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October 14, 2008
There is a lot of apocalyptic talk around these days due to the systematic financial crisis. Capitalism is going to collapse and we will--excluding the Chinese and Australians, of course --end up living some kind of barbaric medieval dark age where we would need to relearn to grow our own vegetables.
Alas the reality is rather more mundane:
Martin Rowson
The talking heads on the plasma TVs are commenting on bad news about intoxicating consumption images created by photographers now appear as a dream nurtured by excess that we've woken up from. As Walter Benjamin wrote, Sometimes, on awakening we recall a dream. In this way rare shafts of insight illuminate the ruins of our energies that time has passed by.
If our intellectual history has mostly hitherto been divided between an Enlightenment scorn for the dream as mere mental detritus, and inversely, its unqualified celebration in the eyes of the Romantics, then we now live with a certain cross-contamination of categories between ‘dream’ and ‘waking reality’.
As Marx first diagnosed with his analysis of the commodity fetish in capitalist modernity, ‘ordinary’ commodities become invested with a magical, quasi-religious and dreamlike aura. If the arcades epitomized the dream houses of the collective in the nineteenth century, then today it is plasma TV that constructs a world where the everyday is saturated with the marvellous; a lyrically intense dream-world in which arises the basis for a ‘mythology of the modern’.
Our everyday life is permeated with qualities of fantasy and imagination in the form of a dream experience constructed by the culture industry. We have awoken from the bubble dream woven by finance capitalism and oar elooking for some form of “rescuing critique” that deciphers the history of culture.
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Gary
André Breton had tried to reconcile Marx and Freud in Surrealism, which set about to blur life and art, waking and dreaming, in a sort of modern marvelousness—what Louis Aragon had called "modern mythologies." By "modern mythologies" they---the surrealists--- meant that the mundane objects of everyday life were embodiments of our unconscious projections.