Notes on Jon Rafman’s Dream Journal
The Masquerading Doctor
Because we understand so little about it, society is often portrayed as a masquerade. Historically, in Carnivale, which used to span much of the year, society is literally an aestheticized masquerade. We know from everyday experience that intentions are inherently unclear, and we openly fantasize about suspicion and deceit when character masks are worn. Even so, the masquerade is an agreeable arrangement: nothing would be more oppressive than depriving a human being of their mask. The freedom that a mask provides is unparalleled in the history of the universe. Luxuriant deceptions are given shelter to flourish; private thoughts, fears, and taboos are indulged and protected; infantile vulnerabilities are given defensive armor; the species transforms from a suffering lot of toilers to something unknown and alien. In the era of character armoring as defense mechanism, the masquerade deepens. Humans don’t think things need to be real, and devise clever symbolic decorums to upend reality wherever it might catch foothold. Where illusion is not the norm, delusion is.
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut represents humans at their most heroic as characters successfully masquerading through high society by donning various disguises — doctor, coquette, father, etc. Crises happen when masks wear thin (e.g. marital characters), and a hero desperately goes in search of new masks. In a society dominated by aesthetics, a new costume could mean a new life, especially when sheltering a modern scientific ethos that grants such a hero access to the deepest of conspiracies. But if the Doctor is careless and too vain in his undercover persona, if he becomes too engrossed in the masquerade himself, he may leave incriminating evidence in his costume jacket, and eventually be unmasked. Not for a moment can the Doctor forget he is undercover and abandon himself to the pleasurable social ornament of mass deception. And yet his unconscious sexual drives that compel him to forget, to relinquish the character, are one of many tools at his disposal to uncover the truth. By virtue of merely having an unconscious, he is already compromised and doomed to be uncovered himself, even as he uncovers. But not before he dents the social ornament with an alien, analytical gaze.
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Still from Eyes Wide Shut, directed by Stanley Kubrick, 1999.
Still from Jon Rafman’s Dream Journal 2016-2019, 2019.
Fidelio
Fidelio is the password to the mansion that Dr. Harford hacks his way into. Fidelio is also the name of Beethoven’s only Opera, exhibiting a woman disguised as a man to free her husband from unjust imprisonment. It was Beethoven’s experiment in political storytelling, emphasizing disguise — character masking — as a means to an end. It is not so much a realpolitik, but a fakepolitik. Dr. Harford finds himself in the position of Fidelio’s Leonore, surveying the enigmatic rituals of the mansion. His unblinking, studying eyes — the only active element of an otherwise mute face — are the viewer’s eyes, desperate to catch a glimpse into the inner sanctum of society’s most private experiences. He is a voyeur into the dark side of reality. This is as good an image of the modern human as we have: a masked set of analytical eyes tracing events, collecting sense-data on whatever life might be living under the rocks society hasn’t yet overturned. Eking through a crack in the mansion, traversing the private, exclusive rituals, a roving nervous system puzzles over the masquerade, the social hieroglyph. A politik of the fake, or appearances — in service of uncovering or exposing the private — is embraced.
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Voyeurism
Eyes Wide Shut is paradigmatic of a new 21st century voyeurism, and it is out of this exposé of the masquerade that Jon Rafman’s video art emerges. People find Rafman’s work so irresistible because they — like all people in the 21st century — are voyeurs, they want to see private behavior. How rare and special it is to catch such a glimpse! Like Dr. Harford, a doctor in the Sherlock Holmes tradition relentlessly pursuing, with all his intellectual pedigree, his optical intelligence, his emotional charm, his sexual proclivities, Rafman aims to get to the bottom of things, which means masking up. An indulgence into the masquerade spirit will continue to transfix people until society is able to become something better, as it inevitably appeals in part to the unconscious. Art itself doesn’t need to be defended: even when it whispers fake nothings, or indulges suspicious behavior, it speaks more than any defense ever could. An indulgence into the carnivalesque and the things that happen behind masks, the things that happen behind closed doors — or the things we fantasize happening in the absence of knowing — preys on the imaginations of billions of humans who suspect, but can’t prove, that they are being betrayed by a conspiracy. We know we are betrayed, but by what or who exactly, and what for? An indulgence into conspiracy theories, and obsessions with any attempt to penetrate to the bottom of what’s really going on in society is continually relevant because no one really knows what happens behind all those masks in all those crowds. It’s all incredibly meaningless in real life, but in the elite, ritualized masquerade it appears to at least have some significance, even though it’s a significance only the most extreme among us will ever only merely glimpse, and even when seen cannot be changed directly by the seer. Like Doctor Harford, Rafman is a scientist of artifice, he is despaired to penetrate into the meaning of social masquerades that elude us in our everyday lives. We suspect that there is something beneath this reality, some secret conspiracy behind the avatars who pull the strings of our lives. But like Harford failing to achieve sexual gratification even though it hounds him at every turn, every time we try to penetrate that reality, it slips away. Doctors are considered sexually desirable specifically because their profession renders them chaste — the moment the disinterested Doctor becomes interested or desiring, the well dries up.
