…our high/low “cultural” representations are the most violent in a world that compared to the past is the least violent in actuality (at least in the happy go lucky West): enframing all media representations to the auto-logic of capitalism, which effects the automatic permutations of/to the extreme: hard rock becomes heavy-metal, then trash, etc…porn, gonzo porn etc…horror, gore, hip hop rap, gangster rap…the faster they go, the sicker they go…on and on..:from Botticelli to Francis Bacon; courtly love to hardcore-porn, gothic sublimity to slasher gore etc…
And yet, this has not always been the universal case. One only has to contemplate the art of the middle-ages, to see that it is a pure and positive inverted heavenly mirror of the real violent negatives: deaths, plagues, miseries etc…of daily life. Our culture is the exact opposite, what Nietzsche and many others called a decadent age, enthralled and fascinated by the very antithesis of their boring fat lives…like domesticated animals grinding against their cages entranced by the wilderness beyond…hence, the violent representations circling around the mediasphere…
And the people who consume the violence of representation, are the fat classes of suburbia who have never stared death or Eros in the face: the bored teenagers with their dead eyes on weed, the dads who slip the gonzo videos to ejaculate to “barely legal” pony-haired girls taking it up into their cum dripping carnivorous voids …the mums who dream of male seducers from the outskirts…
This is the classic Freudian “condemnation” of culture and civilization, but with a big difference; all the diverted repressed materials of sublimation are now out in the open: the unconscious as a libidinous screen, not a dark theater. This is what Freud could not predict: the libidinous botany and flora of the dark continent of our collective unconscious, would literarily exteriorize itself out onto the digital celluloid.
Freud underestimated the power of sublimation, because he was not exposed to the media medium of high-technology; he could not imagine that capital/technology could take over and colonize the unconscious, to externalize by objectify it: glossy print, celluloid, digital, silicon…
Yet, this media mediated exteriorization is severely different from the surrealists who attempted to do the same through aesthetics: capitalism hijacked the unconscious and determined to make a profit out of it; as everything else, another standing reserve to exploit. And who says exploitation (i.e. business), upholds the values of the common, the blandest and homogenous: the unconscious is reduced to a stereotype of form, within stereotypes of content.
Capitalism can take anything except instability, and will not tolerate lacks of identity (how //ever temporary and ambiguous) of any kind (the fashions of authentic belonging reigns supreme) whether conscious or unconscious.
