halloween 365: old costumes new cultures

There is a perversion of the sacred in using and framing advertising and cinematic depictions of women, designating them as spaces of cultural remembrance and extending the narrative to create an entire “pop culture” out of the conflicts and tensions which arise out of this false sacrilization which commodifies the woman as monument and her body as museum that incarnates the horrors of past and future transactions; Walter Benjamin’s depiction of the prostitute as saleswoman and wares in one.

Change is quick but revolution will take a while.
America has not even begun as yet.
This continent is seed ( Diane di Prima )

In previous cycles of mass demonstrations in America, the nature of society, the fundamental structures were not called into question in a meaningful or prolonged way. The American people have accepted capitalist values, essentially consumerism and militarism,  to a level not assimilated elsewhere. Its ends and near ingenious means have totally impermeated all of our institutions, a Society of the Spectacle and an unrelenting and violent entertainment complex serving as a valve of repression with the goal of reinforcing existing tendencies  in the financial markets, education, arts, sports, religion and the entire political apparatus at all levels. Their relationship with  socialization processes have over the past generation, aided by technology, – Benjamin’s Mechanical Reproduction absent of emancipatory qualities-  has  created a vast complex, a mass electorate  endowed with what Thorstein Veblen termed “a trained incapacity”  to understand socioeconomic processes, except in the most narrow and ideological sense which has tended to conservatism.

It is a bit peculiar that America has been virtually alone among Western nations in never having  significant socialist movement. What began as a promising IWW was squashed in a grotesque complicity between business interests and trade unionism is a complicit relationship that wrecked other currents.   American workers  struggled often  to better their lives through union activities;   However these efforts have never been against capitalism,or structural change, but for enhancing the functioning of the system through increased consumption and greater leisure time. The scenario that Rosa Luxembourg warned against. So, a corporate union movement that embraces all the misogyny and male patriarchy from whom they are dependent on and not a labor movement. The current threat to American capitalism? Hard to say. Blowhards like Michael Moore self promoting “new visions” are untrustworthy; but wait for the new movie….

 

I do see publicity regarding women as something similar to the lessons of fascism in WWII. Jacobs went to Holocaust sites across Europe to examine representations of women. Women are depicted as subjects of atrocious acts, and by extension, men are emasculated and unable to protect. These memorial cultures, totems, are revealing in their construction of masculinity and femininity, and like the well oiled advertising machine, basically fascist, which also shows the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping, codifying the archetypes on the basis of race and gender. Jacobs also discerns the expansive and truly insidious ways in which images of violence against the female gender have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. Trademarks, signifiers, triggers etc. used to reinforce a collective memory, hence a process of “sacrilization” of the disgusting. Globalization where the world is a ghetto and we put Halloween costumes on, unable to recognize the Joy Divsions lurking in the shadows of a full moon.

ADDENDUM:

In Maria Farland’s “Total System, Total Solution, Total Apocalypse: Sex Oppression, Systems of Property, and 1970s Women’s Liberation Fiction,” she focuses on di Prima’s sexually explicit disclosure in Memoirs which confesses her lesbian, group, and anal erotic adventures. Here she surpassed the erotica in Ginsberg’s Howl and Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, the male-authored Beat texts prosecuted for obscenity, as she was for this work. Here she exposed through her apocalyptic lens, as had Ginsberg and Burroughs, the source of sexual repression being the bourgeois, repressive economic structure and morality, and thus bridged the divide between male and female writers (Farland, 2005). Read More:http://karenpressley.com/picts/Diane%20Di%20Prima.KP

ley.pdf
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Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letter 16:

we are eating up the planet, the New York Times
takes a forest, every Sunday, Los Angeles
draws its water from the Sacramento Valley
the rivers of British Columbia are ours
on lease for 99 years

every large factory is an infringement
of our god-given right to light and air
to clean and flowing rivers stocked with fish
to the very possibility of life

for our children’s children, we will have to
look carefully, i.e., do we really want/
need
electricity and at what cost in natural resource
human resource
do we need cars, when petroleum
pumped from the earth poisons the land around
for 100 years, pumped from the car
poisons the hard-pressed cities, or try this
statistic, the USA
has 5% of the world’s people uses over
50% of the world’s goods, our garbage
holds matter for survival for uncounted
“underdeveloped” nations
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The ‘holy prostitution of the soul’ compared with which ‘that which people call love is quite small, quite limited and quite feeble’ [Baudelaire] really can be nothing else than the prostitution of the commodity-soul —if the confrontation with love retains its meaning. Baudelaire refers to ‘that holy prostitution of the soul which gives itself wholly, poetry and charity, to the unexpected that appears, to the unknown that passes’, it is this very poésie and this very charité ; which the prostitutes claim for themselves. They had tried the secrets of the open markets; in this respect commodities had no advantages over them. Some of the commodity’s charms were based on the market, and they turned into as many means of power . As such they were registered by Baudelaire in his ‘Crépuscule du soir’:

Against the lamplight, whose shivering is the wind’s,
Prostitution spreads its light and life in the streets:
Like an anthill opening its issue it penetrates
Mysteriously everywhere by its own occult route;
Like an enemy mining the foundations of a fort,
Or a worm in an apple, eating what all should eat,
It circulates securely in the city’s clogged heart.’

Only the mass of inhabitants permits prostitution to spread over large parts of the city. And only the mass makes it possible for the sexual object to become intoxicated with the hundred stimuli which it produces.

Walter Benjamin, 1938 Read More:http://hotparade.tumblr.com/post/640383631/the-prostitute-walter-benjamin
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Thus, in Poland in particular, where the genocide of the Jews was most pronounced, the boundaries between the sacralization of the horrors of the past and the day-to-day lives of those living in the present have become uncomfortably blurred. This aspect of Holocaust memorialization was painfully evident on a recent visit I made to Treblinka. Just as I was leaving the park, a small group of mourners from Israel were preparing to pray when a Polish father and his two sons entered the memorial grounds on bicycles, laughing and joking as they rode past the survivor families. The hostile glances that were exchanged between the two groups of visitors to the park were indicative of the stresses that currently exist in this… Read More:http://fearbeta.com/English/Week%2011/Janet%20Jacobs.pdf