Poetry against capital: A short note on the totalitarianism of prose

Totalitarianism is the mentality of a society run by a bureaucracy as it outlaws metaphor. Without metaphor, all thought is representation. Then thinking is replaced by retrieval of facts. Facts are fully determinate situations whose descriptions are names. A regime that represents facts treats statements as orders. The effective interdiction of metaphor abolishes time and with it, chance, event, and possibility, as well as memory and imagination. This world is impossible, but impossibilities like our fictions can be instituted and often are. Ideologies always do this, taking their imagined truths for fact. Their factual truth can be established simply by observation of scenes and situations or words referenced as the authoritative meaning of others: empiricism and dictionaries of received ideas. The problem is not truth or justice, which always is the correspondence of action to existing norms. But it might be one of both freedom and happiness. Beware then of the bad schooling that menaces all of us daily. Order words are for slaves of capital. To the prose of necessity must be added the poetry of possibility.