Indeed, a scene in Dream Journal portrays a lord — one of many — who slaughters a slave praying to him and transforms him into a marionette plaything. But the play doesn’t last long before he is engulfed by a sea of enigmatic castles with abject faces on them. Faces sprout up everywhere in Dream Journal, on wrists, on anuses, on rocks, in water, faces are worn as self-same faces, avatar heads spread out on limbs like tumescent Greek choruses. Even nature is given the mask of humanity, with gaping Boschian mouths offering our Xanax Girl hero doorways into further hellscapes where avatars constantly change character masks. Transformation, flux, and character morphology is the paradigm.
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Alien Mask
A ghostly echo of Surrealism, there was a nascent sensibility afloat in the late 90s that fantasized the strange, the unknown, to unburden humanity of any dogmatic (neoliberal) imagination that imagined humans as caricatures of race, gender, or any identity as we now know it. People seemed far less interested in being limited to human activity, much less begging to be identified as the identity caricatures currently settled on. What kind of creature is Björk, who often has more in common with something from the insect kingdom? Aphex Twin’s insidious demon face? Eminem’s maniacal Id? This, too, is the sensibility that Rafman’s animated spectacles exploded out of, a spectrum of the nascent alien in all of us, which the artist struggles to represent, to unearth from the caves of morality. It is not Rafman’s outmoded masculinity that is on trial today, but rather an art so expansive, a glimpse into a freed future of sexuality, defined by unimaginable transformations of identity that is feared by the prim proto-fascist-anti-art folk who replay the same tired victim fantasies.
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From Beyond Good and Evil
A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is Concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there — and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.
— Friedrich Nietzsche
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Canceled Seers
The Doctor sees, but he is helpless to change what he sees. Those who are afraid of being voyeurs — those who recoil from the controversial Dream Journal — are those who reject the notion of penetrating to the heart of the masquerade, opting instead to accept at face value a masquerade that keeps them enslaved. We understand the danger; Kubrick died not long after seeing beneath reality — and Rafman was canceled. The mystics always said being a seer is not a path for everyone, and society has internalized this idea in the most vulgar of ways by making those who unmask into pariahs.
But even cancelations operate on the grounds of voyeurism: when people are canceled in our sex-panicked age, it’s because the public wants to see what happens behind closed doors. Only on the surface is it a moral panic (and it still is), underneath is the relentless drive to uncover what other people do behind closed doors, to see if what they are doing in private measures up to what others are doing. It’s a subconscious attempt to create a yardstick in a radical world of uncanny individuated expression doing away with norms. Exposed sexts operate like reference manuals. But deeper than that, it’s a pure hedonistic indulgence into the newfound FOMO of our age: the fear that somewhere out there someone is having better and more sex than you. And they are doing it while they are laughing at you, and furthermore, your frustration is arousing for them. In Dream Journal, there is a wealth of pleasure, but not for any particular individual. The small leap into such fear at the mere suggestion of deception is telling of the fragile, unexperienced reality we occupy. Persecution fantasies are the hallmark of our age.
