Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Shopping is War by Other Means

Keats understood. There's no escaping the commodity. [1]   Not for him, not for us. Not for mixologists either. Baambata dug what Equiano dug before him: all you have to work with is what's there. No Genius, no Literature, no Art, no Critique. Just commodities. Just stuff to buy--or swipe. So you shop. But you do it to torque the stuff you buy, and by torquing change it. Keats makes Homer a book. Equiano made books a weapon. Bambaata makes weapons pay! Shopping is not necessarily subjection. [2]   Sometimes it's war!


Notes

1. See Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (London: Blackwell, 1991).

2. See Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).


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