? Not without producing a new social form of the human being. Marx had a vision that alienation itself would be removed from the picture, meaning that any abstraction of human effort would cease to exist. What would become of the human being? Hard to say. Perhaps, it would become like one of the pupils in Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. Maybe this is itself what is meant by a new, more implicit form of abstract human effort, so that there is no actual disequation. In any case, labour in capitalism was never really meant to be human effort. It couldn’t be, at least. We may pretend nowadays that labour serves as a variable, but how many arrangements actually manage labour in the 19th-century sense? Capital exists, but so do states and extensive labour arrangements that attempt, at least, to remunerate the labourer. These go some way to removing the stench, as it were, of the thorough alienation of human labour, but they cannot ever remove it. At the same time, the production of capital itself, in having underscored no more fundamental social form, in having produced no Glass-Bead-Game-esque rubric of human motivation and engagement beyond its shameless, abstract production, has failed in its own radical project of denaturing the human being. It has not given any meaning to itself as a new fetish. It is a pure dream of human production that can only, at present, exist without them. As caretakers in capital, we have no abstract role in it. We do not see ourselves in it. We are not included in it. The appointed mirror of our own society does not reflect us, and yet there is no naive return to the land. Heartless as it may sound, it is Marx himself who insists that you cannot just go back to Feudal (or even Neolithic) ‘agricultural metaphysics’. We must ask the very naive question of where we might actually fit in into its abstract calculation. Once again, the contradiction is we are not included, not even abstractedly, in the input of labour. Because human effort of that kind was made irrelevant. Ever since, particularly in the post-war period, we have satisfied ourselves by building a class of professionals perhaps equal to a new notion of human effort within capitalism, but it is still not acknowlegded by capital. And the harrowing truth is it might not ever be. This is now the ground zero point: the underbelly of capitalism is really another, now far more symptomatic, input. It is, of course, debt. In the surplus system that is capital, debt comes first. Meaning: there is (“always”) already debt in capitalism. To an extent, this is a very tough problem to solve. It requires not just a future, but also a present in which money- (i.e. debt-)creation makes sense. What we have today is really a permanent debt society. It is a form of socially antagonistic bondage. As we have not dealt with who or what exaclty is going to be providing the meaning to this necessary debt, and by extension or implication for capital itself, the result is that we must produce debt, as we must (still) produce labour, in an extremely vicious and unsustainable way. Debt, like labour, should be an input whose social status is derived from capital. The moment it is exported off to the human being, like the ox with the seemingly unbreakable back, we are dealing with a division in our society which relies upon an extreme surplus (of surplus). This is the surplus of all the additional effort that someone might perform or produce in order to maintain a system, which, at the same time, cannot abstractedly account, and therefore remunerate, this effort without collapsing. This is the perversion of our permanent debt bondage. Indeed, the bondage created is the indivisible remainder of some deeply undealt with consequences. Our legal systems presently prop up the fact that we owe this effort to the instruments, producers, and managers of capital, despite the fact that that effort cannot remunerated. To remunerate it would require the absent social form of capital, without which capital must act therefore without. If we attempt to disrupt capital, our entire economic system collapses. Even Marx knew this: if you fail to understand the transition this system represents, and as you have no right of pre-capitalist return, you will create a special hell, either of permanent debt bondage or, in some cases, of socialist terror. The notion that, in having this debt, we can justly ‘repay’ or rebalance it by producing and controlling the money that is created from it is not necessarily false. It requires, however, that we overcome the twin symptoms of debt and labour. They are not in themsleves bad, merely that their social forms are unequal to what must be done with them in practice. In order to address capital, we must address them. Perhaps we may find that permanent debt societies are unavoidable. But, not necessarily. Capitalism is the idea, really, of necessary debt, but such large and necessary debt-loads have existed for thousands of years. What has not is that debt is the social form of society, or of human production. This is less tenable. What it would require is a seriously robust understanding and use of debt. Capital markets, as they exist, give us an extremely reduced version of what debt is. All they really protect is the right to raise debt, or in another sense, make use of, society’s debt. But, we do not talk about capital markets as society’s collective debt. If the 2008 aftershock has taught us anything, it is that society, in manually having to give debt to society’s capital owners and producers, is therefore evidence of the social authority and meaning embedded in the debt that makes capitalism fundamentally possible, but also social. Recall that among the contradictions Marx said we had to deal with was the notion of surplus value that didn’t go the worker, because capitalism, in abstraction, did not