Brainworms (K6BD, CM, and Spectacle
What is an apple?
Well, it's a series of geometric lines displayed on a flat surface. These geometric lines communicate instructions for people who see them and who know how to read English to make a certain combination of sounds. Those sounds, in turn, communicate instructions for English-speakers who hear (or imagine hearing) them to start thinking about a certain type of fruit.
That fruit has absolutely nothing qualitatively in common with this series of geometric lines. And yet, if someone pointed at those lines and asked me what they were, I would give the completely false answer that they were, somehow, the fruit. I'd mean it too, even though I'd know it was completely wrong. Somehow, this is not a contradiction.
...
Symbolism might be our very oldest technological invention. The fact that some other animal species have independently developed the ability to invent languages means that we could have had it before we were even hominids. Talk all you want about how cell phones or cars or television have made us slaves to our own technology, but those inventions have nothing on language; we rely on words and other symbols not just to communicate, but even to think inside our own heads. Technologically dependent thought. We've been cyborgs for at least half a million years.
It sounds insidious, until you remember that humans are, naturally, very good at distinguishing symbols from the realities they represent. A symbol doesn't mean anything if there's nothing material on the other side of the
...okay fine, but still, money does *effectively* represent something material because of the social context we've created for it. The symbol in this case might have subsumed the material reality of gold or silver, yes, but in so doing it has acquired some of those metals' real world qualities, if only contextually and with our active participation. A banknote is still a material reality. The bill is specially treated and printed through an involved process to make it distinct from just any random slip of paper, which means the government can maintain a genuine scarcity (and thus value) for its fiat currency by
...fuck.
You know, looking back at the evolution of fiat currency, maybe there actually IS something kind of sinister about this transition after all. The idea of an immaterial phantom consuming, replacing, and assimilating the real world qualities of a material object, well...it almost sounds like I'm describing a monster from a horror story.
“The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”
It's hardly a cutting insight to point out that people who constantly buy ostentatious expensive shit are just trying to fill an emotional void of theirs. That's pretty much the most basic bitch anti-consumerist observation there is. It also doesn't take a genius to observe that accumulation of these objects doesn't actually make the buyer any happier, or make any progress toward filling their void. The thing is though, if it's really so obvious that this doesn't work and has never worked, if this critique is so ubiquitous and so accepted that it's considered a cliche rather than an insight, then why do people keep doing it?
Competitive wealth displays - "keeping up with the Joneses" etc - is the obvious answer, but I don't know that it's the correct answer. Sometimes that's a factor, sure. But this phenomenon extends even to things that don't get shown off. So, what's going on there?
“In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.”
There are images, symbols, of what it means to be wealthy, or happy, or virtuous. In some cases, the actual token is multiple layers of symbolism removed from the reality it's theoretically supposed to communicate. And, as previously noted, humans don't just use symbols to communicate. We also use them to think.
The image associated with the thing, and the thing itself. Collecting images that tell a story you want to be living in, versus trying to make your actual life the way you actually want it. These two wires are running right next to each other, and they aren't very well insulated.
Put enough of those symbols, those images, together, and get enough people to agree on what they mean, and the conglomeration starts to generate a kind of gravitational pull. Material reality is warped and reconfigured around the mass of symbols. Pulled into it. Assimilated by it, turning into more layers of symbolism getting ever further from the original concept and increasing the reach of the pull. Like stars falling into a black hole.
“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at.”
“The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.”
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.”
In recent K6BD chapters, I wondered why Solomon David would tolerate Gog-Agog's presence on his homeworld, let alone give her control over such an important event as his Circle of Power tournament. The alt-text for some of the relevant pages explains that he just couldn't get rid of her, so he decided to toss her a bone and hope she'd be satisfied. That explanation doesn't satisfy me, though. If fending off Gog-Agog is that difficult even for another Black King, why is she only ruling a seventh of the multiverse?
It's obvious in hindsight. According to Talmudic legend, king Shlomo ben David needed the shamir, a magical worm with stone-boring powers, to build the great temple of Jerusalem. In Kill Six Billion Demons, what is Solomon David's temple to himself made of? What kind of powers does it take to build and maintain such an edifice? What sort of worm can do that?
