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 )
Read More:http://fearbeta.com/English/Week%2011/Janet%20Jacobs.pdf ---Janet Jacobs:The reemergence of the conflicts over the sacred at the death campsites in Europe and more recently at Ground Zero in the United States confirms that, contrary to predictions of the death of God, the spiritual and religious aspects of social life continue to have value in a world marked by political destruction and crimes against humanity, even as the persistence of such values may contribute to the furthering of violence and the promulgation of religious intolerance. ---Will Lammert, Burdened Women statue Ravensbruck
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….
Read More: http://karenpressley.com/picts/Diane%20Di%20Prima.KPressley.pdf ---...As she writes in her poem “Rant,” whose title echoes Ginsberg’s Howl, There is no way you can not have a poetics no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher You do it in the consciousness of making or not making your world. The rhythm of this work and benchmark literary era reminds us of the inevitable poetics of our everyday lives,...
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:
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