Nowhere to go

Ok, this is a short story I wrote using a prompt from The Writer magazine. I actually took 5 verbs (they only recommended 3) to weave into my story:

Button
Delay
Quiver
Muster
Quit

I very quickly realized that I had written myself into a corner and decided to self-consciously go along that route. You will see what I mean.

Nowhere to go


Her voice quivered as she spoke into the phone. It took all of the confidence she could muster. A deep voice bellowed on the other end. She quickly hung up, hoping there was no way to trace the call, but of course there was. Everyone had a way to retrace calls these days. As the young woman in the café had said to her horrified café confidante, there is no such thing as privacy anymore. She knew that. So why did she do something so stupid. Why would she think that she could trust something so private in such a public venue? She should have just gone to the internet. But she needed to hear the soothing sounds of someone’s voice in her ear, a voice as soothing as a hand stroking her hair or rubbing her back.


She decided to go out. She buttoned up her jeans and pulled on a t-shirt, slipped on her boots, and went out the door. It was a warm night and she decided to walk the 10 blocks or so down to the bar that she had been meaning to go to. As she got closer, the cell phone in her pocket began to ring, a ring that said the caller was unfamiliar, but when she looked at the number, it was not an unfamiliar number at all. She put in back in her pocket and continued walking.


Being new to town, she didn’t know anyone yet. She had moved here less than a month ago after she had quit her job and decided to reinvent her life. She had taped a note to her boss’s door, using a bit more tape than was required for the job, and gave her 5-minute notice and a forwarding address for her check, her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend’s address. She left town two days later, go a PO Box and arranged to have her mail forwarded. In three days time, she had changed her whole life, including her cell phone number. There was only place that knew her number. She looked around instinctively, knowing that she was being silly and paranoid. No one was paying her any attention, but was that a good or a bad thing? Could someone snatch her off the street without being noticed?


She walked up to the bar and put her hand out to pull open the door. Something stopped her.


It was the realization that this scenario had been played out with every possible ending. If she met someone and had a one-night stand, it would either be the pornographic version, or the post-modern “wasn’t that meaningless” version. If she went in and no one noticed her, it would be the sad and lonely Lifetime women’s movie or it would be the self-help realization that she didn’t need anyone but herself all along. Come to think of it, that was also a potential Lifetime movie, made for lonely women that didn’t want to admit it and tried to seem empowered. Perhaps she would have the crime novel ending, in which the mysterious stranger from the phone sex line would have tracked down her neighborhood from the incoming phone line and had started hanging out, in hopes that she would start to take chances with her lonely, empty, sexually unfulfilled life and he would be there to snatch her. (This was also a potential porn plot line, although much darker and one that she was loathe to admit that maybe she had come across once or twice in her internet viewing.) Perhaps it would be the action movie ending with all of the same plot lines as the crime novel/porn story ending, except that she would get away and potentially kill her captor. If she went in and nothing either happened or failed to happen, if people talked to her and she felt good but left alone and didn’t call any of them, that would just be a modern slice-of-life film or novel, or maybe a short story. She started to feel a sense of panic rise in her as she stood at the door, delayed, unable to stay or go.


OMG, she thought. Maybe she was stuck in some kind of hipster stream-of-consciousness writing!


Guy Debord was right. Living in an overmediated culture, there was nowhere to go, nothing original to be done. Our life is prescribed, stolen from us in a media feedback loop so intense that there was nothing to be done that hadn’t already been mapped out in some way, easily recognizable as an Oprah book or a movie of the week. She had created a situation in which an original response to whatever would happen to her was impossible.


She stood at the door with her hand out. The world as she knew it was now stopped, although people were clearly moving, asking if she were going in, edging around her, and eventually asking if she was ok.


She nodded absent-mindedly but remained frozen.

Pornography, fashion models, and Tea Party politics

I was talking the other day with a friend of mine about pornography and certain images that were being shown and we were having a debate about the details of the pictures and whether or not they were titillating. I finally just said to my friend it’s a fantasy. Some people might go out and act on those fantasies, but for the rest of us, it’s a release of those fantasies. I might find something arousing or titillating that I would never actually do. Unlike, say, the models in magazines or on tv, who also represent fantasies about what women should look like, wear, be willing to do. The difference is that we take the fantasies of advertising seriously whereas the fantasies in pornography, we don’t necessarily. This is why women starve themselves to death, have surgeries, etc. in an effort to look like the women we see on television and in fashion magazines. We know this. We’re told this repeatedly. And yet, we forget it. We take the world that advertising creates, whether it’s selling us investing opportunities or clothes or alcohol, as real.

