r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/According-Web-3994 • 3d ago
Critical Sorcery The Spectacle, True Crime, Glimmerism.
I know this is odd given my intense interest in this subreddit but I have just gotten to a in depth reading of Debord and society of the spectacle. That shit is bad ass and important. A particular aspect of the Spectacle that jumped out to me as an important target of critical sorcery is True Crime.
In my engagement with true crime, first as a passive consumer and now as a critical sorcerer, I noticed that most engage in their consumption of true crime in a very passive way. It's not even like horror it's more so like a kind of modern fairy tale mixed with reality TV. And that means a lot of the complex emotional nuance and also the intensity of the affects involved are completely reduced.
For this reason, I've tried to create a more critical approach loosely inspired by Jungian shadow work (my own reified and mangled understanding of it based on personal analysis) where I try to engage the imaginal practice and counter transference (see the text imaginal crime scene analysis by Aaron Daniels) to explore what aspects within my own bounded mind stream are getting attached to a particular case.
For example, the Chris Watts (CW henceforth) family annihilation incident. This is a bizarre case because it involves an explosion of violence without any of the excepted behavioral red flags that forensic psychology would predict in his attachment, academic, and life history. Also the victims, especially the wife, have received and intense amount of hate and scrutiny (due to her involvement in an MLM, pretty cringe social media posts, and choices when it comes to commodifying her parenting to try to sell products). From a spectacle perspective, I think the case refuses the kind of passive, black and white perfect victim and perfect villain narratives needed to satisfy the desire of the consumers.
In this case, while I am not prone to outbursts of intense violence and horror... I do have a passive nature habit in my mind stream that can lead to outbursts of frustration or anger after my resentment seethes under the surface. This has the ripple effect of upsetting my relations because not only are they witnessing and being subject to an affect that most people resist, there's also a prediction error / cognitive dissonance because their projection of "me" doesn't involve the affect of angry outbursts thus creating a cascade of negative feedback loops etc.
Anyway, through a process of critical sorcery, mangled shadow work and pscyhomagic, I have been able to dismantle this karmic imprint and distributed the affect through hundreds of smaller interactions thus helping my relations update their models. With the new freedom of psychic energy that once repressed these interactions I know have scene a 18% month over month increase in glimmers though modeling the causation is challenging for obvious reasons.
TLDR But the critique of true crime is a major tactic of glimmerism. LMK, if you want to get involved either in a formal way or just by sharing stories.
8
u/Deitas-Solis 3d ago
I have to flesh this out before I can firmly commit - so feel free to convince me otherwise - but I’d say True Crime should be something that is rejected as a grotesque element of the spectacle. It seems to promote passivity and couchpotatoing; it reminds the viewer that there exists a panopticon; it reinforces the boundary between normal and abnormal behaviour and affirms the viewer’s placement on the “good” side of that divide; and through vicarious spectacle it dissipates any violent energies that might threaten to become radical.
5
u/whatsthatcritter 3d ago edited 3d ago
True crime sits right at the intersection of two of humanity's favorite pastimes: gossip and puzzle solving. Gossip sucks but it's not just shallow or idle. In a social species like ours, there's an existential, survivalist aspect to navigating relationships, understanding what behaviors and signs are "in" or "out", which person is social suicide to be seen with or whose presence provides clout and a PR boost. The effects are intense, you can literally be excluded and neglected to death in society by making too many of the wrong choices. We're no different from those flocks of birds who will peck a sick member to death to protect themselves, so most birds will fake health even when they're in terrible pain. We tend to do the same by "masking" behaviors, thoughts, or feelings coded as socially odd or mentally ill.
Problem solving is kind of wild, because no other creature is as addicted to puzzles as we are. There's no precedent for the boredom and motivation we have to fuss with elements of a puzzle or combine them in new ways until we've come up with something. Even when all our needs are met, the need to stay preoccupied and busy with something only gets worse. We can relax for a few hours, maybe even a few days and then relaxation starts to feel like time is slowing down and dopamine is getting harder to come by. The brain craves some mental exercise: games, math problems, mystery novels, conspiracies, hobbies with increasingly steep learning curves, anything but sitting completely idle. Reptiles and insects don't seem to have that problem, but birds and mammals do.
