Spectacle Commodity Fetishism

Gotta Love Fleabane

I think it safe to assume that some of us with access to keyboards, internets, television, telephones and teenagers have come to know what Foot Fetishists and Furries are. Of the two, I suspect the following understanding of Furries better elucidates the subject at hand: "An interest that can lead to participating in the furry fandom, a subculture where individuals express themselves through artistic creations like "fursonas" (personal animal characters) and elaborate costumes called fursuits. The fandom is also known for its conventions, online communities, and focus on artistic expression, acceptance, and community." So with Furries it's not just a macabre Halloween, with tricks and treats, it's a whole life style, not exclusively centered on inappropriate or weird commingling of the furred and the un-furred. Commodity Fetishism predates the telephone, as early as 1840 Marx was waxing on the fetish of metal money which everyone loved and needed, paper money just didn't count. In the late 1860's he had a detailed understanding, of how, in our minds a product lost touch with the material world, what the product, let's call it a tooth brush, was, where it came from, the labor involved in making it, who owned the labor involved in making it and on it went for approximately 400,000 words. This social relationship had magically become a relationship with a toothbrush, not a social relationship between two people, but a relationship between a person and a thing. And Lo in 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell for the first time ever telephoned his assistant and rather seductively said "Mr Watson, come here. I want you," a new world of fetishism was born. It was a form of progress that used electric signals traveling along wires, and which soon enough would be overtaken by electric signals traveling through electromagnetic waves. This was the beginning of a condition a Frenchman called Guy Debord, a member of the Situationist International and cigarette smoker who died at the age of 62 in 1994, chose  to call, Spectacle Commodity Fetishism. (Le fétichisme de la marchandise spectacle.) You could turn a love of stuff, into a love of Spectacle, defined as a social relationship mediated by images. We don't interact directly with each other, we interact with images of what what we are persuaded is what our lives should look like  It's not the person, he could be a dim-witted jackass, it's what the person looks like and the image he presents. It's not the toothbrush, it's what the toothbrush looks like, how its presented in images, that may include handsome men driving motorcycles and hot chicks brushing their pearly white teeth. It's not the staged sea battle with multiple casualties in somewhere like Portland Oregon, it's what the staged sea battle does for the image of the Emperor.

I am Spartacus as a New Narrative for David Wallace's Post Irony Depression

Unknown Moth on Moonflower

Rabbit-Rabbit, I guess. It's not a truly ancient salutation to the first day of the month, around 1909 it appears in print, it was something children were saying in England and might have soon disappeared if President Franklin Roosevelt, who was diagnosed with Polio in 1921 hadn't adopted it for his polio charm or whatever. For a long time, across many countries, rabbits have been a symbol of growth, abundance, fertility, rebirth. You only have to see them in spring, there's something in new grass that hops them up, they bound around with no shortage of self esteem, like rabid mental patients, frightening the cats. The thing about new spring grass, it's very high in moisture, sugars and starch and contains very little fiber, it is like an all natural doughnut washed down with a caffeinated soda pop for the rabbit world as well as a source of rabbit constipation. You can always talk about the rise or fall of collective insanity anytime you want, go back to the Roman Emperor Titus and the equally autocratic Roman Emperor Claudius in 52 AD and 80 AD respectively, they put on sea battles as an entertainment for the masses. So why not a healthier diet, a more stable body mass index, no facial hair something called FAFO, something else called PT, they must both be naval expressions. Either way these bunny hopping offerings from our higher echelons must have been a less expensive alternative to the massive cost to the treasury of Sea Battles with Real Live Casualties as Spectacle to keep an understanding of the world simple and stupid, or KISS as it's called by the very un-woke safety people on the big boats that aimlessly wander the oceans looking for good will or trouble. After that sort of mind blowing desperate hunt for spectacle by the destroyers of the Roman Republic, the First Century AD decision to introduce a more formal practice of Condemnation to Beasts, otherwise advertised as publicly feeding lions with fresh Christians must have been a rather clever economy measure. In our own Post Enlightenment, Post Irony arena my own current favorite in state orchestrated spectacle is that of unlabeled, and slightly pudgy, slavishly obedient to a bee stung and aging princess, masked men with bearded JD running styles employed by the taxpayer attempting to chase down urchins with Brylcreem free and wonderfully flowing youthful hair riding their bicycles. Me, as an upstanding, and paid up member of the back row, it's a narrative I heartily approve of and can't get enough of. I think David Wallace had he lived would agree..

