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September 6, 2009
Positive thinking: the cult of uplift. The tight smile covering over the despair of helplessness. A matter of self-confidence ---maintaining a positive outlook--in times of institutional failure. Out of the Depression, the modern Positive Thinking movement---the advocates of the peppy, look-on-the-bright-side attitude-- was born.
You can have whatever you want say the books in the business section of airport bookshops.They scream out against 'negativity' and advise the reader to be at all times upbeat, optimistic and brimming with confidence. Thus we have the affirmation business.
Positive thinking--feeling happy in adverse circumstances--places to one side our fears and negative thoughts, thereby ignoring that we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of ‘negative’ people. Carnival is a better response when we re faced with the symbolic penetration of corporate advertising culture to the city level--it is a resistance to full capitalization of everything.
Historically, carnival or festival was a celebration of social inversion when hierarchies and polarities of wealth, power, gender, and race were reversed and parodied. It is a view of the world as seen from below. This served as a kind of steam valve in a feudal world, allowing the plebeian masses to transgress the rigid social order for one week out of the year. The names in modernity are Baktkin, Bataille and the Situationists.
Carnival was never an aggressive or militarized act of revolution, but rather the kind of "Revolution of Everyday Life" that would later fascinate the French situationists. Carnival's strategy was to turn the world on its head. Its weapon against advertising photography's seducing us within a endless labyrinth of commodified market desires through image production is laughter.
Punk, a howl of rage, was a 'carnival of the oppressed' by 'teenagers who changed their lives and overturned established differences.and everyday life is reconfigured. It was an inversion of low (debased, tabooed) culture over elite high culture that produces new combinations in a given semiotic system.
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I have political qualms about techniques that might turn me into a grinning, uncomplaining conformist: we should be angry and gloomy about, say, our politicians' behaviour, or the state of the climate.