backpack

The backpack exports and imports.

It conceals. It hides.

Under the assumption that its purpose was primarily academic (prior to acts of terrorism that took advantage of the backpack as the parcel by way of which its potential use, as an implement of revolt, was rendered opaque because of its preconceived interpretation as educational and therefore innocuous) its undisclosed contents were rarely put into question.

In a contemporary context, however, the content of a backpack has instead become the most questionable of the quotidian unknown. The backpack shifts in its moral depiction from one of productivity, education, and youth, to a dubious, precarious, and potentially destructive sign that provokes fear and anxiety.

Left alone, without being strapped to a subject to affirm its use-value, the backpack turns terrifying.

No object, other than an isolated, unidentified, backpack tucked into the corner of a crowded train station can create the same sentiment of unresolved terror in a passerby.

One questions its alienation.
One questions its contents.
One involuntarily relates such contents to the worst of suspicions.

A backpack can carry an entire crowd astray, into confusion, delirium and chaos.

The backpack is a pouch of paranoia.
It compartmentalizes fear.

Prior to its use as a weapon deployed in the name of terrorism, it organized and categorized other utilities of education. It has now become the locus around which our insecurities in regard to an idealized war, and the potential for those insecurities to materialize in a real world, are organized.

The backpack is infected.

It participates, amongst all other forms of packaging which enclose and hide, in a contagion that indicates the fundamental nature of our world as plagued and paranoiac, and the consistent possibility of its affirmation as such.

It is the realization of a ubiquitous fear of the unknown.

A fear of form emptied out of identifiable content.

Its perversion (unlike the stapler for example) is not personal. It is instead a collective desire for this unknown to give birth to an evil, to give birth to an explosion that brings about our death.