There's another part to that Talmudic story. In order to find the shamir, Shlomo had to first capture the demon Ashmodai and imprison it in his palace so he could make it tell him where the worm was and how to exploit it. Ashmodai later ended up escaping its bonds, and stealing Shlomo's identity. According to some versions of the tale, the demon then used Shlomo's form to deliberately set the events that would lead to the fall of the original Israelite kingdom into motion, either as an act of extravagant revenge or simply because that was the demon's nature.
Or both.
...
“The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is, because its development is identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from everything they produce.”
I know I've turned Plato's Cave into a running gag in my review threads, but now I'm going to interrogate it - and the sort of immaterialist worldview it epitomizes - more seriously.
On its surface, the idea that the "real" world is actually an intangible one that material reality is just a reflection of sounds like childish contrarianism. Like it's deliberately flipping things around just to challenge listeners to argue with it. It makes more sense in the context of Greek spiritualism, of course. Or, really, in the context of religious thought in general. But, that there is the entire reason why "idealism" became a philosophical snarl word starting in the late nineteenth century or so. A reason that's related to the, shall we say, very rocky history that critical theory has had with religion.
“Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver. In this sense, all separate power has been spectacular. But this earlier universal devotion to a fixed religious imagery was only a shared acknowledgment of loss, an imaginary compensation for the poverty of a concrete social activity that was still generally experienced as a unitary condition. In contrast, the modern spectacle depicts what society could deliver, but in so doing it rigidly separates what is possible from what is permitted.”
The belief in a truer reality, a heightened reality that the material world is just a pale reflection of, is one that lends itself very readily to exploitation by what Guy Debord calls the Spectacle. Hell, you could make the case that sympathetic magic is the epitome of belief in symbols-overtaking-reality. The "spirit world" or "realm of pure forms" or whatever a given mystic is calling it has a lot in common with the version of reality you see in commercials. Or, perhaps more specifically, the version of it you see in fiction influenced by the images in commercials.
If you want a really obvious example of how that chain of recursive symbolism effects people's real world attitudes, look at going through puberty in a world where sex sells.
That's it? I'm supposed to be satisfied with THAT? This is what I've been spending so much time, money, and effort trying to get?
Ahhh, there we go now. That's more like it. 3D pig disgusting, amirite?
Before selling a product, sell the idea that people want to buy your product and that they can't get it anywhere else. It works even better if the product doesn't actually exist so you're free to say anything about it that you want.
“The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.”
“Spectacular oppositions conceal the unity of poverty. If different forms of the same alienation struggle against each other in the guise of irreconcilable antagonisms, this is because they are all based on real contradictions that are repressed. The spectacle exists in a concentrated form and a diffuse form, depending on the requirements of the particular stage of poverty it denies and supports. In both cases it is nothing more than an image of happy harmony surrounded by desolation and horror, at the calm center of misery.”
It's important to remember that those four scans from Chainsaw Man are arranged in order. She still has them fighting over her promises even after she's shown them to be false. The promise is fully detached from the (alleged) fruition, in the minds of Makima's victims. A symbol freed of obligations to any reality.
The thing is, Makima isn't really a person, viewed through this lens. Neither is Gog-Agog (and in her case it's much more literal within the textual world of the story; she's by far the least human of the Black Seven, and may in fact be literally made up of disconnected little bits of trivial information stored in those worms). There's no room for a sane mastermind in the society of the spectacle. Sanity is antithetical to the entire paradigm. Even the deceivers must be, themselves, deceived, in order for it to keep growing and pulling and crushing. Solomon is the one who needs Gog-Agog to build his temple of narcissism and pageantry, to televise the drama of which he is both director and audience. He's a prisoner to the continuation of the performance his self-perception relies upon.
The only one who can be said to be *in charge* is the symbolism itself. And it's not even real.
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
It occupies the space between the lines on a flat surface, and the fruit. It lives in our heads, but it's not actually alive, and it doesn't actually think. It comes to puppet human interactions. Taking on the characteristics of genuine society, in the process of subsuming its functions. Like paper money subsuming gold. Or hell, gold subsuming actually useful material goods in the first place; it's not like gold itself would be worth anything if our ancestors hadn't arbitrarily decided to turn it into a symbol of wealth.
...
If symbolism is effectively part of the human body, then the spectacle is a type of cancer. An organ within the body growing out of control, until it not only can't perform its needed function but also chokes the life out of the rest of the organism.
On the bright side, unlike actual cancer, you don't need drugs or radiation to get rid of it. You just need to change your mind.
