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"Reality is stranger than fiction." So, fiction must be restrained to be believable.
Yet merely observing a character and the hypocrisy between stated belief and action is already good fiction. But for comedic gold, like Don Quixote, allow the character to adhere to their beliefs strictly: a character devoid of flexible hypocrisy, that is, an utterly restrained character, is unbelievable.
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Fascism is fear and pain amplified until we beg for strength to save us.
Fear is created through a conspiracy without facts: we can protest for our rights without affecting change. In this neutered, weakened state, we turn towards strength, even if it is only an image of strength, a memory of power.
Once affiliated, communally anxious quick fixes are applied: symbolic interactions and stylistic switches. Watchwords, repetitious dogma, flags, and costuming precede conversation, curiosity, or insight. In so doing, we sacrifice self to the tribe.
What must be considered is that we would love to remain individuals, strange and selfish, but when stripped and trapped, we will turn back to primal instinct and scapegoating. The reason for fear is because it is natural.
"Benjamin said that fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics, in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate." ~ The aestheticization of politics, wikipedia
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Therapy is primarily learning to care less. Over-caring leads to anxious rumination, where we spiral into desperation.
One approach is to shift the direction of care: from inward to outward—caring for others instead of fixating on ourselves.
Another is to reframe our perspective, diminishing the importance of the issue until we care less. For example, remind yourself that “it’s just a job” or question why we need a relationship with harmful people.
Ryder Richards
ryderrichards.com
letusthinkaboutit.com
(c) 806.790.5508
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When trying to make up for mistakes, we become vulnerable to new forms of manipulation. In looking for immediate solutions, we tend to choose flawed solutions that are easy to hand.
Applied to the social/communal sphere, our effort to avoid repeating atrocities (such as Nazism or slavery) creates new opportunities for totalitarianism: our insistent righteousness by saying “never again” becomes blind rigidity, overpowered extremism.
Rather than learning from the past, we become more concerned with becoming virtuous and increasing our positional distance from it. As such, we cease to react to some forms of empirical reality and embrace the symbolic, as it alone offers an eternal, ideological guiding star divorced from the world’s complex muddiness.
Since all symbols are stand-ins (reductive categorizations), the secondary traits of people (race/sex/religion) also become primary and more readily defensible. Yet, the symbolic defense becomes convoluted and complex, perhaps in inverse proportion to the discounted reality, as if we seek to recapture/recreate reality’s confusion, which we threw away for certainty.
The past is thus repeated from our desperation not to repeat the past.
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Art has shifted from representation to an emphasis on presentation, where an immediate felt connection with the artist’s genius/pain is expected.
This unmediated, instantaneous transmission thwarts the opportunity for thoughtful contemplation, insinuating emotive transference as the principal (and perhaps the only morally right) way to engage in art.
Demanding cautious consideration is labeled elitist; instead, the premise is that art should be blatant, obvious, abundant, heartwarming, brilliant, and presumptively democratic. It should require no thought or pause, only submission to the prescribed experience.
In response, art criticism should now only transcribe the emotive range or comment on the lack of openness. All limitations, though, are forgivable given the biographical specificity confronted with the impossibility of knowing another’s experience.
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A question I have repeatedly heard about Trump or Biden is: “But how does it look? Can you see that person in charge?”
This usually appears when you have gently dissuaded or countered a few hyperbolic statements with opposing facts. When we run out of reason and facts we appeal to aesthetics: what you believe is how you feel about the image.
Attacking the image is a root instinct to attack the symbol: if the person does not appear presidential/fatherly/powerful, it insults my aesthetic pride.
Despite our layers of logic obfuscating core motivations, we are very visual and socialized animals reacting to appearances far more strongly than we know.
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Watch the arguments move between symbolic and particular traits: we love the art but abhor the person, OR we love what he/she stands for, so we will excuse their character flaws.
For instance, when America’s hopes are pinned symbolically on Trump or Biden, we wish for the symbol to overcome personal flaws. (In essence, every universal symbol/signifier is empty and needs to be filled, fleshed out, but the alignment cannot be perfect.)
To disparage a symbol, we debase the concrete, particular individual’s specific traits, showing the hypocrisy between the symbol and the flesh. Yet, when we must argue for our side, we ignore the specific human and resort to the aligned characteristics.
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Jameson says parody relies on idiosyncratic style. The style is an inimitable way of moving through the world defined by a period of history, and parody can emerge only from such historical authenticity.
Modernism has dispensed with the characteristics of history via universalist flattening, thus robbing a parody of a barbed, driven imitation, leaving it as a blind, toothless mask.
Parody today is merely pastiche—dumb style with no content: “a statue with blind eyeballs”
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Linguistic creep (or semantic drift) is exemplified by the use of terms like "art," which, once rigidly defined by culture and its relative merit, argued, today, "anything can be art" as beauty is in "the eye of the beholder."
This horizontal expansion renders the term ‘art’ nearly meaningless, and alternate categories must be delineated to allow critical judgment.
A similar expansion occurs with "violence/trauma" or "racism": if all things are racist (systemic racism) or any action can be deemed triggering, we must now invent new terms to respecify the attenuated definition, such as "anti-racist" or "pro-peace."
Words function symbolically. Once the categorical definition is expanded, it de-defines the word, rendering it useless as it ceases to point to anything. (The sign points to the signified (idea) forgetting about the signifier (object).)
Just as we can no longer recognize "art," as it is everything, the danger is to be unable to name actual racism or violence: the broadening spectrum dilutes the impact. Originally, to open a term spotlights unconsidered applications, which can be helpful, but once popularized as a tactic we must reinvent the language.
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To pursue the ideal, you must formulate a middle ground (a substance or medium) from which to lie in order to create the future.
This can be called the "aesthetic mode," which takes reality and then projects forward an image (fantasy) of how it could be reshaped to serve human ends.
Interestingly, the first past appears as a lie but can eventually become functional as an addendum to reality.
(from Shulamith Firestone)
