i live in a glass house. i don’t throw stones. or maybe i do. i live in a glass house. i do not dare change clothes, or touch myself, or speak my secrets, lest the act of living become pornography. or maybe i do. i live in a glass house. it has no doors to let others in, no corners to hide, no shadows to sleep in, no sun—only light. the view is beautiful. i live in a glass house. i cannot leave. i live in a glass house. the view is beautiful. i feel terror in the night, when i cannot see out, but i know they look in. when they look in, we trade places. i see myself. they look. or maybe i do. i feel myself. applause. i feel not myself. applause. the view is lucrative. this is not my house. i live in a glass city. i live in a glass house.
i lie in a glass coffin. death is no longer a subject. it is an object—an abjection, a point in time, past now. childhood reaches out, tracing memories with glass fingers, this is not my house, days move like particles, pixelated, weightless and heavy. i hear and see everything. i hear and see and nothing. only light. light— light, which radiates but does not illuminate. light which circulates. light which casts no shadow. no time for shadows. no time for culture. time is death. culture becomes the subject of death…
“and this is what underlies the beauty of the cadaver and the failure of the interior spaces. in any case, the very ideology of “cultural production” is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange. nothing can be done about it. too bad for the masses…”
— jean baudrillard, simulacra and simulation
culture cannot enter a glass city. neither can obscurity, or delay, or my body. a total evacuation of distance, a total saturation of surface. there is no culture, no self without the time needed to cast shadows. no self without distance, no other without distance. we live in a glass city:
“today’s society of control possesses a distinct panoptic structure. not lonesomeness through isolation, but hypercommunication guarantees transparency… they display themselves on the panoptic market. pornographic putting-on-display and panoptic control complement each other. exhibitionism and voyeurism feed the net as a digital panopticon. the society of control achieves perfection when subjects bare themselves not through outer constraint but through self-generated need, that is, when the fear of having to abandon one’s private and intimate sphere yields to the need to put oneself on display without shame.
distance and shame refuse to be integrated into the accelerated circulation of capital, information, and communication. in this way, all confidential spaces for withdrawing are removed in the name of transparency. light floods them, and they are then depleted. it only makes the world more shameless and more naked.”
— byung-chul han, the transparency society
we live in a glass city—in full transparency—the hyperbright.
in the hyperbright, we exist. in the dark, we fail to exist. but there is no dark anymore, no privacy, no world fully disconnected, only the hyperbright. in the hyperbright, we are post-death, in the sense that there is no living without true death. and there is no such thing as virtual death. the hyperbright collapses time into immediacy. we are now without linear time. ideas have no time to gestate, no time to grow, to form a shadow, before they are exposed to the masses. without a place to hide, and without linear time, subculture has no space or shelter to evolve, because there is no obscurity, no erotism in a world of transparency. every movement is threatened by immediacy and transparency.
all subversion is reverted in light of acceleration society. all subversion is engulfed by a society of profit. where all good ideas become commodity, reduced to metric and circulation, the aura of culture is both threatened and enticed by exposure. all culture is vultured. creatives are left with a choice: of not either not existing, or becoming consumed by their own virality. everything risks becoming an overplayed reproduction in a hyper-instant. no aura, no distance, no erotism, only light and acceleration.
“it locks us into a reactive time, which is always full (of outrage and pseudo-novelty). there is no continuous time in which shadows can grow, only a time that is simultaneously seamless (without gaps: there is always “new” content streaming in) and discontinuous (each new compulsion makes us forget what preceded it). the result is a mechanical and unacknowledged repetition.
is it still possible for us to cultivate shadows?”
— mark fisher
is it still possible to cultivate shadows?
i feel terror in the night, when i cannot see out, but i know they look in.
i lie in a glass coffin.
the self is no longer a subject. death is no longer a subject. death becomes the object of the self.
i am not dead, i am not alive. i do not sleep, i do not dream.
i cannot die in a glass house.
thespiritbox.mp3 