Speculations on why socially observable time has stopped

[82_28]

Me and the Booch (Tim Boucher of olden days Occult Investigator) are having a discussion about reality/technocracy/9/11 and other crazy shit. I just kind of rattled this off to him as that 9/11 whistleblower dude who "offed his kids and dog" made it spring to mind. . . This is just an email and flow of mind shit, but thought apropos as when time "stopped". Just recollections. . .

What I mean by the Blair Witch Project is that it was talked up by various friends of mine before I saw it and they, *in those days* were gullible enough to totally believe that the movie depicted real events. I mean TALKED UP. So, naturally, I had to see it. Like five minutes in was like, "you actually believed this shit was real?"

I gave it more time -- as in watching the movie. The hokiness was unbearable. But it was a watershed moment in contemporary culture because so many people back then BELIEVED it was real and they would even ARGUE with you when you said "totally fake". Bear in mind, there were no "Reality TV" shows back then. Then came the Matrix. Then came "There's Something About Mary". We were fully shocked into a new way of thinking. I mean, how much now is pornography now socially acceptable now? It is no longer culturally anathema. As a kid, there were these joints in Denver called "Kitty's" and they were a place you would never go. But the lure of the secrecy was undeniable. Thus, you wanted to know what the fuck goes on in there?

But it occurs to me that "Something About Mary" and also "American Pie" normalized pornography to the degree that made 9/11 glaringly obvious to have been that old "inside job" idea. Reason being is that it culminated various factors of change in how we view "reality".

Remember on 9/11 it was wall to wall for days coverage and to round it out one of the networks or maybe it was all of them would now be showing a commercial free broadcast of American Pie and then it was onto the ramp up of "The War in Iraq". When American Pie came out me and an old girlfriend went down to the Pacific Place theater to see it. You know me. I'm as liberal and assenting as they come. But I walked out in disgust -- mid film. I could not stand the depiction of humans that way and was, yes, offended. I felt there was something deeper, crueller to it, but just could not put my finger on it -- back in the early days.

Ahh, I could go on and on. . .

Perhaps more on this later.

[NeonLX]

Fascinating, 82_28. Keep it up. For me, anyway. I'm desparately trying to understand this stuff.

[8bitagent]

Been really wanting to pour into this thread big time, as this is truly one of my favorite threads on RI and feel it resonates the most with me.
I'll just comment for now on eighty two's last post. I remember the late 90's blu ray clear in my mind, and indeed I'd argue with people
who truly thought Blair Witch was real. 9/11 absolutely came at the perfect time for our virgin minds as a society. OJ, Lewinsky, etc couldnt have prepared us...tho in a way it did.
"...The Aristocrats!" horror show psy op that was September 11 was a new form of performance art splayed and displayed for us out of the television retina. For years and years we
(especially the youngest generation) were weened on Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer/Tony Scott curated summer fair, and then...one day. We awake to see REAL LIFE
horror unfolding on the tv in this larger than life way. Is it real world...or exercise? Remember 82_28, how everything was billed as "Exxxxxtremmme" in the late 90's?
The whole decade was about anger. From popular bands such as Nirvana, Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine to Columbine, or 'hardcore' wrestling
on tv. People worried about Y2K never would guess Y2K came, just 21 months later.

Agent Smith remarks in the Matrix, a fairwell to the OLD world(and seminal late 90's/early millennial film) if there ever was one...that the public didnt realize when the machines took over.
On 9/11/2001 the real life Matrix did in fact happen. Maybe Skynet/Ptech/Big Brother really did take over, or some symbolic Crowlean new Aeon, but shits been a weeeeiirrd hazy fog ever since.
The white soot on dazed lower Manhattanites on Barclay and Church symbolic of it all.

[justdrew]

[82_28]

Look at these photos of Seattle's quake of 2001 that the Seattle PI just put up that happened this week 12 years ago. Besides photos of people using payphones there are no photos of "can you believe we used to wear shit like that?"



http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/ ... to-4250300

Socially observable time stopped around 2001. Perhaps there could be a better term for it. But it stands in my eyes.

