Has there been some sort of cosmic traffic jam between truth and expectation?
We all know about the relationship between truth and simulacra. Where it is not a question of simulacra as some sort of non-truth, rather it is a concern with the truth of simulacra. Here truth is a camouflage of lies and desire and not camouflaged by them. Camouflaged against the enemy of existential entropy. Faith over fact. Here are the lies we want to believe, and the desires we want fulfilled. Letting go of the slowly-bobbing horse of the merry-go-round sends you off on a tangent of depression. In the dark spaces of the carnival no one sees the tears and the wimpering cries certainly can’t be heard over the gleeful yelps of self-satisified satiation. Get back on that fucking horse.
Of course, this is all expected, no? The educated classes scoff at this paramount stupidity. No, worse, literally turn up noses at the fucking stench of desperation to buy in, like at a casino where the possible dream of losers winning subsumes all reality of actual odds, of the reality of the permanent house win. The simulcra is a dance full of evolutionary perversions where the biological intelligence of our hormones propel us into the multi-player tournament space of risk-taking and rewards. An agitated passivity. Feel it! Risk! It is real! Rewarded! But what is the reality? I scoff at this stupidity. It is what I expect. But isn’t this another furious lull? Another freeway masquerading as a side street? Another instant classic? World famous in New Zealand, anyone?
Isn’t there an unthinkingness positioned at the edge of thought, perhaps of evolutionary biology as much as our hormones, an unthinkingness built into thinking? Planned obsolescence of the intellect. This is a program of pure strength. Not of meeting expectations, but of expectations being used to meet the world. The time-space of expectation is a project of the will, continually being propositioned. It is the same challenge as a marriage proposal, but at the level of perception-action. The intellect of the middle-classes is only capable of producing expectations of comfort. It is not a question of going to war against anxiety. They are comfortable with their anxieties because it is what they expect. It is a case of going to war against expectations. (Fuck you and your expectations.)
Expectation is not truth. It is something much more sinister, because it is on the horizon of truth. Roughly hewn, medieval, viking kittens. All pliers and the music video tragedy of flaming plastic flowers. This is the real complicity between simulacra and expectation, a synergy of truth. The burden of expectation continually repotentialises the participatory simulacra. The Right have a mortgage on the participatory simulacra by pwning the technologies of expectation. It is an investment and a totem. They are project managers, not of lies and desires, but of expectations. The technocratic machinery of expectation is a tapestry of synergistic resonances. Individuals can be replaced to maintain the expectation-machine. The individual is irrelevant. Meet the expectations at the edge of the world.
How to break expectations? Divert them? Is it a seduction? A battle? Do people really only want to get a nice job, buy a nice house, go to the football and scream for a while, have a kid or two, eat nice food, read nice books, be friends with nice people, get drunk, have an affair, massage the various scandals of middle class existence like blips on a radar? Is this the sum total of expectations? The disciplining of life for the so-called fortunate. Why bother living? Oh, because the expectations don’t present themselves as such, all played out, as a function of intellect. A calculus of reason presenting itself as a screen across which is projected the flickering images of simulacra. It is all a struggle. They live the struggle of the actualisation of life under the burden of expectation. The struggle is real, of course. It is a mapping of the event of life into single-serve portions of expectation. Struggle. Struggle to make life easy. Work to retire. Navigation in the fog of an other’s expectations, but it must be, surely? It does belong to someone, doesn’t it, this mobile architecture of expectations?
So sitting around having drinks over the holiday period, talking with people, as you do, call bullshit on expectations, especially if you don’t share them. Why inherit expectations? Shouldn’t we create our own? It is a poverty of intellect, to assume an inherited unthinkingness. Let’s not meet the edge of the world with expectations, let’s meet over the edge of expectations in a weaponised world (nature, duration, chaosmos). I do not want to merely share my expectations with you. I love you all. I want to share the world with you, and be worthy of it.