--- # The Unfinished against Capital: Aesthetics of Openness in Times of Revolution The first thing that comes to mind (and it pains me to admit it because it sounds overly solemn) is that we live in a world that detests the unfinished. Or rather: a world that tolerates it only when it can capitalize on it. Quick example: the “permanent beta” of apps. That strategy they market as innovation but is, in fact, an endless loop of calculated updates designed so the user never feels in control—always sensing the next version is missing (and meanwhile, of course, paying the monthly subscription). Authentic unfinishedness—the real error, the breakdown, the crack, the thing that never quite gels—capital hates it. Because it can’t sell it. Or it turns it into a style (see: ripped clothes, “vintage” furniture, the cool precariousness of apartments with exposed brick). And here’s where, I suppose, one could go old-school Marxist (almost sheepishly, because quoting Marx in 2025 feels like a cliché, yet it still works): commodity fetishism consists precisely in erasing the process. In making everything appear finished, perfect, self-sufficient. An IKEA chair doesn’t want you to think about the felled forest, the exploited worker, the screws left over after you assemble it. It wants you to think about the “final product.” The unfinished, by contrast, does the opposite: it forces you to see the process. And that’s where its political potential lies. --- I remember a punk gig in a warehouse in Puente Alto. Everything was wrong: dead microphones, an out-of-tune bass, lights flickering as if about to catch fire. And yet, within that chaos there was something perfect. Not the perfection of a finished product, but the perfection of the living. The unfinished as a form of resistance: no one there was thinking about selling records, about “closing a project,” about capturing the moment to monetize it on social media. It was an open, vulnerable present. (A footnote that isn’t a footnote: I’m thinking now that gig is probably on YouTube, shot on an old phone, and that by uploading it, in some way, it re-entered capital’s circuit. Because everything returns. There is no outside. And yet the original experience remains inassimilable: that cold, that mud on the floor, that power cut mid-song. No one captures that.) --- Capital demands closure. Unfinished art insists on the opposite: suspense. Susan Sontag wrote in Against Interpretation that a work of art should be experienced before it is deciphered. I’d say the unfinished takes that further: there isn’t even a work in the classical sense—there is only a process that opens and opens, a loop without end. And that openness isn’t innocent. It is political. Because it challenges the logic of “finished product = commodity ready to circulate.” The unfinished is a reminder that things could be otherwise. --- There’s something almost revolutionary in letting things remain open. Not as lack, but as method. And I’ll risk saying this is where the word revolution enters in a crooked sense (a bit like Bolaño used “horror” or “hell”—ironically, but also devoutly). Revolution not as the Great Day when capital falls, but as micro-practices of openness: collectives working with digital archives that cannot be completed, community projects remade again and again, performances that pause to talk with the audience. All of that is unfinished. All of that is revolution on an intimate scale. --- What I like about the unfinished is that it also resembles life. We never really close anything. Relationships, books, houses—even our own biography. David Foster Wallace said literature ought to be honest enough to show the confusion we live in, the information overload, the noise. That confusion is, at bottom, the unfinished. So what does it mean to defend the unfinished against capital? It isn’t simply making open works (openness can be sold too). It is sustaining the crack. Insisting on the failure. Not concealing precariousness. Because what capital cannot stand is not the calculated error, but the real error. The one that cannot be monetized. The one that hangs there like a frayed wire in the street, like a corrupted file that won’t open, like a poem that breaks off mid-sentence. And there—right there—is the space of revolution. ★ ★ ★ ---