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

 

Food as Authenticity in Bourdain’s Planned Market, and the Little Room for the Democratization of Cuisine he Promises

Excerpts from Meat Market By DAVID A. BANKS AND BRITNEY SUMMIT-GIL | THE NEW INQUIRY

Bourdain Market, set to open in about two years on Pier 57 in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district, purports to deliver exclusivity and democracy at the same time by putting remarkable food vendors all under one roof, thus consolidating all the hard work of curation and discovery and saving consumers from having to do any of it…. Like the World’s Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries, the market will invert this business model by bringing people from around the world to a large food court so that they may “do” culture. It will provide what Bourdain calls a “democratic space open to and used by all,” a place where “wealthy and working class alike” can congregate in what promises to be the largest food hall in the city….

AUTHENTICITY, from the Greek authentikós, meaning original or first hand, is also related to authént, which ostensibly means DIY. When referring to something like an artwork or first-edition book, authentic is a relatively straightforward signifier: This artwork was definitely made by this specific person. Authentication, the process by which professionals discern whether a given artifact comes from a specific source, is not categorically different from the way we might seek out authenticity in our food or even our conversations. We seek, in our present experiences, some sort of connection to a past or an elsewhere. “The quest for authenticity,” writes Baudrillard in The System of Objects is also “a quest for an alibi.” The elsewhere or else-when, like an alibi, is only as credible as the teller and one’s own ability to cross-reference and confirm. Bourdain acts as our authenticity detective, ferreting out the provenance of food and dragging the perpetrators onto his show and, now, into his market….

Just as adherence to objectivity is a necessary prerequisite for scientific “truth,” authenticity can seem to anchor taste judgments in some pure transcendent realm beyond the influence of social strategy or economic expediency. Though the aura of authenticity may seem like a matter of the aggressively unique thing in its “real” place, as when Bourdain boasts of tasting exotic foods that “you can’t find anywhere else in the world,” it is actually created in the space between the consumer and the consumed. For Walter Benjamin, aura is born of our desire to bring things closer, to experience the original outside the bounds of technological reproducibility. This desired closeness is two-fold: spatial and emotional, measured in distance and human connection.

Authenticity-as-commodity is difficult to pin down for just this reason. It bridges the gulf between self and other, known and unknown, and fills a nebulous in-between space in ways both strange and satisfying. In Ethnicity Inc. anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff observe that “to the extent that the commodification of culture is refiguring identity, it is doing so less as a matter of brute loss, or of abstraction, than of intensified fusions of intimacy and distance, production and consumption, subject and object.” Such culture commodities blur the boundaries of belonging and are thus engineered not for efficiency or usefulness but for optimal alterity. The perfectly stirred cocktail or the well-balanced soup broth is not the end product of scientific trial and error in some food lab meant to impress you. Rather, the authentic culture commodities invite you to believe you have found something that is indifferent to your existence—the food culture of some far away community—and in that moment when you successfully purchase them, you feel as though you have been invited into a cherished tradition. In other words, authentic goods are produced through the manipulation of social context, rather than some purification process….

But authenticity, which requires an arbiter of authority, runs counter to openness and democracy. Bourdain’s strategy for resolving this tension is to foreclose the moments of openness, restricting democracy to picking from among what he has already painstakingly curated. This sounds less democratic than dictatorial, but Bourdain is interested in “democracy” conceived as a matter of broad access, not decision-making: He wants the market to be a public meeting place for working and wealthy alike, but he can only accomplish this by taking most opportunities for decision-making off the table. Bourdain’s name and reputation assures the quality his fans have come to expect….

By intentionally keeping their rhetoric of transparency, openness and democracy as vague as possible, the creators of Bourdain Market let us fill the discursive void with our own desires to be the authenticators. Thus we can quickly conflate individualism and consumerism with openness and democratic ideals….

By making it physically possible to access foods from around the world, Bourdain Market will let you choose the scenarios for your own food-centered reality TV show. And just like a reality TV show, Bourdain Market will run roughshod over particulars in its restaging of the real. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the New York Times article that announced the project, a short writeup that required three corrections, including one for the artist’s rendering of the future market that contained fake Chinese characters.

As Benjamin and Baudrillard warn, it is impossible to consciously create an authentic experience. The friction between Chelsea Market, the High Line, the conceit of Bourdain’s own shows, and his new market reveals the hypocrisy of the entire project: Bourdain Market is as authentic, transparent, democratic, and open as basic cable TV.

The Violence of the Image | The Controlled Televized Coverage of the Aurora Theater Shooting Trial

The father of Jessica Phillips, one of the victims of James Holmes at the Aurora theater shooting in 2012, speaks up about the recent decision, in October 2014, to allow media access to the trial.

“…. Arapahoe County Chief District Judge Carlos Samour, Jr., issued a ruling in October that will help to turn the trial into a spectacle…. In his ruling, the case’s presiding judge, Samour, tried to thread what he deemed a very prudent needle, announcing that, yes, he would permit TV coverage of the trial of Aurora Theater killer, but that the footage would be limited to a ceiling-mounted camera controlled by the court. Judge Samour wrote that he was allowing the TVs “strictly to make the trial accessible to a larger portion of the public, including some victims.”

