Posted on September 18, 2005 at 00:24:42.
300 Cuts: A Postmortem Report on the so-called human, 15-17
By M Satai
300 Cuts: A Postmortem Report on the so-called human, 15-17
15.
I see them everywhere but I don’t recognize a single one: these “human” beings that surround me in supermarkets, bus stations, coffee shops, city streets. The only place I’ve found anything like a genuine human being is in the pages of books or on film or television screens. My entire experience of “real” human beings, my only “proof” of their existence is derived entirely from secondary sources: as if the “human” being were a media myth that bears no resemblance to any actual creature in my living experience. What I’ve begun to suspect is that the idea of a “human” being is a propaganda device perpetuated by a conspiratorial cabal that seeks control…but control of what, to what end? Money, power, the establishment of paradigms that insure an orderly calibration of the events that rush towards a pornacalypse already here—in other words, the illusion of time so that everything doesn’t happen at once, so that an orgasm is possible? Is it also possible that the cabal itself is a victim of its own propaganda, either accidentally or intentionally, self-blinded, in order not to see, like the myths of the Gnostic demiurges, perpetuating a darkness by which gods lose sight of themselves? Is is possible that the creation of the “human” is a device by which the “alien” masks itself from itself—and that the “human” is already defeated and the planet is already in possession of the afterhuman?
16.
A visit to a whore:
Prostitute: “What do you want me to do?”
Me: “I want you to do nothing, to be capable of nothing. I want you to be silent, to lie still, to become the perfect object of my desire. I want you to be completely assimilable, appropriable, absorbable. I want you—for want of the unattainable—to play dead as I project myself onto the image of your beautiful corpse, which is a glyph for the intersection where my own death collides in the unconsummable self-love that is the projection of me onto everything.
Prostitute: “You mean you want to jerk-off on my naked body?”
Me: “Exactly.”
Prostitute: “That will be $75.”
17.
What is there really left to say but to say nothing? I imagine a terminal art—a radical minimalism: a post-apocalyptic generation of genius whose claim to genius consists of having refrained from producing anything whatsoever, ie. the poet whose entire canon of verse consists of an unwritten oeuvre, the painter who refuses to put down a single brushstroke, the composer whose magnum opus is total silence. The only relevant thing left to do in art is not to make art at all. The greatest artist won’t simply undiscovered or unappreciated—he will be unknowable, invisible, and because he produces no works at all, he will be to all practical purposes, nonexistent.