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follypersistof those many lines on the tip of the tongue, ready to speak in another's voice, it's worth talking about one from the intro of PARTIZAN 05: Profit and Loss:
"there is no such thing as a crisis at all."
PARTIZAN envisions a particular future millennia (time is long) from now, acting as a kind of culmination to the divine universe/divine cycle that began in COUNTER/Weight. Built from these roots, companies and capitalists still play a pivotal role in the overall cosmogony. Stretching back to COUNTER/Weight's famous Animal Out of Context, listeners have taken solace in corporate slogans writ for muting the human and returning them to the service of capital. People have "Remember, you've beaten your worst days" inscribed upon their flesh and if it brings them a moment of peace it is worth it - with or without the Context of "Tomorrow, you'll be more than ready to cut down trees again." Perhaps this admission (it is worth it if it gets you through), and balance of dread (do we trust capital to write our internal monologue?), work in concert as precedent, as the structures we rely on seem to crash like satellites around us.
Burden Bittenbach, heir of Kirst Bittenbach, the founder of the great capitalist conglomerate-cum-protectorate Stel Orion, relays his truth in a canny, comfortingly venomous voice: "There is no such thing as a crisis at all. Things are always going wrong, and when they do, that isn’t an exception to the rule, but an extension of it. Expect every week to come with a bad day. Build a process around it. Have someone on standby. Take notes. Only a fool would expect anything else."
And like. Are you not already convinced? Are you not already in love? The best truths in the world confuse and contort the mind until you realize how obviously materially true they are — of course there's nothing outside the world, there's only the parts of the world! Anticipating it, developing our responses in advance, is one way to deal with the real world. This idea tempts us to be folded back into service of capital as it inures us to those dangers presented by the capitalist, by the power isolated in the few and alienated from us, encouraging us to think of the problems they cause as natural forces. But it also encourages us to be proactive, to resist the urge of finance capital in particular to hollow out the marrow and monetize the rot, to instead make our networks robust enough to engage and support one another. Have someone on standby — have slack in the structures you build your life around. Have redundancies for communication; take notes so that if someone else needs to step in—or you grow to be someone else—you have a record of what was being done and why. It requires work to maintain but it boosts the floor on how bad things will get when things, inevitably, do go bad.
The question then is, is it inevitable? Are we comforted by the softer idea that crisis is inevitable? Is there a moral hazard presented by that comfort that makes that crisis less likely to be prevented, and more likely to occur? Would you rather face Scylla, and be guaranteed to lose a few of your crew, or risk Charybdis, and have an even chance of emerging clean or losing everyone on board?
This is a question for which the only answer is a personal one. As for me, no matter the roots, I think it's an admirable idea; but my ethics are not for everyone. And so when your boss makes a terrible mistake and the responsibility for fixing it falls on you, you may take a deep breath and say to yourself with a wry sort of grimace, "well, there is no such thing..." and hope the you of the past and the you of the present can act sufficiently in concert.
Burden Bittenbach, heir of Kirst Bittenbach, the founder of the great capitalist conglomerate-cum-protectorate Stel Orion, relays his truth in a canny, comfortingly venomous voice: "There is no such thing as a crisis at all. Things are always going wrong, and when they do, that isn’t an exception to the rule, but an extension of it. Expect every week to come with a bad day. Build a process around it. Have someone on standby. Take notes. Only a fool would expect anything else."
And like. Are you not already convinced? Are you not already in love? The best truths in the world confuse and contort the mind until you realize how obviously materially true they are — of course there's nothing outside the world, there's only the parts of the world! Anticipating it, developing our responses in advance, is one way to deal with the real world. This idea tempts us to be folded back into service of capital as it inures us to those dangers presented by the capitalist, by the power isolated in the few and alienated from us, encouraging us to think of the problems they cause as natural forces. But it also encourages us to be proactive, to resist the urge of finance capital in particular to hollow out the marrow and monetize the rot, to instead make our networks robust enough to engage and support one another. Have someone on standby — have slack in the structures you build your life around. Have redundancies for communication; take notes so that if someone else needs to step in—or you grow to be someone else—you have a record of what was being done and why. It requires work to maintain but it boosts the floor on how bad things will get when things, inevitably, do go bad.
The question then is, is it inevitable? Are we comforted by the softer idea that crisis is inevitable? Is there a moral hazard presented by that comfort that makes that crisis less likely to be prevented, and more likely to occur? Would you rather face Scylla, and be guaranteed to lose a few of your crew, or risk Charybdis, and have an even chance of emerging clean or losing everyone on board?
This is a question for which the only answer is a personal one. As for me, no matter the roots, I think it's an admirable idea; but my ethics are not for everyone. And so when your boss makes a terrible mistake and the responsibility for fixing it falls on you, you may take a deep breath and say to yourself with a wry sort of grimace, "well, there is no such thing..." and hope the you of the past and the you of the present can act sufficiently in concert.
