white out on gloss photos (taken in SF Bay Area, and Bethlehem,Maryland.
miscellaneous doodles and assemblage scenes
take out that loan
displacement
Grief makes us precise, whether it is grief because of lost potential, or the absence of a person. Grief expands our capacity to absorb every observation; the smear on the mirror, a minor inconvenience in our commute, the pain we hold in our body. Each of these is a reminder; we are alone, we are poor, what we fill our days with we do not truly enjoy. Carl Fisher’s Capitalist Realism portrays the contemporary worker as having been wholly consumed by capitalist ideology. In actuality, the working class, and humans in general, strive for comfort, or the road of least resistance. This road may seem contradictory to our own best interest, but, as Trotsky explained, “Revolution is impossible until it's inevitable.”
Marx understood that humans were endowed with the power to be “active natural beings”, but that with this “vital power” they are also a limited creature, prone to suffering. The despondency that accompanies capitalism is nothing new. Marx understood that humans were not only an object of their senses, but also ruled by the same laws as nature. “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process….men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking”. We live in a sensuous world, however crumbling and ruinous it is, we also take part in it. Although our reality may be bleak, consciousness is not absolute. It seems formulaic, that a negative bias ultimately arises from suffering, and remains till death. At a certain point, despondency can be transformed into its opposite, hope, and even its highest form:allocentrism.
“One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others” Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, or platitude, remains a principle of mine. I believe I read this quote over a decade ago in The Sun, an independent magazine based in North Carolina. Skeptical towards institutions, I maintained a steady discipline for reading. Unruled journals, forgotten but not lost, are filled with passages from books and periodicals. Within the same book, Coming of Age , De Beauvoir describes the contradiction of her own testimony. “The worker's decline begins earlier. All he sees around him is an arid waste. He has not been granted the possibility of committing himself to projects that might have peopled [his] world with goals, values and reasons for existence.” Fundamentally, De Beauvoir touches on the worker’s inability to coordinate his existence with his “essence.”
Why have the audacity to hope for potential, with the carnage left behind as proof. It’s safe to say that Fisher’s take on the revolutionary momentum is outdated. This hole that can be manipulated in the “ideological tapestry”, is something inherent within all of us, but is not brought on by some abstract idea, it is through life that we come to these conclusions. We have the potential to overcome negative bias, regardless of its origin. Fate is not a machine but happenstance.
