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what's curious about the talk show inoculation process is less the progress into the system unfolded by the soma than the sense of vindication on the one hand and legitimation on the other that seem, somehow, to accompany it. what the talkingheads do basically is structure resentment. they get to that, it is said (muntz makes this point in a remarkably dry way, but still) is through the aggressiveness of presentation, be it aurally or visually. it's not that different from the explanation given by a jewish guy who thought he was eichmann and who stood trail as eichmann in the play "the man in the glass booth" for why fascism appealed so: "he told us what it was that we were afraid of."
there is something quite disconcerting about the existing top-down media apparatus, the various commercially sanctioned modes of generating brand allegiance that "conservative" and "liberal" are brands that one identifies with because one likes the flavor of resentment they help structure, likes the trajectories these structures enable, the way they help organize the world into an endless tunnel of Persecuting Agents that one "resists" by being pissy in the same way as one's imaginary comrades in an imaginary Conflict that you get to participate in by sitting in a chair and having someone narrate it for you.
we live in a space defined around a wholesale collapse of politics and consumption that relies on the circulation of officially sanctioned Products in a wide enough range that certain illusions of Choice are presented, one can be oneself by assembling this little collages of signifiers that you breath into and that help you locate the Persecuting Agents of your choice while at the same time the system that generates these signifiers is placed out of debate and is necessarily legitimate and coherent because it enables this Articulations of Selves because that system *is* all the tedious fantasylands that, taken together, constitute the realm of pseudo-politics.
i keep having these conversations with folk--do you think we're living through the collapse of capitalism--and i say no, what i think we're living through is the collapse of the american empire and that one of the defining characteristics of the collapse of empire (historically speaking) is that those who scuttle about within it do not and cannot see the collapse. rather than think about rome, it is perhaps better to think about the end of the hapsburgs.
structures of resentment pull the world close to you and enable you to imagine that you have some plausible control.
this basically therapeutic situation comes at a price.
but you're hardly likely to know that if the therapeutic situation becomes the center of repetitions so that it's narratives become your narrative.
not seeing can be fun and exciting, i guess. a full-time job.
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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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