[IanEye]

[anonymoose]

I don't believe that socially observable time has stopped. If you can't see it you're not looking in the right places. The cycle of nostalgia & revival has always been a part of cultural production. Corporate culture is more pervasive than ever before, perhaps, but street / independent / diy / underground culture is still strong and constantly changing.

[Luther Blissett]

I don't believe that socially observable time has stopped. If you can't see it you're not looking in the right places. The cycle of nostalgia & revival has always been a part of cultural production. Corporate culture is more pervasive than ever before, perhaps, but street / independent / diy / underground culture is still strong and constantly changing.

Thanks anonymoose. I've tried to make that point a few times in this thread and a few cousin threads to this one all dealing with more or less the same subject matter.

Of course the avant garde always pushes a certain boundary unbeknownst to the mainstream and this is what my thoughts are focused on as I write this - the truly bizarre strains of music, visual culture, and youthful rebellion. I'd venture to argue that counterculture might be stronger than it ever has been in the past. These threads seem to mostly want to talk about the dominant culture.

The dominating culture may be what's at issue here; perhaps what has changed is that the machinations that tamp down the avant garde have finally become fully successful. Or, alternately, that the desires of all past subcultures for privacy, exclusivity, a sense of belonging and tribalism have finally been made possible by the democracy of open communication. Or even thirdly that a special breaking point has been reached - a nexus of population volume, mass media manipulation (I've never seen such a divide between the culture that I enjoy and even "mainstream" contemporary visual art with the mass media of television and film - 1200 channels and not one speaks to me? My tastes are not even that weird. I find them abundantly satiated by knowing where to look. Girls Names just released a new album. I'm still geeked on Grass Widow. Jayson Musson is reprinting Black Like Me. Etc etc.), corporatism and global subconscious which hide the avant garde and desire a textbook "conservative" culture.

But then the city I love and live in hosts the Mad Decent block party, a progressive design week, birthed Hollertronix which is still sending out cultural ripples almost ten years later, hosts futuristic pole shifting in science and sustainability within a pretty young class of people, has weird food, weird sex, and foreruns the discussion on trans* rights.

Most importantly, I can talk about radical solutions to destroying industrial civilization in order to save the planet at multiple spaces here and have those ideas be received. Not only that, but they can be discussed with others who have already reached the same conclusion. A decade ago almost all of polite society would have thought it unnecessary, and even disruptively dangerous. Now there is an avant garde who understands that anthropogenic climate change is a crisis and we're almost certainly too late.

[82_28]

Thanks for the speculations fellers. However, I disagree with the anti-premise. I am a hobbyist historian and I have never seen such non-flux in fashion, style and design since 2001. I can scope out decades after decades if you want me to. I do it already. But you get the gist. All of you. You get the gist. If you roll through history like I happen to do and rummage over old photos and places a decade or even a century hence you see that there has been NO CHANGE in what is socially observable between 2001 and now. Besides the tech, that is it. Speculations=questions to be asked of ourselves. Is this not evident in the assertion that "I can't believe we even wore shit like that?" in previous decades?

That's the whole point. Nothing, not a mote, has changed. The tech has gotten more powerful, but nothing, nothing has changed. You do not look at photos from 2001 today as though you would look at them from 2001 looking at photos from 1991. There are differences. There are scarce differences between now and 2001. But 1991, Jesus. Let me break out a year book while I'm at it. It's amazing. Not the yearbooks, but the fact that socially observable time has come to a standstill. Nothing has happened in the last 12 years. Everything is the same except tech shit.

[IanEye]

That's the whole point. Nothing, not a mote, has changed.

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time keeps on slippin'

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slippin' slippin'

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into the future ...

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[kelley]

Great post, Ian. Debt is central to this issue in that it expunges the past while precluding the imagination of a future. At least that seems its structural symbolic role made manifest, or real. What we're seeing is the consolidation of authority in a governing order through the creation of debt as a cornerstone of policy projected as 'reality', even as faults appear in the edifice of that authority, that which constitutes a foundational claim on which the enterprise rests. it disregards hypothetical imperatives in the pursuit of the infinite expansion of its leveraged prerogative. This is an untenable long-term plan, but might explain the curious phenomenon of the stopping of socially observed time.

