Anathema reimagines the microscopic behaviour of liquid crystals undergoing turbulence as a sentient entity that possesses the fingertips and the eyes enthralled by the LCD touch-screens of communicative capitalism.
Anathema can be understood as an object-oriented video that isolates and recombines the magical gestures of dream factory capitalism. By bringing the telecommunicating couplings of mother-father-daughter-son-machines and boyfriend-girlfriend-units into contact with the conductive imagery of liquid crystallization, Anathema proposes itself as a prototype for a counter-spell assembled from the possible worlds of capitalist sorcery.
"The aim of capitalist sorcery is to induce a kind of stupefaction, a paralysis of agency and imagination that by no means precludes a frenzy of pseudo-activity-a ceaseless treadmill of work and consumption, but also of communication, which is now both work and consumption. The sorcery operates on {what is taken for) reality itself. Its chief function is in fact a procedure of ontological limiting, a reduction of all available realities to those formatted by capitalism: the famous there is no alternative.
The Otolith Group's Anathema is not satisfied with simply exposing this sorcery at work, in the manner of ideology critique. Anathema wants to also constitute a counter-sorcery, a weapon built from the very same materials that capitalist sorcery itself uses. Its delineation of the currently dominant apparatus of capture is certainly acute. Anathema apprehends capitalism as (following Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers) a set of sorcerous practices: a system that operates by processes of beguiling seduction, and incantation. But who are these sorcerers? They almost certainly do not see themselves as sorcerers. "If capitalism enters into a lineage of systems of sorcery," Pignarre and Stengers write, "it is in a very particular, fashion, that of a system of sorcery without sorcerers (thinking of themselves as such)".
Naturally, the work of capitalist sorcerers is limited to the parliamentary arena. It is carried out most effectively by reality managers and capturers of desire: PR consultants, advertisers and, yes, politicians insofar as they resemble these libidinal technicians.
Anathema concentrates on a specific kind of libidinal capture. We might call it communicative capitalist sorcery. Jodi Dean defines communicative capitalism as a system in which 'the standards of a finance and consumption driven entertainment culture produce the setting of democratic governance', and in which messages become 'mere contributions to the circulation of images, opinions and information, to the billions of nuggets of information and affect trying to catch and hold attention, to push or sway opinion, taste, and trends in one direction rather than another.' The genius of communicative capitalist capture is that it is indifferent to content. It doesn't care how many anticapitalist messages are circulating, only that the circulation of messages continues, incessantly."
Digital Psychedelia - Mark Fisher (2012)
37 mins Colour, Sound, Stereo