The late great comedian Bill Hicks, in his DVD concert Sane Man makes fun of the notion of women appearing in adult magazines as “models.” I’ll spare you the further, yet funny, details of his routine, but he clearly spoofs the ideas of them as models. But if we actually think of the women in adult magazines as models, then that allows us to rethink this whole concept of “legitimate” models, advertising, etc., to break the spell, no, the fantasy of our lives, that they dangle in front of us, which most of us will never even begin to achieve.

And then I started thinking (and talking, because I am an external processor who thinks outloud) that this really can be extended to politics, for example, to the Tea Party movement. They see things on tv, especially Glen Beck or Sarah Palin, and it appeals to a side of them that longs for simpler times, which weren’t really simpler but just long enough ago to seem that way. These people tell them that they’re on their side, that they believe in the same values that they do and for some reason, possibly because Beck and Palin are white, seem to be middle class-oriented, and represent all the things that they aspire to. But what they seem to forget is that it’s a fantasy that they’ve bought in to and that they’re participating in. It looks real, the same why an airbrushed anorexic model looks real. It might even feel real, like someone who meets their favorite actor and actress and says “wow, she’s just like a real person, like you or me.” But she’s not. And Glen Beck is not. And Sarah Palin is not. And Barack Obama is not.

Guy Debord, in Society of the Spectacle wrote, in 1968, that the spectacle takes our gestures and steals them from us, replaying and repeating them back to us. We no longer recognize our gestures as our own.

“The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Section 30 http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/16

It’s the ultimate simulacrum. Taking our very real desires and re-enacting them to us. Some people know this and cynically turn away from politics, or participate while complaining that there is no real difference between the candidates. Others know that politics affects all of us, on a very real level. And though the differences may be slight, there is a minute difference between two candidates who represent our own desires back to us.

It’s played out on the very unreal screen of television news. At times it’s like an Oliver Stone movie with lots of big crowd scenes and speeches, like The Doors Movie or JFK.. Other times it might be on a slightly smaller scale. We’ve seen these images so many times that it feels familiar. It feels right. That’s what the spectacle, the fantasy draws upon. The familiar, the easily recognized and repeated gestures that come before us, that we know symbolize, even signify certain attitudes. They are cultural short cuts. But it is all a fantasy, just like the models in a pornographic shoot, the car safely speeding down a winding road (while the adman tells us not to try this at home), the fashion model selling us lipstick, etc.

People need to figure out what they really need. And then to fight for that. What if we had no politicians or pundits leading our rallies? What if we, the common people, stood up and spoke for ourselves? Isn’t that what our democracy is supposed to be about? Ordinary people talking about their struggles, their homes being foreclosed on, their struggles and fears around immigration and origin, their vision for the future (not nostalgia for a past that never existed and will never exist again), their desire for the jobs that they want, etc. Others have said it before, better than I. We have to break this spell, once and for all, that television and image culture have over us, to recognize every minute of it as fantasy and nothing else.

It’s ok for a fun escapism, whether it’s a conservative watching Glen Beck or Bill O’Reilly for a few minutes of soothing succor or a liberal watching a documentary of Woodstock and longing for the good old days of protest and rebellion. It’s all been packaged for us. But it’s not real. Repeat after me. It’s not real. It’s not real.

Spectacle and Language

Ok, this is a conference presentation I'm working on that also contains a lot of the work I'm doing for my dissertation. This is the first half to two thirds. I'm still working on the poetry section. I'd love to know what you think. Particularly, since I just finished rewriting this section, I'd love to hear opinions on whether or not the examples seem relevant. Tell me what you think!


Spectacle

Guy Debord outlined a society of alienated social relationships mediated by images known as the spectacle. Debord defines the spectacle as a totalizing system, discussing under its aegis everything from celebrity culture to avant garde art to concepts of time and history under the spectacle, as well as the commodification of every day life. Whereas in Barthes’ conception of myth, the interests of the class in power, are made to seem universal, natural, and “just the way it is,” the spectacle “manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond all dispute. . . . it demands . . . the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of appearances.” Not only does the spectacle in this case naturalize its own interests, but it also demands passivity, and through it, “the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise,” ultimately serving as “total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system. It further ensures the permanent presence of that justification.”


