express yourself !

I can, therefore I must.
---Zizek.

Express yourself. Just do it! Go with the flow. If you don't, it must be machismo on your part (so dated!) or some form of repression (you aren't Catholic, are you b? Or a conservative, a fundamentalist?). Or is this a White Man thing...the white man couldn't abide the Red Man's secretive nature, his reticence. One wonders if he feels the need to expose nature herself?

Physical, social, and psychical nudity is the order of the day.
---E. Enriquez.

Confess! (so says the Inquisitor)...a confessional society. Bare it all, let it all hang out, bro'. That's what it's about, isn't it. Exorcise your demons: the therapeutic society, making yourself desirable? And yeah, let's not talk about limits, or private and public realms and how capitalism destroys them (no, that would be too close to home). Art, religion..it's just a choice, a lifestyle choice, a preference ordering.

'The rush to the numerous beauty salons springs partly from existential concerns, and the use of cosmetic products is not always a luxury. For fear of being taken out of use as obsolete, ladies and gentleman dye their hair...'How can I become beautiful?' runs the title of a booklet recently launched on to the market..it shows ways 'to stay young and beautiful both now and for ever'.

No, not Qutb, but Kraucer in the 1920's.

Here's some more:

'..history is no process at all but a hodgepodge of kaleidoscopic changes-something like clouds that gather and disperse at random. There is no flow of time'

A pointed, spiked life. A few instants, 'moments', 'events', loosely held together. 'Things themselves are experienced as insubstantial [and] appear in an evenly and flat grey tone, ...float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money' (Simmel)

This relentless drive to commodititzation (what M.J. Radin calls 'commodification'). What is your market value, your net worth (as the Americans say). An idea has passed its shelf life..I don't buy what you're saying. Publish or perish.

Isn't the internet fueling such tendencies? Not only in terms of 'expressiveness' (and one would have to ask: an expression of what..the 'subjectless subject'?) but also in terms of 'one-click' buying. I want it, and I want it now. Not genuine expressiveness in a public world, but a selection of traits to be displayed, as if they were a shopping list. Not a real conversation which requires listening, revision, continuous attention.

Question: what is meant by 'experience'?

But to have desires without reflection, silence, and only those types of desires ...isn't that to be like the gambler in a virtual world, a frictionless dream world of 'zero drag'

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time...the stabilising old narratives of religion and divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment.
---J. Franzen.

'Love abstains from promising an easy passage to happiness and meaning. A 'pure relationship' inspired by consumerist practices promises that passage to be easy and trouble-free, while rendering happiness and meaning hostage to fate'
---Z. Bauman.