SERGE DANEY: And at some point, I got scared, scared for me, I told myself I was developing a ridiculous sense of superiority in relation to television. TV doesn't care about being superior or inferior to me, I'm not in its world, I only exist because I put myself there by force, I said: "Well, I enlighten myself every day, it amuses me, it amuses people like me." After that... It's not even understood. Beyond that.
REGIS DEBRAY: Which is to say that you can't criticize television –
SERGE DANEY: No.
REGIS DEBRAY: - without criticizing the public it's targeting?
SERGE DANEY: There. I think I'd always doubted, I'd always balked at that because I didn't like it, the idea that you have to criticize the public. But I think that today we have to because of the recent evolution of television.
Who is targeting who? When a mob, with its inevitable ENTHUSEMIASMIC or ideological burden, takes up or seizes -- inhabits -- an IMAGE, rather than a post office or a barricade -- we are dealing with a specific sort of Ellulian crystallization -- a mutual discharge happens -- the Fascist Event is conveyed into its image, which swells and shimmers because it has a material force which cannot be any longer questioned, but at the same time the self-same image becomes more reflexive too, it is no longer "mere image" that is, the image scorned, theoretical, unseen or ideal, but this Latourian hybrid: the lived-in image-crowd, which in turn can be spectacle and attractant, drawing even further discharges into itself.
To refuse to throw oneself under the Juggernaut of Our Noble Whatever is downright prufrockian. And so...
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