The House of Memory

The more obsessed with records, the more storage needed to house those records: thus does the dustbin of history devour the content of our existence. Because all is consigned in advance, there is no possibility for repetition (i.e. tragedy-farce-history); rather, what takes place is identical reproduction: the uncanny phenomena that even when two things are exactly identical, one is even more identical than the other. The trend can be seen in political systems (with certain exceptions such as North Korea and a few Islamo-Fascist states) and the adoption of global capitalism and the speculative market economy (again, with certain exceptions and slight variations on the theme like authoritarian capital in China, South American “eco-capitalism,” etc). Capital is very close to shedding the vestige of democracy it has worn for nearly two centuries—China being the prime example of capital without democracy.