UbuWeb | UbuWeb Papers I Love Systems (2002) Michael Scharf RELATED RESOURCES: Michael Scharf in /ubu Editions
I love systems; corporations exploit systems
and deform them to channel capital. I love habits; capital destroys habits so
that implements must be replaced, which requires further raw materials to be
drawn and further labor added, and fetishization and idealization to be the
main quality of cathexis. I love cathexes; people murder and hurt one another
because their drives have been pushed into fucked up images or ideas, either by
genetic predisposition or by a variety of family pathologies, psychological or
physical abuses, that often stem from economic factors, but cross class lines
and can express themselves in large-scale non-egalitarian modes of power, as
well as in their more familiar manifestations within the living space, a
determiner of roles among those sharing it. Neglect, a pathology, results when
unstructured time, which is now a kind of structure, is eroded by capital,
which requires labor in order to accumulate, via the insinuation of value into
cathexis as a result of consumerism, and not consumption, which is necessary.
Even when actually coming into contact, people carry distorted images which
they bring to their chosen objects, and they hurt these objects, which are
people, because such images represent strong cathexes and demand to be
reproduced. People also create systems specifically to coerce people into
exchange, to force them to play prescribed roles which have real psychological
and material realizations. These systems draw energy from libidinous dementias,
from partially destroyed cathexes, and result, at best, in exchanges whose
participants are profoundly alienated and which are mediated, however
indirectly, by money, which was itself created when the direct comparison of
the values of goods proved impossible, and is the basis for city life, a kind
of idealization, which seems to be preferred by artists because of the kind of
social contact it allows, because of the care that its infrastructure evinces,
or has remnants of, and because of the kinds of work it affords. There is a
little time to write. I am paid per hour for my cube labor, which involves
writing, a “shit where I eat” problem, since writing is one way to
resist the incursions of capital. But I am an agent. I love systems; they are
but structures for action, for encounter and exchange, and come to life only
when taken up, providing terms for decisions, terms that should be able to be
accepted and used or rejected and reformed but are not, but yet not all of them
are corrupt, although the rate at which they are corrupted as they arise,
meaning those systems that do not have to do with law or state or corporate
power, the lag time in which they are allowed to hang, poised and expressive,
is shorter and shorter, as the movement of capital has become more and more efficient,
part of which is due to computers, though studies dispute the actual gains.
Systems must be changed from within by agreement or destroyed by revolution,
which means destroying sets of images and the people who carry them, which is
accomplished by agents, who are people, and replaced by other systems, but
distorted images linger as traces embodying former sets of terms, in books and
in pictures, in buildings and in testimony to be discovered and recovered, or
reproduce themselves through genetic predispositions triggered by abuse. Power
itself forms a current wherever there is more than one agent or its image, so
that in the absence of state power or enforced legislation, which often appears
to itself as a coherent, logical system directed at a collective good, but can
also appear, even to itself, as an organized and perpetual structure for
murder, in its absence, arising when one or another group, concentrated in a
locality, has the power of enforcement without the rule of law, which is just
as often abused, the results seem to be worse, as we know them from books and
images, recordings and translations. Some argue that this is the case in parts
of the world of which I have no right to speak, especially being a subject in a
state that creates and acts on the indirect or direct demands for their
exploitation, particularly in terms of labor power and raw materials, and in
terms of culture and in terms of peoples’ bodies, their very lives. In
the U.S. itself ideas and images have been, within some formations and often
involuntarily, replaced with a more subtle brutality taking the place of the
old, overtly physical and more directly linguistically transmitted subjection.
