"Prop State" - pt 5

Scene: Night, factory

Alfred Jarry addresses the shareholders, who are represented by the guides. The light in the factory flickers to some hidden music. A podium has been erected, constructed of books of various critical theory, to assure the shareholders of the seriousness of the operation. Baruch de Spinoza waits behind a deck of turntables.

Jarry: (reflectively at first, then stronger)

Oh my friends.

Was it Diogenes who wrote in the absence of friends? We have no morals to share here, no wisdom of profitability. We have lost our way in a poetics of production, the worker and the reader sleeping in the same bed. We are no heteronomous fellows!

Oh my friends.

I would rather return to the cliff than go on living in such a trance. Could it be believed that the fac- tory we have dreamt of for so long will finally come to pass? Who could believe it? We have imagined into the world a new-world. We have adorned our placards with slogans and IP addresses, lengthened our toe- nails to get purchase on the new grass, grown our hair like the ravens, and filed our teeth. We understand time in ways that others refuse to: factory time is simply a wider time than that of the world outside. It is within this wide time that our new worker will labor, her feet protected by company slippers, and her palms padded with company gloves. Our workers will be protected from market pressures, will create, in their entrails, small inviolate economies meshing into the factory body with small sounds of surprise.

Oh my friends.

Our workers will be in no single vector state. No need for lectures here. No. Ha. You know very well what I’m talking about, being educated men. Into this wider time we will be able to slip more workers, more ethics. We alone will recognize the worker as more than a cog, as more than a machine to be used up and discarded, but instead marshaled according to a new model. Our workers will be recognized in the factory as friends. They will be recognized as a distinct series of moving vectors, each with a specific trajectory. They will have souls, will have wide conduits in the quantum computer, will be busy formulating programs for fading and loving.

It is these quantum workers that will drive our factory. We will have no fixed points, but a constantly shifting matrix butressed by suicidal love for the culture of the West. That sweet decaying vapor that we call the individual. Darwin, in his later years, grew to hate birds.

Gentlemen, this is what we are up against!

Spinoza: (starts record and sings)

We return/
Through advances in simple vertigo/
To a new understanding of our actions./
We have set aside chisels and nets/
Busying our times/
With stretching strings/
And building lutes/
To sing materialist songs.