I found youse some text warez at ambulanzen.Enjoy! Subject: On Negativity Cc: sonofgomez709@yahoo.com The Future of Negativity "All advice is bad, but good advice is fatal." Oscar Wilde The future has become completely predictable; a script that is being worked through from A to Z. The Plan has finally prevailed. There are merely some anomalies, corrections that have not yet been made. All arguments are for the following of the prescribed route. It is true that there are always a number of simultaneous scenarios that are partially overlapping and partially mutually exclusive. But they have one thing in common: they are all true. Will it be an ecological catastrophe or an atom bomb? Whichever you request. Humanitarian disaster or military defeat? The choice is yours. Will it be abstract or figurative? Whichever way the wind blows. Brazil or China? All options have been thought through. All the right specialists have been found and their reports are ready and waiting to be implemented. The field of vision has narrowed to one perspective, wherever you look. There are no surprises, only possibilities. Reread Musil. Even the biggest problems (AIDS in Africa, Bin Laden in Afghanistan, CCP in the WTO, Bush in Washington) will never be more than entrances to new markets. At the moment they appear, all phenomena already contain the structure of this model. All that remains to us is the dull task of unravelling the software underneath. The number of programmes is extremely limited. The hermeneutic and semiotic reading of the world puts up a smokescreen which manages to enchant us again and again with its wealth of shapes, turns and suggestions of depth, but alas, in fact it is all a bit simpler than that. The theory of difference is no more than a cloth for the bleeding in the "abimes superficiels." Unbearable (and irresistible) simplicity is no longer really distinguishable from banality, and this sends many a public intellectual fleeing to the safe haven of interpretation. Through this mechanism, an originally critical practice like cultural studies has slipped away into a safe, meaningless sketch of image culture. "Visual culture" has degenerated into a profession with prospects. This is how modelistic thinking works: once you get it, you can apply it to anything. We locate this suprahistory when we train our gaze on the sub-human level. The drama of micropolitics: the pension plan is in place by the time you're 21. Try and get out from under that. A little heli-skiing won't do it. Total burnout at 26 seems like it might help, but it turns out later to have been just a sabbatical. RSI at 14? Just as easily. What else is the future but paying off mortgages and life insurance? The secret collective longing for a market crash, i.e. a world war, remains a last, authentic expression of the longing to make a clean sweep, to undergo an adventure and then start all over. The hippies supplied this model. There's no running aground, lost ideals or middle-aged cynicism in this case  that would have been the fall-of-man model. Yesterday's hippies are today's crisis managers, guiding whole peoples at a time through their dips. They work according to the dynamic model, which uses resistance to get ahead by systematically improvising. In this model, things must go wrong for one to become a success. This is in contrast to the compulsory positivism that three-quarters of the world must disavow to preserve its good humour. Hippie thinking is happy with any opposition and derives its energy from it. Negativity rejects every model; that much is clear. But is repudiation, however elegant or brutal, not itself also a model? Negativity distinguishes itself rigorously from deconstructivism. Deconstruction is an installation CD-ROM that always works. But the software's ability to anticipate is nil. Something must be built up before it can be taken apart, thus the orientation to the past. The nice thing about this model, however, is its youthful elan in believing that the future can be predicted. That is the game Soros plays. His theory of reflectivity is based on a solid foundation of European negativity. This is why he can stay "ahead of the wave",most often, while legions of market analysts get caught in their own sales speeches, whose nonsense they can never understand, since belief in their spiels is precisely the product they're selling. And non-monetary negativity, where is that? Who can enjoy the certainty of decline, and benefit from it? What a riddle! But one thing is sure: there will always be enough that can be destroyed. "As long as there is death, there is hope." The future of thinking, the development of forms of expression, planetary architecture, these are all projects of others. Negativity is an experimental attitude, an exercise in remembering, followed now and then by a short series of outbursts, and then a long period of hiding inside normality. Optimism can turn into gloominess. On the other hand, it is impossible for cheerfulness to neutralise negativity. Negativity is itself a form of cheerfulness. There's no future for negativity, a punk would say. The marketing department of negative.com (TM) should really be at its wit's end, but that is not the case. Negativity continues unexpectedly to do well, generation after generation, even as it denies its own future.