noel emits
a wonderful wooden reason
It's not metaphorical.
oh man, leave the thread for a few hours, and look what happens. I must admit, when this sort of stuff comes up, I'm totally in over my head, not having read much "theory" etc.
But am I alone in feeling the slightest bit queasy at how real mental illnesses are used as sources for metaphors for ways that non-mentally ill people can different (dis/)engage with consumerism and capitalism? (i.e. sometimes this way of talking sits uneasily. but go on, please!)
But she is talking specifically about them AS CONSUMERS... and saying that whether you are consuming Razorlight or Iannis Xenakis, you are engaged in precisely the same system, and that at some level what you are interested in is manipulating a sense of self identity through the purchasing of products (the fundamental methodology of marketing in late consumer capitalism)... hence the pejorative aspects of hipsterism must be dispensed with, (although perhaps one could say that they show an excess of this kind of behaviour, which is seen by the majority as somehow unseemly in its extent...)
experience of all art is reduced to the display of empty sets of signifiers.
...
as I sit alone in my studio downloading thousands of albums from all cultures of the world, I can not help but think about the intimate connection that the makers of this music must feel toward his/her art, how it is a lifetime of devotion, how meaning is acrued over time, and how, by comparison, I am hopelessly aliented, cut off, and unable to eat and digest the real fruit from these trees.
what capitalism does is filter everything through the lense of consumption, so that all creativity, empathy, communication, becomes inextricably tied to the dynamic of the market, and experience of all art is reduced to the display of empty sets of signifiers.
but if you think you can access the knowledge of a yogi or feel the understanding of a master oud player by dropping a liquid in your eye, you've got another thing coming.
Psychedelic drugs to my mind merely imply a nightmarish level of hyper-awareness of social dynamics and tortuous transcendental horror-shows of mass murder and coruscating self-assassination.