The world is drawing attention to itself by means of its symptoms, its becoming aware of itself as a psychic reality.
The world in which all subjectivities are set has fallen apart. Breakdown is in a new place – bank scandals with government collusion, pollution and street crime, the loss of literacy and the growth of junk, deceit, and show. We now encounter pathology in the psyche of politics and medicine, in language and design, in the food we eat. Sickness is now “out there”.
Hence, to call a business “paranoid” means to examine the way it presents itself in defensive positions, in systematization and arcane codes, its delusional relations between its product and the speaking about its product, often necessitating gross distortions of the meanings of such words as good, honest, true, healthy, etc. To call a building “catatonic” or “anorexic” means to examine the way it presents itself, its behavioral display in its skinny, tall, rigid, bare-boned structure, trimmed of fat, its glassy front and desexualized coldness and suppressed explosive rage, its hollow atrium interior sectioned by vertical shafts. To call consumption “manic” refers to instantaneity of satisfaction, rapid disposal, intolerance for interruption (flow-through consumption), the euphoria of buying without paying (credit cards), and the flight of ideas made visible and concrete in magazine and television advertising. To call agriculture “addictive” refers to its obsession with ever higher yields, necessitating ever more chemical energizers (fertilizers) and mass killers (pesticides, herbicides) at the expense of other life forms and to the exhaustion of agriculture’s earthen body.
– James Hillman –