Wednesday 13 October 2010

Touched by fire..admin 2

Like aspects of the Post Modern,the Cultural Industries rapaciously consumes marginal identities under the guise of plurality and respect for"otherness" The Cultural Industries have created a working environment which mocks the reality of otherness. It is totally disengaged from its own ego,and devoid of a self confidence to engage in the realm of radical negotiation because of the deep rooted fear that the "other" might,in reality,rise up and challenge the existing order and demand a change in the power structures of the privileged order.Hence a system of forced communication,which is non communication,is devised by introverted administrators resigned to,rather than revelling in their experience of alienation.

This cynical abuse of language is a means of not engaging in the world of human emotions and all corresponding uncertainties which are activated by involvement with fellow human beings.This is not just an avoidance,a sort of turning away from the chaos of life, rather its an attack on the problems and dangers of creative engagement.What is going on here is an attempt to live in a world of anti engagement,an imprisoned limbo akin to the corporatist dependency on creating for the consumer a desire for inner comfort.The outside "real" is reduced to nothing more than interiority and the abnegation of the real.

In this inward looking,frightening world we encounter those other worlds,two of which are represented as "enlightened false consciousness" and the "passionate attachment".Two sates of emotional unbliss which arise from the desire of the unobtainable.

The Enlightened false consciousness is concerned with the resurgent interest in mystical accounts of the world and the return of the ritualised concern with sentimentality,a form of dysfunctional personality within the community of sentimentality..A return to the false occult and the seeking out of the conservative exploration of the irrational in popular culture,the embrace of the authoritarianism which is at the heart of the"psycho-technic" rhetoric in the corporatist propaganda and publicity,the publicity of the essentially event less.

...publicity,situated in a future continually deferred....experience is impossible within it.... everything publicity shows is there awaiting acquisition...all hopes are gathered together,made homogeneous,simplified,so that they become the intense ,
yet vague, magical yet repeated,promise offered in every purchase....publicity is the life blood of this culture....

The passionate attachment....that emotional drive which makes our lives uncomfortable yet at the same time satisfying, the strong urge to forget reason is dangerous.
To forget reason is to forget,or for ego rationality.Passion drives the motivation of rational thought into areas of transgression;it leads to an ill defined logic,whereby the act of passion unites both parties in an embrace which logically will end in bitter separation.

The separation will cause catastrophic complications for all those involved,either directly or on the periphery of the relationship. The passion will involve and eventually devour all those parties caught up within the relationship.This all consuming emotional relationship serves as a warning to the naivete of greed.Passion becomes a shared emotion,a locked embrace at the expense of the external world.

Post Modernity collapses the disjunction between aspiration and reality;it annihilates the difference between the possible and the reaching out for the impossible,the very locality of art. It is this reactionary acceptance of the moment which as led creativity in to the hands of the publicity machine.Art is no longer used as a means to rebel against the censorship of our "big other"the bigger super ego.The Dionysian forces which push to extreme satisfaction, the subconscious thrust of excess have been sacrificed on the alter of banality,tragedy is reduced to living in a state of the ever present;there is no space in which to ventilate our instincts.

Dionysus,in Greek mythology provoked excess.He transcended into animality and chaos.He sacrificed himself and was torn apart. A restrictive reality principle circulates the domain of the impossible.We are dominated by the tyranny of the script and a false dream for the desire called normality.

1 comment:

  1. There is not such thing as normality. What really exists is the tendency of human societies.

    Since we talk about Greek mythology, another myth related to the topic is this Procrustes, or "the stretcher [who hammers out the metal]", also known as Prokoptas or Damastes (Δαμαστής) "subduer", was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who physically attacked people, stretching them, or cutting off their legs so as to make them fit an iron bed's size. Metaphorically, It refers to the real nightmare we all live, called conformity.

    ReplyDelete