Deadspace

An audacious adept of democratic metaphysics reads the motto on the entrance to the new world from the nineteenth century: God is Dead. Hiding in the shade an old butler awaits a reply. The postscript that opens the way says, „Everything goes.“ The man with no fear of God may enter.
He became a citizen.
The democrat by stepping into the world of equality and freedom, rejects the question of God‘s existence. With the same resolve, the claim that God is dead is unacceptable for a believer who doesn‘t lose the certainty of God‘s presence, because God is his life itself. He doesn‘t question the identity of the guardian of the dishonest epitaph: it‘s Satan. A world without God is therefore chaos.
Recognizing that God never existed, the democrat never had such a devilish antagonist. In democratic metaphysics, ultimately nothing matters. The world is the way it is. This order continues as long as the world exists.  A world without order can neither be seen nor conceived as a whole—indeed, the world is the whole itself.
At this point, I encourage the reader to select one of these aforementioned ways of reading, and to conceive of the terms used in the most specific way!
Democratic laws guarantee equality and freedom of the individual.  People are equal under the law in terms of freedom of action. The law defends the borders of democracy because the pole of individual freedom is dictatorship.
Maximum equality, for all people, is death. Democracy has no choice but to always avoid the Scylla of absolute power, and to run away from the Charybdis of death.
Democratic politics is an enduring struggle for the ratio of freedom to equality. We know what will come after democracy when it loses its equilibrium:  all imaginable revolutionary or reactionary regimes—liberalism, socialism, fascism, feminism, Zionism, etc. Confronting the enduring threat of dictatorship, democracy promises immortality as an alternative to death; as a counterweight to despotism, it offers independence.
The means that should lead democracy to its goal is capitalism.
The quest’s only risk is that before the goal is achieved, the means could be mistaken for the goal.
The individual in capitalism has lawful equal right to enter the marketplace, in other words, the free society of other people-merchants, and offer and exchange goods and services.
Even though the capitalist marketplace is considered to be the model of free society, equality is an essentially foreign principle to capitalism. The problem of capitalism with democratic equality consists in that equality is given by law, but the law-making bodies (states and nations) are many and are not equal—this is because they enact contradictory business laws and limit the freedom of entrepreneurship.
Until a single global state emerges with one universal legal system, individual equality within a single market can not be guaranteed.  In contrast to this, the problem of democratic equality with capitalism is that private ownership, directive decision-making of the owners and their effort towards a maximum profit with minimal cost, inevitably create inequality.
The symbiosis or conflict of democracy with capitalism requires the solution of the problems of (1) culture, (2) history (3) irrationality.
Culture in the broadest sense (art, science, technology = Civilization) excludes people from nature. Culture means inequality, immanence, revelation and justification of all privileges: culture is hierarchical. Inequality is the principal of existence and development of culture. 
History is an image of inequality’s persistent lingering in the past, which keeps growing against the interest of the present.  With its ever growing and immeasurable weight, history threatens democracy’s future.
Democracy’s greatest burden is the very artificial idea of equality.  The dogma of equality for all people is a rational human choice, an ideological decision that has nothing in common with the endless irrationality of reality.
Modern capitalism has become  democracy’s twin because it took on equality rationally, and began to do business with it.
The capitalist technology of equality is ubiquitous and accessible, because it is cheap and calculable--in contrast to Freedom.
The precise flatness of surfaces and uniformity of homogenized clean materials, minimalist right-angular typification, standardization, homogenization enables the simplest machine production, montage, storage and transportation, arbitrary replication, copying of all measures, multiplication, washing, and easy cleaning. Prefabricated parts enable the selling and construction of anything virtually anywhere, independently of the environment; the interlink-ability of components is unlimited.  In the world of material equality, incompatibility is an fundamental flaw.
The ceaseless innovation of capitalist technology is a guarantee of a continuous closing-in to the ideal of compatibility and a reason for the endless transformation of standards to which new components of capitalist goods are related.
Yes, eternal novelty--scientifically projected permanent change of geometry branded for future perfection--has changed human culture in a decisive way.
Modern culture is as modern and democratic as capitalism.
The democratic hero--having lyrically forsaken the high metaphysical virtues of humility, sacrifice, fidelity, love, and devotion to everything untouchable above, and Dadaistically mocked the nauseating, eclectic abstractions of high art--has prosaically begun to demolish all the base taboos and has started a competition to transcend the boundaries of human potential.
The democratic hero is not a saint. The hero of the democratic ethos is Prometheus, Lucifer and Faust, actor, athlete and model, entrepreneur and gangster: always a free and independent individual who is the measure of all things eagerly promoting his own plans.
The revolutionary artists of Modernism transformed, reappraised, and rejected all the traditional art forms in search of new ones. But soon it became clear that the repertory of the ways of artistic expressions, the human body’s expression and mental movement, is limited. Then, Modern artists became thrilled with machines. In the factory, the revolutionary artist shook hands with the modern capitalist, the owner of machines. The traditional creation of mythical gestures of providence was first rationally substituted by concrete geometry, and finally by conceptual algebra. Nowadays, artistic revolution can only happen through technology.
