“From his illegible sexuality to his leadership position within a massively powerful alien apocalypse cult, Cruise’s public and private presence reveals layers of insight into the ways that wealth, power, and desire intersect.”
Excerpt: It’s not that anal sex disrupts capitalism… but that it symbolises the dichotomy between public and private which also characterises the accumulation of capital.
Taking all these intertwining histories into account reveals an archaeology of power. This is not just a history of Farrow’s life, but a cultural history of the link between celebrity, adoption, and the idealisation of the nation-state.
Excerpt: We have always been defined by our thingness, our places in different economies, different kinds of circulation of value. We’ve only just learned how to make our thingnesses visible to each other.
In this context, time as we understand it no longer exists, and has shifted into a permanent state of the ever-present; social media has served to flatten out time. There is no “was” in this scenario, only an “is.” We suffer from a permanent state of is-ness, engorged with anger.
