[...] this horrible feeling of a blind, cutoff space behind the fullness of everything, this half that is always missing even when everything is a whole, this is what eventually makes one perceive what one calls the soul.”-Robert Musil; The Man Without Qualities
“We have much more to learn from
Max Weber than we do from Karl Marx [...] The question is the nature of a bureaucratically organized society. When people attack technology, attack science, and attack all these things, more often than not, they are attacking what happens to ‘these things’ once they get in the hands of a bureaucratically organized system.”- Stephen Toulmin; taken from
an Interview
Prologue:
The day is here when the human being ceases to be known by any distinguishing characteristics, other than his or her consumer rights. Human qualities are losing out to the value of market commodities; and the human will no longer have to strive to overcome nature, nor the clashes of competing national identities; the human will have to attempt to compete with faceless corporations, with technology itself. At present, one’s functions as a consumer take the place of one’s basic democratic rights—it takes the place of the soul. The question is not raised as to who you think you are—the corporation waves that right. Needless to say, the corporate society has left a great vacancy for human sentiment...
End of Prologue
Poem:
You are not a Subject, nor an Individual.
You are a ‘corporate soul.’
“What is your social collateral?”—“What is your social credit score!?”
Without any credit, without any collateral,
Any private capital, you are merely a nuisance, unaccounted for.
Society is—must be!—a perpetual machine, self supported,
Where the algorithms are regulated beautifully,
To service the ‘body without any organs,’
To reproduce advertisements as a collective ‘feed.’
If the organ-less body should wish to exit the machine, what would be left but
An error in the program?
Clear away the mistake: Human Subjectivity.
Cut, remanufacture, copy, and repeat,
Until the “I” is lost irrevocably, in the endless stream of simulacrum.
Was there a time before the ‘feed,’
Before the infinity of data, information, and Technics?
This question can be answered, by The Machines,
With very inconclusive results,
With very little hope, of capturing history,
The sense of memory, the last frontier
For Human Subjectivity.
Have we lost Collective Memory, or, gained Collective Data for “memory banks?”
What you own is relegated to the State;
And what you are is as manipulable
As the social network interface.
Identifying you through your accumulative data;
A metric for determining your personality.
The minutiae of one’s life is kept for all to see:
The political party your pledge allegiance To, as well as your sexual identity;
The religious view you have taken,
Be it fanatically, or secularly.
We take what is given from the Television,
Without question;
If we have not interrogated the media,
We cannot see that the Medium is the Message:
Such Idols of the market place, giving shape To the public mind;
“Nothing” is happening, yet the media is Packaging a narrative to prescribe:
“How to continue collision between parties, for political strife?”
The last of the “Spectacle,” to invade
Every waking moment of one’s daily life.
How to simulate revolutions? How to Simulate the passions?
To give the impression people still believe?
How to keep the churches from
Complete dissolution?
How to keep people congregated in a Tumult of confusion,
Even when ‘the Gods have fled!?’
The time to lament has long since passed;
The time to exchange the life you lead,
For a life well-lived, as the Man Without
Qualities . . awaits.
Relentless to the one who resists;
A Human lost to the past,
Confronted by shadowy images,
In these ephemeral days,
That merge into one another until
No Trace remains.