The Brilliant, Transcendent Clarity of Chauncey DeVega Applying Cone, Baudrillard, Adorno, Gordon and Postman in his Nuanced Argument about the “Kanye West.”

[The eclipse of serious journalism by punchy soundbites and outraged tweets, and the polarized, standardized reflection of opinion into forms of humor and theatricalized outrage within narrow niche-markets makes the category of individual thought increasingly unreal. This is true on the left as well as the right, and it is especially noteworthy once we countenance what passes for political discourses today. … The new media forms have devolved into entertainment, and instead of critical discourse we see the spectacle of a commentariat, across the ideological spectrum, that prefers outrage over complexity and dismisses dialectical uncertainty for the narcissistic affirmation of self-consistent ideologies each of which is parceled out to its own private cable network.

I am reminded of a lecture I attended some years ago where the late James Cone, an intellectual titan and the father of black liberation theology, observed that some of the most difficult students to teach on questions of the color line were those who happened not to be white. Why? Because black and brown students often believe that because they were born into a certain body at a certain point in time, they have special knowledge and wisdom that makes it unnecessary for them to engage in serious study of the color line….

We see this in an America which in many ways has lost the ability to determine what is “true” and what is “fake,” and where lies are now labeled as mere “untruths” or “disagreements.” As with Trump, Kanye West is the human distillation of America’s social pathologies of greed, narcissism and a celebrity-driven culture of distraction and emptiness. Hyperreality is the state of being where these social pathologies exist, and through which they are mediated.

Ultimately, Kanye West is just one more character caught up in the orbit of the human black hole Donald Trump, in a malignant reality where the absurd is now the quotidian….]

Full article here: I love Kanye West | Chancey DeVega for SALON

 

Violence & the Poetic Subject | Dr. Brad Evans | Lecture at GCAS

[Contemporary liberal societies are saturated by images and representations of violence. From twenty-four hour news coverage, the extreme torture of Hollywood blockbusters, to increasingly brutal gaming formats, the realities of violence have arguably never been so embedded in our cultural, economic and social fabric. Some might even argue that violence has become so normalized today that it is reaching the point of the banal, as its entertainment value supersedes any considered political and ethical questioning.]

Read the full lecture here | GCAS – The BLOG | Global Center for Advanced Studies

[Countering this requires more than a rigorous discussion on the ethical subject of violence. It demands an entirely new concept of the political. This brings me to a an important quote from Jacques Rancière’s recent book Figures of History, which resurrects what is an all too familiar (if unresolved) debate – to quote:

So we have to revise Adorno’s famous phrase, according to which art is impossible after Auschwitz. The reverse is true: after Auschwitz, to show Auschwitz, art is the only thing possible, because art always entails the presence of an absence; because it is the very job of art to reveal something that is invisible, through the controlled power of words and images, connected or unconnected; art alone makes the human perceptible, felt.[i]]