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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Monday, October 08, 2007
As part of an occasional series here, this piece seems to suggest that JG Ballard has provided the most accurate depiction yet of the spirit of our times:"Feverish shoppers ripped clothes off shop mannequins during a bargain store sale which ended in trouble and police being called... Product manager Will McCooke said some people had lost all sense. "It was completely primeval - it was like hunter-gatherers. Within half an hour of the store opening the windows had been ransacked by people coming in and ripping the clothes off the mannequins and just leaving the mannequins on the ground. They were literally tearing the mannequins apart to get the clothes."
Amongst other things, it doesn't really help that the shop in question is called 'Clockwork Orange.'
Update on a similar note, I found myself rather arrested by this piece, if not ncessarily for reasons the author intended:"Auge’s remarkable observation was that, in the contemporary world, place is giving way to "non-place." Places, Augé explained, are made up out of social interactions between people, accumulating in memory to form historical meaning. Contemporary life, however, is a relentless procession through spaces of transit. Airport lounges and freeways are non-places, but so are less obvious spaces: ATMs, computer workstations, and supermarkets. In these spaces shared experiences between humans rarely develop. Non-places, Auge concluded, remain empty, meaningless environments that we pass through during our solitary lives.
Anthropologist Ichiyo Habachi has observed that the mobile phone creates a "telecocoon," an extension of intimate personal space into our surroundings. Through both phone calls and text messaging, it is possible to feel the presence of others nearly constantly and non-places become domesticated."
It's difficult not to feel that the reassurance that the abolition of place will be offset by being bathed in the warm electromagnetic glow of networked appliances is scarcely less preferable that the original scenario. In either case, it still seems, once more, like a manifesto for a Ballard novel.Labels: Alienation, Architecture, Ballard, Dystopia
posted by Richard 6:21 pm
