Steal This Essay 1: Content Is a Pure Public Good

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Subject: On Negativity Cc: sonofgomez709 at 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.