Linked up
A short addendum to my fandom pieces, I swear I’ll share happy thoughts later.
Entertainment as Logistics
The game of peek-a-boo relies on surprise.
Tension and release : Your grown up has disappeared (behind something) but actually no ; here they are coming out of hiding, saying “boo”.
It’s a melange of positive, surprising and reassuring moments that also help kids realize the concept of distance and absence. Eventually they get used to the trick, your dad has put his face behind his hands, he’s still here. The fun might then come from tricking him yourself, or seeing what face he’ll pull. The game’s play gets more complex as you get to know it and play with the rules.
The element of surprise doesn’t disappear as much as its shape changes, what function it serves, etc. Its narrative can be made more complex as the kid learns to project stories in their mind or maybe it stays a pure event-to-event play, a succession of moments that don’t amount to anything but surprise=> expectation => surprise. Tension and release.
Surprise is not a product that comes in different flavors but a reaction that’s run over our mind, a response to a situation that calls back to all the previous responses we’ve had to all previous situations that have similarities or connections to this one. Our mind recalls a path, it doesn’t wander endlessly.
A familiar game is comforting, it’s also interesting to go back to a game you’ve played before and get a new understanding of the usual, all the elements you’ve integrated and made a habit of, make all of these into a background to other elements and details you sketch out with your eyes, you try and expand your appreciation of it as you re-experience it. But there are only so many moving parts you can rearrange before you’re bored.
In Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451, art and entertainment have been replaced by logistics problems and school mathematics, not even the complex elegant models and forms that exist in the realm of those who actually practice it. In the world of the story, popular culture is centered around the simplification of interactions, a societal project that emerges as a shaping of affect and desires under forms that can be more easily handled and oriented, the approved and sanctioned cultural production of that society is one where you interact with a story-game where you have to answer simple questions : there’s a right answer and an infinity of wrong ones and if you get the right one the screen will pat you on the head for it.
Simple and easy to handle : tension and release follow one another clearly without so much surprise that it could disturb you or lead you to rethink much of what you already knew, you simply need to learn by heart and hold it.
Less a prophecy than a prefigurative satire of an already existing trend at the time of the movie’s making, the idea of art as a service (game) or as a fungible ressource (water) that can be distributed as widely as possible feels very prescient when you look at the state of cultural production online and worldwide nowadays.
Authorless mass entertainment, content creators operating under the auspice of opaque platforms, aggregators, sharers, “thieves”, prototypical images of the much discussed “parasocial relationship” in the form of “the family” but also the image of a resistance of people who try and go back to a more authentic form of Art, not just art consumption but art cultivation. I’m not going to spoil too much of the story but the “resistance” in the movie operates as a subcultural parasite that only lives outside society in order to better integrate it at a later date. There’s no revolution in sight, only resilience.
This Canon of entertainment as logistics, which is found in a number of conversations that touch on culture and “content” and proves to be how a lot of peoplese seem to interact with narratives, has a simple enough premise : there’s a correct view of what the Object is, there’s a true Object out there and you need to know how it is and act right by it, all objects that don’t do right by that Canon are failures.
It’s an anti-artistic approach to culture but also a strangely industrialistic one : Everything is a product that can be well done or poorly done according to a blueprint that is agreed upon by enough people or people that are loud and persistent enough that they can mobilize a response to artists who fail to conform to that blueprint.
By extent, entertainment as logistics is anti-spoilers because spoilers undermine the stimulation that’s brought out from being surprised. It follows then a distinction between The desirable rarity which makes an experience stand out as “its own thing” as opposed to the undesirable scarcity which betrays the absence of a much needed stimulation. Because that’s what all entertainment is ultimately : Individual acts of consumption.
Stimulation, fun. Discovery emptied of connection and expansion.
It fosters entertainment that doesn’t discomfort because it doesn’t surprise you in a way that makes you reconsider any hard line you’ve set for yourself morally or existentially.
Entertainment that is easy to chew and doesn’t require much reflection or outside context and doesn’t trust its audience to understand things or accept ambiguity.
Entertainment you’re done and over with once you’ve consumed it.
That “cultural consumption practice” doesn’t revolve around understanding the depths of an Object as an art-piece but, at best, to draw shallow aesthetic connections to other similar objects.
Consumption of aesthetics and signaling of those rather than actual reflection and growth upon the material within the objects.
The fact that it has to obey certain laws means that the object can’t surprise, it can’t sit in ambiguity, it can’t challenge everyone or anyone because it also has to be hypervisible and at the same time it has to be legible to the majority of those who know the Canon of what constitutes a good piece of entertainemnt, a good product.
Which explains that disapointment is one of the defining affect of cultural consumption nowadays, it’s not just that you can’t please everyone, it’s that someone will be displeased with what you did and they will let you know it.
Entertainment as logistics is not only anti-art, so far it’s anti-artworkers. Look up any cultural industry name alongside “unionbusting” or “harassment claims” and you’ll get a picture of it all.
A piece of art is a gift, there’s nothing more to it. It’s the offering someone has made to you, something they’ve constructed, understood, that they want you to see.
There’s no promise here. You can always close your eyes.
SOME LINKS :
A sex close to Nature :An Essay about Transgender Women and Music by Leah
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Carbon Dioxyde Removal Primer by Holly Jean Buck and Roger Deane Aines
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Gender Capitalism by(?) The Right Lube
which I read in tandem and contrast to
Gender as accumulation strategy by Kay Gabriel
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Geopolitics of the Diaspora by Nadia Yala Kisukidi
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Stock Picks From Space by Frank Partnoy
Rest In Peace to the villain.
ospare@protonmail.com - ospare@substack.com /// take care, i'll brb.