PERIPETIAL REPLAY

The textual richness of the “event” which unleashed a veritable ninja-tsunami of sublime racist cliches about The Murdoch’s Guoanbu Controller, Dame Wendi Murdoch (I’m kidding, kidding! Or am I?) needs to be unpacked. Everyone agrees, I think, that its spectacular interest is high. Why?

1. The men of the clan, so focused on projecting their defensive alpha authority in the frontal mode, that is toward the camera, that they are vulnerable to attack from the periphery. This is perhaps a cognitive occupational blindness of media workers, the fatal assumption that the periphery doesn’t exist. Not only does it exist, but that is where things happen. A debordian rule: Always Look Where the Camera is Not.

2. The image-fact that The Murdoch is both in need of defense, and defensible, inevitably humanizes him. That his defender is a Chinese woman is beautifully metaphoric, something that sino-atavists are naturally not taking lightly. A subtle prismatic inflection of the master image, that is, of the Fall of Murdoch, has occurred. If it were a corporate goon slapping aside the intruder – we’d think, sure, business as usual. In that case we could perhaps with justice speak of “ninja reflexes” – but in this case it is a capitalization on an opportunity that always exists in potential, something that people versed in the languages of strategy and power should always be on the lookout for: the convertible event, the event that can be turned or crystallized. That husband and wife should be equals and peers should surprise no one, but in this case, strangely, it does. 

3. The discussion of mediated events inevitably takes on the phenomenology of the sporting event – an idiotic instant replay style of criticism that amounts to a minimal sort of aesthetic appreciation for the beauty of the move, and did it work or was it a noble failure in the accounting. Did it result in a win, etc? Did it lead in a linear way to the next circumstance recorded by the Spectacle? But there are at least Seven Beauties hidden in any mediated event, each more profound and interesting than the efficient discussion.