entitle him to it. Marx’s point though was you do not solve this by giving some of that to the worker, which is actually just another contradiction. Instead, what must happen is the entirey of humanity must become involved direclty in the production, and not in the labour of, capital. This was the meaning of socialism. Does this answer the question of necessary debt? Not really. In socialising something, you do not necessarily address the governmental and political factors vital to the ongoing creation of debt. What occurs is that society’s projects become, to an extent, part of what humanity produces, but this requires the equation of society’s project with capital. Capital does not go away in socialism. It is only that debt is (imagined to be) socialised. This can only occur, though, with a serious debt and monetary system that also views the equation of debt creation with human production, which is the more serious formula. If, for instance, we do not view ourselves as having debt first, then we underestimate what actually our political unions really consist in. We underestimate what society actually is, and what it does. It is a giant amount of debt from which we pull from; and the pre-given value, so to speak, of that debt is a political question decided upon by our representative systems who make the formative decision as to how much money should exist at any given moment. Our right of access to that debt is balanced out by the fact that we also create with debt. Human production has its social value in debt. This is why whoever controls debt and its creation controls society. More importantly, we speak then, not only of gross debt bondage, which is debt that relies upon extra-social, and therefore exploitative, forms of debt-creation, but also of the fact that all capital is debt, and so if our social system of debt-creation fails we become subject to the viccistitudes of exactly what Marx outlined. Contradictions without end. The extra-social parameters of debt-bondage have created the toxic form of work as we understand it nowadays. Labour, in the old sense, remains pivotal, but it is not actually the contradiction to which we are most vulnerable. Huge national debts have created toxified markets, which do not produce even their own forms of remunerable or monetary debt. At some level, they are not even capitalist. Furthermore, they have created inflationary crises that only deepen societies into extreme forms of multi-generational debt bondage, a reality, not only created by 2008, but which 2008 itself has created as an effectively new system of toxic debt which makes it so that—and this is a political failure entirely—states must give more debt, effectively illicitly, in order to feed forms of debt management, i.e. capital, that are not within any social jurisdiction. This is the weaponisation of debt-creation for the enrichment of the few over the many. Debt can exist, not only sustainably, but socially. It must be owned and operated equally. The instruments of its creation must be democratic. Mark this well, the 2008 reality in which we live has created a very specific political arrangement, not an economic one, in which we must now work in order pay off what cannot and should not be paid off by us. It is an impossible debt levelled against society, and it increasingly demands that humanity work in an entirely newly exhausting way, facing outrageous prices, only ever temporarily stabilised by the very same hands of the central bankers who massacre money in the name of enforced political arrangements. Our exhaustion is new. It is the distinct result of this kind of work which can and never will see itself remunerated. This is because the debt amounts are larger than can ever be paid back. Not so long as this social and political arrangement remains. Instead, societies will pull themselves apart with false dilemmas as political leaders point fingers as to who is responsible for this towering debt. Worse yet, the debt will only increase as it becomes necessary for a society that has gone realistically generations without sustainable and social debt and monetary practices. This lack of investment makes society even more unready for the productive demands which are placed upon it and therefore forces an even greater number of new workers to engage in unremunerated, not even labour, but just effort. Labour is a specific input. This isn’t labour. It is debt-work. It has no commodity status. It has no market. Furthermore, as our political systems are frustrated, largely by the shear lack of acknowledgement that should be given to even the most basic inputs of our society, such as debt-creation, they produce a mass of overworked people who cannot even speak the word reform because they have actually conflated a political problem with an economic one. They imagine that they work with respect to a so-called capitalist framework that is simply unfair or ignorant of the human being. It isn’t. There is a political arrangement at work here. It is vampiric in how it wrests from us our social blood. There is nothing economically productive about this work. It is only meant to ensure the continued minatauric sacrifices to the debt-control of a parallel group of societal organisers who have decided to radically misuse this debt for a program of enrichment that will ultimately never be able to actually be recognised by society except by force. The will of inequality will not be one defined by income disparity, but by the shear enforcement of certain powers to maintain this debt-control, in some respects, as it will be argued, for the sake of humanity. It will, to the point, never have its wealth socially validated, because it will have disfigured humanity in order to get it, and so will therefore require even more severe forms of political management in order to maintain its unfettered access to it.

