Sleepy Weather

I sit outside watching my son at play in the dirt in the light of the afternoon sun. He runs a hand over the ground like he's smoothing a blanket, and with the same disregard for the transference of disease. I'm struck by a vague sense of his limited powers of differentiation, and of the growth of what powers he does possess out of that nebulous pool of sensual stimuli beginning, let's say, in the womb. And as I continue to watch, he inserts a fingertip into a nostril and digs out a viscous coagulum, looks around coyly, and stabs it into the earth. "Take that, wench." The words bubble up out of nowhere inside my head. My eyelids feel heavy. I start to nod. I decide to surrender to the god of siesta.

The Gates of Heaven Are Closing

When a rich person looks down on a poor person and denounces him as the source of his own poverty, he's not wrong, he's just following a different protocol for inscribing subjectivity. The person - the subject - is an assemblage of multiple forces; the individual is only its avatar. But it would be a mistake to think of those forces as purely social; the assemblage is not a class (the rich, the poor). It's less human, more elemental, more demonic. There are occult forces at play in every gesture, all too easily dismissed under the rubric of chance or coincidence.

A subjective act can be any event whatsoever, understood as an irruption of surplus reality into the world. In this sense, winning the lottery is a choice as surely as any kind of wage labor: the numbers fall into place as uncannily as the neurological impulses directing muscular contractions.

All of this adds a new spin to Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." A rich person, in so far as he is alleged to create his own wealth, is an inflated subject encompassing not only the individual - the avatar - but also the entire legacy of conditions enabling his prosperity, up to and including other individuals from generations past, and all of their numerous bequests. He is a vast, pulsating mob bottle-necked at the gates of heaven.

The paradoxical flip side of this view is that when a poor person, as an individual, blames society for his own misfortune, he unwittingly accepts his own denunciation. He chooses to be poor by relinquishing himself to the subjectivity of his disabling conditions, and likewise becomes too unwieldy to pass through the gates.

Rich or poor, it is better to be so immeasurably.

Trapping Fools

By now you will have heard about the Supreme Court's ruling on April 2nd to end restrictions on overall contributions to federal campaigns. If I know you, there is a good chance that you will agree with me on what this signifies: the further collapse into political impotence of the citizen majority, the tilt of power leaning in favor of the ultra-wealthy. But you will probably disagree with me about its greater significance. There is none whatsoever. 

The inconsolable outrage of progressives is as amenable to what they ostensibly despise about the ruling as it is completely predictable. They clamor for the right to an alternative configuration for trapping fools in the serial order, where all voices are rendered equally impotent by the redistribution of contingencies separating individual speech from the actions of state. Instead of allowing for state sovereignty to converge on the sovereignty of a few individuals, they would let it disseminate into the inhuman dimensions of the world at large.

But dissemination is always already immanent without being represented through legal mechanisms. Representation is only a passing illusion, a futile gesture for arresting the collapse into immanence.