I’ve long thought Zizek is too full of himself, but I can’t say he’s wrong here.
Björk continues to amaze.
(Disclosure: I am a fan. If you are not a fan, maybe skip reading this.)
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She’s really amazing… so many of the women who came on the scene in the 80s and 90s turned out to be total bad asses, but got so much shit at the time. The way the male dominated music journalism scene treated her, Tori Amos, Tracy Chapman, and Sinead (RIP) among so many other talented artists is really enraging in hindsight (and at the time). They’ve all managed to have wonderful careers and proved all their naysayers or those who treated them as less than because of their gender (or a flash in the pan, or a novelty act, or whatever) were just dumb and probably jealous of them…
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ETA
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This report reflects themes I’ve seen repeated for years, especially in promoting boys-only schools and programs in Black communities:
The inequity was the first thing that came to mind while watching this. However, there’s another part of this that wasn’t really addressed. What also concerns me are groups using this to target vulnerable people and push really toxic narratives (like the need to fight against being controlled and/or replaced by members of minority or marginalized groups). How much of their anti-education and anti-elite messaging might be part of the problem?
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Yes and.
As long as we are fighting each other, we can’t spend our time and energy addressing the real culprits of oppression, inequities, violence, climate breakdown, the rent being too damn up, the ferociously screwed U.S. healthcare “system,” etc.
And we absolutely can’t have wimmin a-thinkin’ fer themselves! That’d ruin everything! /s
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A meditation on how to think about good advice from horrible people:
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Collective trauma:
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All day, every day, I am surrounded by screens. Screens that greedily divert my attention and mediate my daily life, work, and a great many relationships. I am tired of screens, even resentful of them. I often tell myself that I yearn for liberation—a pure experience of walking through the world with nothing standing between me and my distractible little eyes. And yet, watching videos of the Sphere’s luminescence dominate the intensely famous Irishmen onstage—watching its splendor turn the rockers into wee, leather-jacketed ants—I felt an irresistible desire to stand in front of it and experience digital oblivion for myself. I wanted to see if the Sphere could help me learn to love screens again.
There are many ways to get to the Sphere. Within the corridors of the Venetian hotel, you can follow ominous signs that simply say sphere, with arrows pointing east, and never step outside. I would not advise this: To truly experience the Sphere, you must watch it grow closer. Especially at night, you can appreciate its true weenie-ness as it attracts crowds like moths with novelty adult-beverage cups. I watched a group of 10 Strip-weary couples standing agape in the middle of the road, phones out, blocking one lane of traffic, fixated on the pulsating curved structure a quarter mile away. The moment reminded me of the scene in Independence Day when the UFOs break through the clouds over cities across the globe, causing pedestrians to stop and gawk at the sky.
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And so the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.
The disturbing thing I’ve been noticing is members of the far-right using fat shaming to draw people in. Once folks start on any form of haterade and othering, it’s probably much easier to convince them to accept even worse stuff.
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They do have a thing for pushing narratives of disgust about non-“normal” bodies…
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Given how many of us in the modern world are overweight or obese, this is just more chasing of an unreal ideal of “normal” that few if any actually match.
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Nevertheless, the buff, male body-type has always been a key part of the fascist ideology, as is the thin woman who some how also has like 10 kids, though she always goes back to a size 2…
None of fascism is grounded in reality for the individual adherent, it’s all about endlessly contorting yourself into knots based on what the “dear leader” spouts is the way to be…
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Definitely. It’s not very reality-adjacent or consistent ideology at all.
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I think it’s internally consistent, don’t get me wrong. But it just doesn’t line up with actual reality. The spectacle is part of the point, though. It is an ideology of the mass mediated world, after all. I mean, there has always been people in power who use spectacle as part of their rule (the pharaoh or the emperor is a god, etc), but that was always limited by space and time. Sure, you can understand the divinity of the pharaoh, but if you’re a peasant way on down the Nile, that’s not going to be something you probably had a direct interaction with most of your life, unless you go to the capital to see some of that spectacle… But modern fascism not only elevate a "dear leader, but also the volk… it often centers the “volk”, but an idealized “volk” that most actual humans can’t replicate exactly, because it’s all pure projection.
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Awesome artist.
I’m pretty tempted to get her book.
Red Star credits a project called “Interference,” which she completed at Montana State University, as foundational to her artistic process. For it, she installed a number of tipis around the Bozeman campus, which sits on what was once Crow territory. After the first night, Red Star noticed that the poles had been knocked down, so she reinstalled them in a different location—only to have them knocked down again. Finally, she set up five tipis on the fifty-yard line of the football field. In the new book, Red Star recalls that a visiting professor remarked on her apparent interest in political provocation. “That was our territory. There was nothing political about it. It’s the truth,” Red Star says. “People tend to think a lot of my work is political, and I’m not offended by that. But, really, it’s just a fact. And, if that fact is political to you, then that’s interesting.”
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