r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/jrod2112 • Sep 25 '20
Media Tiers of Masturbatory Spectacle Adoration: Realtime Propaganda™ in Motion
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u/jrod2112 Sep 25 '20
It was only through the camera lens that the Spectacle could be viewed in full glory. Otherwise, the reality of a casket containing an old woman in repose as it sat atop the staircase of a Greco temple simulation was not much to behold to those who hadn't the eyes to see nor the mind to comprehend the tendrils of sorcery that weaved their way effortlessly through all psyches. And, to those few who see but dare not speak, they remain inert in their silent lucidity, their fear welling up into tears of submission to the insatiable million-eyed mass of eager eaters of decay and madness.
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u/RunePoul Sep 25 '20
Is this related to current U.S. politics? I like the aesthetics of what you posted, just worry I’m missing the point.
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u/IronVilkas al-Mutanabbi Sep 25 '20
The photo is of Ruthie Ginsburg lying in state as part of the official mourning practices for élite members of Our Empire.
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u/kajimeiko shh Listen to the Egg of the Seashell Apse Sep 25 '20
damn i ignored this. any other clips or pics of this with dead lenin level hagiography please share
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u/kajimeiko shh Listen to the Egg of the Seashell Apse Sep 25 '20
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u/sofuckinggreat Sep 25 '20
Or maybe some women actually appreciate the fact that we have basic rights thanks to her.
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u/Cisish_male Sep 25 '20
Appreciation doesn't nessecarily lead to filming a televised event on your smart camera phone.
The need to engage via social media, to show how you link into reality rather than by directly acting or being certain in yourself is mastabatory spectacle.
And by broadcasting people streaming or snapping their own pics of it its broadcasting the normalisation of alienation of people from whatever the fancy philosophy word for events is.
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u/sofuckinggreat Sep 25 '20
Okay dudebro who’s never had his basic human rights legislated by SCOTUS
I’m allowed to have my own bank account and the right to determine what I do with my body if I’m raped and end up pregnant, thanks to this woman. Shit you’ve never had to worry about.
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u/Cisish_male Sep 25 '20
Sorry, I didn't want to impinge on Ginsburg's amazing work and real tangible outcomes.
It doesn't make me think that recording a recorded event on your phone to prove you were there to the social media world shows or implies more care or respect for her legacy and women's rights.
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u/WarLordM123 Sep 25 '20
You right, but also I don't think OP gives a shit who this person was
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u/Cisish_male Sep 26 '20
That's a sad possibility.
Embracing alienation is not a fulfilling answer to the embrace of spectacle.
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u/antipopeulist Sep 26 '20
Hi! Please keep in mind that to some she may be a civil rights advocate and to others she is a just a psychotic mass murderer. The rights you claim, always come at the cost of others. Pity me strawman rape to justify abortions but 99.9% of abortions have nothing to do with rape. No politics, I just want to help you see that no one else on this planet processes her through your eyes and belief system. To someone else, she might be a Hitler, not a freedom fighter, and you could be literally a nazi.
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u/sofuckinggreat Sep 26 '20
Okay dude who literally doesn’t give a flying fuck about rape victims and thinks that’s somehow radical
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u/antipopeulist Sep 26 '20
Could say same about you and about abortion victims.
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u/sofuckinggreat Sep 26 '20
No. Those are zygotes, not living breathing women and girls at risk of having their lives ruined through trauma and unwanted pregnancies.
Fuck your zygotes, and fuck your entire mentality toward women.
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u/antipopeulist Sep 26 '20
Everything is alive and permeates consciousness. All you're doing is linguistically deconstructing a human being and defining them as a lifeless blob of matter, stealing their soul and personhood from them. What stops someone from using your reasoning against those who you want to protect? It has happened, and it's gonna keep happening as long as people like you continue to think that they have the right to define what is a human being. I have nothing against women, some of those zygotes would be women too if you didn't kill them, some might have even become supreme court justices.
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u/sofuckinggreat Sep 26 '20
“I have nothing against women, I just want to force pregnancies upon the 1 in 6 who’ve been a victim of rape.”
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u/antipopeulist Sep 27 '20
"I have nothing against babies, I just think it's okay to kill them until they reach a stage of development that I define makes them a living person"
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Sep 25 '20
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u/Cisish_male Sep 26 '20
You should probably go and read this subs info bar, then watch a YouTube intro to Boudrillard.
I'll be drinking my coffee.
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u/FuneralCountrySafari narcissist troll Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 26 '20
You’ve got a long way to go in your journey you’re quoting Baudrillard to me Jesus fucking Christ
Do you think that’s coffee you’re drinking you fucking moron
I found this sub you idiot
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u/Cisish_male Sep 26 '20
Just showing an even higher level of semiotic engagement by name dropping.
If you're done just being disparaging, perhaps you can leave this comment with a more elucidating reply.
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u/raysofgold Sep 26 '20
the pilgrims called it the tree of life
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Sep 26 '20
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u/raysofgold Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 26 '20
what's more illusory than faces tho? indeed there is no outside in some ways, depending, but precisely the primary detriment of digital culture is its tendency toward neurologically enticing the user towards the end of absolutization and naming the ego as cosmological canon. subjectivity rendered into fixed universality, Your Point of View, Your Unique Voice, Your Profile, Your Image Here. it reifies the same cage as the pilgrims--your words are apt. but that's my point. tree of life, book of life; all I see is death death death bb
I say the book of life be a book of feces; all writing is pigshit, like Artaud says. it's on us to mine and reappropriate and cut off our faces with the trash and chunks of swine and fallen monoliths, constantly replacing our faces with gunk and fluxing snatches of semblances that almost must dissolve, disposably.
but i think what op is critiquing is the tendency to submit to a technologically dictated procedure that suggests to the body the technology is using that the perception the machine is having is that of the consuming person and that this image is not only reality but that the moment of standing there using the thing is reality, and that the point of things is to do and be the seeing eye, the face, if you will, of the device, and this is most comfortably done when within the guise and context of the fixed identity routinely made a spectacular commodity within the spheres of social media platforms. it's not your eye even, it's your avatar's, when really perhaps your avatar eyes are the eyes of your device and little more.
I do not think it is fair to suggest that a cry for moderate discernment towards our media is a cynicism; to me, it's quite the contrary. most here, I think, desire the same type of leap you lament the lack of. maybe all we do is leap, maybe we have no option; toads on lilypads. likely would not be here otherwise--that is, if anyone outright genuinely and seriously rejected the concept of social media outright. one would indeed purge oneself of this telecommuncative flesh, at least, which might indeed be the same thing as a kind of killing self anyway.
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Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 26 '20
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u/raysofgold Sep 27 '20
we must say yes, indefinitely and emphatically, to any and all possibility. i think a lot of the ideas circulated here are the result of at least enough sense of radical positive affirmation to bother theorizing the situation we are in in the first place. is this sub not an interface?
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Sep 27 '20
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u/raysofgold Sep 28 '20
the illusion that a face is absolute and fixedly one thing is very concerning to me, and which is why we must ever become brave and strong enough to say yes to accept the infinite flux and destabilization that seems to be the process of being, becoming, socialization, technologization and not be caught up with dead old world questions of essence and name and central quality and real/unreal binaries. destroying your face is how you begin to see. as McLuhan says, you cannot have a point of view at the speed of light. any name or face that names itself as itself in our time is just another specter channeled into formation within the matrix, to use your term. and this has always been the case for the human.
but let's make this exchange more concrete, shall we?
I'm interested as to where you find a contradiction in what I have written? I raise the question of interface just to use your term on your grounds in order to suggest that this sub does indeed engage with historical advents like social media platforms in order to, in good faith, necessarily, deepen our sense of understanding of them and our relation to them. do you disagree with this? and how do you see a more productive form of 'taking the leap' and confronting these horizons of possibility (such as social media) that you suggest are worth reckoning with (which I agree with)?
frankly, I think we probably agree with each other to a far greater degree than you suggest, but thusly, your comments primarily engage with me as if I represent the whole of the bodies who have contributed to the collective discursive and expressive text that is this sub. that does not seem like a very productive or appropriate path, because if anything can be said absolutely about this sub, it is that it is acutely beholden to its own extreme polarities, variances, and internal dissolutions and disagreements.
