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well first off the holy grail of any cultural critic is to be the one naming the zeitgeist. people try it all the time. time only tells which ones stick really...in the meantime, trying to name to zeitgeist is in a sense a cultural power move. so the essay is about b.e.e., really. that's one way in which it performs what it's talking about.
second empire/post-empire: that this isn't explained is obviously not accidental and is probably the way in which the essay most exactly performs the historical situation in which it was written. maybe the ambiguity about what the term designates reflects some ambiguity for b.e.e. about the situation. either way, it refers to the structures behind the security-entertainment complex (a term i still like and still am not sure about to the extent that i am not entirely sure what it refers to) and comportments that align(ed) with it during the (last--chronologically) american imperial phase, and to the imperial situation itself, so the whole american empire in the post-world-war-2 mode, which was associated from the outset with an invasion of consumer goods and entertainment options--you know coca cola and film noir--that kind of invasion. so charlie sheen is being positioned as a fuck you to the first--the Man in the local entertainment hierarchy kinda sense---and as a symptom of a mode of dealing with the implosion of the american empire, a kind of mockery of the older comportments and pathology at once, all of which is normalized because it appears as continuous on television. so pathology as a kind of aesthetic posture at a point of breakdown of obvious aesthetic postures. if you play the game of equating social power with distance from necessity (it's a sociological position) then it seems kinda reasonable to equate the loss of distance (performed through rituals of decorum) with a breakdown of power, and a loss of power (in both the local sense of the entertainment-security complex and more generally) with the breakdown of the invisibility of power---so with the distance that separates the exercise of power from the perception that power is being exercised--which is perhaps the most basic distancing in a hegemony.
or something.
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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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