I would like to bring myself back in touch with my culture. But I have restricted means to do so. I thought America was the land where anything can happen. I thought cyberspace could produce a surrogate culture for me. I guess I will have to make do with whatever I can find – even if it is reductive and offensive to me. And kind of funny at the same time. Cinematically manufactured mythologies.
Locating the feeling visually, through cinematic and televisual detours:
Notorious US party girl Tara Reid fits into the type of star that Richard Dyer classifies as “appearing to be meaningful but [is] in fact empty of meaning. Thus [this] star is well-known for her/his well-knownness, and not for any specific quality.”
How did the Greek riots impact the Greek economy? For the time being, we can only assess the impact of the disaster on a short-term basis. A fuller impact will be more calculable once the peak season for tourism arrives. Have security concerns abated in Greece and in those visiting Greece, or have they displaced the meaning of Greece within the experience economy?
Perhaps they should consider inviting Tara Reid (and Paris Hilton) back to Greece, as that seemed to do the trick. Even if it means that Reid will get more exposure than the actual travel destination.
Case in point: how the major part of the blogsphere covered Taradise’s visit to Cyprus:
Last night Tara traveled to the Baths of Aphrodite, where she imparted her first bit of true knowledge on viewers.
You see, Hugh Hefner modeled his Playboy mansion grotto after the baths of Aphrodite according to Mz. Reid, and she would know about these things.
We were then treated to the following scenes:
· Tara searching her brain for the term “Guinea pig” as she riffs about her love for Greek Mythology.
· Tara figuring out that “eternal beauty” is not located on the corner of Nip and Tuck in LA, but instead achieved only when one swims three laps around an ancient rock off the coast of Cyprus.
The rest of the show was Tara being Tara. Drinking, eating, and clubbing in Ayia Napa.
Man she is a monster when she gets in the zone.
Marina = Speech&Wordless, but not imageless:
*Nothing in excess
* *Everything in moderation
Louis Vuitton – Cyprus style (inside joke, only Cypriots might get it). A fusion of nostalgia and “progress”. A status symbol juxtaposed with a stereotype. That’s all that can be said with words and images. You have to be part of the culture to get it… and even maybe laugh at it if you have an appropriate degree of cultural detachment at the same time.
Please Read:
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Nearly democratized internet access (at least in developed countries) and easy to use web production tools (such as our very own wordpress) make it easier for the average person to make their mark on cyberspace. However, this also facilitates the accumulation of “webjunk” – new media objects that are just a waste of webspace.
But, one person’s junk could be another person’s treasure, right? So, what qualifies as webjunk ? How do we assign value to digital creations? Is there still an implicit hierarchy under which information and content usefulness are categorized and accessed (not just through search engines like Google) ?
What exactly does democratization entail? Free (?) access, free sharing, creative commons, collective [media] intelligence, a free flow of information, a free flowing exchange of creative input, democratization of production tools, globalization, etc …. ?
Ancient/ Classical Greek is not a dead language. At least not in the academia. Perhaps in parts of the the Greek academia it has already been buried, but not in schools in the U.S. and the U.K. This is not directly related to the ubiquity of the Internet, but it is nonetheless facilitated and accelerated by the advent of global and virtual networking. Now everyone can “speak” Greek thanks to electracy. You can google Greek, translate into Greek, and pretend you know Greek (or at least Greeklish).
But do you? I stumble upon so many misinformed definitions and uses of a language so close (yet so remote) to me, that I can’t help but wonder why some languages are conjured back from the dead. Does citing Plato and Aristotle or tracing Greek roots legitimize one’s accumulation of knowledge? What purpose does the Greek ancient civilization serve in the academia, besides adding to its pretentiousness? Does it really help “us” understand and explain better? And don’t give me all that “founding fathers of our civilization” crap. Yes, this crap is true, but it is also what is keeping Greek culture from being internationally recognized as part of a *modern* society. By remembering Greece, you are also forgetting it. Remembering means never knowing it at all.
I can’t really speak my language like I used to. The “native” has migrated to another language, another culture.
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Is this what I come down to? How did I bring myself to this? Was this with me this whole time?
Obsession with Others
THE REST IS SILENCE
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The Affect as Part of the Experience Economy
How does the affect find its way through the logic of the general economy? One example of the affect being used as a “brand” or a marketing tool is the emphasis on the consumer’s product experience. Experience commodified; experience as capital.
Product researchers such as industrial designers associate product experience with affective experience, and often use these terms synonymously.
