What are we like now?

[luka]

its bettter and more lucid and coherent than i remember it. essential reading for all who wish to understand waht we are like now.

 

[version]

Hence the 'psychotic character', the anthropological pre-condition of all totalitarian mass-movements. Precisely this transition from firm characteristics to push-button behaviour-patterns - though apparently enlivening - is an expression of the rising organic composition of man. Quick reactions, unballasted by a mediating constitution, do not restore spontaneity, but establish the person as a measuring instrument deployed and calibrated by a central authority. The more immediate its response, the more deeply in reality mediation has advanced: in the prompt, unresistant reflexes the subject is entirely extinguished. So too, biological reflexes, the models of the present social ones, are - when measured against subjectivity - objectified, alien: not without reason are they often called 'mechanical'. The closer organisms are to death, the more they regress to such twitching. Accordingly the destructive tendencies of the masses that explode in both varieties of totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes as manifestations of what they have already become. They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.

Adorno, Minima Moralia

 

[hmg]

Perfectly explains the sneeze reflex so, so many have to Trump, COVID scepticism, "climate crisis," etc., etc.

 

[version]

To an extent, although you're doing the classic thing of exaggerating and lumping together. You also seem to think you're outside the dynamic despite constantly posting buzzwords, memes and talking points you've picked up from right wing social media.

 

[hmg]

To an extent, although you're doing the classic thing of exaggerating and lumping together. You also seem to think you're outside the dynamic despite constantly posting buzzwords, memes and talking points you've picked up from right wing social media.

I do plenty more than that, and you know it.
Stung, didn't it?

 

[version]

Not particularly, I'm posting this in a thread called "What are we like now?", not "What are they like now?". The whole point is it's describing something we're all being pulled into.

 

[hmg]

Fair enough. Good find.
It's ok to resist.

 

[version]

Hence the 'psychotic character', the anthropological pre-condition of all totalitarian mass-movements. Precisely this transition from firm characteristics to push-button behaviour-patterns - though apparently enlivening - is an expression of the rising organic composition of man. Quick reactions, unballasted by a mediating constitution, do not restore spontaneity, but establish the person as a measuring instrument deployed and calibrated by a central authority. The more immediate its response, the more deeply in reality mediation has advanced: in the prompt, unresistant reflexes the subject is entirely extinguished. So too, biological reflexes, the models of the present social ones, are - when measured against subjectivity - objectified, alien: not without reason are they often called 'mechanical'. The closer organisms are to death, the more they regress to such twitching. Accordingly the destructive tendencies of the masses that explode in both varieties of totalitarian state are not so much death-wishes as manifestations of what they have already become. They murder so that whatever to them seems living, shall resemble themselves.

Adorno, Minima Moralia

Another one.

Baudelaire's poem about the martyr of sex, the murder victim, allegorically celebrates the sanctity of pleasure in the fearsomely liberating still-life of crime, but his intoxication before the naked headless body already resembles that which drove the prospective victims of Hitler's regime to buy, in paralysed greed, the newspapers in which stood the measures announcing their own doom. Fascism was the absolute sensation: in a statement at the time of the first pogroms, Goebbels boasted that at least the National Socialists were not boring. In the Third Reich the abstract horror of news and rumour was enjoyed as the only stimulus sufficient to incite a momentary glow in the weakened sensorium of the masses. Without the almost irresistible force of the craving for headlines, in which the strangled heart convulsively sought a primeval world, the unspeakable could not have been endured by the spectators or even by the perpetrators. In the course of the war, even news of calamity was finally given full publicity in Germany, and the slow military collapse was not hushed up. Concepts like sadism and masochism no longer suffice. In the mass-society of technical dissemination they are mediated by sensationalism, by comet-like, remote, ultimate newness. It overwhelms a public writhing under shock and oblivious of who has suffered the outrage, itself or others. Compared to its stimulus-value, the content of the shock becomes really irrelevant,​

 

[version]

... experimentation occurs not only in the extreme cases. Behind every television and computer screen, every technical operation which confronts him daily, the individual is analysed in return, function by function. He is tested, experimented on, fragmented, harassed, summoned to respond: a fractal subject doomed henceforth to be disseminated in the networks. And the price to be paid is a mortification of the gaze, the body, and the real world.​

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With the media, polls, and all the checks and verifications which go on, we are living on a kind of perpetual test-bed (McLuhan), where the feedback is more or less automatic.​

​

BAUDRILLARD (again), IMPOSSIBLE EXCHANGE

 

[version]