``The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest. Why don't people vote their own self-interest?...[because]...People vote their aspirations..'' David Brooks
``...That Time poll, which has 39% of Americans either thinking they're in the top 1% or will be someday, is just as revealing as Brooks claims. It uncovers a fundamental fantasy about American life. Even though we've got the most unequal distribution of income in the rich world, the highest poverty levels, the greatest persistence of low-wage pay, and only moderate levels of mobility - that all doesn't matter. Most Americans just don't care. You could recite the facts over and over and it won't make a dent in that fundamental fantasy. I'll be damned if I can think what to do about it.'' Doug.
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What to do? Understand it first. This isn't about individual hope or aspiration or some wistful dream or fantasie that has some how mysteriously triumphed. And it isn't just plain old positive American wishful thinking as David Brooks would have it.
It is the entirely manufactured world of the virtual, triumphant over the actual. And it illustrates another stark fact of life in the imperium, that the battle that counts is for the hearts and minds, and the imperium has won that battle. It is only a matter of maintaining its frontiers, repressing internal disorders that threaten the status quo, and getting on with process of accumulating as much power and wealth as possible in the hands of as few as possible.
What makes the culture of media and its arts such a perfect ideological tool for capital's empire, and its seamless hermetic universe of mass consumer society, is the intensified sensorium of experience orchestrated with the technical mastery of illusionism into a total simulacrum of the unreal as the real. The ensemble effectively erases what was once the ever present barrier of the picture plane, that metaphorical window between the actual and virtual, so that such a distinction is perceived as no longer relevant.
Self-interest which should reside in the actual, on this side of the picture plane, is transfigured into the virtual, that of supposed aspirations, which all lay on the other side of the same plane.
In the prodigus chaldrons of media production whatever is imagined as the virtual is made actual---and to such an intense and compelling degree that all that can be constructed as virtual is made implicitly actual by default. The dynamic interaction between object and simulacra, vastly extended to circumscribe all the actual and all the virtual, is the quintessential expression of the power of capital's global imperium.
As if in a cosmic joke of epic proportion what we are presented with in the dialectic of the actual and virtual is the total comodification of experience which is then technically extended and enhanced in cultural production as a virtual realm, that of our aspirations, and then sold as an instant replay back to us as our actual experience in the recycled cultural machine within which we suffocate like insects trapped in a air tight jar while we materially descend into a netherworld of unimaginably bleak outcomes.
To what purpose? The purpose is to motivate belief in the illusion-reality that the US capital imperium is worth devoting the entirety of a society's productive labor and being toward its project, and thereby to re-capitulate through endless thresholds the same mantra of making the virtual into the actual, forging aspiration into interest, as all social strata are carried along from their own actual circumstance into their virtual visions of what should be instead of what is. Thus we labor toward the virtual and simultaneously pay with the fruits of that labor for the same virtual sensorium, where production labor and consumption of the fruit are separated only by two temporal moments of the same virtual-actual continuum.
Among the many concretely pernicious effects and simultaneously illusionary benefits of this ideological totality, the envelop of cultural simulacra masquerading as the real, is that material distinctions between classes and groups of the society are blurred and erased. Within this envelop all manner of material understandings can be and are conflated with each other so that the urban masses live as if in the sunlighted suburbs of individual hope and self-determination, where their future prospects stretch out before them toward an boundless horizon, instead of ending violently in the dark urine stained corridors that lay just beyond the front door. And, meanwhile in the brilliant light of the stratosphere, streaking overhead in their hermetic commuter jets the elite pride themselves with their honest hard work ethic, imagining their manicured fingers have performed actual labor while tapping on a keyboard.
Material distinctions and concrete criterion are entirely blurred in the mind of all who behold them by the onslaught of massed electronic simulacra. The previously refined intellectual constructs from another era of what is propaganda, ideology, and cultural production on the one hand, or what is empirical observation, measure, and objective analysis on the other hand, are now all simultaneously blended without distinctions into the same homogeneous media discourse. That discursive tract can be arbitrarily nuanced and be made to appear as any category of thought what so ever. Thus the same generalized constructions become ideological diatribe if trumpeted by a fanatic, or an objective analysis of the political economy if outlined on slides and presented at a academic conference.
It may still be possible to sort out what are the strictly material conditions of the actual from their virtual simulacra and the attending and facilitating discourses, but the results of such efforts seem increasedly bland, obvious, and even some how disappointingly out of date. So much so, that the actual is simply a sorted reminder of what the entire social fabric and its institutional supports have abandoned in their embrace of the much more lucrative simulacra which these same institutions manufacture as their own representational authenticity. Everybody is for progress, that is ignoring the obvious and concrete and getting on with the business of articulating the imaginary.
There is manufacturing consent, but consent is merely the opening incursion to the cultural sensorium where manufacturing the virtual through the simulacra of hope and aspiration, that is their virtual counterparts through consumption, replaces the boring actuality of empirical understanding of self-interest, and therefore deflects all motivation to change the concrete conditions of living. Thus it appears pointless to object. Who could argue against hope?
Chuck Grimes