Now that Trump has won, perhaps a post-mortem is well-overdue. It has been well-said, or ought to have been well-said, that in having reached, if not this exact point, but all previous points actually leading up to it, we had lost. I don’t consider this a grieving day for the world. Not when one puts into perspective that when Kamala was pitted against Trump, avowed liberals, and certainly avowed leftists, should have wept then. More importantly, one might even say that by the time one came upon the American electoral system, leftists should have wept. If even old-guard federalists and tea-partyists are disavowing at least some part of American political heritage, not by voting for Trump, so much as questioning the condition and at time even the principles of the American system in promoting the rhetoric that they do, why does the left remain convinced that maintaining its maturity in respecting the system will seem like an appropriate political compromise equal to their demands? Is its strategy not weirdly conservative, in that it wishes to respect established political boundaries so as to “have the chance” to voice its so-called radical priorities? Meanwhile, the right has taken the opposite approach: to woefully reject all boundaries so as to maintain a vicious status quo. When Lenin made his infamous defence of compromise, his viewpoint was that one could compromise so long as one’s goals were minimally established. This resulted in a complex pantomime of shifting positions, whose chimerical quality, of course, it could be argued led to the Stalinist terror. How were we ever to say when such-and-such a compromise was respectful of our goal? But, then what was the precise goal of the Russian revolution? There is no question that by the time its reins were placed into the hands of Stalin, the failure of its underlying principles, and to an extent even of Marx’s own predictions, were reacted to in the name of violent compromise. But, it was still Lenin who had given the only formula really worth salvaging in the post-1917 aftermath, that one was to, in a sense, follow the language of compromise so as to find out what one’s goal was. This is the opposite of what the Left does today. Instead, it compromises immediately its goal, or at least postpones it indefinitely, largely out of avoidance, but maintains a strict fidelity to the operation and procedure with which it imagines its goal will ultimately be established. It does not wish to question any part of the electoral or representative system, because this is really the only thing it actually supports and believes in. Most of the political ideals and goals of Leftists politics are considered quite abstract even to most Leftists, partly because they cannot imagine their application. They underestimate the following paradox, however: you can have no other goal in your system, which is not at the same time the method of how it is implemented. This is why Lenin knew that one had to ‘follow the compromises’ so as to fully learn one’s own position, rather than viewing something like strategic voting and asserting that one knows one’s goal and that this is merely a temporary delay. For Lenin, compromise was never delay—on the contrary, it was an advancement. If there is someone who has realised this, I regret to say, it is Trump. He is deeply aware of the status of compromise, a fact he has demonstrated in flouting many of the unwritten rules of American politics. Perhaps more importantly, though, he has also shown that, in doing so, one can more materially advance one’s goals. This has meant that, in understanding really what he can question about the system, i.e. compromise, he has been able to move through the system far more effectively than someone who “really believes” in it. Indeed, if there is something Trump has uniquely co-opted from the Left, it is this mixture of ironic distance and opportunism, something which has disfigured the Left, in part because it has remained its only option, into a political position that seems to care only about protecting the system from its apparent manipulation, even as it is this very manipulation which has proven itself to be so politically appealing. Why is it that Leftists concern themselves now only with an arch-program of preservation? Is it not partly owing to the discomfort of the intersection of Leftist, or indeed anti-establishment politics generally, politics with Trumpism? Is it not perhaps then the achievement of Kamalites to have demonised the only serious form of politics capable of actually initiating serious, system-wide reform, the only one, again, which is willing to mobilise compromise in both senses of the word? What remains to be said but that Kamala offers very much the view that the system is working, if only it would stop breaking down. Does she not stand-in for the option that you can believe in a functioning system, just so long as you don’t vote for Trump? No leftist under Kamala is going to come to the conclusion that the system is rigged, because their entire position takes its enjoyment from the fact that with Kamala you at least get the fantasy that it could work. Trump is just the interruption that has become regulative. So, in many ways, has Kamala, however. The emergency setting tactics of this and other election cycles represent the ultimate purgative for leftist politics. Kamalites devastate the notion of a serious leftist alternative, not simply in policy, but more in strategy, as has been argued. Meanwhile, Trump offers a serious strategy, only in defence of what remains a statist’s view of serious reform. But, we must recognise