door: Ian Alan Paul (May 10th, 2025)
https://illwill.com/fascism-and-the-spectacle-of-death
pictures: https://www.vice.com/en/article/camera-made-of-police-bombs/
“The degradation of life has saturated society so completely that it now appears as just another unremarkable feature of the scenery, entirely predictable and completely accounted for in advance, widely documented and circulated for all to see, glued like decorative wallpaper onto the inside of every eyelid. In a society whose common sense involves the perpetual degradation, devaluation, and destruction of the living, no one bothers anymore to deny or dissimulate the reality that child laborers are buried among the cobalt they dig from the earth by hand, that families of migrants collapse and die at the border beneath the desert sun, or that distressed and depressed workers jump from the upper story windows of iPhone assembly plants. The affluent and the impoverished alike swipe between videos of military jets bombing refugee tents, of riot police spraying chemical weapons into crowds, and of people being dragged off the street and sent to camps, all of which serve as high resolution reminders of just how superfluous and disposable capitalism has made life to be.”
“What is involved in submitting to a fascist culture, in embracing and living a fascist life? Above all else, it requires becoming enamored with the view that some people are meant to live while others are meant to die, grasping life and death simply as they appear as complementary entries in capitalism’s balance sheets, and ultimately in literally seeing lives in this way. The economic division between affluence and poverty which is the foundation of class society thus also takes form as a sensible division between lives which are perceived to be of worth and lives which are perceived to be worthless, aesthetically shaped by the desolation which is inherent in the total economization of life and death. “
“As the world grows increasingly unlivable, the question remains whether we will be able to constitute ourselves in such a way so that the world is made to be increasingly intolerable.9 A life experiences something as intolerable when it sensually refuses something in the world, when it can no longer withstand an experience and thus is drawn to radically upend the situation within which it lives. An intolerable world is one in which things can no longer simply go on, in which business as usual becomes unbearable and is seen as something which must be overturned. Intolerability explodes in diverse forms, manifesting as workers who walk off the job after a boss has made one too many demands, as students who occupy a campus laboratory when they learn military research is being conducted there, or as prisoners who set fire to the building which cages them after a new round of punishments and restrictions is announced. In each instance, a shifting perspective of the situation also shifts what is possible within it, revealing new lines of flight to follow, new sides to take, new targets to strike. The task of making the world intolerable thus involves a violent break with capital’s sensible organization of the world, just as it involves a sharpening of our senses and a sharing of perceptions which allow us to fully live within and forcefully confront the reality of our situation.”
