Desert of the Real
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- KuzII
"He too fought under television for our place in the sun."
Robert Lowell on Lieutenant Calley, 1971"There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them, because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse and of the various forces organized to relay it . . . Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion, which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then very quickly dissolved altogether . . . Once one controls the mechanism which operates the only form of social verification to be fully and universally recognized, one can say what one likes . . . Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it wishes to, once, or three times over, and change the subject: knowing full well there is no danger of riposte, in its own space or any other". [Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle]
September the 11th – as a media spectacle:
Of the bombers of the WTC in New York: Hopeless symbolic gestures.’ We agree quite strictly with all three words of the diagnosis. (As do the perpetrators, it seems. In them chiliasm is spliced with nihilism, to form a distinctively hyper-modern compound. They boast in their communiqués of being ‘for Death’—in contradistinction, they imply, to modernity’s miserable attachment to a Life not worth the name
NOTE: The terror of September 11 had a handful of targets (our tendency to make it, in memory, simply ‘the bombing of the Twin Towers’ is not untrue to the logic of the event). The perpetrators knew full well that they lacked the means to spread out through the wider social fabric and bring ordinary doings to a halt. And they believed, rightly or wrongly, that in present circumstances they did not need to. What they did was designed to hold us indoors, to make us turn back and back to a moving image of capitalism screaming and exploding, to make us go on listening (in spite of ourselves) to the odious talking heads trying to put something, anything, in place of the desolation. .
Is the suicide bomber attempting to destroy the society of the spectacle by producing the spectacle of its destruction?
Observe: Yesterday insurgents detonated a bomb of unparalleled ferocity in the heart of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The compound supposedly immune to the decay of the wider country. Never has an attack been so well orchestrated for television, whose strategic purposes were negligible to non-existant.
WATCH THE VIDEO: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world…
Welcome to the DESERT OF THE REAL
- KuzII0
*looks longingly for paraselene sonthonax
- determinedmoth0
Gosh. Less coffee Kuz.
- KuzII0
umm....