• vote
    8
    0 starsshadowpuppetmaster | Shared With: Everyone - May 04 2008 | the, film, world
    The Pinocchio Theory » Blog Archive » Diary of the Dead

    Shaviro has a great review of G Romero's new Zombie flick, "Diary of the Dead"....

    one awesome passage from his review:

    "Such is the antinomy on which the film ends, and I think that it is a profound one. We have moved from being a “society of the spectacle” to being a society of participatory and interactive media. And Diary of the Dead is thinking about this change — not to say that the new media regime is either better or worse than what came before, but to try to delineate just how it is different. The great unitary spectacle of which Guy Debord wrote has been shattered, and replaced by new forms of distraction and activity in what Deleuze called the “society of control.” We are no longer passive, voyeuristic spectators; instead, we actively both give ourselves over to surveillance, and eagerly surveil (is that a word?) both others and ourselves. We fragment, multiply, and network both ourselves and whatever we encounter. This no longer falls under the dipolar schema of subject and object; but rather has the form of a network in which everyone and everything is a node. This also means that we have moved on from representation to simulation: instead of trying to capture the Real via mimesis, we actively produce bits and pieces of a reality that is directly composed of images, rather than merely being captured or reflected in images. The regime of simulacra is not an “extermination of the real” as Baudrillard claimed; it is rather a state in which the real is effectively being micro-produced and virally disseminated. In consequence, the real and the imaginary have become, as Deleuze puts it, “indiscernible”: reality pushes toward a “point of indiscernibility,” as a result of “the coalescence of the actual image and the virtual image, the image with two sides, actual and virtual at the same time” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 69). Every imaginary simulation becomes altogether real, even as every reality is dissolved in simulacral multiplication."

    read on....

    • gravitymax - May 05 2008

      "micro-produced and virally disseminated"... sounds like my job unfortunately >.<

    • shadowpuppetmaster - May 05 2008

      what is your job?

    • gravitymax - May 05 2008

      interaction design for an ad agency. i make stuff like micro-sites and viral content by the ton. ton!

    • LostInTheSupermarket - May 05 2008

      Although I have not seen the film, I can surely say that his references to Debord reflect something of a misunderstanding of Debord's text. Stated simply, Debord isn't necessarily concerned with the fact that we watch a spectacle passively, whether it be TV or cinema. The spectacle isn't some empirical event of a subject's relation to a media apparatus, transmitter, or device; rather, to paraphrase Debord from the first chapter of SoS, the concept of spectacle names a social relation that is mediated by images. This includes both the ritualistic gatherings at Nuremberg ("the greater unitary spectacle"), more network-based, participatory technology,etc.,; in sum, it is perhaps closer to Shaviro's description of a "reality that is directly composed of images, rather than merely being captured or reflected in images." More on this at some later time.

    • tfwright - May 05 2008

      actually, i think it's more like the relations im having with your mom

    • shadowpuppetmaster - May 05 2008

      re: will
      yeah one of the commenters agreed with you. it's been too long since i read debord.
      but yea, we should talk about it sometime. i think the question is interesting.

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    0 starsshadowpuppetmaster | Shared With: Everyone - Apr 11 2008 | the, world, film
    The Pinocchio Theory » Blog Archive » Boarding Gate (film)

    Shaviro sells me again.
    i have to see this movie now.

    also: see his review of There Will Be Blood. as usual, you can re-watch the movie all over again and he'll give you a whole new way of loving it. that's why i love that guy.

  • vote
    28
    0 starsshadowpuppetmaster | Shared With: Everyone - Feb 03 2008 | the, film, books
    New Statesman - Zizek's Intellectual suicice

    (see prev dot first)

    okay, apparently i've never read the New Statesman before, and this explains my surprise that they are completely conservative reactionaries.
    cause they are and that's their thing, see?

    this 'condemnation of postmodernism tout court' is one of the most ridiculous shrugging-offs of an entire generation of thought i've ever seen.

    "When Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari say we should all become schizophrenic, when the gay Michel Foucault embraces the murderously homophobic Ayatollah Kho meini, when Zizek suggests a return to Leninist terror - these very positions are admissions that postmodernism is merely an unserious confection by intellectuals. It leads nowhere except to demoralisation and disaffection."

    aww this hurts my ears more than an introductory class in existentialism from warnek.
    ughhh.

    Quoted: Johann Hari * The star philosopher Slavoj Zizek commits intellectual suicide in ...