There will always be exchange, the question is how to structure it, what system
to use. People have been coerced into habits and cathexes that lead, directly
and indirectly, to the exploitation of others, but this exploitation and its
results are hidden from consumers, who must participate in the system or
perish, ceasing to exist within recognized or vigilantly maintained alternative
social formations, dying, though there will be a day when to be a consumer will
not be a pejorative, for there will always be consumers as long as there are
exchanges, and there will always be exchanges, but for now the exploitation and
its results are hidden, so that responsibility for consumption is made
impossible by more active participants in the systems, who produce them and
produce the images of them, and work to shunt the capital into calibrated sinks,
or accounts. Those with ideas for more efficient or transfixing systems can
either work for corporations, or strike out on their own as entrepreneurs
within legally defined structures, a decision which is represented as a kind of
freedom. There are magazines that cover, that reproduce with words and pictures
using raw materials plus labor power, including packaging and delivery, the
imagining and actualizing, the building and maintaining, the reacting and the
prescribing of system creation, cover it from the idea or image stage to the
addition of capital, which allows systems to materialize, literally, and to
shunt the needs, habits and cathexes of people, who put their money into
weighted exchanges that concentrate it with the corporation or entrepreneur, which
as a legal entity has discretion as to how and when it will again appear in the
public domain. Often, because of psychology, and, currenly, because of poorly
theorized neo-evolutionary demands, capital is concentrated and passed down
among those whose genetic bases are most similar. I personally have benefited
from this system in myriad ways. When my father became sick with Hodgin’s
Lymphoma, he and my mother, 27 and 26 respectively, if age affects
decision-making, took out a 100,000 dollar policy on his life, on which they
were, with the help of other family members who had accumulated capital, able
to meet the very high monthly payments as his condition worsened, and then
improved, until his sudden death on May 15, 1974, after which the policy was paid
in full to my mother. This policy was a partial image of the labor power
represented by my father and reflected a bet by a corporation against his early
death; that the labor he did, which was adjusting the habits and cathexes of
people who were not able to function completely and efficiently within the
system, arguably serving the ends of capital as well as of those, more
directly, whose suffering he worked against, was not relevant. The apartment in
which I live, in which I write this and which I own with my wife, who is 28,
was bought with money directly generated by the investment of money from that
policy, by the further accumulation of capital that resulted from the payment
being committed to certain corporations, including Merck, Thermo Instrument,
and Archer Daniels Midland, of which I had fractionary ownership, and is
itself, the apartment, a form of acculated wealth, though its exchange value is
dependant, like currency, on the market and easier to pass in the U.S. to
people with similar genetic material or with whom legal relations are
permitted. Writing this is a form of narcissism, now in wanting to insert
myself in a debate over a magazine, but originally as a reaction to answering a
questionnaire, which asked for certain cathexes and, indirectly, economic
conditions to be named, thus aiding a kind of class consciousness; since the
naming recalled an image or idea of a “life,” as a life is a
construct made up of representations of decisions plotted over time and
intimately bound up with the control of capital, the commonality of the terms
of which led to narrative conventions, the questionnaire established a basis
for comparison with the decisions, cathexes and degrees of control of the
participants, all of whom are at least acquaintances through text-based
exchanges. The expression of my cathexis with an image of my father, here and
elsewhere “in my work,” can be said to be a luxury afforded by the
capital that I accumulated as a result of his death, although the cathexis
would remain, I feel, regardless of the amount of capital involved since it was
not known to me, conceptually let alone with numeric specificity, when the
cathexis formed, which allowed a kind of cathetic purity that is often
idealized, the image of love pointed toward transcendent value, one that can
trump the market, within literature and most religions, and within many actual
lives, if I can speak of them, other than mine, but writing depends on material
conditions unattainable in most. If I am allowed to speak of your life, a set
of decisions plotted over time, it is a form of exchange; because of certain
histories of exploitation, the subject position created by my relative control
of capital and my physical characteristics encounters quite forceful and
correct barriers to exchange in various contexts. Though they are often
portrayed as protecting images of sets of physical characteristics or images of
set of habits, called race and culture, gender and sexuality, such barriers are
forms of resistance to the incursions of capital, because capital tries to keep
as many of its mechanisms as possible hidden, including labor, a transcendental
category, in that in most climates one cannot live without working or paying or
forcing someone else to work, so that capital, an image or meme carried by
people, makes use of psychological prejudice as part of its hidden mechanisms
for exploiting labor; it blurs into such habits and cathexes comfortably and
easily, through other ideas and images, and attaches itself to them without
dissipation or diffusion, as well as targeting the barriers resistence to such
images provokes. To target these incursions via economic analysis is the
“class trumps race” theory, which can be extended to other
categories, and which when implemented led to the splintering of the left in
the late 1960s in the U.S. and to the attempted recovery of origins, previously
subsumed by the promise of reform and of a better life,both of which are
images, origins and promises, though when lived attain the status of memory and
experience, testimony and impression, and then out to the endgame of economic
self-justification. Such analyses are abstracted so as to locate the
systemizing terms at work, finding them in appeals such as “France for
the French,” which paradoxically allows a majority within a locality to
feel that their genetic material benefits from redistributive action, though
the complications of having 3,000,000 post-colonial citizens, if I may speak of
them, particularly as a Jew, since Jews have been closely associated with the
market and demonized via that assocation by Christians and others, leading many
to convert or to become adherents of Marx, a son of converts who conceived of
class consciousness as the royal road to revolution, but the presence of those
citizens in France has led, because of the contradictions it heightens in
certain images and ideas, to the creation of parties such as the National
Front, which tries to define what the French part of “France for the
French” might mean, and has certain distorted cathexes with that idea,
though anyone can shop at Fauchon if clean. Similar movements exist. Class does
not always seem to trump race, or gender, or sexual orientation, though this
may still turn out to be the result of false consciousness, which most often
today is applied to consumerism, and there is no right of return, a material
re-creation of images, for anyone. Some theorists believe hetero- and
homosexuality to be chimeras created by capital, and believe race and gender to
be so as well, though one does not hear the latter spoken of as lifestyle
choices, and medical research continues into their bases.
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