FROM NOW ON, THE OFFICIAL SPONSOR OF SAN MARCOS WILL BE ABSOLUT…

“Cinema should not only be profitable, it should be profitable enough to allow the government to cease the production of Vodka.” 

                                                     -- Kossior, in his incarnation as Soviet Film Executive

Everyone should read Coronil’s interesting book on the cultural anthropology of the Venezuelan state and its’ mythic relation to Oil. It’s called The Magical State. The quotes below are from a lecture, elaborating on some of the points made in his book, bringing the story, as it were, up to date with the fascinating contradictions of Chavismo.

In Crowds and Power, Canetti describes in detail the strange process by which the mental ambient or weather of the leader, his paranoic state, begins to infect and consume the infrastructure of the whole country. The paradigmatic oral-tribal leader, Hugo Chavez, who governs through an incantatory stream of words, is an interesting variation:

Coronil: “I want to explore one aspect noted commonly and constantly in Venezuela but seldom analyzed: not just what Chavez says, but the fact of his saying it and his saying it so repeatedly. I want to explore what seems his formidable verbal production, for some his extraordinary pedagogic presidency, for others his verbal incontinency or verborrea--his production or overproduction of history through words. How does this proliferation of words relate to the transformation of the world?

For those who are unfamiliar with Venezuela, let me just say that Chavez speaks publicly a lot, as far as I know, more than any political leader on earth, ever. According to those who like to count, he speaks an average of 40 hours a week, a full time job. He has spoken now for more than a year continuously, 24 hours a day. He does not hold regular cabinet meetings, like previous presidents, where technical reports are presented and discussed carefully and in private; his method is to convoke the nation to weekly meeting, his Alo, Presidente! where policies are defined and proclaimed --- sessions which have no time limits --- one knows when they start, but not when they end--some last more than seven hours.”

The French have a lovely expression for bullshit – they accuse someone of ‘making cinema’. Chavez is engaged in making cinema with his words, with the force of ten film studios, ploughing the seas, in a heroic, and farcical performance. He is Bolivar. He must keep talking until reinforced by a phantom army of images that never come. This performance is literary primitivism – he’s better than Rómulo Gallegos, better than Roque Dalton, better than Ahmadinejad, better even than Bolaño and Fidel and Che -- it’s an epic novel, a new history, but completely improvised. It’s like one of those endless radio dramas in a Lav Diaz movie, where every scrap of actuality is seized as poetic material. But the inescapable fact is that it is a solitary, oral performance.  

Desarrollo Poetico. 

We can even theorize that the whole world exists for Chavez to articulate his never-ending story.

This over-production, this surplus-ideology must go somewhere. There needs to be a constant neurotic engagement between the leader and his friends & enemies. It is probably impossible to dream, or to sleep without hearing the voice of Chavez. Coronil notes that the State Department of the United States has a whole team of Kremlinologists and a mainframe that takes down this amazing production, so that they can perform an elementary literary criticism on the work. And this monotonous, neurotic obsession between lover and beloved without respite, without intervening images can only lead to mutual exhaustion and drinking. But people should only get drunk on the poetic effluvia from the Presidente. No other intoxication is possible.

Coronil: “Last week I read an article in the Venezuelan newspaper Tal Cual about a meeting with Chavez and leaders of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). One sentence jumped at me: he told these leaders that they should be disciplined and forget personal projects and vices -- that they should not like whisky, but be ready to die for the nation. I found this juxtaposition remarkable, this bringing together the demand that they don’t drink whisky, and be ready to die for the nation.

For those not familiar with Venezuela, Venezuela is the first consumer of whisky per capita in the world. Under Chavez regime, it has become quite common for leaders not just to drink the already expensive 12 years old whisky, but also the much costlier 18 years old. What Chavez demanded from his leaders was something that everyone knew was not possible — not that people would be ready to die for the nation, because this was imaginable, but that they would stop drinking whisky. Yet, people accepted this and applauded Chavez. What to make of this disjuncture between what Chavez says and what is, between representations and reality? Even if we accept that people understood “whisky” as a general metaphor for vices, and “dying” for the nation as a metaphor for working hard for the nation, what to make of this manner of presenting alternative codes of revolutionary conduct?”

What of this strange prohibition: is it Chavez’s own secret desire to drink, his refusal to do so, projected into the people? Or does he feel his own interest in the national epic – which is after all HIS national epic, flagging…?