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Delusional Paranoia 2.0
Studies of persecutory delusion have been linked to the rise of modern media starting around the 1920s. “After the spread of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s in Slovenia, there was an obvious increase in delusions of outside influence and control as well as delusions with technical themes.”[1] In our time, the internet has been the venue for delusional paranoia. The censorship problem of the internet — so overwhelming that people can’t even discuss it without striking the entire nervous system or losing a family member in the process — seeks its pariah in Rafman, the first artist to see and represent the 21st century’s world wide web for what it is: a masquerade deformed by industrialism; a vanity hell-fair unlimited in its artifice as never before; a last carnival of avatars for Western Civilization; a virtual landscape of art-tribes, freshly neutered and desperately seeking pleasure that they suspect exists but from which they feel excluded. Proofless, conspiracies can’t be confirmed but only indulged. Believing they have been persecuted by the dreamshow of the internet existing over and beyond their own delusional reality, those who are against art strive to pull the plug out of those few, who, plugged into the masquerade, try to lift the veil of society. The one who lifts the veil, like the wizard of Oz, is the closest the persecuted can get to the dream world that taunts them like Xanax Girl’s anxious dreams, which operates successfully on their unconscious even as their clone-of-a-clone morality shames it. But Oz is not reducible to the Wizard’s tricks.
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Doors of Perception
Dream Journal opens into a vast hallway with various doors lining it, as in, “Let’s see what’s behind door #3!”, or “Choose your player”. In fairy tales, the correct door needs to be chosen, and various unimaginable hellscapes supposedly lay beyond the others, eternities unto themselves. But in Dream Journal, it’s hard to discern where one ends and another begins. Doors open into other hellish doors, doors are entered through gaping mouths, portals in the ground open up, cracks in mansions hacked into. Are these William Blake’s “doors of perception”? In Dream Journal they reside somewhere between a videogame and a mystic’s eternity. Indeed, Spartan Girl, scarred with numeral slashes, is lost in a “Roman wilderness of pain” and is immediately pitted against a “minotaur of conscience” in a labyrinth littered with disembodied eyeballs, who proclaims that the “trial period has ended”. She slays him and wears his head as a mask for future confrontations. She has taken a mask from the ancient gallery and proceeds down many halls of countless doors. As she enters more doors that open, her eyes are electrified, possibly seeing things she’s not supposed to. She rescues a neck-less boy-head straddling legs only, after a struggle with a red-robed character, the first sight of a conspiratorial clan. With her boy protected they escape through doors into various cabarets populated by drunken, beastly avatars, eventually finding respite in a desert campfire, possibly an allegory for the origin of fiction. Elsewhere, Renaissance bodies inflated with collagen have sex in ancient baths, a muscular man sends his lover into a sea occupied by red-robed masquerading men. He jumps in and watches an insect have sex with a woman birthing a caterpillar. Back in a dormitory, the Merman lover awakes, or is born again, captive in a small pool, observing another door marked “authorized personnel only”. She is harpooned in the head en route. Xanax girl awakes in a sea of milk and rides the merman while white zombies attack them and a severed head delivered by batwings replaces the Merman head. Rafting down white river lined with stabbed sufferers, she lobs the head onto a roof. They watch all of this on TV in real time. Xanax Girl then sees her children friends, who warn her of a deadly whirlpool ahead of them. Yet another door and another eternity-level to confront.
Here the Eyes Wide Shut-esque conspiracy against seeing deepens, as a devil wearing a red mask (i.e., Red Goblin emoji) stabs a scientist with his penis nose after seducing him. He is a liar, a deceptive Goblin King who may have created this hell-game. He is like a ‘mock king’ in Sacaea: an ancient festival where a maniac prisoner is elected king for a week, where anything can happen. Possibilities are wide-open. The scientist’s severed head is thrown in a gallery of toilets to be shat on. Unlike ritual, surveillance cameras monitor and record this spectacle for further understanding. Meanwhile, Xanax Girl (or is it Gamer Girl?) is revealed to be a clone-of-a-clone, as she unplugs from a brain-in-a-jar and walks on down a dank hallway, glimpsing various private activities, ranging from a man cooking his own face for dinner, a robot masturbating to pistons, and an pathetic, clingy Brainman who hangs himself in desperation, and whose body is plucked by Xanax girl to be used as an earring via a clever trick of her eye. Paranoically, she dreams she is left out of a social joke, and has nightmares of classmates watching her poop pink pills. When she meets her knight in shining armor in the library, he is later revealed to be impotent and suicides himself in shame. Shame is everywhere: it is the ether in Dream Journal. She sees an ouroboros on an altar, spinning like a clock, and has a pet owl who is later kidnapped. Some of the most enigmatic fears of Dream Journal are of a loved one being stolen, kidnapped. People fear not being able to protect more innocent creatures from a violent conspiracy. She dreams that her family, the boy and some children, are slaughtered by red-robed men, whose images later appear on enigmatic accessories worn by dead and decayed people by the children as they raft through this heart-of-darkness-in-a-videogame.