Cultural, social, and personal experiences interfere with, affect, stimulate and often guide a consumer’s product experience. Of course, this depends on the kind of product as well.
In reading marketing research surveys and analyses, I noticed that the affect has become an emblem of consumption. The affect is now used for branding consumer experiences, and thus assumes a material form – in more ways than one.
No, this is not enough, yet too much. Let’s just call it affect for now.
“[M]y body is not only an object among all objects, . . .but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.” – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
Affectivity = the potential for experience ?
” … affectivity names the capacity for the body to be radically creative, that is, to be the agent of a framing of digital information that generates images independently of all preexistent technical frames.” – Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media
Hansen’s argument has been contested, especially in the ways in which he implicitly privileges vision over all other senses, and in the inferred attributes of the [largely asexual, non-gendered] body he envisions. Nevertheless, Hansen’s approach is useful because it points out that the requirements for perceiving new media (not just new media art) are new. Affection/ affectivity, in this respect, is not quite synonymous to the Deleuzian understanding of affect as “pure quality”, and does not quite designate a “particular modality of perception”.
Vivian Sobchack’s essay, “What my Fingers Knew: the Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh”, calls for the affect in cinema. However, her approach is limiting in the sense that she mostly focuses on embodied experience and -like Lev Manovich- on the cinema’s mimetic potential. Nevertheless, Sobchack’s essay is yet another example of the intellectual inquiry that the [affect/ the visceral/ whatever you want to call it] stimulates… and another example of the “fact” that the affect escapes interpretation precisely due to its very “essence”. [words are inadequate]
Pie chart: We can’t help but rationalize the affect, albeit in a cognitive way
“… it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
- Shakespeare, Macbeth (Act V, Scene V)
Naked Landscapes
I showed the Spencer Tunick documentary Naked States to my students once. I got no response, just embarrassed looks and no eye contact. That in itself was a response. Affect renders us [speechless].
Scene from Wolfgang Becker’s film Goodbye Lenin! (2003).
East Germany, 1989: A loyal Socialist living in Eastern Berlin during the Cold War loses her husband to the West. After seeing her son protesting against the Socialists, she suffers from a heart attack and falls into a coma. While she is in a coma, East and West Germany reunite. When she awakes from her coma, her children try to prevent her from experiencing shock by converting their now westernized lives back into an Eastern-Socialist lifestyle…
* * *
The shock of discovery … the shock at discovering that the disaster has come and gone (was it ever here?), and I could not bring myself to its site. The disaster is beyond me, beyond time, beyond comprehension. A film/ a ” reality”/ a fiction/ a myth conveys this feeling better than I ever will.
Anarchists, like the disaster, are situated outside the experience economy. Like some aspects of the disaster, anarchists place themselves inside the experience economy only to destroy it. The fact that anarchists remain powerless against (and within) the experience economy makes them more determined to find their power outside of it. However, they usually end up becoming part of the experience economy by their very opposition towards it.
Anarchists = otherness. Their/ Our obsession with others.
Example & Application: the Greek Riots
The defacement of public property in large Greek cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki has impacted tourism, a contributing aspect to the experience economy >>> The anarchists have been integrated into the experience economy model through the commodification of their acts: for instance, millions of photographs of the riots and of public property damages have been circulating around the world. The riots and their aftermath turned the world’s attention to Greece and Europe in general. The apocalyptic overtones attached to the disaster by various global media outlets have placed Greece at the center of it all, only to ultimately decentralize it.
Profit/ credit= e.g. international exposure, profile, capital ## #
Debit= e.g. impact on: tourism, government, education labor…
Corporate media tend to ignore anarchists, or try to minimize their impact. The fact that corporate media outlets have been forced to detail the anarchist involvement in these and other struggles in Greece attests to the significance of anarchist activity. Leftists attempt to portray the events in Greece as a general uprising of “the people,” and this is not inaccurate, since countless “normal” people have participated. However, from the vantage point of anarchist supporters and those intimidated by anarchists, it is the anarchists that have instigated the riots and have remained the most influential force within the “movement”.
From one perspective, the anarchists – and “anarchy” in its abstract form – function as a political scapegoat. A scapegoat that is used to let the government almost entirely off the hook. A scapegoat that does not point to what is wrong with the System, but serves the purpose [to some] of placing blame outside the system and displacing the flaws outside the system.
If only it were so simple.
Democracy is dead. Long live democracy.
