What is Hollywood, you ask, dear children? A quorum of whores babbling endlessly on about fucking while the bordello is razed for a penny arcade -- Paul Bern

Thursday, July 29, 2010

THE SCHIZOPHRENIA OF THE INTEGRATED SPECTACLE

 Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts.
                                                                                           -- Terry Eagleton

The concentrated part of the spectacle is becoming more Stalinist, more concentrated. Nothing in it can exist except as indexical reference to another part of the spectacle. Re-makes, pop-culture riffs, certifications of things on TV, The New York Times.

One could even say, mystically, that these image-artifacts of the spectacle can only be allowed based on some FUTURE referential substance that they may colonize in the imagination of people -- some future capitalization of their power -- that such images-to-come may inherit as children to the father. This operation performs the eternal present by sewing the past to the future. To which Bewitched do we refer to? It no longer matters. Hollywood's aesthetic strategy is enmeshment -- the opposite of ostranenie.

And at the same time, other aspects of the spectacle become more diffuse, as everyone is conscripted into the work of acting out the spectacle. We're back to Rousseau and Gesamtkunstwerk -- back even to the situationist dream of uniting actor and spectator.

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