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11/30/02:

Two terrifying externals straight from my hyperbolic inner monologue

1. For anyone (like me (especially in Chicago)) wondering if their opinions of the local rent-raisin' mucky-mucks are a little too caricaturised, confirm these stereotypes and more with the often viciously anti-social views expressed by the white-hatted, ray-banned nouveau riche at LPTrixie.com. I honestly thought this was satire at first, but this not-so little society is quite for real. Articles include "Celebrating a new Starbucks" and "Come ride in my Jetta."

2. I'm quick to mentally characterise certain rejected ideas as "fascist," yet refrain from taking this epithet too seriously. However, it becomes a bit disconcerting to read Brian Holmes article "Unleashing the collective phantom" (from Mute #24) arguing that networked culture, while promising democratised channels of access and dissemination of cultural production, actually functions as a conscious but militarised from of "neo-fascism"-

"This work helps us see what the easy money and pluralism of the Clinton years kept hidden: the outlines of a social pathology. It has an authoritarian cast ? like everything that involves the military ? but it does not produce unthinking, stereotyped behaviour of the kind we associate with fascism. What Crandall describes is an extremely intelligent process that, precisely by individualising ? tracking, identifying, eliciting desire, channelling vision and expression ? succeeds in binding the mobilised individual to a social whole. The new fascism discovers a complex, dynamic order for subjective difference, perspectival analysis, jouissance, even schizophrenic ecstasy. It integrates networked individualism."

The article that Holmes sites is called "Fingering the Trigger" by artist Jordan Crandall, also an oddly prescient read.

posted by jeremy @ 9:27 PM