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Old 08-14-2009, 06:24 AM   #146 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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well, it isn't a threadjack, ms media. you could see gun fantasies as reactions against a combination of things---picking a couple: a society of the spectacle in which everything is image and every image has it's place on the one hand and both the fact of significant socio-economic dislocation and (even more) anxiety about that.

revolution is the introduction of a new product line into a system of products that's legitimated through the new product lines that are introduced. anything and everything is narrated as a variant of the same. on the basis of narratives that make anything and everything variants of the same, image collages are produced and soon elements from these collages end up devices in other collages and so politics becomes entirely a matter of combination and recombination, a sort of shopping for elements as much as a shopping of objects and the personal identities that come packaged along with those objects.

so you can look at guns as they circulate in far right contexts as commodities that come with the consumer identity "free" appended to them. free is an element in a collage that gets abstracted and pasted into other collages: so "free" becomes strapped becomes like a minuteman becomes strict constructionist: "free" means resistant to any and all change that's happened since the 18th century back when scale made sense and there were fewer in the ways of institutionalized Superegos running about, watching, meting out punishments---all of which are decoys behind which the Reality lurks, which is an image of the Persecuting Father....

but there are many possible combinations

"free" can operate in assemblages that enframe a notion of personal space, and a notion of personal space made inviolable can be a way to compensate for the sense that in socio-economic and political terms the ground is dissolving beneath your feet or (more widespread) anxiety about the possibility that in socio-economic and political terms the ground may well be dissolving beneath your feet or be about to and maybe your consumer identity will allow you to see it maybe it won't.

free can mean that there is some possibility of enforcing a separation between an entirely colonized space of desire and dreaming (ideology, advertisement...no real difference) and some object world that you can pretend is separate from that entirely colonized space, even as you try to enforce that sense of separation using the same kind of device (a commodity) enframed using the same devices (advertisements in the largest sense) and so are acting through what they call an interpellation (through a social identity that follows from the way commodities are framed, so a position for the user of a commodity).

the irony i suppose is that this way you can imagine a gun gets you Outside the entirely colonized spaces of desires and dreams which shape the entirely colonized spaces we (sometimes laughingly) call reality because you can potentially shoot people with it and that, goddamn it, is real. but dying is just an inevitability: it is no more or less real than anything else. killing can be a largely imaginary act---so if you shoot some atf guy who enters your imaginary house under some imaginary scenario to take away your imaginary freedom by taking away your imaginary gun and see in that imaginary act something of a rebellion and not an enactment of a consumer scenario outlined from the beginning, one which appeals to a demographic that you happen to be part of....you're not doing anything but following a script.

all having a gun does is make you a consumer of a particular type of commodity.
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