Facebook is Everywhere - This is Art

When I look out into your eyes out there,

When I look out into your faces,
You know what I see?

I see a little bit of Facebook
In each and every one of you out there.

Lemme tell ya...

Weeeeeeeeeellllllll...

Facebook is everywhere.
Facebook is everything.
Facebook is everybody.
Facebook is still the king.

Man o man,
What I want you to see
is that Facebooking's
Inside of you and me.

Facebook is everywhere, man!
He's in everything.
He's in everybody...

Facebook is in your jeans.
He's in your cheeseburgers
Facebook is in Nutty Buddies!
Facebook is in your mom!

He's in everybody.
He's in the young, the old,
the fat, the skinny,
the white, the black
the brown and the blue
People got Facebook in 'em too
Facebook is in everybody out there.
Everybody's got Facebook in them!
Everybody except one person that is...
Yeah, one person!
The evil opposite of Facebook.
The Anti-Facebook:
Anti- Facebook got no Facebook in 'em,
lemme tell ya.

Michael J. Fox has no Facebook in him.

And Facebook is in Joan Rivers
but he's trying to get out, man!
He's trying to get out!
Listen up Joanie Baby!

Facebook is everywhere.
Facebook is everything.
Facebook is everybody.
Facebook is still the king.

Man o man,
What I want you to see
Is that Facebooking's
Inside of you and me.
Man, there's a lot of unexplained phenomenon
out there in the world.
Lot of things people say
What the heck's going on?

Let me tell ya!
Who built the pyramids?
Facebook!
Who built Stonehenge?
Facebook!

Yeah, man you see guys
walking down the street
pushing shopping carts
and you think they're talking to Allah,
they're talking to themself.
Man, no they're talking to Facebook! Facebook!

You know what’s going on in that Bermuda Triangle?
Down in the Bermuda Traingle:
Facebook needs boats.

Facebook needs boats.
Facebook,
Facebook,
Facebook,
Facebook,
Facebook,
Facebook,
Facebook needs boats.

Aahh! The Sailing Facebook!
Captain Facebook!
Commodore Facebook!
Yeah man, you know people from outer space,
people from outer space they come up to me.
They don't look like like Doctor Spock.
They don't look like Klingons, all that Star Trek jive.
They look like Facebook. Facebook!
Everybody in outer space looks like Facebook.
Cause Facebook is a perfect being.
We are all moving in perfect peace and harmony towards Facebookness.
Soon all will become Facebook.
Everything everywhere will be Facebook.

Why do you think they call it evolution anyway?
It's really Facebook-lution!
Facebook-lution!

Facebook is everywhere.
Facebook is everything.
Facebook is everybody.
Facebook is still the king.

Man o man,
What I want you to see
Is that Facebooking's
Inside of you and me.

Talk to it! Call it up!
Say "Facebook, heal me!"
"Save me, Facebook!"
"Make me be born again
in the perfect Facebook light"

That's right!

You've got that Facebook inside of ya
and he's talkin to ya
He says he wants you to sing!
Everybody's got to sing like the king!
Like the king!

Get that leg going now
Get your lip too.
Not no fool Billy Idol lip either
Everybody!
Yeah, we're rockin now!

Facebook is with us.
He's with us and he's speaking to us.

He says, "Peoples!"
"Peoples!"
"Everybody!"
"Everybody got to sing!"

Facebook is everywhere.
Facebook is everything.
Facebook is everybody.
Facebook is still the king

Man o man,
What I want you to see
Is that Facebooking's
Inside of you and me.

Facebook is everywhere
Facebook is everything.
Facebook is everybody.
Facebook is still the king.

Man o man,
What I want you to see
Is that Facebooking's
Inside of you and me.

Facebook!

