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decoy
the ghost army u.s. military unit was set up during world war ii and employed visual and foley artists to create inflatable tanks, decoy army bases, and misleading sound effects in order to confuse enemy troops.
U.S. MILITARY BASE CAMP SOMEWHERE IN EUROPE, 1944
flexibility: the quality of snapping back to one's original form.
a flexible form is at once duty-bound to and amnesic of its original or designated form; it is the corporeal manifestation of capitalist momentum in this way, and effectively serves its purpose by remaining endlessly mutable in accordance with capitalist need. it is, in other words, a capitalist device: a flexible form twists and bends itself into whatever shape yields profit or power for its authoring institutions, whether that amounts to its expansion, reduction, alteration, or erasure.
flexible forms are built into capitalist structures, as capitalism is a system which generates wealth for its central institutions by capturing the inertia of transformation—of anarchism, even—and neutralizing it, funneling it through a “flexibilizing” capitalist process. under the logic of capitalism, transformation occurs when there is profit to be yielded from change, and as such, the modes of transformation which work within capitalist discourse are those which reproduce its capitalist ethic. the forms at the center of such transformations are therefore only useful to capitalism inasmuch as they can fulfill their role as capitalist instruments, which here means they have the flexibility to take on a new appearance while still retaining their capitalist muscle memory.
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