I AM LOVE STREAMS

Let’s hazard this, at least: Beauty is something that increases freedom, spirit; that feeling of the pleasant sublime. A real refuge. It is of the Party of Eros. We know that Tarkovsky, for instance, is beautiful. Shimizu’s films, too. Is it a reproach to us, living in this Grande Bouffe of images, that their images were produced under conditions of extreme misery, and some of that misery is still etched in the film?

Glamour, a card carrying member of the Party of Thanatos, is a mode of aggression; it tries to hijack some of the expressive (let's say, superficial) qualities of beauty and deploy them ideologically, or in the service of force. Glamour is a sort of desecration-destruction – sometimes it withers the object or person away, like it did to Garbo, and sometimes violently explodes it -- makes it vanish.

The complex act of imaging the unseen classes on the Agit-Trains was revolutionary, but not in the expected way --  as soon as they were captured on film, they were doomed in their entrancement. What they cried out for next was cine-vodka! Down with funky Kino Pravda with its Tolstoyan scoldings and austerity and up with a glamourized, apple-cheeked, abstracted revolution of eroticism, a visit from some shiny future that worked. Fascism is also an aesthetic; making certain things emphatic, "enriched", and finally, again, this word “glamorous” -- and that takes a whole machine and a value system that is dedicated to Thanatos. And of course, there must be an audience sensitized to it, hungry for glamour. That gnawing hunger -- there is no easier way to bring out one's inner fascist.

Three Songs of Lenin, The Great Consoler, Bezhin Meadow, New Moscow — four  extraordinary films about the dangers and contradictions of materializing images. The suppression of the Soviet avant-garde was a fight about defining the means of exchange: images.

The poetic impulse is always to drive a beautiful and estranging wedge between knowledge and power -- which always tend to flow toward each other like doomed apparatchiks in love -- with that quality that Shklovsky calls ostranenie.  Approved systems of Art, like Socialist Realism, the seven headed hydra of Globalist Realism aka “Hollywood”, Advertising, or Television News, must confuse the two streams in a numbing familiarization, to increase tolerance for things that the mind & spirit revolts from. Enmeshment.

We are on a path to a great literalization: If I describe something – anything to you, perhaps make it strange & wondrous, let it catch a glint of something on its surface, an intimation, then I am (I hope) conveying something to you that is technically false, something as faraway from A FACT as is possible. But whatever strength it has as an image may reverberate in you, breed other images, it may send you on a vain journey of experience to recapture something of that reverberation.

THE GREAT CONSOLERS

Ellul says, among other things, that propaganda is conjunct to democracy, for the obvious reason that there needs to be a mutual fluxing of knowledge (episteme) and power between rulers and ruled that is not required in a dictatorship or monarchy, where power must every so often be displayed directly & unambiguously, ideally through randomness and terror. 

In other words: the players in such a game must present tangible and potent images of themselves -- to each other. The mass must recognize its image in the mirror-glass of its leadership. In democracies, even in “Chinese Democracies”, consequently, images serve as a common means of exchange, an intermediate term between knowledge and power. Social Engineering from Disaster Capitalism, to Lady Gaga, to school lunches must be IMAGED and SOLD before implementation. 

In the Technological Society, Media function as orgone accumulators of the irrational – if enough particles crystallize around certain subjects – a ground for human action can be perceived – it becomes “actionable” -- the government acts in the name of the people, and celebrates itself, and then, at a later moment, the whole thing is easily transformed into myth. Even in the Soviets, images were required to establish the mutual majesty of both state and proletariat. But that royalist word “majesty”, one of the key subtexts of the West, hides a little the dynamic inter/shadow play of aura between power and its subjects.

Power-aesthetics, the erotics of images, and a whole class of cheerleading RELATIONAL antinomies that pussyfoot approvingly around them, like hot, quirky, cool, sexy: word-acts that are the equivalent of the fist pump or the Heil Hitler, the interlock of the hive around the queen – these, too, are part of civilization. Language is no longer just the Benjaminian caption around these image-utterances. 

Images don’t need explication or explanation now that they are the outnumbering crowd that hovers like a sky or washes us like an ocean. Despite their expressive poverty, these word-acts are our way of interacting in this arena. They signal a relative range of psychic engagement in the realm of power-aesthetics, from “I privately recognize the image and the power behind it but I am cool  to it” to  “I need to be seen in approval of this visible force pressing on us, comrades.”

