Identity is a bust and am I even human? Maybe there's something in post-humanism beyond silver eye-paint and art-parties where they try and pass noise off as dance music lol

Here we are in a wasteland of netflix and home cooked meals. If I see one more post about resisting capitalism by not being productive then I am going to fucking kill myself. I mean, does capitalism own productivity? And what is so fucking radical about not doing anything for twelve fucking hours, what's so fucking radical about binge watching a series or sitting on your bed staring into the wall like a piece of mould, sad and thoughtless? (Or wearing track pants until they're discoloured and masturbating until your dick or clit falls off).

Also; I do not care if you are using this time to dig deep and learn how to cook, or acquire a second language. These are things that no one should be advocating or that no one needs to know about, not your friends or family or colleagues. People are literally dying. 

What I am interested in is thinking about how life will 'carry on' on the other side of this fucking shit show, with respect to the fact that we have endured a pandemic and people have lost their lives. Anyone brazen enough to reduce this period of enforced isolation to an 'opportunity' to clean out their Tupperware drawer or spend quality time with their family is a brainless fuck-wit with the emotional intelligence of a mole-rat. 

PEOPLE HAVE DIED. END OF DISCUSSION.

What matters now and what everyone currently identifying as human should be concerning themselves with is whether or not the previous capitalist status quo, comprised of collective human misery and socioeconomic uncertainty, is something we feel like resuming after this breather. 

Important questions to ask oneself before we exit level-4 lockdown; 

Does mindless consumption make you happy?

Does having an unthinking unfeeling complicity in systems of third-world exploitation and deliberate impoverishment bring you happiness? Are you content with this being the premise of our lifestyles, and the legacy of our generation?

Are you content with the bombastic inequality within our society, in which you can enjoy relative comfort while others struggle through subtle blocks of discrimination which disable them from attaining the same levels of basic subsistence? 

I hate to bring 'discrimination' into it because it serves a bullshit identity politics which would like to think it is transcending the raced and gendered biases of history, but which uses history as it's ultimate signifier, has wrung cultural/social/cognitive capital from the late-capitalist model of immaterial currencies while masquerading as some kind of disruptive force. The truth is identity is never a disruptive force. Identity is a commodity and will NEVER have a radical influence on the way society organises itself because it is structurally identical with the commodity form. Identity is a product, whether you're gay or straight or white or non-white; it is all up for grabs in the metric of capitalist value. So even though I am firmly sided with the majority of Leftist values and crusades for re-distributive social justice, if you are someone who thinks that society can be renewed through this crusade then you are fucking deluded. 

The only radicality available to us is yet to exist, will only come into existence when we find a means of extending beyond identity, the endgame of which I cannot see but an action towards which might be in acknowledging identity itself as a technology, as something akin to the avatar and it's systemic function of mobility through an existing matrix. 

Right?

Fuck identity. Is what I'm saying. Alienating people on the basis of what they are has somehow become the Leftist argument du jour, and I refuse to participate beyond this point because the stakes are too fucking high. 

So with that behind us, is there a possibility now of a more profound and spontaneous solidarity? If this crisis has any benefit at all perhaps it's in this, levelling the usual socioeconomic demarcations towards a unity of an elite billionaire ruling class versus everyone else. I'd like to think so but I'm also aware of how deftly capitalism has proven in the manipulating of it's own crises towards an even stronger position for itself. Look at the 2008 financial crisis for example, in which governments bailed out banks with tax-payers money, despite the low-income tax-payers being the obvious victims of deregulation and the double bind of systemic debt and credit. Instead of state power disciplining the recklessness of speculative value and it's corrosive effects on production, the most vulnerable were left footing the bill so that a toxic status quo could be maintained indefinitely. The end of the world is apparently a minor obstacle when it comes to the up-keep of executive lifestyles. 

And it's those lifestyles and their ecologically devastating modes of production and consumption which have brought us to where we are, a pandemic symptomatic of an ideological manoeuvre pitted against the environment in service to capitalistic efficiency, an efficiency which tabulates human life itself as equal in value to the methods and materials of production; just another resource. And so this pause is a breath being taken by the world machine which has two options before it; either implement a more mindful model in which profits are distributed evenly, a reconfiguring of production to serve actual human welfare (including a more infinite-minded approach to environment-as-resource), or total barbarism. 

Democracy and it's free-market mascot have always been heavily flawed but within them the symbolic value of a world order, allegedly pitted against exploitation and war, has kept total global barbarism at bay (if only selectively and in fits and starts).  That symbolic order has just taken a heavy blow, and utopian thinking has all of a sudden become less of a fantasy and more of a viable solution. That is, compared to the alternatives. 

