Kolya on 19/11/2011 at 15:09
A lot of civilian protests have been sweeping various countries lately. From the Arab spring to Occupy Wallstreet and the Greek protests. I separate these last two on terms of quality: Although the Greeks share their concerns with the Occupy movement, their background isn't the fear of, but an acute disintegration of civilian society. But this thread is only marginally about politics.
What caught my attention was the (
http://images.google.com/search?q=Aliaa-Magda-el-Mahadi) picture (NSFW) of Egyptian student of Art and media sciences Aliaa-Magda-el-Mahadi, who photographed herself naked with stockings, red shoes and a red bow in her hair and released that picture as a protest against "the censoring of our knowledge, self-expression and sexuality". In her blog entitled "A rebel's diary" she continued that she was fighting "against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harrassment and hypocrisy".
This created quite an uproar in Egypt where women usually are not supposed to even bare their arms, to the point where the Liberal party felt it necessary to distance themselves from Mahadi. Shortly before the elections as it is. They don't support nudity, they made it clear. And Mahadi may well be in personal danger for that picture right now. So as a protest this worked perfectly.
Now where I live nudity would never work as a protest on that scale. (Which fortunately doesn't keep female students from trying.) It's not because we had no censoring, violence, racism, sexism and hypocrisy here anymore. It's because pop has eaten this form of protest just as it ate long hair with men, smoking weed, Guevara t-shirts, Doc Marten's shoes, Kurt Cobain and countless other symbols.
Yesterday's symbol of protest is today's pop culture. This is nothing new. It is interesting to note however that this integration process, while accelerating enormously (see Grunge and Emo), has practically stopped to include any of the goals these symbols originally designated.
How did that happen?
When pop culture started to get "generated" by an industry of entertainment and PR professionals, they completely detached signifiant and signifier. In many cases the symbols were perverted and used in exactly the way the original symbol criticized (Ramones t-shirts for toddlers, Lennon playing in the supermarket, etc).
Pop as we know it today doesn't wait for a protest to develop anymore. The demand for pop compatibility nowadays goes right down to the root of any protest. If it doesn't have a catchy slogan and doesn't make for good pictures, you do not have a legitimate protest. You're just a nut.
The question whether there might be an actual cause or concern that a protest might try to address, is ignored from start up and replaced with the request for
marketability.
See the early critics of the Occupy movement who couldn't stop asking for a clearcut message.
However you don't need a good marketing slogan to sell toilet paper. If things are obviously shitty (how could you miss that?), you don't need a clever slogan, you need to do something about it.
This is just one example. The critique aimed at the Pirates party here in Germany is similar and I'm sure you know other movements that struggle to sell. The main point is that pop itself has changed from something that maybe once grew organically to be popular into a media hype machine that doesn't give a flying fuck about reasons.
And the time where we blindly swallowed the idea that the principles of the market could be applied to anything, including our personal lives and civilian society, is so long ago that we barely remember it ever being different. I guess for many it never was.
Nowadays the the smartest people in fact seem to be the ones who point out the flaws in pop compatibility/marketability first and step away from the original cause and concern and into the hype.
tl;dr: There are areas of our lives to which the imperative of marketability cannot be applied without losing the original cause. Civilian protests frequently are such an area, but there are others.
SubJeff on 19/11/2011 at 17:01
tl:dr
RE Greek protests - I find it hard to sympathise with them because the situation they're in is largely their own doing. I'm surprised the Germans aren't more vocally dissatisfied with they whole thing given that they actually bother to pay their taxes and work to a respectable age.
june gloom on 19/11/2011 at 19:39
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
tl:dr
Kolya on 19/11/2011 at 19:46
Despite what everyone thinks Germany isn't the gleaming model economy that we are currently sold as. In fact we don't fulfil the same stability pact that we are slamming the people of Greece with. We have higher state debts than Espania who are in danger of being downrated by those damn rating agencies, yet we can borrow money for free on the market. It's completely irrational. And just because we're on the upside of this doesn't make the schoolmastering of our dear chancellor towards other European countries any less disgusting.
Where there should be solidarity between our nations we are being played out against each other to the harm of all of us. And our national governments are too weak and torn to get their act together against the global financial system, see fincancial transaction tax.
Aircraftkiller` on 20/11/2011 at 01:02
I'm really just thrilled to see something like Occupy happening. They're saying the things I wish I could have expressed during the 2008 financial crisis.
SD on 20/11/2011 at 05:09
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
I'm surprised the Germans aren't more vocally dissatisfied with the whole thing
Hey, it's just the realisation of a long-held dream. They've already ousted democratically-elected governments in Italy and Greece and nobody's batted an eyelid. The last time two times they tried something like that, we painted the continent with German blood. How things change!
Kolya on 20/11/2011 at 11:34
I take it that was a joke. These government haven't been ousted by Germany but the financial market. And their democratically elected representatives haven't been replaced by Germans but by financial experts.
This is indeed a frightening development. We watch as they destroy whole countries and the lives of the people who live there and then seize power. Meanwhile democracy is openly called "dangerous" and successfully suppressed (see Papandreou's plebiscite).
But the German government isn't the driving force in this process. They are driven just as much as any other European government and the American government. They're not in power. And that means we're not in power.
Now democracies are openly overturned and we just watch and fear that we might be next. Fear has kept us paralysed. The fabricated fear of terrorists, but even more so the fear that our company might move to Asia and we'd lose our jobs and the fear of a recession. That's how a globally acting financial/economic system wins against our democratically elected but nationally bound governments. That's how we are being played out against each other.
tld;dr: Democracy has been deemed economically inefficient and is now openly replaced by an oligarchic system. This is the logical consequence of applying the rules of the market to politics.
Sulphur on 22/11/2011 at 20:50
Let me tl;dr this thread as filtered through my sadly unscholarly perspective in one sentence: Kolya is decrying the shallowness of pop symbology today because its sources are not from authentic, sporadic, rebellious grassroots movements but instead from corporations or individuals that design/astroturf/mould their message as required to squeeze out as much mass appeal for monetary benefit.
This is, of course, ignoring the fact that pop symbology is inherently shallow anyhow because the message behind the symbol has long since been lost or been invalidated by public nihilism.
When your OP's modus operandi is basically a discussion around the significance of pop culture - as if there were much to be signified behind it except for mass trends, which change as often as the direction the wind blows in - where 'signifier' and 'signifiant' have always been devouring each other since the time 'pop' became 'popular', and in the process, erase the entire context for their being... it's a discussion that's meant to be a bit of a faff, isn't it?
After all, all the Ouroboros effect is, in the end, is a really cool belt buckle.
Medlar on 22/11/2011 at 22:26
SD you are a very naughty boy!
june gloom on 22/11/2011 at 22:37
Quote Posted by Kolya
I take it that was a joke.
If you have to ask...