Here’s what that means: Judge Samour decided to permit a consortium of mega-media conglomerates to make money off Jessica’s death and simultaneously glamorize the man who killed her….” (The Killer I Refuse to Name | Politico Magazine)

While, as a viewer, I am once again seduced into witnessing a spectacle beyond, in so many respects, my ability to intelligibly process in full, I realize that I am also forced to essentially become a producer of yet another cultural text that is mainstream (public access) television; and talk about it. And perpetuate it amidst the illusion of a symbolic exchange that did not actually take place. I also cannot help but think of Jean Baudrillard’s comments of pornography and seduction. Martin Ham elaborates in Excess and Resistance in Feminised Bodies | Senses of Cinema:

Baudrillard argues that seduction, as a mode of representation, can be understood as fundamentally oppositional to pornography. By “pornography”, Baudrillard does not refer simply to graphic depictions of sexual acts, but to the modern tendency that seeks to render the relationship between viewer and viewed totally transparent, that is, apparently without mediation. Pornography endeavors to conceal its re-presentation of reality by raising the visibility of the most powerful images towards the points of maximum proximity and exhaustion. Taking sexual pornography as paradigmatic, such images are typically of penetration and ejaculation, the visibility of which engender an imaginary zoning of the sexual body into genitals and periphery. This marginal area, which includes a multiplicity of subjective triggers for arousal (posture, expression, context, minute exchanges between participants) is eclipsed by the centrality of the genital region. The over-exposure characteristic of pornography works to compensate the viewer for his/her passivity and absence from the pornographic scene, though at the cost of tantalizing peripheral details and the nuances of an independent, detached interpretation by its viewer. In this way, pornography is  h y p e r r e a l, in that it becomes more real than the unmediated object it depicts, and thus represents the supplanting of the real by its model:

Pornography… adds a dimension to the space of sex, it makes the latter more real than the real – and this accounts for its absence of seduction… [In pornography,] sex is so close that it merges with its own representation: the end of perspectival space, and therefore, that of the imaginary and of phantasy – end of the scene, end of illusion (Seduction, 1990 | pp. 28-9).

I also wonder whether Judge Semour requested permission from the survivors or the deceased victims’ families or not, to reach his decision to allow media access during Holmes’ trial. Mr. Phillips’ article suggests that Judge Semour did not.

Baudrillard goes on (in The Procession of Simulacra):

Go and organize a fake holdup. Be sure to check that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no life is in danger (otherwise you risk committing an offense). Demand ransom, and arrange it so that the operation creates the greatest commotion possible—in brief, stay close to the “truth,” so as to test the reaction of the apparatus to a perfect simulation. But you won’t succeed: the web of artificial signs will be inextricably mixed up with real elements (a police officer will really shoot on sight; a bank customer will faint and die of a heart attack; they will really turn the phony ransom over to you)—in brief, you will unwittingly find yourself immediately in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour every attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to some reality—that’s exactly how the established order is, well before institutions and justice come into play….

Thus all holdups, hijacks, and the like are now as it were simulation holdups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their “real” goal at all.

Baudrillard emphasizes the audience’s mass self-seduction:   “The group connected to the video is also only its own terminal. It records itself, self-regulates itself and self-manages itself electronically. Self-ignition, self-seduction. The group is eroticized and seduced through the immediate command that it receives from itself, self-management will thus soon be the universal work of each one, of each group, of each terminal. Self-seduction will become the norm of every electrified particle in networks or systems.” (Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond)

The question is, what kind of value is there in a world in which we are all self-seducing and plugged into our own terminals? Is this a meaningful, liberated, democratic, creative, and valuable world? Or is it its own nightmare inversion of Big Brother? Another question would be, how can any sort of “refusal of will” be formed, and an “original strategy” be structured (Baudrillard’s modes of resistance) under these circumstances? And why… why will James Holmes’ trial be televised? How will for-profit mega-networks safeguard our democratic territories, or our “sacred” freedoms? How is the principle of checks and balances be assigned on a hyperreal premise, and still maintain its validity? Wouldn’t thus the principle (transparent unobstructed justice) become also a simulacrum like the commissioners of its application (for-profit, self-interested media corporations)? McLuhan must be turning in his blissful grave…

When the real no longer is what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality: of secondhand truth, objectivity, and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of lived experience, a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us—a strategy of the real, neo-real, and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence. (Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra)

… as we will soon be watching James Holmes’ trial with our insatiable pornographic gaze, the victims and their families, I suspect, will also have to look. They will have to look at something they have already seen. But we will also be there, through a lens and through television networks, and licensed opinions, and our own two cents.

To tell the victims what really happened.

Baudrillard’s Prequels

– France is just a country; America is a concept.

 – Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

– No, the simulation of power.

Read the full discussion | The New York Times

Amorality and Rhetoric of Terrorism

[from Jean Baudrillard’s Spirit of Terrorism]

… if we want to understand something, let us go somewhat beyond Good and Evil. As we have, for once, an event that challenges not only morals, but every interpretation, let us try to have the intelligence of Evil. The crucial point is precisely there: in this total counter-meaning to Good and Evil in Western philosophy, the philosophy of Enlightenment. We naively believe that the progress of the Good, its rise in all domains (sciences, techniques, democracy, human rights) correspond to a defeat of Evil.

Nobody seems to understand that Good and Evil rise simultaneously, and in the same movement. The triumph of the One does not produce the erasure of the Other. Metaphysically, one considers Evil as an accident, but this axiom, embedded in all manichean fights of Good against Evil, is illusory. Good does not reduce Evil, nor vice-versa: there are both irreducible, and inextricable from each other. In fact, Good could defeat Evil only by renouncing itself, as by appropriating a global power monopoly, it creates a response of proportional violence.]

Read the entire Spirit of Terrorism here | EGS

The Need to Postpone the Encounter with Our Emptiness by Obsessively Using Cellphones | Louis C.K.