A corollary to the strange circuitous and oscillating rituals that describe late capitalism is the constant senseless circulation of materials and energy, which no longer circulate to perpetuate a functioning organism, but which circulate as echos gradually wobbling further out of orbit, like dead under-manufactured objects moving down a broken dysfunctional conveyor belt, dropping off rhythmically onto the floor.
I'm thinking here of the pallets upon pallets of groceries which arrive at the store, sit on the shelves, and then are tossed out with the garbage as a means of maintaining a specific social order, or the articles of clothing and cheaply made manufactured goods which appear almost as pure marketing ideas, wafting through and stripping from consumers their currency - like phantom free radicals stripping electrons - which immediately unravel and break the moment they are bought and used, and then end up in a landfill or off the side of a road, or are dumped somewhere down a country road where no one is looking.
Or the absentee-owned housing stock standing empty for the sake of maintaining a sagging constellation of real estate values, propped up crudely by desperate financial fictions. The land is razed and laid to waste to make room for labyrinths and prisons, designed to pump up ephemeral abstractions with real resources and exploited people, and which then cast out the people and material and energy when they have passed through their short life cycles.
And this reaches straight down into the individual flailing bourgeois protestant, unwilling to climb down off of the time clock, pointing to their fevered pace of make-work and declaring: "look at all the work I do, and at all that I give you; don't blame me if something goes wrong!" A perception that is not entirely invalid after all, as in our mutual interconnectedness, we have inherited the material accumulations in motion of a whole string of historical crises stretching back thousands of years, and must collectively carry those accumulations as living things which demand to be fed.
And then this is the general function, this relentless generation and belching out of waste, and the leaking and spraying of organized energy, and this circulation of dying and dead materials, in shorter and shorter intervals, so that the structural integrity of a dead social order can remain, and a shrinking minority can draw power from its unraveling threads.