It was not the institutional non-violent, non-offensive, democracy but capitalism that fulfilled the perennial human dream: indeed, it was capitalism that finally defeated nature.
Only then did Modern capitalism have enough power and resolve to transform a child-murdering mother into a maid. In comparison with mother nature’s enslavement, the democratic liberation of the individual from an imaginary God-the-Father is an entirely insignificant event.
The so-called core-capitalism (til the end of the nineteenth century) was in an uneven subordinate position in relation to nature, and civilization had to adapt to the surrounding world. Pre-modern capitalism defined itself against nature with a hierachical historicism emphasizing  a social inequality over the course of time, in which only the lower classes were closely exposed to the inimical nature. The social elite, on the other hand, would only expose itself to the barbaric uncultured outdoors during such festive rituals as game-hunting, military parades and garden parties.
The technology of Modern capitalism inverted the position of man in relation to nature.
With hygiene,  modern man has been liberated from infectious diseases and parasites. Hormonal contraception gives freedom of choice over conception. Surgery enables sex change, transplantation of organs, sperm, ovaries and embryos—even the most daring of adrenaline sports. Psychiatric drugs liberate one from the soul’s hardship. Industrial medicine gives more and more opportunities to the hopeless. Technology offers human identity the opportunity to alter any aspect of the anatomical and genetic arrangement of the imperfect and mortal body.
But the educated self-assured modern man understood that only a machine can be perfect and immortal.
The man from the era of rational purity has entered into the sullied sphere of dead space. Dead space is an anatomical part of the respiratory system that does not immediately participate with the exchange of oxygen. The air animals need to mix with, or remove from, blood bypass this apparently non-functional, unnecessary dead space. It requires a certain pressure and effort-- energy outflow--that could be conserved if lungs were in immediate contact with air.
Dead space is also a part of a firing range where it is impossible to aim the barrel. The enemy exploits that—it is de facto enemy territory.
Dead space is useless, unpredictable and dangerous because we cannot see into it, and we don’t know what’s going on there. We’re not interested in it because it’s unpleasant and extra. Dead space is easy to identify: it’s everywhere where dirt, which is difficult to remove, gathers and sticks.
Now it is up to man to adapt to technology. Not vice-versa.
A sea of dead space flows in the shadow of the crystalline technological rationalism of modern capitalism’s progress. The space is unwanted by anyone with whom it gets in the way, as if it doesn’t belong to anyone.  Useless space borders on private land, property, objects, and lives. It abounds at every dividing edge, border and link of modern architecture and design. 
Corners, niches, teeth, alcoves, detachments, folds, connections, joints, welds, and fissures. Dead space is filled with trash heaps; traffic jams, delays, boredom, food fat, allergies, infertility, addiction, populations of elderly estranged selfish men.
The irrationality of independence—the freedom of half-baked, rickety things and imperfect materials--is the magic that turned the wheel of life, the eternal youth and novelty of capitalist technology.
The liberty of unreason and waste makes claim on and colonizes the classic material space which is, in real time, finite, necessarily consumed and exhausted.
Dead space comes about as a by-product of free enterprise. As a commodity it is nowadays a fashionable market opportunity—but it is not an exception to the earth’s surface. It is not a new space. The recycling of trash, the elimination of ecological damage, the removal of graffiti, the industry of entertainment, the health system based on the life-long cure of civilizational diseases (with the ideal of endless liposuction), the creation of virtual reality and the market with bubbles will not do without the enduring base of living nature and economy. The human parallel world is forever dependent on the real world.
After the era of uprooting, the stage of ruminating substitutes comes to an end. And after? After physical annihilation of space the classical capitalist economic sine-curve will not return, but the direct line leading to the end will establish itself. The ideal of free growth of inorganic crystals led to the emergence of the  civilizational cluster incompatible with life.
What’s the solution for democracy?
Independence (isolation) of politically apathetic individuals is sufficient as a defence against ideological dictatorship. In order for biological survival, it is in this stage of development necessary to ensure the other pillar of democracy which is technological immortality--an alternative to Equality.
The marketing-like optimistic concepts about technological direct democracy, as a remedy for the corrupted system of representatives show the naivete of the traditional democrats of the late capitalist era in naked beauty: we want equality as a unified hardware, as a unified code of communication, we seem to wish for a language and graphics of communication degraded to the level of dyslectics, dys-graphics, an-alphabets and psychopaths. Freedom in the shape of mobility. Everything, anytime and anywhere ready to be read, found, focused on, and open to erasure. Today, one lacking a mobile phone does not exist. A bit later, the one without a chip in his body will not exist. He will be neither free nor equal before the law. If he doesn’t become a code.
The egg of the soft post-industrial digital society is already rolling out of the Modern box. The  ecological post-modernism will either give birth to a human-machine or a small, solar independent, auto-motive, in the best case, a green, homosexual little machine.
I can imagine no other future of democracy.

01.01.2010