Accelerate or Evacuate: an introduction to politics of/as sorcery

“Who arrived at this article by way of rigorous, self-contained thought and not through a bunch of hyperlinked wormholes teleporting us to increasingly curated and commodified digital spaces? Who here has arrived without making jokes that later became sincere, having recently been tugged even just one notch beyond their current understanding?
Life under anxious capitalism—a process that reactively reproduces anxiety through the compulsion to communicate in terms of artificial social performances grounded in the dominant system’s terms—has become a venereal cul-de-sac. Alienated as ever, we end each day by re-pondering the limits of truth and fact, re-grasping at articles where the outbound links lead either to the dead or to living persons who speak in tongues.
There is no escape velocity in our current condition—a condition of hypernormalization: the rapid oscillation between opposing views on subjectivity, the dialectics of the last century, and the indeterminate genealogical flows from modernism to postmodernism to metamodernism. It is this unpredictable and imperceptible terrain—a vicarious cultural milieu that has mutated from sincerity and irony into a form of unmitigated cynicism—against which anti-capitalist politics must begin to organise.
In such a society, where each statement is simultaneously genuine and sardonic, our options tend to resemble one of two possibilities: 1) we can attempt to evacuate these ambiguities, pushing for a re-turn to an enlightenment serialization of rationality, which, according to a well-meaning if not traditionalist segment of the Anglo-American left, can still provide a basis for transformation and emancipation OR 2) we can adopt the cynical language of power, a structuration of differences, an ironic-yet-sincere voice that attempts to ‘out-dada a dada president’ in a race to some infinite bottom against an opponent for which controversies make them more popular among their supporters.
Evacuate or accelerate. Whichever approach one sympathizes with, there is no denying the haunting impassability of this tautological trap we have created between serial rationality and structured cynicism.”
rest @ http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/introduction-politics-ofas-sorcery/
https://adamkingsmith.com/

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