A War of Imagery

I. Imagery is weaponry.

We are at war.

A war of imagery is taking place. The city is the sight of collision. Images of a world collide and compose the world-as-montage, and what we get is the big picture. The battle takes place over the image of society: over society-as-theater, architecture-as-prop, form-of-life-as-character, and labor-as-plot.

An image of the world defines the parameters within which social norms are accessible, and social deviations, inaccessible.

The world is at best molested imagery.

The world comes to us as a given set of images, an image-of-images; an image measured by a medial conflict, and an image measured by conflicting images; a world measured by a void, indexing images to voids, to loss of images, to blindness.

We are living an impossible image, an image of avoidance.

We are looking at an image-void – a void of imagery, a vacuum of personality, a black hole of individuation. And yet we are also looking at ourselves, facing our own fetishes. We are at war with our mirrors.

But we are also at war on a level unseen. There’s a level of the eye, a subtle perfume, an almost inaudible tone that needs tending to. What we need are new nerves to challenge incentives, evaluate implied meanings, and reassess intentions.

We cannot live as a people in the so-called now. We cannot experience the now together. Presence is behind us. We are like stars, always light years behind each other.

But it’s not getting out of the now that makes the difference. We have to head inward in order to find one another in between planes. In between the now and the then, there’s an in-between reality, a splicing of the unforeseen real. [This is the new real.]

Become liminal, become simultaneous, become anew.

Outside the civic square, in the remote corners of the city, the drums are rolling.

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