An unpopular opinion; recently my IG feed has come up with anti-Jacinda sentiments which I find hard to swallow. Firstly because she's in a coalition government and so the logistical failures of a bipartisan cabinet, not to mention an eight year neoliberal legacy which there's no way one person can rectify in a four year term, are disconcertingly being lumped on Jacinda in the manner of scape-goating. This is something I would expect of alt-right agitators such as Mike Hosking, but never of mutual friends and acquaintances who I'd assumed fairly intelligent, or intelligent enough to recognise the reluctant value of 'lesser evils'. Secondly this sentiment, which apparently includes a failure to acknowledge or meet needs of Maori, is dividing the left all over again, which during an election year bodes ill for the ballot. Certainly, if I have anything positive to say about National it's that they efficiently managed Iwi reparations for which I am grateful (even if Nga Puhi couldn't organise themselves in time to get a decent slice of the pie). However, I wouldn't have them back in a million years even if it meant more money for Iwi's, because they're operating from distinct neoliberal premises which have otherwise destroyed the middle-class and created a terrifying new world of precarious working poor. The Left cannot afford to splinter now lest in our confusion we let National back in, which will surely mean a tipping of the scales towards barbarism. 

A solution to Jacinda's allegedly sub-par approach to Maori (which admittedly includes neglecting to visit Ihumatao) is to vote double red, to give her full authority so she's not bound by anyone else's racist conservatism (Winston Peters, cough).

Ardern's competency and compassion cannot be understated. I know for a fact that she is in direct conversation with small business owners and renters, keeping herself informed on a grass-roots level which I can't imagine there's too much of a precedent for. 

If you have an issue with how she's conducted herself to date, check yourself, repeat the words 'bipartisan government', and on Election Day tick red. Otherwise shut the fuck up, because the Left cannot afford to be divided right now. 

The banks are evil, Japanese animation is lit, and nothing feels real anymore, least of all the flimsy routine I've set up for myself in isolation which frankly feels like the performance of denial, leisure in crisis etc

Defamiliarising ourselves with a way of life that is undeniably closing is the theme right now. I wondered why I was having such a grief-like response a full week before lockdown and realise now it was a visceral reaction, a piecing together with faculties outside my 'conscious' mind, of these facts; the fact of collapse, the fact that a pandemic was slowing the world down in ways which it should have back in 2008 when it became evident the current order and it's privately centralised banks, just would not do. And here we are, having had that defunct world system dragged out for a further twelve years, miseries abound, and to the detriment of the species it is not rationality or radical praxis that's bringing cogent attentions to this system's gross discrepancies, but a fucking virus. 

Was it really so difficult to isolate and contain a problem of it's scope (the insidious leverage the banks have over every world government, their usurpation of welfare and public access with gig-economies/harrowing fluidity which we're meant to read as 'freedom' etc) only under duress of a secondary crisis, one to exhume the first and create dialect alongside? Not getting overly technical, but historical dialecticism seems to have won out here but amazingly in service to the potential dismantling of it's own structural violence (FYI historical dialecticism is a mode of discourse which gives primacy to history as a narrative and justifies everything and anything in the name of a binary consistency;  meaning anything from war to genocide to a pandemic can be turned towards the benefit of the whole, as a kind of transformative collateral). Here's hoping the global reach of this crisis, it's literally-fleshy intimacy as a threat, might topple the mind-tricks otherwise used to justify resuming the status quo when the dust finally settles. Here's hoping the villain of this story (if there needs to be one) ends up being the banks, and that governments can finally out-manoeuvre the hostage situation we've been in to them since certain reformations that gave primacy to finance. 

Fuck the fucking banks.

Drinking and eating and generally consuming is like, my life now. I guess it always was but now it's really apparent how the domestic space has been coded as a fortress of 'entertainment', and I'm asking myself what implications does this intimate proximity with a rabid media complex have, what is it's value outside of a crisis, who does it serve?

Obviously industry pundits get a dollar, food production gets a boon because there are junky-caffeinated-sugary consumption habits around entertainment which have historically been sold as 'comforts', which in reality are as insidious as smoking because marketed to be habit forming etcetera. I live with someone who is a gamer, and who has recently admitted to me that when they're not being constantly inundated with media (gaming, frankly terrible music, watching a shitty movie) they feel acute anxiety. I know there's not much to do in isolation if you don't have clear 'working from home' parameters but this person's clear addiction, seeing them deny what could otherwise be a period of introspection and a re-inscribing of themselves in a shifting world order, is really starting to bum me out. 

But I also don't want to judge any person's reaction to this, or how they see fit to wile away the enforced time at home; but on the other hand I don't want to endorse infantile behaviours which might seem harmless but which mostly lead to active disempowerment. Yuck.

