Question: is the commercial manufacture (and implicitly – exploitation) of desire and lust through various media and information channels also simultaneously the production and inevitability of loneliness and emotional dissatisfaction? Might it be that a complex tapestry of desire (cultivated on a spectrum from behaviourally-conditioned salivation for junk food through to an endless ocular fascination with the variously-rendered mechanisms and neurochemical impulses of our own organic self-replication) depends in foundational ways upon a simultaneous, if unacknowledged, production of a functional psychological, cultural and existential inversion experienced as loneliness? Much is made of the extent of loneliness and sadness in our contemporary world but much less of the extent to which this may be a necessary consequence of our orientation towards consumption and productive economic aspiration to social status.
An object of desire reflexively and inversely defines its desiring, needing, wanting subject. The manufacture of desire simultaneously manufactures a subjective emotional void that orients itself towards but, as though in orbital free fall – observing the source of gravitational attraction forever slipping away as it is approached, can never attain its object. The only successfully self-propagating economic framework or cultural system of desire is that in which an Object under construction also produces its Subject and this process can only place value on one side of the equation if it is extracted from the other. Psychological deficits and emotional asymmetry may be the price (or at least – the cost) of social, economic and cultural continuity.
Daedelus Kite 