Note

Since blogging requires no real investment, since most blogs, like this one, can be begun without any capital invested at all, the possibility to destroy a rival and bring about his eternal ruin is reduced. This has perhaps saved many good blogs, but has also preserved many abominable ones. It certainly takes from me the pleasure of destroying rivals; but, this pleasure being prohibited by circumstance leaves me only to marvel at the ultimate goodness proscribed by my fate. I am now a more religious man, as I now must amend to almighty God, and pray wholeheartedly for bolts of lightning or hideous plagues to be brought down upon the heads of those whom I despise.

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a Total Disaster

I just started my blog yesterday, and I did not intend for it to include political analysis and opinion; however, the decision of the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is so staggering that I felt compelled to offer a few comments with respect to the most basic reasons why I think like this decision is a complete failure.

My first objection to this decision comes from a simple observation of facts, one which is so blatantly obvious that it is truly astonishing that the justices of the highest court in the United States of America lack the perceptive acuity to recognize its baldfacedness, or the resolution of purpose to properly educate those who so erringly misperceive what is a human being: a corporation is absolutely not a human being. To claim so, or to address a corporation as if it were a human being, within the context of law or in any other context, is to demean the value of plain human perception. If it is the case that a corporation is indeed not a human as we claim (and here we do not need to show what a corporation is), then free speech, or any kind of speech, cannot be an issue for it. There can be no simpler way to explain this mental failure on the part of the majority opinion.

It is as if in compensation for some perceived reflexive impotence on the part of the justices of the majority opinion rendered by the fact that the right to vote is prohibited for objects and concepts, these justices have allowed objects and concepts to vote by alternative means: by liberating inanimate things to “contribute” as much money as “they” want to any political end. I am reminded of Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” wherein Freud relates the desire children have for their toys to come alive and follow their commands. Corporations are the toys of the very rich, and in the fashion of children the justices of the majority have succumbed to the pleasure principle, and as such they have opted for irrational gratification – here, the joy of identification with the empowered other, the joy of fantasy associated with the killing of the father and taking his place: rich people playing with their toys and acting through them – rather than properly repressing the impulse to gratification as healthy adults do in response to the fact of the world as it is.

Freud speaks much of eyes in “The Uncanny,” of the specular relation of the subject to the object of fascination, which is equally pleasurable and anxiety-ridden, the anxiety precipitant from the possibility of loosing one’s vision, from the fear of castration that accompanies the position of having. When a child dreams and sees its desire manifested in the form of the automaton, the toy come to life, the dream is “bad.” It is a horror for the child to see its toys come alive, but not because it is “unnatural” for toys to walk and talk as if they were real. It is horrifying because in the dream the process of repression is revealed to be in this instance a failure. The child must repress. The terror is seeing that prior repression undone, seeing the wish win out over the forces of reality.

The justices of the majority have inverted this process, blithely ignoring the reality principle from the start, and perhaps this is why the failure of the court in this instance strikes one with such a high degree of meaninglessness and banality. It is business as usual that such a decision is enacted. It is assumed that the child, in this case the wealthy elite, will get its wish, and see its toys come to life, its corporations endowed, Pinocchio-like with real human agency. As it is a matter of course, there is no need for repression, and there will certainly never be a weirdness, an uncanny feeling pervading life precipitant from the failure of repression to subdue the wish. We have corporations, objects of thought “walking” around, “spending” money, “promoting” agenda, and no one feels anything is amiss, so long has it been since the interest of the rich has been properly restrained against its impulses.

My second objection is that the court in this instance has both seriously underestimated the impact of media upon culture and seriously misunderstood the structural form of media in terms of the arbitrary relation in media between the form of the media itself and its contents.

The meaning of first part of this objection should be self evident.

The meaning of the second part of my objection I will explain as concisely as possible. In essence, contents in all media are anecdotal and unimportant. All contents are mere variations on a form, and it is the form of media that is consumed by the consumer, specifically not the content. As Marshall McLuhan declared, “THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE.” When we consume media, whether it is a telephone or an apple pie, we consume the form as a totality which prioritizes certain forms of life. Our form of life, then, is deduced, rather than produced, consumed, rather than produced, because of the fact that the parameters and possibilities contained in the form of life are defined not by the free engagement of the subject with the world, exerting its will upon it at all times, but by the parameters dictated by the use of certain media. Parameters, preferences, and possibilities for the form of life are dictated on the level of the form of media, not on the level of particular content: for example, the parameters of life as it is as it makes use of the media, telephone, are dictated on the level of the form of the media, the telephone, itself, not on the level of content, the level of what is said on the phone in any given conversation.