Those of us who live in this world of ruined, sputtering images, which are now thrusting us back into orality, cannot now do without images, and on the whole the use of them tends to stabilize and harmonize as much as it stupefies. It is this undeniable trinity that is so resented, but never realistically challenged, by the revolutionary cadres of the 20th century (the Lukacses, Foucaults, and Debords of the world) but the fight against images (icons, fetishes) from Plato to the Taliban really seems dystopian, when cast in this light -- and one suspects that these people, in all sincere good faith, would prefer rivers of blood in the streets, than fluent images on the screens.

Images of power, or images with power, are more efficient and acceptable, than the dark burning radiance of the act/thing itself, which we would likely not survive. The unspoken terror unearthed by the story in Marker’s film of Medvedkin and Vertov living in the same building in the 30s and never speaking to each other.

But there is a double bind, here. Too often, the mediated functions as a spiritual decoy so that they can blow us away in the real world. The surrogating, subtituitive function of the image is not unlike the transubstantiation of the Host. It's a mystical operation. People laugh at the quaint cannibalistic ethos of communion, but is it any different, really, than how we routinely accept images as envois from the Real?

Yet, the fact remains, when power structures abandon their supple traffic in images for any kind of actualization, you must gaze keenly out into the hills. The killing fields can’t be far off, in some secret, unimaged place.

ACTION PICTURES

The Modern Action Film as an oral narrative: 

“Ong explains that the structure of oral narratives is such that it facilitates easy storage and retrieval of information; narratives serve as oral storehouses of history. Rhapsodizing and linking together episodes with little regard to a linear plot structure, (flow, tactility) the use of flat characters (typage), and focusing on interaction with the audience (interactivity, kinetics, trailer lines) help to foreground the elements of an oral narrative and make them easier to remember. With literate cultures, narratives do not need to be structured mnemonically. Consequently, the narratives of literate cultures tend to follow a linear plot-line, make use of heavy subordination, and are structured such that the narrator/writer and reader are detached.”

THIS JUST IN...

Several things are happening quickly right now, at once:

1. The fusion of producer and consumer of the spectacle.

2. Commodification and fluidification of identity. “I’m Guy Debord’s friend on MySpace!”

3. Intensification of eternal present. Extreme commodification of the temporal. Twitter is not information, but a way of carving up time. It is a time medium. Also: texting/email is orality barely disguised as visuality. OMG. LOL!

4. Visual Platforms (cartographies) for the specularization of social relations. (i.e. social networking) The fact that social relations are visible (like Vertov’s dream of the intelligible soviet society) makes comparison pleasurable and irresistible.  Rear Window social platforms.

5. Globalization of terror as a secret anti-spectacular force, the solution to which is, naturally, more surveillance.

6. Insofar as all things are mediated through images/orality, (but without any final accounting from an AUTHORITY as in tribal culture) nothing certain can be settled, history made impossible, the rule of indeterminacy and many beautiful & wild gardens of disinformation flourish.

BLACK HAWK DOWN / SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE

The basic work-problem of Globalization is to introduce spectacularity to the Favela/Colonia/Slum/Urban Interface. It is this vast “untapped” population which must be brought into cultural production of the spectacular.

FORGERY WITHOUT REPLY

The spectacle: power looking and admiring itself. 

Like the protagonist of La Jetee, we (the producer-consumer of the spectacle) cannot know that haunting and haunted image whose meaning is so desperately sought is the secret, static memento of our own fatal encounter with power. 

Also, Don Quijote having to deal with the false adventures of the false Quijote. 

Forgery without reply.

KINO PRAVDA

All these vertovian kinoks running around with camera-phones, producing-consuming the spectacle – they have the cheap pathos of African child soldiers with their Kalashnikovs.

ZERKALO

The mirror is the fastest route into the irreal.

THE INVISIBLE SYMBOLIC IN THE CINEMA

"Who could fail to sense the greatness of this art, in which the visible is the sign of the invisible?"  -- Jean Gremillon

What the people of the early cinema understood, but almost everyone has forgotten -- an image of people suppressing emotion on screen is almost unbearably moving for the audience. Why is this? Perhaps, because, in a similar way, the thing that is NOT shown, the invisible term in the Kuleshov effect, immediately supplied by imagination of the people watching, results in a powerful effect: a gesturing off-stage to something that is not, perhaps, representable. A suture of the cosmic and the mundane.

WE SHALL CARP NO MORE, AMID THE RUMORS OF THE MOTORS

Il fiume no, il fiume basta!

Bisogna dimenticarselo il fiume

Ci dicono di salutarlo

Ci ordinano di salutarlo

Verranno qui con delle macchine

Verranno qui con le loro draghe

Ci saranno degli uomini diversi

e il rumore dei motori

Chi ci penserà a tirarli su che non gelino i pioppi ?

