by PAUL B. PRECIADO
The system has reached such a degree of feedback integration of its own critique that it can simultaneously produce the problem and its symbolic resolution. Capital no longer needs to justify itself or hide.
Purple, like some other publications and arty institutions, has become a sleek interface through which an impersonal financial constellation of powers — markets, technology, monetary flows — gazes upon and consumes itself. Political reality has been replaced by its symbolic representation. War has been transformed into an operation of design, communication, and the accelerated circulation of signs and commodities that sell a simulacrum of peace.
An issue of Purple on “Peace” heralds a reconciliation, an escape, the possibility of critique, and perhaps of hope. But peace is neither a psychological feeling, nor an atmosphere, nor an image. Peace is a political practice of struggle against the material conditions that produce inequality, dispossession,…