The Labubu: Capitalism and the Black Hole Fetish of Eternity
The Labubu: Capitalism and the Black Hole Fetish of Eternity
I. The Economic Logic of Capital
Modern capitalism functions under one blanket rule — if it exists, it is sacred, in that it has some value. Ontologically and metaphysically, this claim is deeply correct. In the modern American capitalistic logic, all land can be bought or sold, human beings can be bought or sold; all that is is a commodity with a right figure attached to it for purchase, possession, and dissemination.
This philosophical economic logic allies itself deeply to the essential metaphysical truths intuited time immemorial — that which constitutes the Universal Wisdom proper. That all things are endowed and imbued with the sanctity and primordial logic of creation; as such, they all have inherent and intrinsic sacredness. The modern capitalistic ethos of plastic, scrap, metal, cardboard: this is the ethos of the repurposed charnel house of the cosmos unto a reconstitution of the value within the transient, junk, wax, dispossessed form of the dustbin of the Milky Way; the creational force of the universe.
In American capitalism, nothing is unredeemed. All can be converted. Old toys? Nostalgia value. Outmoded technology? Cultural renaissance of form. Everything is recycled and remade. Purposeless wooden goblet, or Holy Grail?
II. The Birth of Industrial Capitalism
The birth of industrial capitalism at the onset of American modernity served one explicit purpose: to act as a transmutation engine of exponential phase change of the psyche of the global human consciousness to reveal and elucidate the true nature of creation out from under massive shift and upheaval in circumstances. Digital light codes, massive plastic toys, televisions, and the aeroplane engine — all of these necessarily are the developments of capitalism as in the American creative mind gifted with scientific technology to mine, exploit, and terraform the very shelf, crust, and precious minerals of the Earth. The very upheaval and destruction of the world, conscripted for parts, is the legacy of industrial capitalism.
This is an inherently profoundly creative urge, just as it is absolutely destructive. The Earth is rent for labubus and Fortnight game consoles; minerals mined in massive slave endeavors for iPhones; televisions built in factories internationally without regulation where pregnant women are punished for not working quickly enough. Children in the breakers in early modern America. Children in Southeast Asia making t shirts in factories for events that never happen, that are dumped in Africa or wash up in trash heaps offshore.
This creative madness was an explosion which shifted the possibilities of human idiocy and causal failure — forging brave new worlds of opportunity to rift space and time in order to leverage venture capital currency, or else wage a war on a false promise for material gain. This has long been an essential tenet and faculty of the unmet human soul — seeking manifest riches in the outer world, even at the cost of complete and utter disrepair.
III. Everything is Free Now, That’s What They Say / Everything I Ever Done, Gonna Give It All Away
The lived reality of the underside of capital is a perennial marketplace where everything is for sale to the right buyer. Prostitution, Bugattis, the human body, the human labor, land, former plantations, the Xbox gaming console — new names and lexical inventions are continually added to the symbolic order of mankind to accommodate the accumulating inane, exponential births of inventions. Nail extensions, Botox — industrial capitalism is a proxy symphony of everything no one has ever needed and yet desperately needs. It is a hair extension on the artifice of mankind — supplementing sex, drugs, violence and murder with a nail coloring set from Sephora.
The language itself is revealing — an endless cascade of nameless names. Brands, siphons of meaning which split and diversify human speech into oblivion. All temporal and fashionable, the names fade even before they are uttered; known, and understood. DOGE, Bitcoin: it is the death of language as in meaning — a natural extension of the death of God as in collective cultural nervous system synchrony. If capitalism is fragmentation — both of meaning and the human being unto the human body as harvestable labor and junk parts — it abides the fundamental law of the fractal dispersion of the creation of the universe into scalar thermonuclear dynamics: an endless cascade of nesting dolls: all of which is fundamentally connected by universal value, but appears intrinsically apart or separate by way of the sheer magnitude of introduced scale.
IV. Narrow Chinks in His Cavern
Human perception has always been flawed; evermoreso under industrial capitalism. The death of meaning as in the death of language reduced humanity to a primordial state of silence, stripped of symbolism and meaning making vessels equipped to hold the ever diversifying fragmentation of meaningless lexical combinations of letters stripped down to simply black geometric shapes upon a void canvas. Names held no sacred philosophical weight. And so the death of language availed mankind of a true return, a re-encounter with the sacred not experienced for five hundred years.
