Why did Gregor Samsa wake up as a huge ‘insect’? Is it because he had one foot in each of the worlds? Then, according to necessity, he should have woken within the class chilopoda, ‘with each passing day, I feel myself more chitinously woke in inverse proportion to woke’s disappearance from the wider world. My chitin-woke complex operates as the scaffolding substance to the cuticles of my epidermis and trachea, not to mention my peritrophic membrane, that semi-permeable, non-cellular structure, of my gut epithelium! If we agree chitin is necessary to the practical integrity of my exoskeleton, and to the peritrophic matrix, forming complex structures integrated within varietal collections of cuticle and peritrophic matrix proteins, which in turn generate the physicochemical and mechanical stuff of biocomposites, does all that mean I am now a leftist? Sometimes I even find myself thinking the crazy old nonsense, abolish all states, Israel first, all the others last - and really believing it! The shame of it, what has become of me, am I an anti-imperialist now? Certainly, my sympathies function as a barometer of defeat, they indicate, or are engaged only by that food bolus which is just now passing undigested from the gut of the world. Alternatively, if I am not a leftist, then am I to be considered a tragedian? That is to say, I have always felt humanity in its fullest amplitude may be recognised only in the tyrant at the moment of his defeat. My chilopody senses register the full spectrum of evanescence not seen ordinarily by human eyes. Only I can perceive the register where truth encounters something of itself, something emanating, where it sheds what has just now, and all of a sudden, become insupportable. As mighty Human Resources departments archive their once vital strategies of diversity, equity and inclusion, the vast reticulated digital PR networks recycling idealised representations of identity that corporations once energised, now rapidly wither and disintegrate, along with the monetary vitality they were once indexed to. Those momentous battles fought between trivialities seeking to grift objective legitimation, and attain the utopia of a viable funding stream, have met their natural end amongst so much disinvestment. Woke was an imposed discourse, a managerialist ideology, designed to break down directly experienced modes of collective bargaining and common cause through legalistic entanglements and the representation of gradations in quantities of relative privilege - woke managerialism turned the given form of the demarcation dispute back against its workforce. Whatever else woke was, a composite of manager, lawyer, moralist discourses, it was also a policing strategy: representations of diversity, equity and inclusion militated against all immediate needs for diversity, equality and inclusion - that after all, is the function of representation. Just as religions work against the sacred by representing it, just as the illicit drug trade deliberately problematises both supply and product as a moment in the cycle of dependency, just as every particular movement of emancipation works acquisitively and privately against general emancipation as such, so representations must work against the use-value they represent, destabilising, introducing uncertainties concerning their reliability, manipulating by means of artificially maintained scarcity (that americanising discursive stratagem of who precisely has the appropriate qualification to talk of this oppression, thus propertising and privatising it), and of the narrative jeopardy set forth in advertising, so it is that all this whirling of perfected forms also funnels back into the convergent spectacle as collapsing ice shelf, drawing in customer investment, brand loyalty to the placeholder image (so immediately affective and yet so empty of meaning), and identification with whatever instantiation of whatever cause. Our one-time friend, Amadeo writes, ‘modern capital, which needs consumers as it needs to produce ever more, has a great interest in letting the products of dead labour fall into disuse as soon as possible so as to impose their renewal with living labour, the only type from which it “sucks” profit. That is why it is in seventh heaven when war breaks out and that is why it is so well trained for the practice of disasters.’ The customer’s experience of the thing represented is strategically channelled by and mediated through its representation (consumption is also work, the recycled energy powering the totality’s upstroke) - after all, that’s how ideology moves. And contrariwise, and yes so it is that everything must and will invert, when particular advertisements are disintegrated from the totality, at first seeming hilariously old fashioned, and then, mysteriously a vector of occult and prophetic profundity, the decayed use-value they had previously retained within nested circuits of excluding mediation, begins to bleed back into the substrate as a sort of utopian pollutant. And wherever representations lose their currency, they also relinquish what they once possessed (Burberry, the upmarket British fashion label, destroyed unsold clothes, accessories and perfume worth £28.6m last year to protect its brand which ‘not only leads to extortion from the living of so much labour power as to shorten their lives, but does good business in the destruction of dead labour so as to replace still useful products with other living labour.’). The absolute devaluation of a product is the only precondition for de-representation: because its moment for exchangeable realisation has passed - at that point it becomes a glut, a butter mountain, a wine lake (as Amadeo says, the steel dump becomes a fortress in the cause of stealing); because that useful thingness, that particularity, which was just now represented and circulating is suddenly frozen and all too obtainable; because the radical danger of its withdrawal from the market is dispersed; and because all its bound up energy, that energy specific to deferred realisation, is wholly evacuated. The rays of light given off by obsolete forms, and above all by obsolete forms of policing, repression, exploitation, briefly suffuse the vaults of wealth that otherwise went unexamined - what property was, what freedom was, what relations were, all these are suffused with an exigent reality at the point they become unsustainable. That dirty evanescence carried into the world as capital’s woke gambit deployed as exit strategy from covidian lockdown was just such a highly perfected form designed to disguise corporate power getting back in gear as it softened us up with images of inclusion and diversity, and only now, in that poignant ignis fatuus peculiar to the police cemetery at the moment of its slumping and landslip, can we make out what it was precisely that the woke stratagem was denying, disrupting, deceiving etc in the operation of its 5D kill chain. And only now, only now that it is all over, now that woke’s grift suffers the indignity of capital flight and we observe that familiar correlative of all deflating bubbles, nobody giving a shit, where the networks once lit up to realise its merest nicety are now going dark, dark and cold, so it is that only now I find something of the will-o'-the-wisp in woke’s eclipse, something retrievable and precious. Only now at the end of its useful life am I won over by its obsolete project. Only now, having defended myself for so long against its obvious misdirections, do I get it. It is just now, amongst the frozen archive of its suspended hyper-circulation, that I am persuaded of woke’s integrity, just as I am persuaded of the humanity inherent to all fallen houses. I have woken up from, or I have opened one eye from within, my trajectory towards chitinised suspension, and I am struck by the image of, as I really really see it, and in celebration of the liberatory movement towards decomposition within all things, how yesterday’s highest form is released today back into the world as but a raw material to be metabolised, suppressed and realised, by the action of living labour. And as dead and dying things like woke, as they are borne down by their inadequate realisation and formal constraints (institutions, legalisms, relations of production) only to melt back into the furnace-driven action of production, so it is that its preserved and metabolisable quality, previously remote and instituted as mere police consciousness, neo-essentialist quotas, and legalistic mystification is freely released like fairy dust back into the class struggle, becoming some sort of folk memory and a realisable potential for living relations (make woke a treat again!) Nobody is happier than I to see the defeat of every act of resistance - every permutation tried, every avenue explored, before we return home, in the Pierre Menard sense, at a higher level. Full compliance is the true accelerant and coefficient of end times. That is to say, one morning, I woke from wonderful dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into a kindly and useful sexton beetle. That is to say, we come to bury not to praise, but in our busy burying we might also take a pause to praise, with a slight enthusiasm, that is to say, this work of our burying. What then, Amadeo, as you contemplated the mortality of the Po’s embankments, would you say now constitutes the human community stripped of living labour, if not a graveyard for all the old ways, the recalled point of convergence for all history’s disasters and defeats?’