Xanax Girl seemingly begins a new life in a midwestern home from which she escapes riding an obese family member. She encounters a boy with a gun strapped to his head that shoots a portal right through it for her owl to enter at dusk; fried eggs asking to perish; a man holding a smaller version of himself like a gun and whose smaller version holds and shoots a real gun; a mourning prince decapitated as he peeks above a sewer grate; Mr. Peanut Butter informing her another trial period has ended; and perhaps Rafman’s own gravestone reading 1981-20… (will he survive a pandemic and the cancelation of his art?!). These are only a few things, and the devils are everywhere in myriad details and references. Surely a more comprehensive view of the total vanity fair has barely been explored, as Rafman finds eternity not in a grain of sand but in an arcade, and with a symbology inherited from the polyglot “internet’s dreams”. It is total in the sense that multiple art histories compound and coexist in the present, ranging from Greek mythology, Renaissance fantasy, modern film, and internet-era emojis. But in the end, Xanax Girl’s trials and tribulations as she seeks to rescue her beloved pet Ace from a masked conspiracy, and then tragically fights him to the death, are but a page in Mirror Man’s archive of the microcosmic world-in-an-arcade. She is powerless.
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The Persecution Movement
One of the more telling scenes though is when a robed man unveils to reveal a true identity as a walking mirror, empty, reflective warden of this labyrinth in a videogame in a film. But he does not exist: he is not a he at all, but only a mirror, the projection of the internet’s participants who willingly play the game. Disrobed, he is nothing but what people want to see.
Where masked balls disintegrate and reform into more and more incoherent sticky dramas of avatar-tribes — thus proliferating instead of exposing the masquerade — paranoia grows around the experience that people lack in reality. And where personal experience is found lacking, persecution fantasies emerge to compensate, dreaming up red-robed conspiracies, satanic cults who eat children, etc. If I am not living, but only a suffering nobody with a mask or two, there must be a reason, and it must be because of those people who are masquerading and hiding something. But must it? Suffering scars all people differently, which may also in turn be covered-up or masked differently. People aren’t the same. There’s a social movement out there that wants all people to be the same, to suffer equally, which is not possible, necessary, or desirable. The tendency of this persecution movement to conform to stereotypes and caricatures is confounding. Don’t people want to be distinct from each other? Is there no longer a suspicion about homogenous culture and the attempt to ‘normalize’ everything? How many times does it need to be repeated to the infantile minds of the persecution movement that no two humans are the same or ever will be or should be?
For radicals in exile — those outsiders with a rare glimpse into the inside and the nothing that exists there (e.g. Adorno) — persecution fantasies are linked to capitalist modes of thought regarding commensurability. In exchange society, all goods are reducible to their exchange value, and things must be rendered equivalent somehow. Marxism highlights that human labor is a commodity on the market as well, and people become material for equivalences, though not a commodity like any other, at least in theory. By analogy, the ‘eye-for-an-eye’ mode of justice doesn’t work in modernity, not because it leaves the world blind, but because no two eyes are the same. The politics of persecution seeks to render different types of suffering equivalent by merely advancing a politics of putting people into the same masks. But since the best masks are those that are custom-formed to specific scars, these socially distributed masks never quite fit right. Rendering suffering of distinct individuals equivalent is absurd and totalitarian.
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The Best Queer Social Artist?
