A Child

Falling everywhere and unnoticed, falling in every part of the world, yet falling invisibly: it is ideology that falls and covers our mouths and our ears and our eyes.

Do you remember the man who taught his asshole to talk?, Burroughs asks. The asshole talked, but this man’s mouth was covered by a fine film. From now on, the asshole spoke and not the man. But what does he say? What do you hear when you hear the voice of ideology in your own voice? You’ll hear a voice that is pleased with itself. That speaks out of a man for whom the world as it is is the only world there can be; it is natural, eternal, this is it, now and forever.

Capitalism is your milieu; it gave you your chance, you took it; you’re a success. And your success is natural, you say to yourself; you deserve what is yours. A success that would have rewarded others, had they worked hard enough, had they worked on themselves and let capital work through them.

What interrupts this voice? What stops it from speaking? Not boredom: you haven’t the time to get bored. Not melancholy: you have everything you want; the future is yours: a great wagon of a car, a detached house in the countryside, private health care and your children at public schools.

Then what? What remains? The past? Remember the happy moment when capital turned its benign face to you and said: you; I want you. And, being called, you were as though called into being: you were put on the road to where you are; you were able to find yourself. You said: here I am, to the call when it called. You knew you were indebted to this voice, to the voice of your boss, of your workmates.

You found yourself, but what did you find? And what did you lost by finding it? Yourself? No, not that. But the one you were before you were called: you lost him. The non-capitalist, the one who had not been hailed and gathered together. You lost the one you can only regard as lost: the child: youth? Is this is what is unbearable about your own children? That demands you turn them into little capitalists as quickly as possible?

Youth: not your youth – not the youth of anyone. A child: the one who is not yet caught, whom capital has not yet seen. The one has not been hailed. A child: still there in you, capitalist, still alive in you: a child who is not anything at all. A child who returns from the depths of your past. Remember it: but what can you remember? A child: a kind of hole in memory. The forgotten one. The one who is forgotten in you. And the one who forgets, who draws you close when you forget to remember to forget. When ideology, for a moment, does not claim you. And you live from a future you bear in the past: in a future that is not the future of capital.