I will not “PTL” because you successfully passed your second-year exams after a marathon cramming session that was necessitated by your general negligence of your studies over the course of the year. Nor will I “PTL” for any of the myriad other events in your life that are big deals in your self-contained, self-concerned world of middle-class privilege, but ultimately aren’t meaningful or positively life-changing for anyone else. I will PTL when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And so should you.
My minister mentioned something to me a few weeks ago that I’ve been thinking about ever since: in our twenties and thirties, the interiority that marks adolescence (and returns again in “middle age”) is replaced by the exteriority of “things,” of accumulation and accomplishment. In the rush to have the right things or to be at the right “stage” of adulthood, one can easily forget about life’s unquantifiable undercurrents. I know these are overly simplified terms, and I don’t mean to posit a strict interior-abstract/exterior-material binary, but as accumulation and accomplishment increasingly become priorities in my life, I’m starting to wonder if I’m losing my grasp on other things.
None of my shit is on there, yo. I quit.
My dreams are becoming increasingly conventional and seem, on the whole, to be lacking in true abstraction. I am concerned that this is an indication of my own unoriginality.
Kony 2012 was never about oil. It was about white men and women saving poor, starving, but promising black children from savagely violent black men.
We seriously need to stop talking about oil so much. It’s there, and it means something, but it doesn’t mean much. Oil is nothing in this fraught field of racial-sexual-economic violence. Every article written, every movie made, every photo splashed across the cover of Time, is worth more than all the oil we could ever hope to plunder.
“The problem is at once to distinguish among events, to differentiate the networks and levels to which they belong, and to reconstitute the lines along which they are connected and engender one another. From this follows a refusal of analyses couched in terms of the symbolic field or the domain of signifying structures, and a recourse to analyses in terms of the genealogy of relations of force, strategic developments, and tactics. Here I believe one’s point of reference should not be the great model of language (langue) and signs, but that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning.”
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
Currently using as bookmarks: 2x pieces of scrap paper; 1x Shaeffer pen; 1x Google Nexus S; 1x tube of Allen Edmonds premium shoe polish (walnut); 1x CD case (RHCP, Blood Sugar Sex Magik); 1x different book.
In light of an impending deadline, and for the sake of making a thorough, coherent, and most importantly original point, I’m about to advance an argument that isn’t entirely charitable or fair to its intended target. Over the next several days, I will so forcefully and repetitively make my case that, by the time I’m done, I will in fact believe what I started out knowing to be untrue. I know it’s not right, and yet I’m unable unwilling to do otherwise.
I occasionally have to read male theologians who insist that gendered language does no harm to women. When I do, I’m reminded of prison studies of convicted male rapists who adamantly maintain that the women they raped “enjoyed it.”
The common denominator is, of course, authenticity and nostalgia for a time when things were “real.”The Current Rage in Branding: Fake Authenticity is now A-Okay
Fashion?
Culture?
Music?
Theology?
Hasn’t this been going on in Euro-American societies since the Renaissance? The operative assumption here seems to be that there can be something prior to “manufacture” or “production” or “construction,” that there’s either a “real ‘real’” (which these brands aspire to but fail to acquire) or else some other kind of authenticity (e.g. the authentic, if boring/undesirable, moment of the present-day consumer). I don’t buy the assumption (which may be why I continue to buy the branding).
I think there’s also something to be said for the aesthetic dimension of nostalgia as somehow productive in its own way. No one looks at an Asian guy in a plaid shirt and assumes he’s a lumberjack or aspiring to be one. There’s an aesthetic dimension to the shirt that isn’t exhausted by its reference to something else.
(Source: jeffreylo)
28 Mar 2012 / Reblogged from jeffreylo authenticity nostalgia commodification Foucault the myth of pure origins
