The user’s first realisation
You know it: School taught you to be still and listen; Friends (and bands and brands) told you to Just Do It and live life to the fullest; Work taught you to be speak out loud with a conviction—politely, but with a slight edge—and according to corporate policy; Life has taught you that a sneaky way in between all of these is personally the most profitable.
My personal question is: Will I continue to sneak and bend, or will I find something solid that does not melt into PR? In the words of the Captain from Leonard Cohen’s song: “There is no decent place to stand in a massacre — but if a woman take your hand, go and stand with her.” To which the protagonist of the song answers discontentedly that none of that will do. So what will be left, when not even the greatest poets can raise their love such to a very high degree?
Well at least there is the poetic shortcut to a marxist phrase that Metahaven uses: “All that is capital melts into love.” But is is only a utopian provocation? What kind of love is that? Are we really at the point where we are compelled to, as Marx says “face the conditions of life, and our relations to our kind” or have the conditions simply changed so much that none of us realise it as such?
Metahaven continues: “When in love, giving and receiving have no calculus; they have infinite supply and demand.”
Frightfully I recognise myself and my working condition in this, and suddenly all the love that I have been giving, strikes me as love lost on a cause that I have no stake in.
Metahaven’s love is a “total exhaustion of resources that abound to the point of melting into each other.” But in my five years of employment this love/ time/ energy/ concern/ anxiousness /effort /work has been spent, and nothing but chains for self-restriction have been given.
This is not what they meant, is it? The “reallocation of resources from the workplace to the bedroom” has not taken place in my life.
I’m starting to realise that it is simply because I am a user.