Life under capitalism is a spiritual battle to keep feeling something, to stay in the emotional game, to hang onto your emotional heartland as a fully functional human being.

Mystical revelation and epiphany, the secret moments of lovers, the times when art simply clicks, the hushed whispers of plotters and conspirators, donning the black mask and running through the streets, transforming the urban design from a locus of power into a space of creation, recreation, redesign, renewal. What can we say of experiences like this other than that they are moments in the truest sense of the word, a time that moves against time, an undisciplined time, a time that scrambles the coding of time under postmodern endlessness.

Experiences that move against, push back, unleash divergent paths, breed mutant orders and non-orders, are indicative of critical breaks in the now. Capitalism and the state are profoundly conservative formations, parasitic formations designed to constantly colonize the future by imprisoning it in the dismal cage of the past. So while we can say that there are no organic states of being or authentic experience, can we not speak of states of being – or better yet, becomings – to come, of future kinds of experience? These are moments whose outline we can perhaps glimpse, and have even engaged with to a certain extent, but with an ultimate unfolding and outcome that we cannot possibly know. Why let the bored dictum “it’s all been done before” reign supreme? There is an entire world, and perhaps even a cosmos, to move through – but only if we set ourselves the task of breaking down the moulding that discipline has lent to this world and this cosmos.

Can such a situation arise from simply reforming capitalism, by opening up the apparatuses of the state or by pursuing a majoritarian democracy? This seems doubtful. Generating the very capacity for new sensations forms a fundamental part of the infrastructure of a new earth – a transvaluation of values, as Nietzsche would say. From the perspective of power and its language of standardization, homogenization, and efficiency, the impulse to break experience from time, activity from its particular coding, intention from efficiency, so on and so on, might appear as little other than a mad proposition, or more properly, a proposition for madness. And that is precisely what it is! “One day, perhaps, we will no longer know what madness was.”

-Kono for the Blackspot Collective

Adbusters #131

Planetary Endgame