The majority opinion of the court wrongly believes that because of its commitment to freedom as an ideal it must support “free speech,” or the right of those who employ media to control the contents of such media, even to the point of extending free speech to non-human entities. Unfortunately, on the level of form, this decision represents an indefinitely open-ended commitment to a form of media, from which few will reap the rewards of true freedom in access and control, and which will precipitate a reduction in freedom for the disenfranchised many, restricted via not being rich from contributing to political life on the infrastructural level of formal media.

Debord, Heidegger, Kant, Warhol 1

Debord was a total asshole. I’ve heard stories that go like this: Dude went to his brother’s wedding and Breton kicked him out of situationism; but, we all know that assholes can be important philosophers – Heidegger is model for the 20th century, and I suspect that the philosophical establishment has been dealing with (though no one can really know) an overly high degree of philosophical dickitude precisely because Heidegger’s most monolithic contribution, Being and Time, was temporally prior to so many great works of the 20th Century, and because so many of these works, in one way or another, have to treat with black hole that is the early Heidegger.

It is perhaps most interesting to me personally that for the most part it seems that much of the philosophical work that followed directly on the heels of Being and Time – the first responses to Heidegger’s rising star – responded to Heidegger without there being any real compulsion to engage the work as philosophy only. It was philosophy, sure, but it was also THE philosophy of Nazis. Some of the most cogent readings of Heidegger from the 40s come from philosophers set out with the expressed intention of destroying him forever: Carnap, Frege, logical positivism as a movement generally, even Wittgenstein a little (as the story goes, Wittgenstein was too often on another planet to be a professional Heidegger hater) all expressed in some regard the need to refute Heidegger totally, then forget him forever. I say this because even though the political nature of early readings of Being and Time could be argued to have seriously contaminated the scholarship, the logical and linguistic refutations of Heidegger’s thinking are sound in many respects as well.

Other thinkers who engaged Heidegger during the war years and afterward who we might say gave him by degree a more “favorable” or “disinterested” reading, like Sartre, could not be said to have given a completely “clean” reading. I feel that there was simply too much at stake politically to engage Heidegger directly. Further, it seems that even the thinkers who were most influenced by Heidegger, (again) like Sartre, were influenced by him more generally than literally in areas of confluence, and by directly contrarian responses otherwise. Being becomes an issue; we get “existentialism.” We, of course, know that we owe Heidegger somewhat for this; but, we also know that Sartre’s formulation of the existentialist language is more or less his own deal. His terms are his own, and his particular brand of existentialism, even though it shares a core issue(s) with Heideggarian existentialism – the priority of the question of Being – even as it rejects others wholesale is, at bottom, Sartre’s own philosophy.

So, how is Debord’s Heideggarianism different? Why talk about Carnap, Sartre, and Wittgenstein first, and not Debord right off the bat? When we talk about the way Heidegger is brought up by other thinkers, we don’t fault Sartre for being a bad student, even though he uses Heideggarian concepts just as often as Debord, and takes just as many liberties with them. We don’t worry about the fact that Wittgenstein was probably just as much as an asshole as Debord: there are stories about him hitting kindergarteners and telling students who were in the hospital that they were full of shit when they complained about their pain with clichéd expressions – because clichés do not sufficiently invest one in the truth or falsity of the propositions they express in regard to the particular character of each one’s own experience.

