roachboy

the religion analogy--particularly the church community analogy floated in the opening quote--seems too narrow---the earlier stuff on this question of celebrity culture that talked about magic as a way to think about the types of relations folk can develop with the celebrityimages they consume works better because it is less specific about the type of community imagined.


most magical practices are about visualization/projection---one thing that becomes really clear via either doing or knowing folk who do these types of practices is the fundamental role played by syncretism (mixing types of signifiers, adapting to changing conditions etc.)--thinking through the framework of an organized bureaucratic religion tends to obscure this fact in that it relegates syncretism to a marginal phenomenon. magic as visualization and/or projection--that is as a variant of meditation that is directed outward in a kind of complicated/ambiguous manner---at least opens up ways of thinking about a whole range of usages--transcendence via direct appropriation--usage of certain celebrity images as ways of focussing other actions (on this, think about what motivates kids in particular to start forming garage bands)---devices for adding density to conversations (quotation. allusion) which are also about shifting the social position of the speaker in a given context--signifiers that structure desire, not necessarily for the celebrity him or herself, but for commodities associated with the image or with commodities associated with a mode of life that is connected at the fantasy level to the image of a particular celebrity.

you can use this metaphor of celebrity as talisman (say) to open up possibilities for thinking about masscult--but this does not mean that the patterns you can isolate using the metaphor are necessarily performed by folk with the same idea in mind (in other words, the masscult-magic connection is an analytic metaphor rather than a motivation you could impute to folk in real time)

also britney might not be the best signifier to use to think about this kind of stuff--she is also very much caught up in the tabloid press as space of compensation--i heard this argument somewhere and stole it---the idea is look at britney--she has everything, fame, cash, talent (?), cash, cash and cash--but she is really fucked up--like most stars you hear about in tabloidspace--all are really fucked up--it is hard to be really wealthy--aren't you, reader, glad that you are not plagued with excess wealth?

think more of elvis or the beatles.
for example:
when i was last in paris, three years ago, i remember wandering across the pont d'alma and passing a shrine for diana spenser that was set up above the entrance to the underground passage in which she was killed. there were lots of notes attached to the shrine asking diana to intercede for them with god--she had become a saint, and was being invoked like a saint.

there is something quite strange about this--the pattern of saints and intercession is obviously catholic, but it seems to refer to a much earlier type of relation to the symbols of catholicism within which magic and prayer intermingle without problem because the boundary is not fixed.
much of the strangeness derives, i think, from a notion of sainthood as coming from below, from communities of believers, and not from the church hierarchy.

thinking about this introduces lots of complications in how you imagine something like a saint and its history within the church--what are they about, saints? are they about the church trying to co-opt/stop/limit/supplant popular forms of spiritual engagement in the interest of its own bureaucratic power?

more generally--is there only an artificial boundary that seperates prayer from magic? how is prayer not a form of magical practice? (a serious question, actually)

this points to an entire history of popular relations to religion that we, sitting here in the 21st century, cannot know anything about because very little of/about it was written down.....

sometimes i wonder if folk really wish for magic as something they can engage in, that gives a different sense of agency in the world.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite