World's Best Rejected/Banned Advertisements

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Some of these may warrant commentary.   Thoughts, anyone?        ...

Needless to say, some are undeniably in poor taste.  Many clichégenically, unapologetically, sexist.  For instance, these from our very own (rabidly right-wing and very wealthy) hosting service, GoDaddy:

Why we are still hosting with these jerks, I sure dunno.

Others, largely philanthropic, fall into a different, mildly more interesting category of censorship.  See for example this one or this one.  These ads seem to pose an actual threat/provocation to the comfort of, you know, whatever Zizek is calling it these days. 

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maybe ten years ago . . .

There's a lazy tendency to slander the past when something happens in the present. In today's New York Times David Carr writes that the firing of Don Imus for his racist remarks is a "sign of the times."

Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether — the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others.

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adbusters and the "existential divide"

I wasn't quite a charter subscriber to Adbusters, but fairly close to it. Maybe issue 10 or so, if memory serves. I cancelled about a year ago. While it has a certain connection to some of my perennial interests (see the name of my personal blog), I just started to feel increasingly out of touch with, what was it, the tone, the tonal politics, and the plain old politics of the magazine.

Here's part of a post salvaged from my old site, just about when I wrote Adbusters to cancel out:

I've always been unsettled - in the wrong way - by the approach to politics embraced by Adbusters and the like. Seems to me to be an infinitely foreseeable adaptation of left politics to the self-help, self-fulfillment culture that marks the current tidal mark of the American experiment. Marie Antoinette-ism... What the magazine prescribes for its readership is something other than politics, I think. At base, it's a strange sort of "lifestyle" magazine. It is full of stuff like this, from the current issue...

Here in rural Telemark, Norway, my husband and I have an ancient, 100-acre farm without a road, without electricity, without running water, without a computer or mobile telephone or washing machine or CD player or remote-control carrot-dicer... without corporate products, including Barbie dolls or Nike sneakers. We have a fjord-horse to do most of the heavy farm work (and so on...)

And a subscription to Adbusters, it would seem...

Anyway, they sell the magazine at the snazzy co-op where I buy my food, and the other day I bought a copy to see if anything has changed, either about the magazine or about me or both.

Nope.

Right from the first pages - which feature a "visual essay" by Kalle Lasn, the founder and editor - I found some material that I can only classify as disturbing, symptomatic, symptomatically disturbing. Here are a few snips:

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la rochefoucauld favorites

22
Philosophy triumphs easily over past, and over future evils, but present evils triumph over philosophy.

26
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily

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The distribution of the sensible

Melanie Gilligan asks an interesting question of Rancière. Anyone care to offer a response, thoughts?

Zen vs. Episteme?

From the Hsin-Hsin Ming, by Seng-Ts'an, third Zen patriarch (sixth century):

Deny the reality of things
and you miss their reality;
Deny the emptiness of things
ad you miss their reality.
The more you talk and think about it,
the further you wander from the truth.
So cease attachment to talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.

Tis a difficult thing to imagine Long Sunday without attachment to knowing, to pontificating, to ascertaining and argument...  And yet, is it possible?  Can we imagine a quiet space and mode of non-attachment when it comes to what we do here?  Is it possible that this non-attachment, this negation that is not denial, is kin to Deleuze's plane of immanence, or Derrida's differance?

Separated at birth?

 To continue with a theme....More ill-thought out and badly timed lookalikes

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and now for something completely different: lookalikes

Proud to relay that Crooked Timber has nothing on IT in this most crucial of blogging departments. See also here and here and... well I'm undoubtedly missing some.

If not for this damn sled to catch, I'd certainly labor to come up with one myself, to put right smack-dab here on top, in fierce competition with Alain's eternally-nauseating neocons. Maybe you yourself have a suggestion though.

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The Can

Just as motionless images can contain narratives, so stories also paint pictures. This is hardly news: the careful selection, accumulation and arrangement of details, interpolations, parenthetical remarks; all of which delineate a scene while dictating the point from which we see it.

Lacan’s well-known story of the sardine can, with its pointedly pointless ‘joke’ is both a story about pictures and a carefully drawn composition in itself. These two things are, I think related. What follows tries to explain this relation.

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts – and at that time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea.

The first element of the composition is this image of the young intellectual striving towards, thirsting for, the world of action and conflict. This is what young intellectuals do - an utterly recognisable, commonplace trope. Isn't this is part of the comfort of stories – they move forward under a kind of spell, a spell cast by elementary recognisable scenes that promise to unfold in more or less predictable ways. Not that the exact content is predictable, of course, but the structure is predictable, the ‘parameters’ secure, and precisely so we can surrender to the content. So once more, the young intellectual longing for the ‘remedy’ of action. We know that the ‘action’ dreamed by his sedentary life is nowhere to be found, that reality will outrun and educate him.

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gaze (1-)

But the look will be given just as well on occasion where there is a rustling of branches, or the sound of a footstep followed by silence, or the slight opening of a shutter, or a light movement of a curtain.

These are all potential points from which one might be seen, ie become an object. It is this ‘gaze’, the one seemingly embedded in and punctuating the world, which is so uncanny. To see why, we can contrast it with another type of gaze that has a more specific profile. Zizek:

“Imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a certain gaze in the Other. So, apropos of every imitation of a model-image, apropos of every ‘playing a role’, the question to ask is: for whom is the subject enacting his role? Which gaze is considered when the subject identifies with a certain image?

This ‘gaze in the Other’ might be that of, for example, a harsh Paternal figure: …

he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure, and so on; but the crucial question is again how to locate the vicious, superego gaze for which he is humiliating himself, for which this obsessional organizing of failure procures pleasure…….

In any case, this gaze has content – it is, if you like, a definite question. But the uncanny gaze is different.

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