that the strategy of ‘questioning the ballot’ is an eminently leftist tactic. Only those who support, in a very conservative fashion, the fantasy that the system of election works, but for Trump, are willing to question Trump’s tactic as someone the ultimate political evil. This translates to a critique of leftism, and indeed any systematic critique. The question is whether one can have Trump without his denialism. To some extent both yes and no. So long as Trump continues to make politics ‘enjoyable’ for his supporters again, he will represent the side of the false dilemma which is willing to question everything while doing nothing about it. Kamala, by contrast, can hardly convince anyone except insofar as Trump is squarely the enemy. Not the system which necessitated him, just him. This is a vicious political gambit, excluding as it does even the mention of any serious analysis into the nature of his popularity. All those who support him are ridiculed for their frustration, largely because no one on the left at the moment can process how it is possible that, if they aren’t critiquing Trump, they are critiquing anything at all. There are two forms of extreme denial at work here. One rejects the system, while defending some pre-existing social arrangement which has worked and which we have lost. The other defends the system, while rejecting that there is anything wrong with it. They’re both worse. The reality is that the system has morphed into something, which, in the dance of false dilemmas, works with these interruptions. It manages to lurch forward, as leftist politics is crushed on the one hand through pseudo-strategy and all remaining populist frustration is given terrific body in the form of a political opportunist who will not ultimately service its needs—just mention them. Let us be very precise here: if given the demands of Trump voters, Kamala would succeed no better than he does at addressing them. She would certainly be missing the fantasy of a bygone America which makes that frustration so legible, while her own program, no matter how concrete, would fail utterly because it is only as good as the frustration it can assist to express. Without fundamental reform and material changes, much like the post-2008 aftershock which endures in endless and vapid monetary policy through debt-bondage, the political system will continue to float itself through stimulus packages that may look like they are greasing the wheels of political engagement, but which are really artificially synthesises it. Our biggest failure is not recognising that a Leftist Trump is precisely what we need. We need his sense of strategy, of distance with the dishonesty of the system while nurturing a sense of our own theatricality, of compromise so that we can actually question the system we nevertheless want to work opportunistically within. Mark one thing, all that has been demonised in this race is the precise leftist strategy, which Trump, in masquerading, disfigures, and which Kamala persuades, like a pied piper, the rats of the left to spurn, without which there cannot be any hope of serious, system-wide reform. One must add a leftist twist to “rigged elections”, avoiding the nefarious tropes of the deep state in favour of the point that there is rigging going on, not Trump, who has become the bogeyman meant to scapegoat away all genuine perpetrators of systematic manipulation, and it is contained in the consistent frustration of the left as it is promoted and ensured by the double-act of the false dilemma itself. Is it not better to say that we need a leftist version of the deep state? At present, all it serves to do is provide a shadowy edifice behind which we may imagine some radically enjoyable program of world domination and control. This must be rejected in favour of the far more horrifying reality that there is no control room for the disaster of the contemporary state. It has itself become zombified, largely by market-addicted societies, and, if anything, its worst product is the death march of the election cycle dilemma and the theatre of choice which it now puppeteers. After all, the fact is that Trump’s greatest achievement is to succeed even when he loses. The left, in its fixation on the fantasy of some notion of business as usual (sans Trump), eviscerates therefore the possibility of some deeper existence to both its strategy and identity. One must insist that the left should become as desperately opportunist as Trump is to advance its own program. Our only virtue cannot be honesty, because all we do there is sacrifice our ability to compromise. In ‘being ourselves’, we render quite vapid the possibility of discovering the very means we need to succeed. Most importantly of all, we must appeal to the Trump voter by replacing his or her sense of fidelity to the non-solutions Trump ultimately provides. We must affirm the 2008 aftershock paradigm as fundamental to the cultural and societal decay that has made false dilemmas both necessary and unavoidable. Our solutions must not work in a world in which Trump does not exist. He exists because we have forgotten something about the scale of the system’s rupture. Understanding what he does well is the only way we can ever possibly get a handle on what eludes us. We cannot, after all, say that the system does not work with him in it, when, if anything, the frequency of this dilemma has spawned an entirely new system of symptomatic regulation, one which most leftists and rightists deny really exists. The fact is that, both Kamala and Trump are wrong: the system is working fine. It just isn’t the one you think it is.

