Generation Bubble
Henry Brulard
Local Theater: Counterinsurgency and Biopower in California
For the last forty years, democrats and republicans alike have destroyed the social infrastructure that was meant to deal with the problems associated with the urban poor.
Formlessness Meets Functionlessness: Stefan Ulrich’s Real Doll For The Creative Class
As Ulrich sees it, the creative class is marginalized because it has voluntarily given up the very things that give comfort to traditional marginalized groups. Creatives are alienated not at the level of the political, the economic or the social, but at the most basic human level. If the life of the poor is not the life we imagine for ourselves, it plays out as a parody of that life, following the same rituals of family, church, marketplace, and the political. At the center of all these rituals are the comforts of home, place, and humanity. Where the old alienation could be said to take place in a geographic location, the new alienation of the creative class is played out in lonely hotel rooms across the globe. And why is the creative class so alienated? Because it has chosen to be alienated in order to keep up with the dictates of money and success.
Funny Games: Flash Mobs, Lynch Mobs, and the Human Flesh Search Engine
When technology meets the crowd, it is the crowd that wins. This should come as no surprise. The crowd is an organism of its own and only incidentally a collection of individuals. The crowd is neither wise nor foolish. It uses technology for its own purposes, and when the crowd comes into being, it is beyond the power of any individual to question those purposes. Similarly, technology has no moral content; it neither knows or cares what uses it is put to. It is a tool in the hands of humans, and subject to the reasons and instincts of flesh and mind. This is what the ideology of technology would like us to forget. We would prefer to believe that the latest marvel is “improving” our life, when we are improving or impairing our lives depending on what technologies we use and how we employ them. At its best, technology is morally neutral. But there may be certain technologies that are inherently destructive and repressive. The jailhouse, the handgun, the atom bomb have seemed at various times to be useful tools, but it is difficult to find moral neutrality in any of them. Instead, technologies tend to be the reflection of the men and women who produce them. Individual technologies, then, are unlikely to be any better than we are at the time when we use them. If the flash mob is benign in the hands of urban prankster, in other hands it is not so benign.
Two Cheers for Technocracy: Social Media and Information Liberation
The possibility that there might be a difference between viewing a Rubens on the 2- by 3-inch iPhone screen and seeing it in person or in a book is not even worth mentioning. We have more culture in our pockets than E. D. Hirsch, Allan Bloom or Matthew Arnold ever imagined. We can do something that Matthew Arnold and Allen Bloom could not. When we turn on our iPhone to take part in culture and find that we do not like what we see, we can refashion and remix that cultural product into something that we do like. If that fails, we can simply power down the device and return culture to our pockets.
An Ever-Living Fire: All Things Change Until Nothing Remains
We have since demystified history, carefully taking if from the hands of god or the proletariat to rest it safely in the bosom of religio-scientific “market forces.” But in the process history began to seem not more rational, but less so. The market is somehow larger and more mysterious than God, the Proletariat, or even progress. And what are we, or any individual, compared to the market? Subsumed into it greater will, we are individual data points. Occasionally, through stock ownership or consumer purchases, we get to take part in its mysteries, but never too great a part.
Apoc-ellipsis: Slavoj Žižek on Hipsters (a Translation)
The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body.
Hooked on Hedonics: Happiness as the Universal of Feeling
We do not know what happiness is. Like obscenity, perhaps, we think we know it when we see it. But if we actually understood and knew happiness, we probably would not spend so much time, money and effort pursuing the things that are supposed to bring happiness, and would instead simply pursue happiness. But happiness slips away as soon as we examine it. Always represented as freedom from worry or want, happiness is known only through its opposite, the unhappy state of never-ending thirst for something more that successive and compulsive purchases can never quite quench. Happiness seems to exist not so much as an experienced subjective state, but as the echo from a distant future or past of a life beyond what is currently possible.
Right-Wing Melancholy: The Graven Images of Glenn Beck’s Amerikan Kargo Kult
McNaughton’s painting does with images what Beck and Skousen do with words. Blending apotropaic and imitative magic, McNaughton has not created a painting so much as a charm or a spell intended to restore the old America of goodness, virtue and abundance. His symbols, and the control he exercises over them is not an attempt to create meaning, but to strip it away. Once the excess meanings and connotations of these ghosts have been excised, the absent god-men can be properly conjured up, and America will be restored, One Nation Under God, with no King but Jesus.
The Unobtrusive Dinosaur: A Review of Wallace Shawn's Essays
Shawn’s book is not a self-help manual or a how-to guide, and he offers no precepts. Instead, he reveals his own struggle to make a life and the uneasy peace that he may or may not have found. The result is a demonstration that a life grounded in reality and guided by a continuous questioning of morality, reason and art can offer a true hope (a hope that is not reduced to a slogan beneath the smiling face of one of our “leaders”) that life and humanity are still possible. But Shawn is resolute that art, morality, or reason alone cannot offer this hope.
The Cloud of Unknowing (cont'd): Admiral Yamamoto as the 20th Hijacker
Islamofascism transformed the incomprehensible face of worldwide Islam into mere incoherence: they hated freedom in general and our freedom in particular. Even better, Islamofascism tied in perfectly with our own growing belief that 9-11 was the new Pearl Harbor. Unable to accept that the events of 9-11 had been masterminded by a very tall Saudi billionaire criminal who now lived in a cave or by the disheveled and obese Khalid Sheikh Mohamed we knew that hidden eastern hordes lay in wait, ready to make the trains run on time and destroy our way of life. So what if nobody had actually seen Islamofascists goose-stepping to midday prayers, we had found our enemy and our war.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
© 2012 Generation Bubble. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 