nucking futz i say...

The other night shortly after getting home from the midterm, my girlfriend came over distraught and frustrated over an advertisement she had seen in the lrt station. Apparently, Pro-Life Edmonton has huge posters up across the traintracks at university station. I suppose it makes sense beings funding is still being given generously to the christian religious right, but still, it prompted a conversation about action regarding this issue. I looked online and was unsuccessful at finding a Pro-Choice coalition in edmonton, but I very well may have not been looking hard enough. We racked our brains thinking of some way to refunction this irritating poster, in order to at least let it be known to those who are unaware that there is indeed opposition to this movement (it never occurred to me that that may be an issue, but at dinner the other night I brought up the posters and someone at the table said, "Pro-Life...what the hell is that?? I'M SO HAPPY TO BE ALIVE???"...I was like, umm no it's actually about abortion...). And this was not a person who I consider to be uneducated or unaware at all; needless to say I was shocked. Anyways, I have been schemeing in my head about a stealthy culture jamming adventure that may need to take place...I suppose it isn't the most genius thing for me to announce my criminal aspirations in such a public space, but i'm just so pissed off. It feels like we are regressing, and it depresses me that I'm not clever/ambitious enough to really do anything about it. I don't think I am artistic enough to politicize aesthetics really...my immeditate solution was to spray paint 'are you fucking kidding me?' beside the poster, but I would prefer my act of refunctioning to be slightly more intellectual and more appreciated than something a 12 year old punk could do when drunk for the first time. Plus, how would I get across the tracks? I don't have a death wish. Haha. So...if anyone has any input on this issue it would be awesome to hear it, even if it's just sharing a moment of frustration. That is my rant. Enjoy.

mimi, oh mimi

In Mimi White's article she continually speaks of a conflict and tension within the hegemonic discourse, or an 'ideological problematic'. This slipperiness of meaning allows for a range of voices to be heard (through advertising for example). However, is the 'range of voices' actually representative of those from oppositional discourses, or is it simply the predominant ideology commodifying other viewpoints, or worse, paying lip service to other perspectives in order to squelch any growing resistance? Also, despite the fact that White insists we do have agency, it seems to me that change seems more difficult than ever considering the uneven development. If there are so many traces from the future and the past here in the present social formation, and we (obviously) are not one giant homogenous population, where can change begin? Clearly I am having a glass half-empty day here, because Baudrillard seems to be making the most sense to me- and that is pretty fucked. I cannot help but feel that the constant bombardment of images hinders our ability to take any clear action...and that even if action is taken its purpose can always be twisted into something reverse discourse-esque thereby making it reinforce the very thing we were fighting. Blah. Yes, that was a full sentence.
I suppose that is where provisionality comes in. Re-fuctioning is not an attmept to get 'outside' of ideology, but to rework the raw materials that we are given. Even a momentary disruption is better than none at all. The glass is filling up folks. Oh- and I thought I had an idea of what a conscious subject was, but perhaps I have no idea. Maybe I was being too practical and just thought of the conscious subject as a more provisional identity...like...oh, I just read a stop sign that read "STOP RAPE" and it sort of jolted me out of my monotonous leisure-less unquestioning life...therefore i was 'conscious' for a moment. That sounds a lot stupider than it sounded in my head, but does that makes sense? If anyone could fill me in that would be grand.

seeking conscious subjects

Kipnis states that a left popular culture would have the task of refunctioning already existing antagonistic discursive moments into moments that are unassimilable into the ruling bloc. However, in the current climate of raging capitalist hegemony, I wonder if anything can remain unassimible. I believe that every moment of a populist intervention must be provisional, creating conscious subjects (provisionally), for eventually it will become commodified and distance from the moment will occur. Ultimately, the point of a left popular culture is change, and in order for this to occur, individuals must be interpellated into not only the dominant discourse, but also into a left populist discourse. Kipnis uses Laclau’s version of populism in which one (dominant) class cannot completely absorb ‘the people’, hence the more radical the rearticulation of the antagonistic moment, the harder for a hegemonic discourse to survive without populism. I keep wondering if these provisional left pop culture interventions must be done consciously and intentionally, or if they could occur accidentally. Does Kipnis intend to make all people conscious subjects, or does it take a conscious subject to take part in a left popular culture? Baudrillard would interject here and say that we are not conscious subjects, for due to continuous bombardment of images we ‘the mass’ has decelerated and become a giant apathetic body of matter incapable of being moved. Or, he may criticize a populist intervention as simply more simulacra, further perpetuating our hyper-reality. Personally, I would like to believe that all are capable of being conscious subjects, even if it is merely a temporary moment of as Benjamin would say, tactile shock.

slow it down!

According to Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", the term "shock" refers to a tactile sensation that should be 'cushioned by a heightened sense of mind', however it is the times when there is no cushion to be found that we remember. A few years ago I watched a documentary called "Tarnation" which was so brilliant, yet eerie, that to this day it is difficult to express or explain the film because I cannot pinpoint anything specific about why it was so memorable. I was stuck with a tight feeling in my chest, a light head and a fluttering stomach- and not in a 'i'm-floating-on-air-because-i'm-so-twitterpated' sort of way. What caused the images to register on my body in such a way, I believe, was the fragmented and montage style of the film (the main character had chronicled his life via video clips, photographs, drawings, phone messages and assembled them together in a narrative type fashion). The speeding and slowing of the images and sounds, as well as the sheer humanity of the piece left me no time to reflect but only to feel. Not only does the film rely on "shock", it is as John Fiske states 'excessive' (a device which magnifies ideological norms in order to bring them to attention in order to disrupt them), however I cannot pinpoint what norm it would be hyperbolizing- it seems as if he is hyperbolizing his whole existence in order to create an empathetic viewer.
Perhaps the reason the film resonated in such a way, was because I watched it alone, so I wonder, is that 'simultaneous contemplation'? It certainly was asocial, and others watched the exact same images as I, so does the 'simultaneous' mean the image(s) are being seen by many at once, or simply that the same image is being viewed?
Also, in regards to Benjamin's usage of the term 'apperception', what I understand it as is since sound and film have occurred in art, we have a heightened sense of our surroundings. Does this mean our material surroundings, or the surroundings of the art (for example in a movie, we as the audience are the 'experts', therefore are conscious of more than the characters)? It seems the only thing clear to me about apperception at this moment is my confusion. If anyone can clarify that would be fantastic.