Yes. I've backslid. I've barely cracked open Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View. I have felt rage, fear, outrage, horror, relief, adulation, dismay, depression, camaraderie, and so many other emotions in a short time frame that I have been focusing my attention on my assigned tasks at work, dreams and schemes (a la Ralph Cramden), writing poems, watching copious amounts of low quality t.v. programs, eating junk food and perusing catalogues. All tried and true methods heavily culturally endorsed to keep us hypnotized, anesthetized and otherwise like podlings in Henson's "The Dark Crystal"--drained of our living essence. Okay, except for the writing poems part. In all that escapism the divine Hand tapped me on the shoulder during a not so low quality t.v. program--a revival meeting of sorts--a gathering of radio talk show hosts from am 1090 Seattle http://www.am1090seattle.com at a town meeting in Seattle, Wash. --a place that quickly snaps to my attention that Utah is Bizarro-World--gently I was nudged back to the issues, okay let's call them catastrophes, that concern me. In the televised alternate universe people spoke like the people I talk to in daily life, not in the usual artificiality and propaganda so clogging the air/airwaves. There were soul searching discussions. There were "green party views" and some pragmatism, but mainly there was a problem identifying and addressing approach. I will be checking out their website more often and finding out if there's a way to hear more of their shows.
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rage, fear, outrage, horror, relief, adulation, dismay, depression, camaraderie
Zizek brought all that out of you?
Well, I can see how the proximity could seem sequitur but unfortunately, due to my semi-manic state it was a non-sequitur-- "news" and a book I just finished, James Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" provoked the perplexities-- and a visit from my friend, Brikena (now teaching at Ohio State brought the camaraderie. Zizek actually has more of a calming effect despite his desire,no doubt to produce jouissance rather than plaisir. I would describe his concept of parallax as the cognitive dissonance produced by irreconcilable similarities. Examples in his introduction include: (bear with the generalities because I don't have the book in front of me) an anarchist who devised means to torture fascists based on principles of Modern art and a news story in which it was reported that Walter Benjamin had not committed suicide to prevent capture by fascists but rather was murdered by a Stalinist assassin for having written a treatise on materialist dialectics that Stalin found subversive to his own program of dialectical materialism.
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