Caught in a dense and heavily polluted air, the stench of rotted corpses of doxa and the excrement of hollow ideological ramblings dulls the senses, preventing one to find a way through, yet even to make sense of what is happening. We are not assailed by a force from without, but instead by an overly underwhelming stagnation of the senses, and in particular, the historical sense. Any trajectory of historical movement is clogged with bad air, we are waist high in the waste products of the spectacle - the possibility of escaping the spectacle’s grasp only finds you in a feedback loop that takes you right where you began. In a state of utter dejection and embedded in a field of ideological shit.
So many deny the deteriorated landscape of the political, the doxa smelling so repulsive in its ‘inauthenticity,’ or in its complete corruption, splattered with blood from the countless bodies that had to be scarified for its existence. But this is the trap, in which the extrication from this field presupposes a cleaner place to start from, an age of innocence, where we can start anew as if nothing has happened. One wants to forget how wretched the dull sheen of decaying utopic ideals have been transformed from this into that, from what it had once promised into a kitschy, narcissistic image of the spectacle society.
The ‘world,’ ‘society,’ etc. is at a stasis, unable to develop and take shape, due to the half-submerged existences of past historical events, underlying secrets to the stillborn current of non-contradiction. New worlds have been partially constructed and then left to decay, its inhabitants having long abandoned the process. The desolation of these worlds, as deserts of the real, inscrutable and incomprehensible now, reeking of sulfuric odors that are unable to be erased. The lingering smell of corroded ideals presents itself as so many stains that have not been cleaned, instead pushed to the background and further dulled by the incessant obsessive dynamics of late capitalism, veiling the contradictions within itself as the conditions of its own possibility.
The guillotine has long been dulled, its pallid glint that brings light into this world through the blood-spattered death of the elite transmutated into a dirty secret that smells of decay. Everything has been layered with a gray mist of undecidability, the fog that comes to rest after History has ended. Where is the pivotal site of contradiction, in which the affects of revolutionary fervor can be deployed? Where are the fragments of the New world of Utopia, that resides beneath the surface, like an enormous glacial iceberg submerged in the hidden depths of our collective History? These are questions that we, the faceless masses are attempting to piece together. But it all falls apart, into disarray and chaos, stemming from not merely a lack of cohesion, but the impossibility of even thinking (and what goes along with thought, envisioning) what a so-called ‘Revolution’ would look like for the 21st century. This is our dilemma.