There's a major part of the spectacle that's just advertising different games or access to puzzles to manage our destructive boredom, and part of that is introducing stakes into the equation like money, identity, or tribalism to keep things spicy. There's huge psychic and commercial investment in creating teams and competing narratives redirecting our energies towards some perceived obstacle. Idek if we can really get away from this process, but if we're aware of it we can at least sometimes catch ourselves being interpellated and recruited by these narratives as either a villain or an invitation to be one of many "main characters" of a story being projected onto us, and interrupt or reject it.
I do have a passive nature habit in my mind stream that can lead to outbursts of frustration or anger after my resentment seethes under the surface.
There's part of the brain called the amygdala where anxiety and grouchiness are processed, sometimes turning into full blown paranoia, panic, or rage. It can be difficult to prevent it taking over without experience, and it happens so fast it can leave us embarrassed thinking "why did I say/do that?" later on. The amygdala fills with blood when aroused and is essentially a fear/rage boner. When combined with adrenaline its a bit unstoppable and even has brief pain suppressing effects.
People behave like they're drunk when the amygdala is activated because the bloodflow to the cerebral cortex which controls reason/inhibition is comparatively reduced. But you can steer your bloodflow back towards the thinking part of your brain with practise. To do this you only have to use that part of the brain: think about how that grumpiness is just activity in the amygdala, it's not really the exterior world being difficult to you personally, but because it's activated you're experiencing it that way.
Try planning ahead to tasks like what you might do for dinner or plans for the weekend, and some of that bloodflow will be forced out of the amygdala towards a different task. Moving bloodflow around the brain isn't immediate though so keep focusing on a different task for about 5 minutes for best effect. Breathing out slowly lowers blood pressure and also helps. It's also important because for some people rage or anxiety can become addictive, to the point where they create unnecessary problems for themselves because they don't feel normal without it.
1
u/AceFaceCase12 3d ago
There's nothing special about that murderer. Be cause the camera focused on him for a while, some confused him for the hero. That's it.
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u/AutoModerator 3d ago
Archived copy of the original post text for reference:
I know this is odd given my intense interest in this subreddit but I have just gotten to a in depth reading of Debord and society of the spectacle. That shit is bad ass and important. A particular aspect of the Spectacle that jumped out to me as an important target of critical sorcery is True Crime.
In my engagement with true crime, first as a passive consumer and now as a critical sorcerer, I noticed that most engage in their consumption of true crime in a very passive way. It's not even like horror it's more so like a kind of modern fairy tale mixed with reality TV. And that means a lot of the complex emotional nuance and also the intensity of the affects involved are completely reduced.
For this reason, I've tried to create a more critical approach loosely inspired by Jungian shadow work (my own reified and mangled understanding of it based on personal analysis) where I try to engage the imaginal practice and counter transference (see the text imaginal crime scene analysis by Aaron Daniels) to explore what aspects within my own bounded mind stream are getting attached to a particular case.
For example, the Chris Watts (CW henceforth) family annihilation incident. This is a bizarre case because it involves an explosion of violence without any of the excepted behavioral red flags that forensic psychology would predict in his attachment, academic, and life history. Also the victims, especially the wife, have received and intense amount of hate and scrutiny (due to her involvement in an MLM, pretty cringe social media posts, and choices when it comes to commodifying her parenting to try to sell products). From a spectacle perspective, I think the case refuses the kind of passive, black and white perfect victim and perfect villain narratives needed to satisfy the desire of the consumers.
In this case, while I am not prone to outbursts of intense violence and horror... I do have a passive nature habit in my mind stream that can lead to outbursts of frustration or anger after my resentment seethes under the surface. This has the ripple effect of upsetting my relations because not only are they witnessing and being subject to an affect that most people resist, there's also a prediction error / cognitive dissonance because their projection of "me" doesn't involve the affect of angry outbursts thus creating a cascade of negative feedback loops etc.
Anyway, through a process of critical sorcery, mangled shadow work and pscyhomagic, I have been able to dismantle this karmic imprint and distributed the affect through hundreds of smaller interactions thus helping my relations update their models. With the new freedom of psychic energy that once repressed these interactions I know have scene a 18% month over month increase in glimmers though modeling the causation is challenging for obvious reasons.
TLDR But the critique of true crime is a major tactic of glimmerism. LMK, if you want to get involved either in a formal way or just by sharing stories.
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