So yes, actively defamiliarising with everything we've taken for granted about this way of life, the petty consumption habits which we don't necessarily think about in terms of  a resource expenditure because their initial cost seems trivial, is perhaps something worth doing right now, because if anything what's happening should teach us that no cost is trivial, that every expenditure (monetary or other) accumulates and plays out in time. This lesson is inherent to this pandemic because the virus and it's spread are the ambience of industrial-consumerist processes in critical stages. They are the result of a metric that has no remainder, in which every factor of late-stage capitalism has contributed; population bursts in urban areas, global warming, the privileged accessibility of travel etcetera. The concept of waste also probably needs to go, or at least our pathological avoidance of it's trajectory; knowing that nothing is ever simply flushed down a toilet or dropped off in a desert in a lead vault, cleanly removed from the world of operations which somehow exists over and above it's own refuse. This concept should die, because it's a fiction. 

And look where it's gotten us.

More thoughts on old movies I've been rewatching in isolation;

Howl's Moving Castle is more queer than I remembered, the flamboyance of it's main character which as a teen should've been proof enough to me of a queer agenda but which at the time I couldn't see past Miyazaki's painterly sensibilities. Not that I could really call it an agenda, but it's fun to indulge this idea of a conspiracy of queerness underlying mainstream culture (especially cinema and television), which is probably just the love child of cultural post-modernism and queer theory. 

But outside the conspicuously dapper figure of Howl just how queer is the film?

If queerness can be cited as fluid otherness, as a mode always against the normative, then perhaps Howl's queerness can best be exemplified in his anti-war stance. Which is actually more of a passive anti-war stance, because it's not that he disagrees with or is preaching against the war fundamentally, only that his interests do not enclose the war and so it is of minimal importance to him. Howl's interests we are told are more vain, and that vanity is in turn pathologized. But why?

If Howl's vanity pits him against war categorically then why is he seen as 'incomplete' until love interest Sophie restores his heart (literally, if you haven't seen the film go watch it now for reference) and he can finally consummate his partial being in a heterosexual union?

Well, Sophie's got her own flaw or erroneous element seeking consummation inside the magic circle of heteronormative coupling. A witch has put a spell on her turning her into an old woman, but also she has terrible self esteem and this is repeatedly offset against Howl's own (pathological?) self-love, a self-love which the film measures as pathological by his indifference to the war and his refusal to lend his magic to the king's military. 

Sooooooo, what's the greater good here; Howl's vanity/self-love lifestyle as a sorcerer and romantic adventurer, or the consummation of self-love and self-loathing when Howl and Sophie end up together in the film's climax (during which they accidentally discover the missing prince over whom the war is being fought, effectively ending it)?

Again, the value of these modes is measured against the war and with that in mind the film seems to be saying that though Howl's Don-Juan-escapades and wizard's indulgences neutrally ally him with a pacifist stance, it's in coupling with Sophie and (only very accidentally) ending the war that the greatest good lies. 

However, Sophie's deprecating servileness is also presented as the flaw of an indulgent character, even if negatively. So it seems it's not 'vanity' per se which is pathologized, but self-interested behaviours and attributes themselves, a romantic excess of introspection leading away from an engagement with the polity and wider society (especially when the latter is in crisis). 

But then why is the effectiveness of political engagement paired so emphatically with a normative coupling? Or perhaps their coupling is not so normative in as much as both Howl and Sophie operate as inherently queer/fluid personas; Howl a shapeshifting sorcerer, Sophie an ageless victim of a witch's curse posing between old and young, maiden and crone. 

But more importantly who cares?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa (I was in the park yesterday and this fucking cop told me I wasn't allowed to be on the grass doing my crunches, that if I was to be out of the house taking my state approved exercise then I had to keep moving; I hope he gets cancer because when we come out of isolation and I have no core to speak of and zero self esteem then whatever I do as a result will be on his head)

Feeling myself disintegrating in a not completely unpleasant way, like there's this caustic dissonance between the roving anxiety inside me (about things like financial ruin and premature death) which when I leave my house for my designated walk is incongruously offset by abundant leisure, which in any other circumstance would be a sign of national abundance. Instead it's the result of this ghostly pause on everything. There were birds in my window box the other night, who never normally venture this far from the refuge of the park come dusk. The city is that quiet. It's unnerving and gratifying all at once; gratifying to that part of myself that's too lazy to think constructively through crisis and would rather there be a conflagration to clear the slate. Harrowing to that part of myself that hopes there'll be enough time to have a nice life with an admittedly vaguer hope (if only for lack of a radical program) for equal access of the same to others. 

But that's definitely not going to happen. We will not be afforded the luxury of a singular event with bells and whistles. Instead collapse will be prolonged, agonisingly so. People will die, are dying. Meanwhile other people will play music and video games and watch movies and get high and cook their favourite comfort foods, all under duress of public health. Disaster, and leisure, deployed in amounts equal to recognised citizenship, to existing privileges; the more the merrier, the more the easier to weather an unprecedented global event such as this, the more a quarantine resembles a working holiday. For some. 

