roachboy

empire was in infrastructure.
empire was in the transparency of infrastructure in the seamlessness of capital and commodity flows. it was amenable to acquiring expression through any number of local modalities, "lifestyles" or class positions or odd combinations of both
all articulated through the continuous waking dream of a mass-mediatic real-time opinion co-ordination and the particular sense of being present or part-of that real-time opinion co-ordination bring along with it.

this co-ordination is the condition of possibility for all forms of modern domination. that the americans fashioned for themselves a neo-colonial form of it is not surprising---why bother with direct physical domination when you get get people to dominate themselves? and if you want people to dominate themselves, what better way than to colonize their dreams? and if you want to colonize people's dreamings what better way than a barrage of images seamlessly presented the work of which is done by consumers through the experiences of repetition?

but its a fun domination. and its hard to point at individual elements and say Clearly This is Bad. there's merely more and less entertaining. that sort of thing. and you feel kinda mean for saying stuff about fun domination.

empire was in the seamless of the flows that underpin the coalescing and coming apart that is everybody's everyday experience. it was in the transparency of flows and infrastructure, in the disappearance of domination. it wasnt replaced by anything. and it certainly wasn't somehow no longer a feature of good ole capitalism. the game simply was refigured acquired a new geography and in the metropole people moved in considerable numbers into flow-servicing as a way of life.

inside the empire which was not an empire there was no hegemony and everyone would tell you that in more or less exactly the same way.
inside the empire there was neither information or a lack of information. there was neither democracy or not-democracy. there was uncertainty and withdrawal into private space. inside empire there was a dissolving of organization and an erasure of the public except as an image of glitterati you could be part of from the television cheap seats in the living room of your place.

inside the empire everyone was quite sure in exactly the same way of how terribly terribly free they were and they could tell you that in exactly the same ways at exactly the same times because sentences that told us how terribly terribly free we are circulate as an interior flow within the other flows of commodities available to dream with.

the curious thing is that neo-colonial empire is about control of consent really. power is of course violence but it doesn't correlate to violence---it's the consent that frames it, that makes it not violence or, better, more often, that makes it invisible.

what the bush people brought the american empire was a problem of consent. this problem ran in all directions, but it seems to have become a kind of soft imperial crisis by the end of his second debacle of a term.

but it's all soft crisis in a context of fun domination. freest people to ever freely be free we of course don't think too hard about such debby downer stuff.
there is no crumbling.
there is no empire.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite