Yeah, the 'spectacle' is definitely a reference to Guy Debord. 'Empire' I take as just referring to western political and cultural imperialism. Bloom is a reference to the character in Ulysses but I've not read the 'Bloom' piece so don't know why or how.

I don't know what you'll make of Society of the Spectacle. It's not an easy read. More like a (long) manifesto made up of fragments. It lends itself to dipping into, rather than being read in the conventional cover-to-cover way. If you haven't already read Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, I'd say that'd provide a far more readable (and definitely more substantial, on an intellectual level) backdrop to a lot of the ideas underpinning Young-Girl.

ha! i see the connections w/ marcuse now but first i thought this was more of a deleuzian tract less frankfurt school.

empire-- see, i don't see the "imperialism", as, there is no emperor, i see an emergent system, yes, but i see no top-down authority, rather, the system itself creates and selects its own bosses. an empire without agency. a fiction. anyway, etc.

bloom-- yes i got the reference (mrkgnao!) because there's a tiqqun text that talks about a "bloom object" and starts with that ulysses scene when poldy feeds the pussens, but i didn't make it past the first paragraph and i was hoping someone would offer a summary.

BUT HEY

brazil/uruguay today which means reading will suffer. ha! ha ha ha! imperialistic entertainments! spectacle! and why not?

alright thanks for the reply man. see you later i'm sure in the fútbol thread.

I think that's where the harking back to the 68 era becomes problematic. As you know, intellectual debates in that period were steeped in the language of imperialism, either in reference to the US in Vietnam, the French in Algiers, the Soviet Bloc, etc. But Empire, as a term, while not entirely inappropriate, just seems like an unnecessary distraction now. Cultural imperialism, too. While the role of images (the 'spectacle') is now arguably greater than it's ever been, it's also used in a far more complex way than anything Debord had to contend with more than half a century ago. A case of the problem moving on while the methods employed to tackle it stand still.

Yeah. I suppose there is a sense of it being Frankfurt School ideas wrapped up in a vaguely Deleuzian language, which just seems like the worst of both worlds to me. I might be more into it if it was the other way around but even then, it'd still feels like a homage to someone else's youth. Radicalism as nostalgia. If Tiqqun were a band, they'd be Primal Scream.

ha ha ha. you meanie. and i was enjoying this!

anyway i'll continue after tomorrow or something. and will post some impressions.

i can't really disagree with this. its either a sign of how absolutely desperate things are, or the last gasp of something finally now ending.

at the same time, at least tiqquns radicalism exists. look at america up until the 80's. the weather underground where prepared to KILL to stop the slaughter of innocents by their own nation. that all stopped, and didn't resurge during the war in iraq.

what the fuck do we have now? we're on a sonic youth message board, a band that paid raymond pettibon to make comics for them (he also did weather underground esque drawings in the same style as the goo cover). and we are either silent and censor this violence or half revel in it in a desperate attempt to shove it in the face of a culture that no longer wants to know.

It feels to me like the last gasp of a kind of postmodern intellectual brand of radicalism, with its roots in 68. America has its own radicalism and its own baby boomer spokesfigures regurgitating the ideals of their 60s youth (Amy Goodman, etc) but it also has the likes of the Tea Party and the whole survivalist thing, which in its way is just as counter-cultural, if a bit silly.

Too many people think buying things is "radical" these days.

The working classes still remain the oppressed and at this point there's no way to add insightful intellectual flourishes to their story, no matter how hard you try. If you keep this in mind you can go through the toughest times even if you realise you won't come out of it alive because of the pressure you go through to remain strong and focused. Everything else is politics as theatre of cruelty, vanity or aimless pessimism. It adds up to nothing.

The most radical thing one can do in times like these is NOT CARE.

I am leading the pack on this one guys. Follow me.

How's not caring radical? From someone who makes a big fuss about hipsters no less!

Because everyone throughout the main-stream of anything is goaded into caring about this, that or the other. Hipsters care very much what people think of them.

coming up with a model for the state which doesnt murder innocents and cant become hijacked by murderers (NOT THE STATE WE HAVE NOW) and can also defend itself if necessary is surely the one human goal that can never be abandoned.

There are tons of worthy goals. having people brainwashed into thinking only instant-gratification and self-satisfying goals matter is something to fight against.

also the eradication of superstition. (I define that as any belief that has no basis in empirical reality)

Nick, ''innocents'' and ''murderers'' in the same sentence makes me think of biblical justice, which is only one tiny part of the problem we face as humanity. Religion has become the clothes that give you a smarter appearance in a bigger plan of mass slavery, but ultimately they are forgotten the minute you start doing the job properly. Very useful but no more essential in 2013.

I agree, but they've been largely abandoned politically, either by a socialist movement robbed of its union power or a 'new left' dominated by middle class activists distracted by self-serving theoretical in-fighting.

Oh c'mon, what are you guys basing on your opinions on? Could you please give examples of organisations, political cells etc you've come into contact with that make you think like this? I'm just asking because statements like the above give me the impression we all really spend all our time on the internet talking shit we don't know or really care about just for the sake of it.

The SWP

It explains a lot. They're the sort of people mid-sermon would throw veganism into their speech.

I am down with the S1W's

bringo.

some of these people are just insane. like the type who take 'great offense' at people writing angry denunciations of say, womens exploitation through porn. they simply take offense at this stuff being TALKED about, because they seem to prefer not knowing about it to people mentioning it. it's like they want to edit away all the parts of reality they dont like from their own little clique of self congratulating london upper class mediaites.

its this 'editing of reality' tactic that they are obsessed with now. oh your magazine does not contain the same amount of women writers as it does men? never will it occur to us that this might be because less women are submitting things and the staff are not actually including less women on purpose. no, its your fault and you have a problem - reality must be edited through the commodity culture! its insane.

also if you're like me and are finished with marxism and dare suggest that maybe the inability to sever with the idea of communism is a big big problem for the left, perhaps the biggest, and we need to abandon this obsolete atrocity at all costs - well then you're just evil. or you need lecturing by the purity squad. people who think anti racism is itself the only heuristic required to develop an all reaching critique and understanding of politics, economics and the systems and processes that sustain and destroy life.

and whats worst of all about the left now is that it has totally abandoned any kind of pessimism or understanding of the universe as indifferent to our fate and life as essentially suffering. this is very cosy because it frees you from thinking too hard about your own nations complicity in violent global systems. at the most you go around denouncing tweeters and left media figures for having impure souls that you can very obliquely connect to racism.

i want a left that can face things like the continuing war we wage against the 3rd world, genocide, the near impossibility of maintaining a state without violence,

and maybe abandon all this residual post christian moralism and slog through the hard roads of science and technology - not to seek some revived communism or easy solutions - but to develop a new system of thought and politics. one based on technical realities rather than the idealism of our discourses. one that goes further than atheism and doesn't believe in belief itself or the self or creation. one that isn't about annoying ourselves by pretending the main source of relief for people today isn't nihilism and that this is necessarily something to be ashamed about.

___

and the fucking left academy is just a collection of rich wankers doing this 'referencology' "here we need deleuze read through the lense of hegel because as marx said but was unable to think because he lacked heidegger's' blah blah fucking blah. go fuck yourself you stupid cunts. if you had ANY INTEREST in actual ideas you could easily explain them to those of us who want to know, but you wont.

have the decency to admit you are nothing more than rich people who want to feel all emotive and moral about their consumption of entertainment commodities and zizek is the lead clown in your avant guard navel gaze circus - it would be more fucking honest than pretending you are actually engaged in struggles that merit the questions 'what are we to do here?' in a serious tone like its some sort of party meeting.

these guys serve the same function as sneering aristocratic dinner party guests judging and making put downs of 'new money'. they basically spend their days denouncing entertainment commodities or art or thinking or whatever of people less 'ethically refined' as them, which is a code for less fucking rich.

seriously though - there is NO SHAME in not being political and just being a consumer - and anyone who understood the actual harsh and hellish nature of life on this planet and wasn't just a fantasist would get that. but these decadent assholes cant do that and constantly torture us all with their meaningless gestures of solidarity and hyping and bullshitting of whatever sparks of resistance us proles below them exhibit.

lets be honest. there is no left because noone WANTED ONE because from the 80's to recently the economy was so good for us - even proles were living lives that were in some ways similar to kings of centuries past. i suppose the problem for the left is and always has been to walk the tightrope of using guilt constructively or just wallowing in it destructively.

we're just machines that produce shit. pretending you don't care i believe, but pretending you don't care cos you're just so busy enjoying yourself in bliss (which everyone does now) - i don't believe. i'm not talking about reviving optimism or belief in our selves. all that's just another poison.

ok.

ok..

i do. i give two shits. go ahead, taste them. TASTE THEM.





yes, like that!

seriously, the way out is not making it to the middle class, because the house always wins. joe the plumber the temporarily embarrassed millionaire? haaa haaaa haaaa. but seriously!

How do you even define working class anymore anyway? With the increase in working hours, declining pay, rising cost of living, I think vast swathes of people who would define themselves as middle class (i.e. culturally) are actually working class (i.e. financially), but because people think of themselves as middle class they don't really think of themselves as being exploited.

hah, the old first-world working class was destroyed in the 80s (except in germany and northern europe maybe?) and replaced by a handful of highly disposable service serfs and a ton of macjobs.


and yet, there are ways to live on little money provided one doesn't follow the scripted path of consumerism and crushing debt-- because rich countries are still rich. and i'm not talking about dumpster diving (though it's an option as well).

