We are beings of performance. We are the society that is always in motion, that is always producing. We are the people who are always producing themselves, and in an age when we have been forced not to produce and not be in motion, we are consumed by the heavy relationship with ourselves. The solution is to regain the relationship with the other and the world, but perhaps it is too late for a society that has felt so much disdain for the useless.
The most useful thing would have been to write a novel or at least try. In that way, we would have suffered the doubts of that first line, of that first line that leads to the next, and to the next, and to the next. We would have hit our heads thinking about how to build the protagonist, and we would have given up for a few days before consolidating the antagonist. But ending the characterization of the antagonist would have been a success, a small success in this task that is to leave ink and blood on the sheet.
And then that magical moment would have come when the novel breaks the chains of time. She would have absorbed us, she would have written to herself, we would only have been a means for her survival and, above all, the characters would have acquired a life of their own. They would have evolved in their own way. Today they would have done laudable deeds, and tomorrow they would have done something despicable. They would have come and gone like any other human; like us, who are both heroic and evil at the same time.
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But writing a novel was and has been the most useless, since it has no other benefit than escaping and reflecting, and gratuitousness and disinterest are values that today are considered counter-current and old-fashioned.
What is in fashion is performance. I surrender, you surrender, we surrender in a cycle of self-exploitation that has no end. We are a blessed generation that does not work out of obligation, but for pleasure, entertainment and freedom; especially for the freedom to know that he is master of himself, without being accountable to the other. However, this freedom of the other is not only emancipatory and liberating.
And it is not liberating because we are a generation that has forgotten the meaning of the term “community” . We are a global society that, however, is composed of isolated egos, closed in on themselves without any type of link with the other. Interaction on social networks only exacerbates one’s relationship with oneself. Each tweet, post and photo is not an interaction, but an exhibition of oneself. And each tweet leads to the next, and the next, and the next, until we become characters, until we become merchandise and exploit ourselves.
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And in this society made up of isolated and narcissistic egos, the only vision there is is one full of people running eagerly through the streets, or running, because now they are no longer only closed in on themselves, but also inside their houses. As Eugéne Ionesco once said, they looked neither to the right nor to the left, with a worried expression, their eyes fixed on the ground like dogs. They threw themselves forward, without looking ahead, for they mechanically traveled the path, known in advance. In all the great cities of the world it was the same. The modern, universal man was the man in a hurry, he did not have time, he was a prisoner of necessity, he did not understand that something could not be useful; Nor did he understand that, deep down, the useful could be a useless, overwhelming weight. If you don’t understand the usefulness of the useless, the uselessness of the useful, you don’t understand art. And a country where art is not understood is a country of slaves or robots, a country of unhappy people, of people who do not laugh or smile, a country without spirit; where there is no humor, where there is no laughter, there is anger and hatred.
Follow the news of El Espectador on Google NewsAnger and hatred still exist, but now those isolated egos cannot walk the streets that they knew so well. They cannot run after the needs that they created themselves. Now they are in their cases without being able to perform, and when the performance man cannot perform, he loses the meaning of his life. That is why he now floods social networks with his messages that they do not communicate, with his feelings that other narcissistic egos do not make their own, with his anguish and with his heavy relationship with himself. He does not yield, and for that reason there comes the point where he gets tired of his supposed sovereignty, and this is how the world implodes with depression, which is not a narcissistic disorder that is born from a truncated relationship with the other and from a lack of relationship with the world. Men are alive and at the same time they are not. If men had imagined a zombie apocalypse, that apocalypse came when the performance man related to himself until he took on destructive traits.
Oh, if those productive men only knew… They knew that the futility of writing a novel is the most useful thing they could have done. It would have been the most useful because it would have been the cure to break the boundaries of their egos, to really establish a relationship with the other, to lock themselves in their homes without the desire to give up, to contemplate and reflect on the beauty and tragedy that is our life.
But the performance man does not stop at the useless. He will not write about heroes and villains, those wonderful personifications of so many people who haunt this world. You will not be able to know what it is to surrender to the other, what it is to understand the misunderstood, what it is to delve into the reasons of the antagonists and what it is to discover yourself with each line that follows the next, and the next, and the next.
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The man of performance cannot be Don Quixote, the greatest hero of futility par excellence. He will not be able to find ideals, as Don Quixote found them in the useless chivalric books. He will not be able to give the meaning to the life that that gentleman did achieve because he will not undertake companies just for the mere love of the story or the interest in the lives of others. The uselessness and gratuitousness of the adventures of the Knight of the Sad Figure reveals the need to bravely face companies destined for failure, but the man of performance does not want to know of failure, of the same failure that he eats every day locked in his home and himself. If something of importance gave him the uselessness of the gratuitous, the disinterested and the relationship with the other, he could leave the cycle of self-exploitation to which performance subjects him and his consequent depression.
