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on the international reaction: i am surprised at the extent to which the reactions i have been following are rooted in close sustained attention not just to the elections themselves, but also to the figuring of the new line-ups, etc.: within this, what is interesting is the extent to which french and english language press coverage of american politics is infinitely more nuanced/detailed than any american coverage of any other country's political landscape.
yet another argument in favor of turning off your television.
and here is another: the apparent persuasive power of the "manly man" approach to iraq--sqaure of jaw and bereft of information--is a direct function of television's figuration of information. from any other viewpoint, the refusal to interact with either information or complexity would be seen as pathological--but in a visual culture wholly dominated by decontextualized imagery, the square=jawed man who repeats and repeats the same things can come to be seen as "resolute" or "manly"---and this has everything to do with the ways in which political information is mediated in the states, and almost nothing with that of the relation between the content of what is said and the putative referent (in this case iraq)....the flip of this is obvious: that politicos who try to address complexity--and who by extension find themselves bumped out of being able to rely on the square-jawed repetition of simple memes--appear "weak" or unmanly.
it is crazy, the power of tele-mediation in the states: a top-down corporate autocracy gets to frame in a close-to-absolute way how american pseudo-democracy functions. worse, a top-down corporate autocracy has, via repetition, managed to frame in its own image the boundary between inside and outside: what complicates the relationship between face-shot, utterances and the notion of acceptable duration for political propositions particular to commercial news outlets gets processed not as a limitation of the medium, but as a limitation imputed to those who interact with the medium, whose political signifiers are shaped through it.
which means that people have naturalized television, collapsed its medium-specific limitations onto the "reality" that is framed by/through them.
which is stupid: nothing more or less.
turn off the fucking television and read.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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