Non resterà più niente

Non ci sarà più l’estate

Non ci sarà più l’inverno

Anche per te è finita

Fatti da parte

Tirati indietro, affonda la tua barca !

Si, parlo anche per te !

Non pescheremo più il luccio insieme

Non pescheremo neanche le carpe

E le anatre non passeranno

Non ritorneranno più dentro il mirino del mio fucile

Basta le folaghe, basta il volo delle oche selvatiche !

Amici miei, vedete:

Qui finisce la vita e comincia la sopravvivenza

Perciò, addio Stagno Lombardo !

Ciao, ciao fucile !

Ciao, fiume !

Ciao Puck !

SACRED MONSTERS

GODARD FROM THE MINARETS

News of the all-too-very-clever Swiss ban of the minarets made me instantly think of that Helvetian fraud, J-L Godard, and not just because he was the first infidel hipster to wear the keffiyeh. It’s possible that that quicksilvery quality that lies behind the famous shit-eating grin is somehow a national trait. Passive Aggression as the key to the Swiss psyche? So-called Neutrality? Ask no questions, tell no lies banking? The Polanski thing? Hmmm….

Always canny, Godard has cut a deal to have Histoire(s) du Cinema broadcast from the remaining minarets when they are not otherwise being used.

THE WOMAN IN HER PLACE

 “The social status is assigned the female sex is such, wrote Carla Lonzi that, ‘…a man would prefer never to have been born if he had to contemplate it for himself.’ Women have borne it, bear it, helping themselves in part—a part difficult to measure—with fantasies. It is difficult to know at the moment to what extent fantasies help us to bear our difference when we find ourselves exposed to the exhibitions of the male sex. Usually one finds out when it is too late, when, that is, the power to fantasize diminishes. Then the female mind surrenders and falls into that state which psychologists call depression."

                                                                    -- Libreria della donne Collective

Reality is the masculine principle; imagination, phantasy is the feminine principle. It is the true home of anarchy and creation.

That is why to put a woman in her place this is all you must say:  

Why, you're crazy...you're dreaming...
you're living in a dream world.

You just need to cruelly mock the ontological status of her secret home.

THE MAN FROM TULSA

The interesting thing about Larry Clark isn't his supposed prurience...

it's that he's a Senecan moralist who insists on telling his moral tales with bodies of people you never see in hollywood.

ALL IN THE FAMILY

Struck by a scene from All in the Family on TV. The camera going shockingly close on the faces of O'Connor and Stapleton for subtle arias of "deep" Fordian acting -- and the broader comedic stuff is kept for the medium shots. Nice interplay of typage, kabuki, and classic 50's style method moves. TV never goes that close anymore because it's too in YOUR face; and the story never requires that level of subtlety any longer, in any case...

one. three. seven.

Part of the anemia afflicting film is the loss of power of the close-up. The dynamic shift from a medium shot to a close up feels subjectively puny in the wide ratios.

LUDIC ECONOMIES

DERIVATIVES -- IMAGES - GHARAR

You need only to conceive something as AN IMAGE in order to trade in it. There need be nothing behind it -- structurally speaking.

A fantasy baseball league of players yet to be born.

The islamic ban on any kind of futurism. "you cannot sell the fish in the sea..."

LOTTERY or LUDIC ECONOMIES -- HEDGES

Hedge Funds make suckers take the risks for the Casino. Nobody beats the house.

"Postmodern financial instruments, like CDSs (credit default swaps) and CDOs (collateralised debt obligations) (OR the EURO rescue vehicle) are in effect money-laundering schemes, obscuring debts by scrambling and recombining them, and selling them off in tranches so as to wipe them off corporate balance sheets. More generally, financial derivatives are "functionally indifferent" (LiPuma and Lee 2004, 44): they can be used to price, and thereby to stand in for, the risk implicit in any situation whatsoever. This indifference, or infinite substitutability, means that the underlying situations themselves need not have anything in common -- aside from the fact that they have all been arbitrarily priced. Things don't need to harmonise, or to fit together. In the world of finance capital, there is no unity or pre-established harmony..."

THIS HIDING OR OBSCURING OF ECONOMIC REALITY, we could also call it Money Art --  is a necessary evil, a positive self-delusion in a world with too much information, whose utter concreteness in its absolute density makes it abstract, unrepresentable in practice.

HAYEK's wise wisdom of the market overthrown:   

"...the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. "

                                                                                      -- F.A. Hayek

This is often overlooked: Capitalism requires delusion. People must be deluded, ideally be self-deluded to participate in the ever widening market.  Lottery as model. How do you keep people playing in a casino market? Just PROCESS, people-serfs absorbing ever-increasing amounts of risk and debt, as long as that pays out in some flashy, ostentatious way every so often, ideally with flashing lights and a-dinging.

Machine Structures such as the internet can both broadcast and harvest information for/from a vast array of human activity. Such command and control, when the data is mined instant to instant, can provide a huge, unsurmountable advantage to Capital.

BUT what happens when the market grows too incoherently wise and too fluid in its imagemaking...?

"1973 also saw the publication of the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula. Two University of Chicago professors, Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, sought secure foundations for an obscure financial instrument known as a "European call option" – a contract granting the right to buy shares of a stock for a guaranteed price at a future date. Their strategy was to assemble a fictional portfolio of stocks and options, and develop a technique of "dynamic hedging" to continually buy and sell shares, balancing out the fluctuations in price among the separate elements of the portfolio. The price of the option would be equal to the cost of continually hedging against possible changes in the value of the underlying stock. Using equations derived from the physics of Brownian motion, they created a mathematical proof and a theoretically risk-free trading technique that used a carefully weighted constellation of values to distribute randomly occurring fluctuations back into the statistically regular equilibrium of the market as a whole."

THE "PROBLEM" WITH STORIES

"How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! He will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification."    

                                                                  --William James, The Will to Believe

STORIES MUST BE BELIEVED; TEXTS HAVE NO POWER.

WE ARE "COOL" TO THEM; THEY ARE "COOL" TO US. Coolness is that strange (non)affective stance whose defensive and protective genealogy is no longer recognized; we use it so often.

When we believe (& risk making a perhaps foolish investment) in something or someone there is a Jamesian liveness, an interactivity that opens us up to something cosmic.

The problem with Petit Recit Anti-Culture is not that the mystical, mythic, atavistic wellsprings go anywhere -- it's that people are numb and clueless to what is moving them.

When seized by these powerful impulses, they become, literally....

IDiots.

SKINNING AND THE LACK OF RUINS

"Skinning" as a feature of spectacular production -- a low cost structure, modular in nature, that can be skinned and re-skinned to meet a particular and consumable time-sensitive image. Such skins can be jettisoned as needed.

The eternal present results.

This particular excess expenditure is a sign of wealth -- as potlatch. Think in contrast of the homely poverty of the brick and stone 19th century building. It is pathetic in its immutability.  It is. It can't be re-imaged, only demolished. "Skinning" a building like that would only point up the tension between essence and image.

Being has a sort of resistance and inertia. History partakes in this as the evidence of being. Ruins.

The impossibility of ruins in the eternal present of the spectacle. Nothing can age. This is why the aged, with its grounding scars, must become invisible.

Today, things -- objects qua thingyfied -- are like quantum states rather than realities.

THE RETURN OF THE WALTER BENJAMIN COLUMN

Are there two kinds of ritualization -- one that activates/recognizes presence; and one that activates or celebrates the absence -- perhaps even the destruction -- of the real object...?

The spirit of Potlatch.

THE FELT UTTERANCE

VIDEO is not an object. It is audio-tactile modulation. It breathes, rots, oscillates, etc.

if you attend with care, you can feel the slight, germinal pulsing on your eyeballs. 
It is closer to singing, to pneuma, than to painting.  

The word qua sound has a power the image no longer has.

Not information but direct traffic in affective states. As arousal -- the old inward mode of fantasy versus the vibrator. The vibrator gets you off but desensitizes to the other electricity of touch.

So the CUT in video becomes sort of irrelevant. Or at best a distracting aberration in the overall pulsation. Like a synthesizer talking an analog signal and embroidering and obscuring it with its own pulse.

Need for a larger vocabulary of transitions (blends) for video.

BLIND MASSEURS

Shimizu's movie, Two Masseurs and the Woman

Beautiful. Like Ford.
Still.
Simple emotions, affect spaces.
Erice's acordes -- often expressed in bursts of mise en scene.
Plot relegated, off-screen, to letters or clumsy dialog.

Brilliant use of ellipses -- scenes ending in the "wrong" place
Profound mono no aware feeling.

A forgotten genre -- the holiday picture.

SAUDAD D'INTERNET

McLuhan: "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture."

Infantile, amigo McLuhan...??