Because machines have taken over millions of jobs that people once did the exploited in the 1st world are harvested through over consumption. Obesity and drugs are the two main ways of doing this. Barrage them with an aggressively hedonistic culture that isolates and ridicules anyone who doesnt conform to it - destroy public space so they cant congregate unless consuminh then get to work hacking their neuro chemistry to turn them into junkie rats that burn themselves out scrabbling about for coins.

The rich today are already in some sort of early form of post capitalism and just printing money and passing it around each other. The rest of us are just desperately trying to stay on level one of the videogame while half cannibalising each other just to get by.

I tend to agree. It sometimes feels like all that's left is culture when determining class, at least on the fringes. I know 'salt of the earth' working class types who are in a far better financial position than plenty of stereotypically middle class people I know. You can probably tell a lot more about a person's class nowadays by the TV programmes they watch than by the weight of their wage packet.

we are all individually distinct in so many ways.

No one has ever had the same set of atoms as another human. No one has ever had the same set of thoughts. No one, not even identical twins raised exactly the same have the same set of inner and outer experiences.

we are all individually ORIGINAL, from our atomic make-up, to our genetic structure, to our experiences.

nah. this is just post christianity. we cant say god created us but we're all 'individual' - distinctly created. we're all special snowflakes!

guess what, the last time you drank liquid you were drinking molecules that were once millions and millions of different now dead people.

your dna is a bunch of recycled junk and i have shitloads of it in common. you and i are AT LEAST 1/100th cousins as is every human on the planet. you're straining to preserve the vestiges of your dying religion in a disavowed secular form, but its not universal and hopefully less and less people are interested. as far as im concerned christianities only redeeming feature is laying the foundations for science. lets stop trying to mangle science with all these smuggled christian assumptions - it can only be holding us back.

everything you do in life, from the people you meet, the places you go, the things your body is programmed to do by its dna, all of it has very little to do with some sort of individual essence you have. its all externalities working through you. you are inside a world you did not create. your thoughts are memes and sense impressions and ego patterns that all come from the outside. you can pretend that your desperate reactions to things outside of your control and your grabbing onto any possible scrap of sustenance and safety constitutes an 'individuality' but it doesnt really.

everything that makes you feel unique is just the outlines of the cage you and all the other individuals are trapped in, which is the same for everyone. post christians seem to hold onto some hope that either sharing or speaking about or trying to commodify or consume this experience can some how allow people to 'connect' but it won't. we are all stranded islands and the most you ever get is glances at passing ships you will never truly know.

what I said has nothing to do with religion/faith/superstition.

every apple has similarities with every other apple but each apple, due to a million unfathomable variables, is DIFFERENT and unique. the combination is what makes everything UNIQUE.

there will never be and has never been another organism like dead_battery. You are IT.


and consciousness is the way the universe looks and analyzes itself. these things have nothing to do with creator deities or personal gods or religion or superstition.

there are a fucking billion other dead_batteries and anything you can come up with to make them 'unique' in NO WAY salvages the absolute devastating loneliness that is the encoded experience of every single one of them. its just the same confusing nightmare playing out over and over, like a billion cinemas with only one person in the audience, locked inside and looking at the hazy and garbled scraps of dreamy fictional interpretations of the outside.

and the universe isn't conscious. it doesn't analyze itself or even have knowledge of itself. again - this is post christianity - a kind of scientific secular panentheism (panensecularism?).

all though my life will always be a totally hermetically sealed box of my own solipsism and there is no way of crossing over into the experience of another and getting out of the body - this same stupid experience is perpetually baffling everyone else on the planet. and in fact once you strip away the aesthetic and circumstantial eccentricities my life is barely any different from anyone elses. in fact its probably incredibly similar to millions of other peoples, and has fundamentally the same stupid series of anxieties/realizations/strivings/failings/events etc.

any great idea or scheme i might come up with an embark upon, although feeling like something because of the neurochemical buzzes and self congratulation i might feel, is the same stupid crap thats been done before, is happening now and will happen again far too many times.

barely different does not equal IDENTICAL

but none of the things that make say, my life unique and non identical are remotely intense or noticeable enough to alter the fundamental sameness of my experience to other peoples. nothing going on in my head is that different from yours.

obviously, the inside of the brain of an asbergers guy on meth or a retarded maths savant 5 year old girl is a bit different, but its just a matter of variations on the same essential hardware.

sure, the exact list of memes, names, dreams and images of things ive seen you could extract from my brain with the tech we're developing now would be technically not totally the same as ANY other individuals, but it would be pretty fucking similar. and the fundamentals of how it felt to me would be the same as it did for millions of others in similar situations to me.

like all the daily bullshit i think - the feelings of there being good in my life and my plans and desires and future redeeming me and all my egos fantasies of praise, adoration, dominance, success and fame - all of this is composed of the same fundamental stuff that keeps most people from becoming sane enough to kill themselves. sure i might want to be a slightly different take on the fantasy we're all chasing, but its the same basic neurological package and chemical flow.