Search Results for: let the games begin

I wanted to follow up on the last post. And I want to discuss in a sense why Tragedy seems to impossible today. I recently found myself in long debates about two popular cultural products, The Avengers and Breaking Bad. I realized that this sort of discussion is problematic, in the same way Obamacare arguments are problematic. It is problematic because government shutdown is just bad theatre. Just a bad movie. But to explain that to, even, a lot of leftists, requires a long and often tedious discussion. Same with having to discuss The Avengers. Someone had gotten very upset at the idea that I called, what was clearly a favorite film, "fascist". But this raises the question of what I began … [Read more...]

"*I am what I am*. This is marketing's latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond the exhortations to be different, to be oneself, and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get to where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I equals I". The Invisible Committee. One of the questions one is often confronted with is to explain why or how an artwork has value, or quality. Now, in one way, this blog has often been about exactly this, but what I'm more thinking about here are the prevailing assumptions this culture demonstrates in it's non specialized outlets. Given that there is so little arts education anymore, I often find distinct … [Read more...]

"...the certain realization that Kafka's entire work constitutes a code of gestures which surely had no definite symbolic meaning..." Walter Benjamin, On The 10th Anniversary of Kafka's Death I want to continue on fromn that last post, and also to incorporate some of the long comments thread, and also try to more specifically look at this idea of violence in the West, and its cultural expressions. The link below is almost a daily occurance now. http://www.commondreams.org/further/2013/09/12-1 The new theatre of violence is this temporary stage on the side of the highway. This mini drama encapsulates the thrust of the white male system of domination. The beating of a woman, … [Read more...]

" Mediation is no less to be inferred from the relation of art to nature, than from the inverse; art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep natures promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise by taking it back in to itself. Art is inspired by the negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty, in the sense that so long as nature is defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfil; they open their eyes. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or … [Read more...]

"It is necessary to recognize that acts of extreme violence and cruelty do not represent merely an odd or marginal and private retreat into barbarism. On the contrary, warlike values and the social mindset they legitimate have become the primary currency of a market-driven culture that takes as its model a Darwinian shark tank in which only the strongest survive. In a neoliberal order in which vengeance and revenge seem to be the most cherished values in a “social order organized around the brute necessity of survival,” violence becomes both a legitimate mediating force and one of the few remaining sources of pleasure.11 At work in the new hyper-social Darwinism is a view of the Other as the … [Read more...]

At the start of Great Expectations, Pip has an encounter with an escaped convict, Magwitch, a very violent man. Throughout No Country for Old Men, violence appears and reappears as if a ghost, a haunting, and at the end the Sheriff sits with this thoughts for a lengthy reflection on our own complicity in violence and destruction. In Raymond Chandler and in Hammett, violence drives the narrative. Violence and crime. Transgressive acts, lies, betrayls. In Shakespeare, its hard to keep count of the bodies. How many are left on stage in Hamlet? There seems to be an outrage now... of a liberal flavor...about depictions of violence in movies and TV. There is also an outcry about … [Read more...]

Several topics rattling around my head....that seem (!) related. But maybe everything is related. Joe Nava wrote a nice small essay titled Looking for the Unconscious in Film, on his blog, here... http://www.joenava.com/ There is in this topic, a relation to the spectacle as it was vomited forth on all media outlets this week. The DNC. In particular, though, I've been thinking on Michelle Obama's speech. And by extension on the colonizing of consciousness. And I've been thinking a bit about Zizek, and how philosophy now, in the guise of this self promoting buffoon, is just more branding. Actually, its worse, for Zizek advertises himself as a leftist. And he's not left on anything. … [Read more...]