Boris Groys on society as a machine “[I]n the West, the Cold War between East and West was principally stylized as a struggle between bodies and machines, between feelings and cold rationality, between desire and logic, between love and rationalist utopia. […] This critique was originally ‘anti-totalitarian’, that is, it was directed against the opponent of the West in the Cold War, against the Soviet Union. With time, however, it was increasingly employed against the institutions of the West itself, which were perceived in their turn as cold, rationalistic, calculating and inhuman—i.e., in a certain sense, as ‘totalitarian’. This discourse is therefore a critique of Soviet communism that has been repurposed as a self-critique of the West. In the process, the anti-communist genealogy of this discourse has generally been forgotten or, better put, repressed. And yet this genealogy is nonetheless of decisive significance for the functioning of the discourse about desire, for every society is prepared to accept a critique that has already demonstrated its effectiveness in the struggle against that society’s opponent. [… This] is a standardized and sophistical mode of speech available for employment by any political strategy whatsoever. After all, where is the body not suppressed? Where are people not traumatized? Where is the subject who is not seized by contradictory desires? Where is the human not threatened by the machine? The answer is that this is the case everywhere. The sales potential of this critique is therefore potentially infinite.” The Communist Postscript (London and New York: Verso 2009) 83-86
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