Laments over style are equally important to these perceptions. It's not the avant-garde imperative to 'make it new' that's exhausted. Rather, I tend to think the desire to commodify novelty is, and this dynamic is a significant part of the crisis capitalism must address in the perpetual 'now' of its making, or perhaps its coming undoing. Months ago when this thread appeared I'd read this bit of Niklas Luhmann, in regards to the social upheaval the 18th century brought:

"These epochal changes affect the conception of historical time as well. The erosion of proven methods of inferring the future from the past at first increased freedom in relation to both past and future by allowing for a transfiguration of the past (not just of Antiquity, but of the Middle Ages as well) that left the future indeterminate, and turned it into a summons. What became politically an open question after the French Revolution corresponds artistically to the problem of self-confirming form. As Novalis puts it, 'We have outgrown the age of valid forms' . . . To the extent that the factual limitations of what is artistically permitted fall away, relevant art forms are defined in terms of a temporal relationship to previous forms. The avant-garde claimed to be ahead of its time, yet since like everyone else, it could not act in the future, this claim boils down in practice to a distanced, critical, and polemical attitude within a shared present. Even the self-descriptions of Postmodernism suggest historical periodization, but claiming a historical position requires unambiguous structural decisions of the sort Postmodernism refuses to provide. These trends converge in the effort to eliminate an excess of communicative possibilities by means of the form of utterance, rather than via the kind of information it entails. In other words, one tends to privilege self-reference over hetero-reference."

-- Niklas Luhmann, 'Self-Description', Art as a Social System, pp. 287-288.

To return to one of this thread's original premises, I believe the forms digitalization takes in its most superficial manifestations are also key to understanding Mark Fisher's take on 'hauntology'. In this shared moment it's impossible not to equate art, in both its construction and its substance, with classicism. The mass aggregation of styles facilitated by market forces has effaced the distinction between antiquity and modernity. Actually, the notion of style itself, as a marker of authentic identity and visible quality, or perhaps as an agent in the ceaseless production of commodities and in contradistinction to a possibly antiquated ideal of the classical, has become wholly obsolete. This is one way in how I'm beginning to consider tech, in the popular everyday sense, as the rope that Lenin referred to, the one that capital will sell us in which to hang it. There was an inkling of this notion in the air prior to 9/11, and It's my opinion the event was staged partially to contain that nascent consciousness, to reintroduce a false notion of scarcity as a means of controlling the power ideas may have as a legitimate form of currency.

[Hammer of Los]

...

You've either got, or you haven't got.

Style.

If I could turn back time.

Nice post Kelley.

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[Burnt Hill]

Look at these photos of Seattle's quake of 2001 that the Seattle PI just put up that happened this week 12 years ago. Besides photos of people using payphones there are no photos of "can you believe we used to wear shit like that?"



http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/ ... to-4250300

Socially observable time stopped around 2001. Perhaps there could be a better term for it. But it stands in my eyes.

Carhartts and Jeans? Been that way since the 1800s, no need for it to change now! The greater indicator of social change is the demise of the payphone, but thats 'besides' the point?

[KUAN]

I don't know how long each period of 'non change' lasts for but I think this one started with the industrial revolution. Laurie Lee's description of how the world changed when he first heard the sound of an engine, in 'Cider With Rosie', is poignant. Great book by the way.

[82_28]

Look at these photos of Seattle's quake of 2001 that the Seattle PI just put up that happened this week 12 years ago. Besides photos of people using payphones there are no photos of "can you believe we used to wear shit like that?"



http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/ ... to-4250300

Socially observable time stopped around 2001. Perhaps there could be a better term for it. But it stands in my eyes.

Carhartts and Jeans? Been that way since the 1800s, no need for it to change now! The greater indicator of social change is the demise of the payphone, but thats 'besides' the point?

Dude, you're exactly right! Actually you're not. You cannot look at photos and recognize the era it was in any longer, which is my point. And thanks for the dig on the "besides". I write like I talk mang when in a forum. That's besides-the point when vocalized sounds like exactly what I pattered out. You're right and you're awesome. Sweet. So go find yourself a payphone. Your "thats" needed an apostrophe BTW, chief.