Fragments on the Globe

Visions of McLuhan. McLuhan did not know to what extent he was right; the “retribalizing” effects of mass media can be seen in full magnificence in the psychedelic, ethno-sploitation aesthetic of Myspace users. This particularly relevant to those using Myspace to promote their music, where people willingly ascribe tribal qualities to themselves and their digital scene.
This correspondence—between McLuhan’s term and contemporary developments in online networking—resonates far deeper than the coincidental. The use of ethnographic imagery to (over)determine the psychedelic content of one’s (mainly electronic or folk-revivalist [which is in fact a re-revitalization of the “primordial”]) music and extra-musical aesthetic considerations produces the affect of religious excesses through a semblance (without substance) of identification. This appropriation of the colonial archive is at once the senseless deployment of a tribal essence—resultant of the excess of documentation and its newfound availability outside the institution—but also a means for recognition and association within virtual communities. The malleability of the virtual identity has enclosed itself within a narrow and unidirectional colonial relationship with the image. What is the Myspace epoch “saying” about itself? The digital mirror reflects a desire to appropriate but also to return to a past free of technological fragmentation. In this sense we have entered a post-fragmentary technological epoch where every day is a festival that preserves community; after fragmentation we enter the illusory divine, the world of image and spectacle. In “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” Bataille writes of the necessity of consumptive acts in the maintenance of survival, or the survival of community (which still amounts to survival pure and simple): “Man does not live by bread alone, but also by the comedies with which he willingly deceives himself.” Given this understanding of community as representation—a subterfuge enacted out of necessity—we can see how Myspace ethno-sploitation and retribalization is an ideological modality whose real function is concealed from the very community deploying it. Debord writes that “the spectacle erases the dividing line between self and world.” The becoming-tribal of virtual neo-primitivism is indicative of the erasure brought about by spectacular capitalism. In terms of sample-based electronic music, Debord’s statement refers to the erasure of difference between self and world music, for it is through the sampler (a device with an infinite potential for “misuse”) that the world music archive is being re-presented without a trace of dialectical intervention. This recycling of the archive amounts not to a critical or playful engagement/acknowledgement of colonialism’s role in informing aesthetic production, but is in fact the projection of empty tribal signifiers upon a flat screen. Self-proclaimed affinity with a tribal social organization is a social hallucination in which individuals radically misrecognize their own reality in a content-less primordial past.

Tourists. The tourist is the negative image of pure deterritorialization; he testifies to capital’s tendency to disperse bodies in accordance with its own prerogatives. The line of flight embarked upon by the tourist is the non-experience of museified culture.
Dragged away from home, the tourist is provided with its semblance in the form of technologized convenience (his home away from home, that is nonetheless also present in his actual home). Yet he often yearns to travel back in time, with his techno-amenities intact. He thus exists in a non-space between the technics of his lifestyle and the inaccessible, museified culture he is a spectator to. Each term has been carefully planned for him, thus precluding any possibility for experience.

Supermarkets. In the Hegelian conception of culture as Bildung work is the (creative) mechanism that puts the human into relation with universality. This universality (culture) is the product of human creative activity. How does contemporary world-financial labor reflect this quasi-religious engagement with the universal?
Global finance, as an industry, brings the human face to face with the abstract sum of all activity on the face of the earth. Capitalism did not abolish religious forms, it just secularized them. This is how the market attains its religious character; it is an alien universal that somehow encapsulates all human activity and something more. It is in the market that we see the full separation of human activity from its product. Unlike the workday, the market never ceases, it accedes the result of activity yet can account for it. It is hyperrational, always on the brink of obliterating its rational basis altogether. The “free zones” in which deregulated commerce takes place is an indication of capital’s autonomy from the human agent. Capital loses its sense of place and becomes a tourist continuously speculating its next destination.
The market is the administration of a plan that is divinely secretive. Without a home, the nomad subjects produced under late capitalism (from the tourist to the immigrant laborer) are the unknowing disciples deployed by the market on a blind quest that is directed but without end.
As a generator of fetishes, the market is itself a fetish—a dynamic object that exceeds instrumentality and rejects its subordination to the human hand. Nonetheless, speculation is now the immaterial labor demanded by the market. More to come on the affective labor done for the universal.

No Capital Investment! Capitalism’s illusory transcendence of materiality presents itself in the notion of investment which, quite obviously, implies the abstract duration of capital. Duration has become the producer of value in the autonomous framework of global finance… In Le Livre Mallarmé deploys a negative econometrics antithetical to the pseudo-production of the vulgar field. As opposed to stabilizing the market through a second-order abstraction (the market itself being a first-order abstraction), Mallarmé appropriates economic numerology and subjects the work (out of habit one is tempted to say “his work”) to the violence and a-signifying delirium/calculations of the market.