An unsatiated hunger plagues the mass of Urban Humanity.  This is not another material desire fed by feverish postcapitalist consumerism.  It is instead a simple desire to exist, even for material existence.  An absolute referent, a thing that precedes language. Language always prefigures the material objects to be manufactured: it is the first and last step of the production process.
 

Because in the urban space, every form is relational.  Everything signifies, but the only signified is the void left by inescapable desire.  In this environment, language itself—that which signifies—is the fundamental building block of material reality.  This is the logic of capitalism: a market for a thing exists.  A void exists, a desire, for, say, “real estate” or “fast food,” and therefore materials are assembled into an object that fills the shape of that void.  The signifier always precedes the signified—everything is born of a desire.  A lack is not the cause of desire, it is the result of the prefiguration.

 

 

 

 

But traditional rationality will claim that language is a set of signifiers that was created in order to describe a reality which preexisted language, and which will continue on long after language is dead.  And now that real has abandoned us to our relational, artificial systems.  And thus arises a deep desire to attain or reclaim the real that leaves us

 

 

 

 

 

 

an unfillable void in the core of the masses.

So how are we to understand this Real, ever more elusive, ever more the object of raw uninteresting Nostalgia?

  My only recourse is the blatant existence of my bestial self.