Desire Machines

notes towards nothing

Screen-desire. Information-desire. The inability to break away from the scroll. Maladies of the present.

The desire to be a market function and thus loved by the market. Mental illness.

Is there a way to think that isn’t reflective and expressive of anxiety about one’s status in the market or markets?

Without a true home—it seems the desire to be desired because the substitute home. The social network. The incessant pings of the feedback machine. “Desire machines work only when they break down.” (D&G)

“Culture sinks into the psyche and becomes character” according to Philip Rieff. This seems profoundly true. Inside of everyone an episteme hums away like a motor. Inside the soul is the soul of the age. We are repetition machines.

The collectivization of personality takes away so much poetic enchantment from meeting another person. Here, instead of flesh, is discourse. According to Casanova, the best part is climbing up the stairs—but the stairs just lead to repressed, normative, lonely machines… not bodies…

The meta verse is already here in the sense that people think of themselves increasingly in the terms of their meta or online identities—having lost track of their corporeality and reality in the process. It is possible to be ‘hot’—for instance—a self-created identity—without being ‘beautiful’ (a physical state).