It would seem that the information overload of events in Israel and Palestine (now Lebanon, etc.) amounts really to a form of denial special to our age. The idea seems to be that if we can engender or promote some reversibility to the actions of state terrorists, which is to refer to the West as much as anywhere else, we can continue to regulate our moral actions as if we can do nothing more than what we are already doing. Indeed, the crux of this belief is how we extend it to past ages, where we imagine that it was only a lack of moral consciousness which seemed to have allowed past, in some cases, imperial, terrors to take place. The reality is that our awareness seems to punish us, not owing to our feeling guilty before events which, however rightly, seem to demand our absolution, but because the impotent form of our awareness reflects for us an accidental truth: there is nothing we can do. Would it not be more admirable to admit this? I mean, to really admit it as a political fact? Contemporary political philosophy seems to come with the vision that there is so much we can do, and that therefore, again, we must be ashamed for not doing anything. This is the first delusion. It also seems to think that if a sizable camp of naysayers emerged there would be no argument against the forces of democracy. This is the second delusion. There is very possibly nothing we can do, not for lack of trying, but because there is a precise design to how the events are happening. Passivity is not only weaponised, it is assumed, and it is pathological in the extreme to imagine that there is any simple escape from a passivity which is not reflected in any conscious choice you make, but which is, in fact, a radically unconscious fact of the present geopolitical system’s self-regulation. The third delusion, though this one extends far beyond political philosophy, is that becoming conscious of something gives you control over it. The violent forces at work in these conflicts are not betting on passivity, they have actively created it. Even worse, they are themselves the product of it. If our moral power rests in our capacity, realistically speaking, to have been able to have changed past conflicts then all we shall achieve the equivalent in our moral politics of what European lawmakers are hell-bent on doing in the domain of their green transition: moral-washing. Not a very attractive word. It involves our taking from a seemingly unlimited supply of what are really moral failures and acting as if we understand the emancipatory politics that would have been necessary to have solved them. All of our moral force is to be found then in a rather constrained, slightly self-involved, if no less desperate, view of history, one in which our image is reflected to us comparatively cleaner in face of the smut of our morally disastrous and dirty ancestors. We spurn them nevertheless at the same time as we fleece their unlived lives for the tenaciously imaginary fibre of our own ethical diet. Meanwhile, we continue to do nothing ourselves in our own time. But, let us now be very precise: we would be far better served by the actions, or lack thereof, of our ancestors if we could empathise with the same way in which they were themselves rendered impotent by forces which seemed designed, as equally and cruelly as our own, to disenchant and disembowel them politically and morally. Our refusal of what we might term their moral suffering (which is the quality in which they lived within a moral universe in which they could not fully act) is, of course, to refuse our own, not to mention the true emancipatory politics that goes with it.< Looking more closely at our own false dilemmas of moral delusion, we see ourselves split into or between two camps. On the one hand, we have those who deny responsibility for the horrors ‘done in their name’, lead by a just conviction, underpinned by false premises, that they have nothing to do with it. This would, after all, be better amended to: we can do nothing about it, hence the choice to take on the pain of a refusal of moral integration over the pain of having to face that, even if you were morally implicated, there is nothing you can do about it. On the other hand, we have those who are fixated on the notion of moral consciousness and yet who cannot face the subtle distrust they themselves sow by having to remind themselves, with a constant infographic supply, of the horror they are meant to have committed. This one we have largely deconstructed already: in acting this way, do you not consistently undermine the only truly available moral and political thesis you have on hand, which is that the scale of the disorder is best measured by just how much it disables our capacity to do anything about it? Once again, these violent forces are likely, if anything, a reaction to an outstanding sense of passivity, which has drawn a medicament (like a terror regime, which I use faithfully in application to either side of the conflict—in their present forms of political ‘representation’, at least) worse than the disease it is meant to combat: the zombified state of geopolitics would motivate all kinds of reactions. This presents us with the really disturbing idea that those in power are not only not in control, but that, in their impotence, this is how they are compelled to react. What then are we really fighting against? Ourselves, surely. The human theatre at work here provides us with the following fact: imagining a moral escape plan, whether it be one based upon disfiguring historical suffering or on simplistically inverting the nature of geopolitical terror into its role merely as force of what must surely be greedy self-bolstering (as opposed to a no-less frightening, victimised wail), is the only thing abusing our politics. There is only one way to face what is going on, which is to accept that, in having nothing to do, only then can we possibly process the disaster. Nothing could be more discontenting than to constantly upload a war crime, which, in being publicised so much, seems to actually deny what is happening. If every photo uploaded is meant to be the ‘last photo’ ever uploaded, the one which finally draws the perpendular No, then what can the meaning of this be, but that our moral victory hinges upon our total denial that the event is happening? Or, better yet, that it has happened. Our investment in stopping it is self-defeating. It misaligns us with respect to the proper problem. As cruel as it may sound, either we admit what has happened, defining its terms, or we continue to broadcast it and so delay the very realisation we are sitting around so eagerly waiting for. The choice is now between either accepting the terms of a radical, unconscious passivity, and thereby confronting the state of the problem we have in front of us, that of a system, geopolitical in nature, which is, if anything, utterly subservient to its own survival, or denying them, and in so doing perpetuating what remains fundamentally unconscious about the problem in the first place: something we know is going on which we cannot accept is happening. Is there not, after all, something deeper which we refuse to accept in favour of images of carnage and bloodshed? The fact is we barely participate in this system, and if we do, our conduct is severely regulated by ideology. Indeed, it would appear that no one participates in this system. And this is what is so scary. This is a system perpetuating itself through us. Trust me when I say that most people’s reactions can be pinned down not just to a fear of impotence, but to a fear in general of a system which regulates itself through the false action of this fear. What, after all, is our great moral failure if not the production of this system itself, which now must resort to our fears of it in order to exist?

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