Funny how this virus has thus far, or until recently, had a character of severity only to those in certain age brackets and with pre-existing health conditions; in the circulation of these facts and to the layman (myself included) a profile has formed, definitely inaccurate, of those prone and those practically immune. But now people in their twenties are dying too, and I feel stupid for ever thinking a virus would make demographic selections on which hosts it would infect and to what degree. I keep thinking about low income families and how my mind is melting here in my relative privilege, which is basically only a privilege of not having dependents and certainly not a privilege of means. It's also a privilege of community. I've chosen to root myself in one particular area and as a natural result I'm basically surrounded by support. There's a lot of mutual leaning happening right now and it's kind of fucking great. I'm wondering how long this will even be possible though, when the dust settles and no one has jobs and there's no economy to speak of. What then? Is it counterproductive to be having these concerns now? Or is it reckless not to, to just sink into an ennui that I swear these walls are whispering me towards? 

Just kidding, I'm not hearing voices just yet. 

I don't know what everyone else's situations are during isolation but mine can barely be called isolation in as much as I am sharing a flat with seven others, boyfriend included. But then this is also giving a false face of pleasantness to the situation. It's collapse and we think the storm has started but it hasn't, and that might've sounded hysterical last week but this week it's too fucking true. I can't believe how easily disrupted, how vulnerable it turns out our world order actually is, that something complaisantly relegated to the dark ages (a virus!) could bring us to our knees practically over night. 

I have never felt so revoltingly close to history. 

Some thoughts on one of the many movies I've been rewatching of late;

Alex Proyas, the 'visionary' behind The Crow (which let's be honest must've been a fluke because everything he's done since has been characteristically stylish but not remotely ballsy enough to carry his ludicrous plots), released a film in 2009 which I think is the best apocalypse movie this side of Deep Impact (another insanely underrated end-time movie). The movie is called Knowing and stars a typically hammy Nicholas Cage as this science professor who's grappling with his purpose in life after the death of his wife. He is also now raising their hearing impaired son and having the same Shamaylan-esque crises of faith as Gibson's ex-priest character from Signs, despite being an academic and not a man of the cloth. The first half (or generously two thirds) of the film runs like a well oiled machine of suspense and intrigue, truly unpredictable and riveting enough to make you forgive it's cheesier riffs on cosmology and determinism. The ending is insane, far-fetched pure science-fiction nonsense and really after the impossible promise of the first half it could only have gone down the road of bonkers. Far from a negative though, the dizzying ambition of the film's conclusion is what makes this stand out for me. 

Spoiler alert. 

Basically the deaf-ish son pulls a letter out of a time capsule at his school, which has been buried in the ground for roughly fifty years. His astro-phsyicist (or something) father figures out that it's a cypher with the dates, coordinates and fatalities of every significant disaster (natural or otherwise) from the last twenty years. Three dates remain and Cage realises these are disasters which are yet to occur and that this cypher is an act of prophecy, which by unseen forces has made it's way into his hands so that he might prevent them from happening. The trouble is the last date is actually an extinction event, the end of all life as we know it. 

Turns out the predictions were made by a little psychic girl who could tap into some higher-dimensional communication by extraterrestrial beings who've known for a very long time that our planet had an expiration date, that a massive solar flare would wipe out all life. Though never confirmed in the film it's implied that these extraterrestrial beings are something like interplanetary guides, perhaps the race that seeded humanity in the first place;  not an overly original idea, but linking this up with exegetical notions of biblical revelation, insinuating the prophecies and angels from the bible are actually alien in origin and not celestial. That's a nice touch. 

The film ends with the children being taken to a second planet so that humanity can continue which leaves more questions than answers; why only kids allowed on planet B? (there is of course a bible passage in which we 'must be like little children to come unto The Lord'; don't ask me which). Also, if they knew earth would burn eventually, why even set up shop here? Why not start on planet B in the first place? It would certainly save an excessive waste of human life, considering they only took like two percent of the population and let everyone else die. Did the adults do something wrong? Is it another romanticism of childhood innocence, when actually we know children if anything are feral instinct-driven bastards and if such a thing as innocence exists then it is learned, acquired through rigorous moral lesson. 

Maybe we were seeded to terraform the planet with carbon, extract it as a resource where they couldn't because the earth's natural atmosphere was poisonous to them? 

Or maybe, and this is more likely, the aliens are bigoted geneticists who feel their creation has been muddied. At the film's conclusion it turns out they're only just taking kids to the new planet, but kids who've 'heard the call'. The criterion remains vague, but what with the nazi aesthetic of the beings themselves, there's a definite eugenics vibe which makes all the existentialist talk before it seem ideologically nasty.