The spectacle itself is not the image, or even the media, but the media is a part of the spectacle and as such, “presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification.” Debord describes this aspect of the spectacle as “the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness.” He goes on to explain that “due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” We no longer have only three television channels to watch, in which to have our gaze concentrated, but there are still cultural icons created by television, movies, and magazines which all the people in given culture or society know about.

The ubiquity of Angelina Jolie, for example, on magazine covers, in movies, on television gossip shows, etc. means that it is virtually impossible for anyone in America not to know who she is. The ubiquity of many of these American media in other parts of the world means that she is known throughout the world. Anything that happens in the American media happens in all media – magazines, television, the internet, etc. In this way, the public’s gaze is kept up on things that the media deems important. And celebrity reigns high on that scale as beautiful, rich people who supposedly embody the dreams of Americans and keep up the appearance of the rags to riches, American Dream. For those who claim to hate celebrities, there is room in the media for them to be mocked and made fun of, particularly if they get too big and need to be taken down a peg, like Britney Spears. Praise or criticism doesn’t matter to the spectacle. What matters is the focus of the public’s attention on what it deems important. The spectacle functions as what media analysts have called a feedback loop, a symbiotic relationship between culture and marketing, or between the interest that the public has and what is presented in the media that feeds back into the public, albeit in a slightly altered form.


Consumption of Language


We are exposed to an intense level of linguistic activity (talking, reading, watching television, browsing the internet, listening to the radio, etc.) on a daily basis. Assuming an average day of 8 hours of such activity, we are exposed to 72,000 words a day, or 504,000 words each week. Thus, we are forced to process language in as shallow, quick fashion as often as we can, saving our more advanced linguistic resources for the most complex mental and linguistic operations. “There is growing evidence that the process involved in ordinary language comprehension is in fact fairly shallow . . . Some linguistic expressions . . . are retrieved from the memory . . . [in] prefabricated chunks, and others . . . must be computed . . . .”


We can, I think, extrapolate from this some ideological implications. In a world saturated by mythological and spectacular images and statements, it is not possible to linger over every expression and analyze its ideological basis. Furthermore, the constant repetition of slogans, jingles, clips from television shows and movies, etc. ensures that those items will eventually be stored into prefabricated units. Consider how common the “Got Milk?” campaign has become and how often “Got _____?” has become used in other contexts. A prefabricated phrase so simplistic, yet so ubiquitous, can even be pushed to the forefront of our warehouse of stock phrases and in some situations, might become the first thing we think of when we’re searching for the right phrase. There are several sites that have the phrase “Got Blood?” ranging from a Halloween site advising people how to make fake blood to an anti-war magnet that has “a picture of George W. Bush with a red mustache like the Got Milk Ad.” PETA ran a series of ads entitle “Got Beer?” I can tell you from my media class that when we do culture jamming spoof ads we have a high number of “Got _________” ads. It’s a pre-made, easily understood piece of culture that they can draw upon.


There are Facebook sites with names like “I speak movie!” and “I memorize and recite movie dialogue for fun and everyday conversation.” The description for “I speak movie!” says “This is a group for everyone who realizes that the best dialogue EVER happens in the movies and can fluently speak movie in any situation.” The wall posts consist mostly of people reciting movie dialogue for their own amusement, with occasional posts or commentary by other people, but largely it is not interactive, but recitative. We hear things like this all the time—people inserting conversation from Seinfeld or Family Guy. Sometimes they quote it, and sometimes they just pass it off as they’re own thoughts or comments. How many times have you heard “show me the money” or “you had me at hello” or a myriad of other well-known movie lines used in everyday conversation? It’s sometimes used to be funny or clever, but it also constitutes and shortcut to conversation, hence a shortcut to thinking. The availability of the prefabricated chunks forecloses the need, and hence the opportunity, for more advanced linguistic procedures that would lead to more original forms of expression. And once again, we see as Debord indicated, the media has acted as a unifying aspect of spectacular society, providing us this time with not only images of ourselves reflected back to us, but the very language, in the form of dialogue or slogans that we can use as prefabricated chunks. There is no longer any need to think critically or creatively for ourselves.