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10:52

(In »The free and open Internet versus the ecological apocalypse«)

There is seldom or never any social change without articulation. Under capitalism, the new literate nation state replaces the old illiterate Church as the common arena, and the statist articulation says that society is a body. But the body metaphor – which statism obviously borrows from the ecclesiastical articulation that says that the congregation is a body – must be exposed. For society as a body never generates any narrative for increased cohesiveness, as Michel Foucault points out, but instead functions as a latent threat to the deviant person in the nation state. It is perfectly possible to be an individual, but it is only acceptable to be exactly the individual who maximises her own frustration, alienation and consumption, and who pays for all this by maximising her production for the capitalist power structure, moreover in the shadow of the prevailing phantasmic behavioural imperative: Whatever you do, blend in!