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

 

Media Which/Who Think | A Man-Machine Relationship

Siegfried Zielinski, German media theorist, and Boris Groys, Russian-German art historian, in conversation about media theory, technology and art. Zielinski interviews Groys about his new book, “Under Suspicion: A Phenomenology of Media.” Topics discussed include ontological imagination, evil, conspiracy theory, the stupidity and intelligence of machines, phenomenology, avant-garde art, aura, the event, and dialectical materialism. Other philosophers and artists mentioned include Plato, Stalin, Derrida, and Malevich.

Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2014 Siegfried Zielinski and Boris Groys.

Is ISIS Really a Fundamentalist Organization? | Slavoj Zizek

[But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the “nonbelievers’” way of life.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating.                                                                                                                                                 In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation.

This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.]

Read the full article | Opinionator | New York Times

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

Postmodern, All-Permeating Irony: The Ability to Interdict the Question Without Attending to its Subject | What David Foster Wallace Warned us About

Read more…. Matt Ashby and Brendan Carroll for Salon

[… Twenty years ago, Wallace wrote about the impact of television on U.S. fiction. He focused on the effects of irony as it transferred from one medium to the other. In the 1960s, writers like Thomas Pynchon had successfully used irony and pop reference to reveal the dark side of war and American culture. Irony laid waste to corruption and hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the ’60s, as Wallace saw it, television adopted a self-deprecating, ironic attitude to make viewers feel smarter than the naïve public, and to flatter them into continued watching.Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It [uses] the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.]

Michel Foucault: A Deeply Penetrated and Thoroughly Examined Life

Foucault – The Lost Interview

This rarely-seen, until now, 15-minute interview conducted by Dutch philosopher Don Elders, in preparation for the debate with M. Foucault and N. Chomski in 1971. Philosophiles, enjoy.