Pre-linguistic civilization is a visual world, stripped of sound-as-meaning; the condensation of cave painting into a reproducible glyph system. In this way, pre-linguistic civilization is also pre-ontological civilization as in being before the symbol — or totally ensouled before the introduction of currency, or flow of information through proverbial gates. There are no letters to make sound; in industrial capitalism fragmentation has reached such an utter pitch that it is useless to speak. Influencer culture and social media stems directly as in atomization from the silenced speech of America’s child miners captured in the witnessing reformist photographs of Lewis Hine at the turn of the century. It is millions of silenced voices due to the sheer nature of noise. It is the labubu buried in the same grave as the Sphinx, swirling in the cosmic junk of an asteroid field in the postlapsarian, broken gravity formerly known as the Milky Way.
The return of the sacred came through the American birth channel by way of this hyper-acceleration, which shattered the nervous system co-regulation field formerly known as civilization and culture. Much in the way of Fermi splitting the atom, the atomization of rapid onslaught modernity reduced the American psyche proper to much, much less than a self. Without subjectivity, without agency — swallowed in the vacuous void of advertisement after advertisement, Coke commercial, Burger King commercial, Sears commercial, Chia Pet commercial. What was once a novelty item; a playground of enticing, pseudo-pleasurable hors d’oeuvres for perennial sampling at the banquet of American novelty turned into a garish nightmare, a carousel which never stops, distorted pitch; wild, screaming carnival ride of a global human nervous system of the rapture of way too much, way too soon, not enough time to digest.
V. The Da Vinci Code in Plush Miniature
American capitalism is genius. It is excessive, hyper-maximal — beyond all of your wildest dreams in the total summation. It is the realization of the absurd, surreal closet of everything that was hitherto unspeakable — the madhouse of fantasy and the dream-realm incarnate by way of the nature of mankind’s rapidly increasing understanding of how to completely and utterly and fundamentally reorganize the neural network of reality to generate new, strange, sublime, horrifying, fantastical phenomenologies. Reality in light of the industrial capitalist revolution led by the American hindbrain changes every five seconds. At the flick of the light switch, the child changes the glowing, golden orb into a Minecraft game, or a cloned sheep. Reality itself has become an infinitely reorganizable joke; as such, like the American dollar, has lost all meaning. If the DOGE coin is worth money, why is the national currency even important anymore? If we can transform anything, change the value of anything, transmute the body, the mind, the identity — what is even real anymore?
And this is precisely the decay and mass societal, schizophrenic breakdown of humanity — which comes barreling out of mass nervous system fragmentation into a total dissolution of the real bounds and physical borders and incarnate realities of mankind. The delusional schizophrenia of American capitalism is the spiritual crisis which comes after and through the total collapse of natural time, into machine time; into absolute somatic dissociation: where murder and suicide are almost comically, equally common — to such an extent where the value of human life, as Camus brought into public consciousness in the 1950s, is not only in question, but perhaps utterly dissolved as a factor in existence and the continued march of living.
The function of genius is to reclaim the cosmos wholly. This is the work of everything from Spinoza to the creeping spider’s web of the collective American imagination which birthed everything from Kim Possible to Billie Holiday to Dinosaur Land to the mall food court. In America, everything is leveled. It’s an impossible compassion to attempt to discern and thus enlist cognition to sort American life, nonetheless the junkyard value of the eternally returning pulse of the zombified dead trend. The American mind is made free by its own misery and perpetual state of dissatisfaction. Thus, like the cosmos, it constantly creates. Unheeding destruction, even to its own end. Plastic, cardboard, metal: the ideological missive was once the claim that capitalism enhanced life. Now, with the passage of time, we can understand it from a radically different lens. It makes life possible, bearable; even somewhat enriching in the face of biological monotony; the predictable recursion of hormonal drives and entropic forces.
VI. Conclusion
That the labubu appears like a face in the thrall of a black hole reveals one thing to the global capitalistic consciousness: the sacred is not infinitely reproducible. Rather, it is infinitely novel, sublime, terrifying; a ratcheting up intensity of high strangeness which holds humanity itself in its thrall — emerging from mankind, yet wearing the face of something entirely ulterior: the strange matter of creation and consciousness itself, untethered from all biological incarnate concern. Creation acts through mankind; risks destruction of the universe itself to further absolute creation.
Climate change, nuclear war, impending doom — these are all perennial callsigns of the deep inner battle of man’s eternal dilemma in the face of the ever shifting lens of historical consciousness; the changes in hue which inform the spirit of each and every time. It is that, in modern American industrial capitalism — the doors are all unlocked. Everything is available, all of the time. The handrails are down; the possibilities are effervescent, limitless — out here on the edge of the strange garishness of every combination harvested from the husk and corpse of transformational eternity.