God Bless Taliesin and The Role of Myth

 

Late Aster not Fleabane

We've talked quite a lot about the Welsh Bard Taliesin and his capacity to sooth the furrowed brows of autocratic scumbags masquerading as Princes. Recently we've explored Wallace's suggestion that as Postmodernism became established it promoted a cynicism that needed to be replaced by a refreshing and positive yellow brick road that  postmodernists would refer to as narrative. Whether he turned left or right, up or down, David Wallace always found Oz. My own view is that as society progresses beyond the hunter-gathering period, it get's fat and confused by agriculture, is made to feel divine by the conquest of nature and Industrialism, it chokes on the Enlightenment, and as the post industrial age is subsumed by labor saving devices, gym memberships, exercise bicycles, cosmetic surgery and other forms of mutilation including tattoos, those of us in a position to grasp for fame and fortune can often lose touch with a self that has been well grounded in Hume's: An Enquiry Regarding Human Understanding. Briefly in the United States the project for common sense, William James' pragmatism fostered by his devotion to the understanding that truth emerges from facts, rocked the New World. Meanwhile in a Europe that had been around a bit, Nietzsche having desecrated the sacred texts attempted to describe the Victory of Will in his long poem Thus Spake Zarathustra. Not the most inspiring vision from Nietzsche, his Zarathustra - his advanced man, his superman, his perfectly wise superior human - to me at least, without a narrative, sounded a little bored out of his skull. Zarathustra descended from his mountain top, he went to find his own story and lo his vision of a world without God revealed the last real man on earth to be a creature fat and confused, addicted to every vice Dante could make up, including whatever that thing is people do to their lips to make them look bee-stung and puffy. And yes indeed while God tends toward a following much informed by a cynical hypocrisy, narrative remains a fundamental ingredient of any society, including hunter-gatherers. And by narrative I don't mean fiction or metaphysics, I mean myth. 

Prim yet Improper.

Praying Mantis

As we old farts attempt to dwell merrily in a Post Irony Condition - otherwise known as Wallace's search for useful narratives that are neither abject snowflakeism, Starbucks didgeridoo-libtardism or unchecked, self-aggrandizing fanaticism in beaky caps masquerading as an "enlarging" cause but is, in fact, a narrow, sentimental, and ultimately "pathetic" form of bondage to a chosen self-image - let's attempt to pour scorn on Cynicism and the Cynics. Mind you, perhaps I'm a little too touched by my own experience as a callow youth in what many might have considered a Remand Home. I fondly remember a week long lecture from the pulpits advising the student body to beware of cynics, cynicism, insubordination, Bolshevik attitude, dumb insolence, it was quite a long list with no mention of Socrates, and as a paid up member of the back row, it was a week I thoroughly enjoyed. Any large language model, and pretty much every dictionary will tell you that there are two kinds of cynic which apparently mean  different things. The word cynic comes from a Greek word that means dog-like, so think about that before patting yourself on the back. The ancient word Cynic belonged to a school of philosophy that was founded around 400 BC. Good to know that Schopenhauer, an admirer of Poodles who once threw a seamstress down stairs which resulted in a judgement against him which directed him to pay her a quarterly pension for the rest of her life, may have fitted in very well with the ancient cynics, who took joy from publicly flaunting convention, engaging in improper acts, and were all together very outspoken. Yet in their rejection of conventions Ancient Cynics chose an asceticism that believed in self-sufficiency, simplicity on the understanding that true happiness lay in freeing oneself from worldly concerns, they eschewed wealth, fame, social status, comfortable housing and stuff generally. The other meaning of cynic from Webster's Dictionary goes like this :  "..a person who distrusts human nature and believes people are motivated solely by self-interest, often expressing this with scorn or sneering. They are skeptical of altruistic motives, questioning the sincerity or goodness of others' actions and expressing this through negativity and fault-finding." Webster's definition of cynic makes an excellent description of what dumb insolence might look like to the frail. Baxter and I are still inclined to suspect that the opposite of cynic is "idealist" : "One guided by ideals especially one that places ideals before practical considerations," or "an adherent of a philosophical theory of idealism." Idealism as a philosophy claims that ultimate reality is mental, it exists above and beyond a materialist's material world. A manifestation of Schopenhauer's Will, as opposed to Hume's empiricism or Marx's materialism. "What do you want? Give me a washing machine, a mule and Pork Chop! A shotgun sound and away I ran." As a potential narrative for Post Irony this abuse of the Bob Dylan line leaves plenty of room for good old fashioned pre-late stage postmodern irony, a whole world of healthy cynicism and a puerile skepticism, sounds about right to this end of the keyboard.