Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Dematerialise!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is the creed of old school environmentalism.

The primary term is Reduce. Limit intake, proportion accordingly. Negotiate the cycles of material production. Avoid unecassary waste. The two other terms echo the first, but a degree of conviction is lost in each turn. The second term, Reuse, mearly reminds us that to keep the commodity in circulation is to elapse the time before its eventual termination. Keep it usefull means keeping it from becoming part of the problem. From becoming waste, an expenditure. And as is well known - all expenditures demand a balanced injection. Something must be put back into the system to take its functional place. The third term, most fathest removed, states that what has been used can be remade. Reduce the exploitation of the environment, by exploiting the waste of our society instead.

The second & more so third term of these co-ordinates of conservation tend to stem on a trajectory outward from point 1 (reduce). Both point 2 (reuse) and point 3 (recycle) require the increased manifestation & circulation of materials. Incremental increases from a starting point (1). These three points can be imagined to sit on a line constructed from this logic. If we work backwards from 3 through 2 & then 1 we find a trajectory, shooting back to a 0. This is the zero point of conservationism. Point zero is the point of dematerialisation.

Dematerialise! Matter into Energy. Form is lost. Only radiation abounds... in all directions. It seems that dematerialising is the radical origin of these logics of conservation. Dematerialise is eternal. Energy has no mass, no decay, no death.

To dematerialise is to restructure society so as to disappear material objects. To end the tyranny of the mass commodity. It is a simple & mundaine thing. Deny the material world commodity status. In capitalism it is a laundry mat. Wash your clothes. What is bought is not a commodity - is is a service. In socialism it is the bus. Cars evaporate & communal needs transpire. In anarchism it would bee the re-establishment of the Commons, to this day still too uncertian to offer a description.

2 comments:

rapunzel.emma said...

Can't quite explain why right now, but this is a truly beautiful piece of writing.

I love you.

miss *e

puppet said...

yer my sweet heart babe :)

cheers to butterfly's, wolves, hedgehogs & other animals of the woods.