There is a conspiracy of silence. The Empire is Collapsing. The Empire has Collapsed. There is no other decisive phase to look forward to, no turning-point to fear or to hope for; only the end. Characterized by ceaseless fragmentation, derangements of scale, ineliminable ambiguity, inconstancy, disinheritance, dislocation, de-centering, defamiliarization, denaturalization; disarticulation of the social fabric — Ours is a crisis so totalizing that past that we wish to recapture cannot be recaptured. Nostalgia is impossible. Nostalgia for the impossible. We cannot begin again. What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. Platonism is the doctrine that everything exists. When the last member of a species dies, it dies as a whole organism. To a large extent, history is not so much written by the winners as it is not written at all. It is unwritten, unwritable. “Even justice will not compensate for loss.”
The Empire is Collapsing. The Empire has Collapsed.
The U.S. Empire begins in 1898, in the Spanish American war. Before, the U.S. was a “patchwork” state, loosely integrated, with little if any federal capacity to intervene in its borders. Post 1898, the U.S. empire is a transnational dominator and regional hegemon. The Philippine War around this same time, produced the first wave of imperial feedback, bringing siege occupation military strategies back to domestic policing. Memory has the same ontological status as the future.
Global warming and climate collapse, the decline of the American cycle of accumulation. Massive restructuring of capital. The division of the globe into a global south of workers and slaves and a global north of banks and stock exchanges. Arrhythmic sputtering, fits and stops, knots, dead-ends, hitches, glitches, bottlenecks, impasses, blockages, chokepoints, friction, stalemates. If the empire is not expanding it is understood to be contracting. Any perceived threat to ruling class interests will trigger a polyvalent response invoking legal and extra-legal measures to reinstate and increase their coefficient of power. Offensive Realism. Deep cynicism. Flashpoints. Fail states. Zero days. “I did not sign up for this category.” Freak observers. A disinheritance of the past. “We shift around. Like marbles we roll.” “Realism is rarely where we expect it.” The selfie melts the polar ice caps. The new Arctic. Seabed mining, asteroid mining. The center of the periphery. The human asteroid. Secularization instead of Modernity. Secularization instead of globalization. The old idea of capital colonizing the imaginary must be reformulated to wage counter-offenses within the virtual as well as actual. That which has yet to come. A people yet to come. A consciousness yet to come. Counter-counter threats with counter-counter-counter moves. As Alfred Jarry said more than a century ago, "we shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well." It is trivial that capitalism has colonized our daydreams, individual and group hallucinations, micro and macro tactics and strategies of counterforce; the production of autonomies and collective actualization will take place in the gaps and blind spots of capital re-production and excommunication. Pay attention without mystifying. From one perspective an impossibility, from the other an inevitability. Each step enables the next, exponentially multiplying networks of correspondence, echoes, allusions, quotations, borrowings. We are always in the present of some past future, in the past of some future present, and so on. There are only two times, the past, and the future. Tempora sunt tria, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuribus. We travel through time at the speed of light. There is always a coexistence of history at different speeds, a layering of time scales producing an infinity of small effects. To think and act across multiple time scales. The ruling class benefits from our accepting a characterization of the world as an incomprehensibly vast, procedurally generated computational wilderness of mirrors. Details regress into infinite fractals. The ever more dense and unpredictable logic of events with complex narrative tropes and layers of logical causality produce a clarification by blurring, a progressive obfuscation and global dissociation of sensibility: a sedimentation of inattention; a desedimentation of attention. A Cumulation. A Culmination. Ours is a crisis not of truth, or its withdrawal from history, but of ‘the whole truth.’