the timboucher experience

I burned through about the first third of A Scanner Darkly this afternoon while it rained on and off. I love Philip K Dick to no end, although this is only my third foray into his novels. All the fucked up layers of paranoia and split identities is very engrossing to me for whatever reason…

I just wanted to jot down this one passage which I liked very much about how the best kind of sabotage is one which cannot be proven to have occurred at all, because that way, no verifiable enemy can ever be singled out, and as such no official defensive response is ever triggered:

One of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven - or even proven at all - to be anything deliberate. It is like an invisible political movement; perhaps it isn’t there at all. If a bomb is wired to a car’s ignition, then obviously there is an enemy. But if an accident, or a series of accidents, occurs, if equipment merely fails to function, if it appears faulty, especially in a slow fashion, over a period of time, with numerous small failures and misfirings - then the victim, whether a person or a party or a country, can never marshal itself to defend itself. (p. 91)

I think the concept contained within that passage is super-duper important for would be cultural-resistors. Reminds me, too, a bit of this article about parasitic resistance through media. Also, it turns my mind back to something which occurred to me after I saw the Village last weekend…

Culturally, its better to be labelled as an entertainer (better yet, a hack) than to be considered an artist (or an activist). Because an artist is understood to be somebody who creates culturally important, meaning-laden artifacts, which deserve to be critically examined and taken apart. Whereas an entertainer is considered just to be basically feeding people candy, and nobody really takes the cultural significance of it as being anything more than a whisper, if anything at all. And in that wise, an entertainer can slip in all kinds of subversive messages, right in plain sight. And they will easily slip by the cultural immune system, because they are just labelled as harmless “entertainment”.

To prove my above point, compare the Village, to Farhenheit 9/11. F9/11 was created by a known activist-artist with the intention of subverting mainstream media culture. And as such, it became an immediate threat, triggering (for a brief period) the full force of the cultural a system. With endless newscasts and soundbites from “experts” immediately debunking the entire thing. They weren’t even allowed to broadcast commercials for it in the US, claiming that it ultimately amounted to campaign advertising. Arguably, all this coverage may have inadvertently helped spread the message of this movie, whatever that message may be. Whether it’s a simple “Vote Bush Out,” or something subtly more complex, like “Mainstream media is no different from a movie you see in the theatre.”

Then you take the Village, where all anybody seems to be able to talk or think about critically is whether or not they “liked” his patented “twist-ending”. The hugely important and subversive message is apparently “lost” to most people who witness this movie. And there was even an article on the front page of MSN, saying something like “Shyamalan, Master of Hack?” I read a variety of reviews on the movie, and nobody at all seemed to even mention what the movie is actually about. It’s about how we create systems of stories by which to organize our lives and society. And that frequently, those stories rely on fear to glue people together into a common goal. And that for some people, all they will ever know is that fear, and it will allow them to blithely go along working and reproducing. But there are other people who can penetrate beyond that simple story of fear into a vastly more complex and interesting world behind it.

Some would argue that this message goes “over the head of the average viewer.” I don’t think people work that way though. I think people record and register everything they see, feel, hear and experience. The difference between types of people is where these things get lodged within them. I think when something like this “goes over people’s heads,” that means more that it slipped past the guards, and penetrated to some very deep dark secret place inside of them, where it will have the ability to germinate and grow. And if properly nurtured, it may become a forest, wild and strong and beautiful, with deep interconnected roots, and a broad canopy providing shade and shelter for all manners of creatures within.

Uh…yeah, that or something like that…

• The Value of Absurdity
• Notes: Light Veils Not Reveals
• The Long Tail
• Knee-Jerk Reactions & Cultural Auto-Immune System Response
• HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS! WE’RE ALL FUCKED