Living here is like perpetually scanning a set of boring personals ads. Everybody wants the same cozy evenings by the fireside, the same long walks on the beach. But it’s all a facade. Organicism is a myth. Our bodies are never ourselves, our words and texts are never really our own. They aren’t “us,” but the forces that crush us, the norms to which we’ve been subjected.

As Burroughs knows, there’s no getting around it: “To speak is to lie–to live is to collaborate.” The only way out is the same way we came in. With postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it. One fix after another, one purchase after another, one orgasm after another; for there is no end to the accumulation: “the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never arrives” (Althusser). All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow them and waste them: spend what we haven’t earned, and what we don’t even possess. That’s my definition of postmodern culture, but it’s also Citibank’s definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan’s definition of love, and J. G. Ballard’s definition of life in the postindustrial ruins. It’s a relief to realize that culture is after all empty, that its imposing edifices are just ruins or sound stage facades, that bodies are extremely plastic, that facial expressions are masks, that words in fact have nothing to express. For bodies and words are merely exchange-value: commodities or money. If postmodernism is indeed, as Fredric Jameson argues, “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” then it is perhaps most accurately regarded as a frenzy of delirious shopping–or better still, of shoplifting. We engage in orgies of endless consumption, forever postponing the moment when the bills come due. The party never ends: S & L scams for the rich, Visa and Master Card financing for the middle class, and even occasional riots and looting for the poor. (As I write these lines, unpaid credit card debts come to more than 33% of my yearly salary; but since I don’t expect ever to be able to pay these cards off, it feels as if I’m getting everything for free). It’s all a whirl of extendible lines of credit, substitution of goods, and metamorphoses of capital. The postmodern economy unfolds in an eternal present. We aren’t interested in duration or preservation; we devour and squander at a frantic pace, latching on to one thing only to throw it aside in favor of something else the very next moment. Everything is negotiable, everything is available for exchange. So let yourself go. Don’t be a good citizen. Don’t produce, expend. Be a parasite. Consume images and be consumed by them. Live off your Visa card, and scavenge in the debris.

- Steven Shaviro (Doom Patrols)

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