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Here, the world is in its terminal phase of aestheticization: lips without a speaking subject and the body in dreams under the dark but charming sky of all the signs of seduction. There are no voices, no memories, only the aestheticized signs of the portrait of clouds and the image of the reclining body as indications of the purely cynical nature of the trompe l’oeil. The signs of difference are themselves indifferent. A topology of driftworks and subjectivity in the reverie of ruins remains.
No longer “possessive individualism” under the Lockean sign of private property and use value, but now possessed individualism under the sign of abuse value. The aestheticization ofexperience to such a point ofexcess that nature, subjectivity, and desire migrate into seduction: into a game of chance and indifferent relations of pure positionality. “Possessed individualism” is subjectivity to a point of aesthetic excess that the self no longer has any real existence, only a perspectival appearance as a site where all the referents converge and implode. Subjectivity, therefore, which is created out of the ruins of abuse value, a designer self which emerges from the cancellation of all the signs. An apparent self whose memories can be fantastic reveries of a past which never really existed, because it occupies a purely virtual space-the space of an accidental topology and seductive contiguity of aesthetic effects. No longer a private subject in a public space, but a public self in a private imaginary time: a parallel self among many others drifting aimlessly, but no less violently for that, in parallel worlds.
© Arthur Kroker
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