It is disappointing to see people who are so deeply involved in fan culture call something "trash" without looking into it at all, I guess people really aren't kidding when they say media literacy is dead. That might be an extreme thing to say- but just recently I saw someone on TikTok make a long video explaining how people who enjoy horror movies are terrible and morally rotted. The days of enjoying things that shouldn't be taken at face value are long gone it seems.
I'm with you, gent. In the era of inmediacy that we dwell in, it is forecasted that, like a cat about to push a glass of water from the countertop, people are unable to read past what's put on display, and, at the same time, puzzlingly, take profuse time into nitpicking the properties of the broken vessel on the floor with the fluid state of the water, rather than intellectualizing what the author of said glass wanted to do with it, whether it was drink from it, or send 1.2 drops in a nanoscopic plastic bag to the droughty kids in Africa. Once a pushing cat, rarely a glue-the-pieces-back-together human.
Nice piece. I particularly liked, "I heard an irate YouTuber on the Piers Morgan show rattling on about betrayals and audience contempt in regard to this film, seeming only to shed, unbeknownst to the rattler, more light on what the film is trying to say in the first place." Seems like there is an experience of object abandonment by the angry YouTuber--that is, a feeling of abandonment vis-a-vis their fantasized "relationship" with the filmmaker.
Thanks for reading, mate. That's an excellent psychoanalytic heuristic with which to contextualize the phenomenon. That postmodernism personalizes object relations with aesthetic content is what permits pathologies such as toxic fandom to metastasize in late capitalism and it bothers me so much that I had to write a piece about it (ha ha), because it depoliticizes class struggle through offering retreats into the private sphere on a mass scale. Mass politics is therefore no longer possible in postmodern life.
Yet, in the sequel, Phillips uses the devices of postmodern aesthetics to diagnose postmodernism's own ailments, something that was much more muted in the first Joker but, with the second, is explicit and explored even further.
I'll send you the clip of the Piers Morgan bit so you can see this guy foaming at the mouth. Sad.
Very interesting. Thanks for that. Freud, of course, famously theorized that our ill-formed, unconscious wishes and needs use imagery from our waking life to construct decodable stories in the form of our dreams. A psychoanalytic colleague of mine once commented that his patients were often talking about the content and images of their favorite streaming series in a like manner--and so my colleague began to look at these as dream narratives of a sort. Postmodern thinkers, such as Chodorow, point out that our unconscious uses existent, available images in culture and society to form notions of self, identify, and identification--but, and this is where she differs from Freud (as do most postmoderns), the identity is always-already informed by cultural imagery and vice-versa, chicken-and-egg style. There is no larval, unformed seed of identity material that *finds* a template in linear fashion. Rather, the unconscious subject and the cultural object inform one another; neither is privileged. In either case, one can more easily understand the aggression, violence, fantasy, and even pleasure that derives from the projection/introjection process which occurs with regard to public/mass/cultural iconography; it is, in a sense, often primitive in nature. What is needed, I think, is an emotionally-intelligent history and philosophy--one which takes basic needs for safety, for "being seen" or "mentalized" (in Fonagy's words), and for affect regulation into account as well as power, material resource needs, etc. into account. And yes, all of this will be on the exam ;).
This lines up with the thesis that postmodernism represents a liquidation of the modernist project, something that, the more I learn about it, makes me ambivalent about this postmodern world that I know and have contributed to. The more I get deeper into orthodox Marxism-Leninism, a thoroughly modernist formulation, the more I grow skeptical of the ways that the crisis of production—which Marx and the revolution were intending to instrumentalize for the dictatorship of the proletariat—has been forestalled through developments such as postmodernism. It's a point of tension in my thought as of late . . . .
It is disappointing to see people who are so deeply involved in fan culture call something "trash" without looking into it at all, I guess people really aren't kidding when they say media literacy is dead. That might be an extreme thing to say- but just recently I saw someone on TikTok make a long video explaining how people who enjoy horror movies are terrible and morally rotted. The days of enjoying things that shouldn't be taken at face value are long gone it seems.
I'm with you, gent. In the era of inmediacy that we dwell in, it is forecasted that, like a cat about to push a glass of water from the countertop, people are unable to read past what's put on display, and, at the same time, puzzlingly, take profuse time into nitpicking the properties of the broken vessel on the floor with the fluid state of the water, rather than intellectualizing what the author of said glass wanted to do with it, whether it was drink from it, or send 1.2 drops in a nanoscopic plastic bag to the droughty kids in Africa. Once a pushing cat, rarely a glue-the-pieces-back-together human.
Nice piece. I particularly liked, "I heard an irate YouTuber on the Piers Morgan show rattling on about betrayals and audience contempt in regard to this film, seeming only to shed, unbeknownst to the rattler, more light on what the film is trying to say in the first place." Seems like there is an experience of object abandonment by the angry YouTuber--that is, a feeling of abandonment vis-a-vis their fantasized "relationship" with the filmmaker.
Thanks for reading, mate. That's an excellent psychoanalytic heuristic with which to contextualize the phenomenon. That postmodernism personalizes object relations with aesthetic content is what permits pathologies such as toxic fandom to metastasize in late capitalism and it bothers me so much that I had to write a piece about it (ha ha), because it depoliticizes class struggle through offering retreats into the private sphere on a mass scale. Mass politics is therefore no longer possible in postmodern life.
Yet, in the sequel, Phillips uses the devices of postmodern aesthetics to diagnose postmodernism's own ailments, something that was much more muted in the first Joker but, with the second, is explicit and explored even further.
I'll send you the clip of the Piers Morgan bit so you can see this guy foaming at the mouth. Sad.
Very interesting. Thanks for that. Freud, of course, famously theorized that our ill-formed, unconscious wishes and needs use imagery from our waking life to construct decodable stories in the form of our dreams. A psychoanalytic colleague of mine once commented that his patients were often talking about the content and images of their favorite streaming series in a like manner--and so my colleague began to look at these as dream narratives of a sort. Postmodern thinkers, such as Chodorow, point out that our unconscious uses existent, available images in culture and society to form notions of self, identify, and identification--but, and this is where she differs from Freud (as do most postmoderns), the identity is always-already informed by cultural imagery and vice-versa, chicken-and-egg style. There is no larval, unformed seed of identity material that *finds* a template in linear fashion. Rather, the unconscious subject and the cultural object inform one another; neither is privileged. In either case, one can more easily understand the aggression, violence, fantasy, and even pleasure that derives from the projection/introjection process which occurs with regard to public/mass/cultural iconography; it is, in a sense, often primitive in nature. What is needed, I think, is an emotionally-intelligent history and philosophy--one which takes basic needs for safety, for "being seen" or "mentalized" (in Fonagy's words), and for affect regulation into account as well as power, material resource needs, etc. into account. And yes, all of this will be on the exam ;).
This lines up with the thesis that postmodernism represents a liquidation of the modernist project, something that, the more I learn about it, makes me ambivalent about this postmodern world that I know and have contributed to. The more I get deeper into orthodox Marxism-Leninism, a thoroughly modernist formulation, the more I grow skeptical of the ways that the crisis of production—which Marx and the revolution were intending to instrumentalize for the dictatorship of the proletariat—has been forestalled through developments such as postmodernism. It's a point of tension in my thought as of late . . . .