9/11 the movie and Morpheus
September 12, 2006 1:14 PM Subscribe
Memorializing Hypereality maybe it is not always something 'new' that bears fruit but rather actually understanding something said before. Especially if we don't listen carefully the first time.
Lacking advanced trainging in hermeneutics, I found this essay difficult to follow.
posted by GuyZero at 2:18 PM on September 12, 2006
posted by GuyZero at 2:18 PM on September 12, 2006
This is pathetic, people. If you want to be pretentious, at least regurgitate someone interesting.
In any case, not only is this pompous piece of garbage deliberately overwritten (apparently in an effort to sound like Homi Bhabha, which is something like listening very intently to your dog as a way of imitating the Son of Sam), but the ideas it presents are old and tired. The one redeeming quality of the best of the last quarter-century's evidence-free rants on semiotics, deconstruction, cultural studies, poco, etc. is that they give us a new, thought-provoking, intelligent, and iconoclastic interpretive framework, or at least cause us to reconsider what we think is obvious. This smelly turd does neither. Of all the authors he could dully rehash, Scott Thill picks Baudrillard--who wrote one good book and immediately devolved into incoherent senility (I saw him give a lecture in November or so. It was like listening to a really high English grad student).
This is a good post, at least I'm now confident that someone out there understands Theory less than i do.
posted by nasreddin at 3:48 PM on September 12, 2006
The blog you are reading now is a fine example of the process at work, a personal revolution built from the code up, one that has forever changed the definition of once-fortified concepts like "journalism," "journalist," "news," "propaganda," and forever onward. With the reign of material media (magazines, CDs, DVDs, and the like) stubbornly fighting off extinction, more than ever are turning to the Internet to give themselves....well, everything. They no longer need to sit at the altar of truths handed down from dominant culture. Instead, they can manufacture, promote and capitalize upon their own truths.Am I a VC? Is this 1998? Welcome to the future! Guess what, nothing has changed! The Internet is as little a device for manufacturing our own truths as was the newspaper.
In any case, not only is this pompous piece of garbage deliberately overwritten (apparently in an effort to sound like Homi Bhabha, which is something like listening very intently to your dog as a way of imitating the Son of Sam), but the ideas it presents are old and tired. The one redeeming quality of the best of the last quarter-century's evidence-free rants on semiotics, deconstruction, cultural studies, poco, etc. is that they give us a new, thought-provoking, intelligent, and iconoclastic interpretive framework, or at least cause us to reconsider what we think is obvious. This smelly turd does neither. Of all the authors he could dully rehash, Scott Thill picks Baudrillard--who wrote one good book and immediately devolved into incoherent senility (I saw him give a lecture in November or so. It was like listening to a really high English grad student).
This is a good post, at least I'm now confident that someone out there understands Theory less than i do.
posted by nasreddin at 3:48 PM on September 12, 2006
crystalline apotheosis?
There should be a pseudointellectual drinking game based on ‘peed.
/also, Neuromancer references. Molly been Chiba too.
posted by Smedleyman at 3:57 PM on September 12, 2006
There should be a pseudointellectual drinking game based on ‘peed.
/also, Neuromancer references. Molly been Chiba too.
posted by Smedleyman at 3:57 PM on September 12, 2006
/sorry - smedley been chiba too...wittier/self-referential/topical...dammit!
posted by Smedleyman at 3:58 PM on September 12, 2006
posted by Smedleyman at 3:58 PM on September 12, 2006
/or does the correction count as hyperreal?
posted by Smedleyman at 3:59 PM on September 12, 2006
posted by Smedleyman at 3:59 PM on September 12, 2006
/'Dude are you being hyperreal?' phft. I don't even know anymore.
posted by Smedleyman at 4:00 PM on September 12, 2006
posted by Smedleyman at 4:00 PM on September 12, 2006
Am I a VC? Is this 1998? Welcome to the future! Guess what, nothing has changed!
Oh come on. You really think something like "loose change" would have gotten any traction in a pre-internet era? If anything, the Internet allows conspiracy-minded folk to come up their own interpretations. It's really amazing how many people think the government was "in" on 9/11.
So if anything, that's changed. Of course it's hard to compare it to anything, certainly Pearl Harbor isn't something that people have trouble believing the way they do the 9/11 narrative about 19 hijackers taking down the WTC.
posted by delmoi at 4:45 PM on September 12, 2006
Oh come on. You really think something like "loose change" would have gotten any traction in a pre-internet era? If anything, the Internet allows conspiracy-minded folk to come up their own interpretations. It's really amazing how many people think the government was "in" on 9/11.
So if anything, that's changed. Of course it's hard to compare it to anything, certainly Pearl Harbor isn't something that people have trouble believing the way they do the 9/11 narrative about 19 hijackers taking down the WTC.
posted by delmoi at 4:45 PM on September 12, 2006
delmoi: If American culture is good at anything, it's popularizing conspiracy theories. Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" does a really good job of showing the way consipracy theories spread before television or radio or anything else. Conspiracy theories were just as crazy and popular in the nineteenth century as today. So that much hasn't changed a bit.
posted by nasreddin at 4:58 PM on September 12, 2006
posted by nasreddin at 4:58 PM on September 12, 2006
Actually, this quote, which is really the heart of the essay (one distinguishing characteristic of stuff like this is always that it could have been written in a tenth of the space) is not useless:
posted by spiderwire at 5:21 PM on September 12, 2006
No, there is no closure when it comes to 9/11 and narrative, just as there was no closure on the Gordian knot of JFK's assassination. That the same director -- the cerebral, political Oliver Stone -- tackled both narratives in film is not instructive: The fact that his film JFK spiraled outward into fractal narrative, while his 9/11 film World Trade Center eschewed geopolitics altogether is. As the comedian David Cross hilariously explained in his live album It's Not Funny: "I don't think Osama bin Laden sent those planes to attack us because he hated our freedom. I think he did it because of our support for Israel, our ties with the Saudi family and our military bases in Saudi Arabia. You know why I think that? Because that's what he fucking said!"I think that's a good point. It's not a great essay, but not horrible, either. It's not like there's a whole lot of insightful commentary on 9/11 floating around.
All of which is a particularly funny way of looking back at the calamity that created our War on Terror, not as a narrative steeped in heroism and binarism, but as one full of mundane realities that play better as polished hyperrealities.
posted by spiderwire at 5:21 PM on September 12, 2006
My response to 9/11 has been to basically ignore that it ever happened and avoid all commentary about it like the plague.
Does that make me a bad person?
posted by ddf at 7:12 PM on September 12, 2006
Does that make me a bad person?
posted by ddf at 7:12 PM on September 12, 2006
The majority of Americans don’t want to think about problems in other areas until it can be commercialized by a bunch of singers making a song with a catchy chorus or famous actors joining together to make a statement. The masses of this country (like any other) are sheep that don’t care as long as they have a job, roof, and food in their belly. 9/11 as horrible as it was, should have been a wake up that our country’s international policies need serious reconsideration. But instead, our government has used it to strike fear in the “god fearing” people in America and the only way to make them feel safe is to attack others, even if they are not connected to the terrorist that attacked us.
posted by Big Mike at 1:55 PM on September 14, 2006
posted by Big Mike at 1:55 PM on September 14, 2006
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I was surpirsed by this essay: If this post was made yesterday, it would have gotten a dot from me.
posted by illovich at 1:46 PM on September 12, 2006