Having thought a little more about the connection between Heidegger and Debord in terms of the e-discussion we had week, I now think it’s a mistake to fault Debord for being theoretically incompatible with hard-line Heideggarian thought, even as he appropriates specific terminologies. For one thing, as I said above, there are plenty of people who do as much without reaping the whirlwind. What I want to concentrate upon is what there is structurally expressed in the Debordian philosophy that allows for the incorporation of Heideggerian concepts without condition and suggest that the Debordian approach to the question of influence generally is more successful than many other approaches, even when other approaches incorporate the exact same texts into their own corpuscular apparatuses in media.

In other words, my idea is that bad Heidegger in Debord is more theoretically consistent that good Heidegger elsewhere.

Why? Because Debordian spectacle specifically challenges paradigms of authenticity and ownership. As I said before, the Debordian spectacle seeks to collapse the reality principle and the pleasure principle into a single, indulgent surreality, which effectively eliminates the unconscious by making it synonymous with conscious “reality.” When Debord expresses in the use of things not some underlying essence or meaning, but instead prioritizes a purely expressive act – a situationist ‘happening’ – in which machines engage other machines on a single ontological level rather than a dual one (where there is both a ontic and an ontological component to a general ontologicaly), it is specifically the symbolic systems of discourse, which require there always be a “real” set of affairs subtending ontologically beneath all mere happenings (in the non-situationist sense), which are most undermined. There is no “real” set of affairs existent somewhere else, no “real” value that is referenced by the use of a thing.

I have this object and I use it, but it belongs to someone else “really;” the capitalist “owns” the means of production, even though he never touches them. I employ walls, signs, people as objects when I break them down, write them, fuck them; yet, their malleability in terms of direct use has no holding upon the essential character of these things. We might rephrase this in the parlance of Melanie Klein, where the order of things is reversed, but the object/essence duality is maintained: the infant, unable in early stages of life to grapple total concepts such as “mother,” instead relates with “part-objects.” The feeding-breast is distinct from talking-mouth, and as such these objects serve as “parts” with which the infant constructs the concept “mother” in later stages of development. Thus, the character of the concept of “mother” that is constructed from the relations between the infant and “part” objects in early stages is dependant on the character of the object relations the infant creates with the “part objects;” however, since the “mother” object is not a brute object in the way a lactating breast is, since it has a symbolic “reality, ”since “mother” has a formal essence and is archetypal, deficiencies or aberrations in the construction of the “mother” object can be remedied by therapy when such deficiencies and aberrations are addressed on the level of the “part” object. By engaging in certain ontic practices, ontological constructs can be affected and essential concepts made more normal. We can see how this could possibly even lead to a quantification of values concerning the normalcy of the “mother” concept (62 % Normal, 78% Normal, 47% Normal) with respect to the observation of certain behavioral cues.

Within an integral, or singular reality structure, like in Debordian situationism, such statements are more or less nonsense. When Bratislava is declared a work of art for a day, it is not a symbol of a city as work of art. It is not “really” a work of art on the days in which the city is not “uttered to be” a work of art. There is no play of veiling and unveiling, revealing and concealing.

Incredibly, there continues to be meaning...

Benediction

I have been talking with my friend Paul Boshears for a while now about starting a blog community.  So far, he and others have been more successful than I have with this endeavor.  I have the perfectionist gene, and I am reluctant to immediately give my thoughts over to the hive-mind, to put on display my thoughts for anyone in the world to read.  But I understand that this is a false concern, since my readership is so small, perhaps non-existent.  I also tend to overestimate the concern in mass culture for subjects that are of interest to me when it comes to the accountability a thinker must have for his own thoughts when he makes his thoughts available for consumption.  There is really nothing to fear.  I am really only writing for my friends.

My first post here, following this benediction, is a response to a conversation that began on Paul's blog concerning Debord and Heidegger.  You can find it by following the link I provided above.  I asked Paul to post it on his blog for me, since it was too long for me to post, but he wisely suggested that I should use the text to begin posting on my own.  I am taking him up on his suggestion.  I will not waste time providing more context than this.  I appreciate your reading.  The only thing I want to express as I inaugurate this digital journal is thanks to my reader, whomever he or she may be, friend or not, known or unknown, forever and ever, amen.  Thank you. 

Ryland Death