The Post-Partisan Emporium

 Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this essay... Who’s Winning? By FABIO VIGHI ‘The West has become a totalitarian space – the space of a self-defensive hegemony defending itself against its own weakness.’ (Jean Baudrillard) One of the most frequently referenced scenes in Arthur Penn’s  Night Moves  (1973) features a despondent Gene Hackman slumped in front of a small black-and-white television, half-heartedly watching a game of American football. When his wife walks in and asks, “Who’s winning?”, he mutters: “Nobody. One side’s just losing slower than the other.” As consciously depressing Hollywood films like  Night Moves  foresaw, the crisis of the 1970s was already signalling the end of capitalist socialisation: a structural and soon-to-be global socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological debacle that is now entering its phase of rapid escalation (though Hollywood this time is in full denial). As it’s becoming increasingly clear, the s...

  Fake Lit and the Curation of History We may need to pay closer attention to the shelves in our bookshops. The construction of the pseudo-reality is entering its secondary phase: the curation of historical amnesia and myopia. John Waters The Darker Side of Bad Books There is an aspect of propaganda to which  we may be paying insufficient attention: the curation of history. Through the work of Mattias Desmet and others, we are pretty much on top of the quotidian drip of news-management, indoctrination, misdirection, disinformation and normalisation disguised as warnings about malinformation or ‘conspiracy theory’, and other delightful skills of the contemporary nudge-monger. But we forget that what is happening is intended to be for keeps. It is not, in other words, as if, when the would-be tyrants have achieved their objectives, they will call an end to the lying and brainwashing programmes, and then revert to something resembling what we remember as the way things used to be...