Plague Journal, What Matters
Everyone has ideas,
even more than they need.
What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis.
Only the spirituality of language
can justify writing.
Not a miserable objectivity of ideas.
There will never be a solution
to the contradiction of ideas,
except inside language itself,
in the energy and fortune (happiness)
of language.
— Excerpt Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard
What matters? Certainly there’s a surplus of ideas, and if one takes internet media into account ideas swarm around us, the emotional and rage-filled expressions at imagined foes… Ideas in conflict. We have ideas, more than we need.
What matters is what is most scarce, the poetic elegance of analysis. That is expressing in words a vision that elevates us above the tawdry scrum of these times. Ideas are abstractions, inevitably in conflict. Yet, language itself is transformative, a solution to the “trap” of the world as it presently seems. Language offers a new operating illusion, potential to becoming event.
Courage my friends! The world does not have to be such as it is.