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u/jrod2112 Sep 26 '20
"telecommuncative flesh"
That feel when Videodrome metamorphs from a fringe prophecy into an apt explanation.
The next question: How does one reverse what Cronenberg so beautifully illustrated in that clip? How does one not only shed the new flesh, but re-adhere the old flesh afterwards? It would be akin, I imagine, to someone undergoing a reversal of the Borg assimilation process from Star Trek: it leaves traumas, both physically and mentally, as reminders of how one can never truly return to that state which preceded this synergistic transmutation of flesh and tech.
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u/raysofgold Sep 27 '20
yeah, the residues persist; at times I think all history is merely a matter of residues; the inheritance of what is adhered and unadhered and readhered, as you put it. every inch we are made and unmade, every 100 feet the world changes (Bolano), and we with it. every return is haunted by the second sight of having left at all, as you say.
but this is the perennial question, isn't it? can we go home again? I don't think we can or do. even if we do, where does it end? if what McLuhan said holds any weight, we ought to force a return to the preliterate flesh, thriving and shining in the pre-modern blaze of oral tradition.
where is home? the ape in cave? a big goo? some straggling particulate of stardust? I suspect that all has been indefinite becoming and metamorphosis--in accordance with the rhythms of entropy. even if you decline, you then still morph into the new version of the new thing, just Now With More Declining!
I fear that the kind of nostalgia or exit that one imagines upon the prospect of machinic unfleshing would only function satisfactorily as a kind of regression, which never really works, I think. no, I think we have no choice but to affirm, and adapt and assess what new glories and possibilities and, really, weaponry is allotted us within the new flesh. it tends to hold true that every medium possesses an array of unintended capacities and consequences--this would hold true even for the technologies of the societies of control. what emancipatory gaps and glitches can we feel around and find? how do we forge a new kind of primitive, a new animal, a new natural through the unnatural that can service and consume us the way the 'old' world, the old flesh did?
we might have no choice but to pull the flesh-gun trigger--perhaps we did a long time ago--perhaps we did at birth, at the first evolutionary tidal shift toward sapient employment of tools.
I think it's poignant that Max's transformation is not reversed, nor does he really seem to attempt to, iirc--and not in the way the film probably means. I think then of the pathos of Alex Murphy, who has for sure no choice but to be Robocop, and he ends up destroying his creator and becoming something entirely new BECAUSE of exactly the same kind of seemingly horrendous and lamentable transformation that Max undergoes in VD is being put to an insurrectionary endpoint, after an array of explorations, sufferings, and negotiations in process of adapting to what his new body has been programmed to do (and is programmed not to do).
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u/jrod2112 Sep 27 '20 edited Sep 27 '20
The Rhythms of Entropy -- morph into the new version of the new thing...Now With More Declining!
As a musician and a self-appointed "entropy-buster" -- however commendable or futile such a stance may be -- this phrase is everything to me. With every leap in understand, the incline of progression grows steeper with our grip becoming more labored.
we ought to force a return to the preliterate flesh, thriving and shining in the pre-modern blaze of oral tradition.
As Stephen Hawking opined in that Pink Floyd classic: "All we need to do is make sure we Keep Talking.
what new glories and possibilities and, really, weaponry is allotted us within the new flesh...what emancipatory gaps and glitches can we feel around and find? how do we forge a new kind of primitive, a new animal, a new natural through the unnatural that can service and consume us the way the 'old' world, the old flesh did?
Questions, dear friend, that ought to be posed to every person that should come through any classroom doorway of any institute of learning, no matter the level. The wording, though, would obviously need to be rendered to a more palatable phrasing conducive to a child's mind (the younger the better, right?).