Culture has a social function; a common culture binds people together. At the very least, it is a way of living in place. This is useful to distinguish your own sex-positive secular mobile phone culture from, say, that of some of those crazy fanatics over there that are making their women wear the veil, and talking sharia and restoring the caliphate.

The orthodoxy of consumption tends to sit astride and co-exist uneasily with cultural products. That's what pop culture means. It becomes less about the particular people and their cultural experience, and more about their THINGS, their processes of consumption. This is what people like Adorno and Debord talk about when they talk about Alienation or Separation.

And here I shall posit something that is maybe dubious -- that culture makes people, for better or worse, more comfortable in themselves, their specific place in the world, and their cultural group, more SELF-HARMONIC and HOMELY. So if that is the case, we can easily see that consumption is a pseudo-cultural process, in that it actually wants to irritate and dislocate the individual and raise questions and anxieties about common culture; Such fluxing and uncertainty actually benefits consumption because the more uncertain they are about their own cultural identity (in the old scheme of things) the more likely they are to seek shelter in ANY particular crystallizations of consumer-cultural activity. 

Stable Tribes vs. Clans of Opportunity.

Without aesthetics, however, beauty is power, real power. It elicits our involuntary consent.

 -- Hickey

Just because the culture industry has been decentralized, moved from the vertical and the OVERTLY authoritarian, and made horizontal and lateral doesn't mean that it is necessarily any better.  Since the internet tends to create very fast power/knowledge loops -- that is, one can crystallize a crowd very quickly and these crowds can diffuse into other crowds just as quickly. That generally seems to be the basic practice of most people.

The internet is a technological innovation in fascism, in the sense that Joseph Goebbels isn't that buffoon on the radio; he's someone in your peer group, and he's you too. In this new incarnation of fascism there is no exalted leader (not even a movie star or a James Cameron) to point to, no funny uniforms, but there is still this basic need to serve and form a crowd. A blockbuster is as much a fascist event as the Triumph of the Will.

So one thing we have to note about the internet is that the durability of masses is contingent with a sort of quasi-psychotic insistence of staying with a particular crowd, and limiting or discrediting other crowds which might compete for our neurotic attention.

Psychosis, in this way, is a method to fight the diffusing qualities -- the mystical, religious qualities -- of the internet.

Cul-de-saccing is easy on the internet. It is made for qualia. There, Solipsism is the rule, not the exception. Chasing the superfluous cultural content of the internet is as much a red herring as focusing on George Bush or Obama or the Congress is to the instrumental character of bureaucracy. For every person who gets their marching orders from the Huffington Post there are ten whose entire outlook for the week (their consciousness, let's say) is shaped by what they experience on Fox News. These aren't just nodes of information that function only when they are watched, their real function is to be pre-conscious filters for the off-line time, as McLuhan says, custodians of the inner person.

So, it doesn't make any sense at all to speak of cultural products as the "content" of the internet -- because the medium is itself doing the work, (and with disturbing efficiency) that the old-school cultural and commercial material was doing. The internet is cultural or culturing, or culturish -- not culture.

The key to living in the global village -- in the great transparency -- and Debord is very clear on this, is secrecy. What is secret and invisible can't be used to "process" and integrate you into the spectacle. But only the powerful can afford the mode of secrecy. Secrecy has too great a cost for the average person, who is stung by the mode of obscurity.

The fundamental problem of the internet is the same as the central one in democracy: how do you protect and value the MINORITY REPORT in a dynamic structure that favors the agglomeration of the larger crowd.

WATCHING A BIT OF TRANSFORMERS

Risky strategy -- All moments have equal weight. You could profitably edit the film into hundreds of Joe Cornell versions.

No builds, no dead moments, crosscutting yields no suspense. Just vague irritation "excitement-state" -- brickish "and then... and then...", montage.

Kinetic sculpture effect -- impossibility of composition. Movement in every shot -- the movement guides the "story" content, such as it is.

Also plane and lens effects, headlights sliding the wall -- foreground scooting in relation to the middle ground or BG.

COMPLEXITY OBSCURANTISM

Concreteness in density becomes utopian abstraction.

Man made systems that are so complex and fast moving and so reflexive that they are beyond human comprehension. The baffling phenomena, only "visible" through the rather dubious medium of computer modeling (if at all) render modern persons as terrified as the mythic savages before the eclipse.

Voila! A new nature, and therefore a new priest class for this narcisismo tecnico.

THIS IS A PROBLEM...MAYBE

There is no religious sense of sacrifice in the destruction of digital data.

no dark joy.

There is no will to destroy zeros and ones.

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.