And the fate of all those zillions of messages and images, in their casual brightness, was to be equalized, to pour forth in an overwhelming glut..
The very act of collaging is a city act—the compacting, side by side, of a swarm of different images which, like people in a city, have little or no common history: the essence of the act of collaging is that the things should have no prior relationship to one another; all they have in common is their presence in the same work of art, just as what all city dwellers have in common is their presence in the same city.'
The bawling pressure of its images—rocket, eagle, crowd, street signs, oranges, box, insect, crowds—creates an open-ended inventory of modern life, a series without a final term, the lyrical outpourings of a mind satiated by what was quick, daily, and real. Its subject is glut.'
--Robert Hughes.
~
Anyone who has lived in a big city and been drawn to city life will immediately realize the appeal of those words by Robert Hughes (whose Barcelona and Shock of the New are hugely interesting. His t.v. programmes are also excellent (though the one on Goya was a complete dud).
And the appeal lies precisely in the 'fragmentarines' of city life, the ability to avoid the imposing narratives of religion, village, tradition and the family. Also: there's a hint of something radical about the equality of strangers, something exhilarating about the final victory of nominalism over metaphysics. 'A series without a final term' is a nomadic thought. Finally, to love without a sense of belonging or even a need for belonging: sovereign becoming. Half of modernity is, of course, this relation to the contingent, the fleeting..this desire for escape from 'boxes' (Houdini), to not be named, to fall in love with the person sitting next to you on the tube.
To put on any other hat is to given in to conservatism, the religious sensibility or, worse, nostalgia for some long-lost unity in your life when there is in fact only bewilderment.
No-one can deny-in so far as they are alive to the times they live in- that there is something liberating about the return to daily, ordinary life..to the notion that there is something spiritual here, right now, right here.
But I want to question that because all the hype about the transitory, the ridiculous appropriation of the idea of nomadism, is itself a product of a late capitalist mentality. In fact, it might be said that religious fundamentalism is itself the other, bastard half, of that mentality and that the two are profoundly intertwined. Instead of talking about the 'essence' of religious fundamentalism why no talk about it as a historical phenomenon? Nostalgia and tribal belonging, narratives of national and cultural identity are not merely a response to the temporality of modernity; they are its vital 'other'!
The relative stability of family life, gender subservience, 'social capital' and a culture of restraint are all aspects of a life that stands 'outside' of capitalist relations and from which value can be extracted, accumulated (up to a point). Without limits, border controls, the game is over. That 'standing outside' is not mysticism but a mystique constructed by capitalism.
{Aside: one example that is relevant today: the 'wild man' Ishmael, outside the centrality of history, beyond the Judaeo-Christian tradition, is the perfect foil to the reasonableness and gaiety of modern man..of course, at other times, the accusation was precisely the opposite: Muslims and their religion were too worldly, too obsessed, like the Jews, with the law instead of the purity of the heart}.
We no longer can think of what we hold in common without being labeled reactionary. That's been the remarkable success story of neoliberalism over the last forty years. The equality we esteem is, when you think about it, really the formal equality of the market (that this rests on deep substantive inequalities is nobody's business).
But why the cult of the fragment and not just the fragment? If one thinks about that word then you begin to wonder whether the cult is something that has been cultivated, produced, manufactured. 'Cult' suggests a technique of management: the organization of the image as an endless, flickering and disrupting glow. Quickness, lightness (Calvino) is the story. The end of the story is the story.
Glut suggests superfluity. We live in an age of excess, which means redundancy as well. There are too many Muslims, too many religious people, too many immigrants and yet there are no more borders! In the old days we could simply expel them, like lepers or mad people, to beyond the city limits.
It's not just that world has lost its balance-and the impending ecological crisis is surely an indicator of that; it's that the lack of balance is something to be celebrated. Surrounded by a glut of things, things that ultimately bore us to death, the only response is to cheer on the production of more junk, collect it all and represent it, make a cult of it.
Life, Illich once wrote, has become an idol.
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