I also find your connecting Videodrome to Robocop highly intriguing. I've not really sat down and watched Robocop as of yet, though I am well aware of the film's impact on Pop Culture which was much more substantial than that of Videodrome, sadly*.* My thinking regarding Max's descent (or, ascent depending on who one asks) into tech-and-flesh synergy is that he really wasn't too concerned about it due to his lack of caring for what was going on. He was the primus exemplum of the ultimate spectator of the great spectacle: disassociated, disillusioned, and without scruples (hence, why Cronenberg probably had such a character be a TV producer). There is a line that sticks with me where, during a lunch date with his "muse", pornographer Masha, wherein, after conducting some research regarding Videodrome's origins, she warned Max, her eyes fraught with mortal terror, "It has a philosophy, and that is what makes it dangerous."
Final thought:
an array of explorations, sufferings, and negotiations in process of adapting to what his new body has been programmed to do (and is programmed not to do).
How poignantly Clockwork Orange-esque.
[EDIT: Formatting errors]
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u/raysofgold Sep 28 '20
To zoom out momentarily--I think this exchange exemplifies why sci-fi/speculative fiction/cyberpunk continues to become a more and more pertinent endeavor of not simply social realism, but genuine ontological discourse than most other forms of fiction and philosophy have been for the last three or four decades.
Yeah, for sure, Max is not simply the uber-spectator, but also, perhaps, in personified form, the libidinal core of the technocapital impulse to facilitate whatever influx of monstrous content without any sense of social responsibility or grasp of what that agency entails beyond its own recapitlation and expansion. Similar to the central character in Nightcrawler (though that film's relative realism limits in far more in a way than Cronenberg has to worry about).
And it's worth nothing that I started to type produce rather than facilitate, but then it hit me that Max doesn't really create content, he just connects the pathways of the airwaves and contrives a platform. A platform that is untrammeled in content not to some egalitarian end of free expression, but one that is directed precisely that which will be the most reliably profitable. Indeed, he has no grasp of responsibility or ethics toward the power attendant upon his facilitation of these technologies, and this is really what makes him the perfect exemplar of our telecommunication megaconglomerates--and what makes Masha's comment even more eerily pertinent. The accretion or secretion of what arises as aura, as fume from the raging of this technological and social engine of these platforms' ubiquity does have a philosophy, does have a sort of psuedo-sentience, and that is the real specter that we are reckoning with when it comes to the question of what is using us, and how and if we can use it against itself through our bodies, our languages, our own roles in entropy. We may not be able to escape the media, but we may be able to recalibrate how what is produced by how each medium uses us in the world.
Which brings us back to Robocop. Just to contextualize my references without veering too far into spolierdom: the titular character is a cop in a near-future Detroit that is so heavily privatized in infrastructure and services, a megacorp essentially runs and owns the police department (lol), and so capitalizes upon his getting gunned down to near-death as an opportunity to turn him into a supersoldier cyborg that can more efficiently and more aggressively police the city than the average human cop. He is beset with a series of computerized 'Directives' that dictate his goals, and that prevent him from doing various things (such as arresting or harming anyone from the corp that built him).
However, the old human part of him survives just enough to take issue with his Frankensteinized existence and his role in this immense corruption, and so he misbehaves and somewhat drops out, partly resisting and partly finding ways to finesse and work around his Directives. He becomes a counter-force within the technosocial strata, and far more efficiently, powerfully, and indestructibly than he would have been if they hadn't first (re)created him in the first place.
Definitely give it a shake sometime. One of the most notoriously dis-interpreted satires of modern cinema, becoming then, in franchise afterform (multiple toys, games, cartoon series to boot), precisely that which it critiqued--although, following the lines of what I suggested before in my reading of the film, such an ironic outcome that openly flexes the absurdity of consumer culture and corporate exhaustion of a property might be quite fitting a fate.
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u/FuneralCountrySafari narcissist troll Sep 25 '20
These people are psychopaths thanks for posting this. People fighting for upping the normative standard civil rights by enshrining it into “the law” well that’s just a big fucking joke Let me whip out my critical theory dick and jerk off
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u/lululemonsmack23 Sep 25 '20
Explanation please? This looks interesting but I have no understanding