Jon Rafman is the best artist of the social turn era. One of the motifs of Rafman’s art is collectivization outside of the academy and official art cliques, beyond the bubbles of card-carrying Democrat artists, in outcast and exiled milieus where suffering as we know it is in various states of transformation and abstraction. It’s the variety of masks — the polymorphously perverse and the embrace of the alien — that often comes across as intolerable because they don’t fit into current propaganda masks. Do furries have a gender? What kind of consciousness is pursued in Vore lit, where Giantesses gulp down or sit on shrunken men? Could such a literature be banned because it transgresses feminist rules by monumentalizing women? Literally, is it possible to ban a fantasy? What is the meaning of sadomasochism when portrayed as leather-clad pig-people guarding private dogfights between dogs that aren’t even dogs but have freckly-red-headed human faces and walrus bodies? The type of collectivization Rafman portrays is unrecognizable to moralist demagogues in the academic social turn, who have not the artistic talent, much less the courage, to gaze into the internet’s terrible dreams, to imagine the masquerading alienness of our society, the wildly estranged fantasies concocted in private and given home in demented arcades, but quickly became content to draft up a social decorum to compensate. And because such an academic mentality has no art to develop, it has no other recourse than to be spoon-fed the most dull and artless aspects of the masquerade, those tired old resentment fables. As if all life today isn’t deplorable, vulgar, and mean. Artificial unto eternity, door upon door opening into depraved artifices and fantasy. It is not the ‘individual genius’ that is being rooted out with Rafman but rather a queer type of collective fantasy that doesn’t jibe with what is supposed to be queer, as dictated by the tyranny of the resentful. How scandalous! Queer isn’t supposed to look that way! Jon Rafman makes better queer art than you, and he doesn’t even have to identify as queer. In this wave of moralist denunciations, one suspects a seething jealousy from artists who secretly fear they have wasted their lives believing they have to identify as something in order to portray it truthfully, when in reality art is far more complicated than unmediated narcissism. A narcissist does not make a good artist, and wounded narcissism does not make radical politics.
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The Underdog
It is telling the way herd society reacts to those special artists who somehow — like Xanax Girl and her dog — find entrance through a secret crack in the mansion to a primal scene, giving the rest of us insight into vistas we didn’t even know existed. At times they are regarded like the player of a football team who breaks away, teammates enthusiastically throwing blocks to help her reach the endzone amidst an uproar of fanfare rooting for an underdog. At other times, such as our persecution fantasy era, she is sabotaged by her own teammates, who resent her for scoring more points than they. Yet are we not all on the same team? Don’t we all want to see into the bottom of things, no matter what the cost, no matter who lifts the veil?
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Resentment aesthetics boring
What ails humanity has not been discovered yet.
The blindspots of moralistic shaming of art — the likes of which one would expect from Nazi mothers against the degeneratest or Simpsons mobs — are painfully clear to those who are not card-carrying members of the community. And the exiled are many. The abstract projection of a power that does not exist onto specific individuals who are merely powerless mirrormen is by definition authoritarianism. When Dr. Harford discovers the murder and is placated by his elite superior, he has to accept the fact that the superior is right: the whole thing was in fact a stage act, a smoke and mirror show. At least in part. The rule of the social masquerade is that no one sees the whole. And where no one can see the whole, no one has power to change it. Only Harford is beginning to see the whole, and he is ultimately stopped and threatened for it. The intolerance of the ambiguities that result, the enforced lack of understanding consigned to the imagination, the fear of the unknown, generates crude projections. The rituals Harford actually observes are luscious sensory feasts compared to the black and white paranoid caricatures of sexual pleasure resulting from his crude resentment fantasies; resentment fantasies the masquerading doctor is not content to accept, because they are aesthetically uninteresting.
The mass attempts to see their reflection in a microcosmic persona. The social persecution of an individual is the phenomenon of a people searching for a valiant leader. It is a trial of the damned for the damned. When hundreds or thousands of such persecutions occur in a panicked sequence, it presents a moving image of a people looking for a leader and casting aside all who will not be. A hellish social metabolism. It is very much a warpath, albeit in our era an economic and moral one. For who could say what or how Rafman thinks? Or if he thinks, or if people today even think in general? What kind of thinking is art thinking? An artist is in so many ways an empty roaming eye, a cold collector of images recalled by some kind of equally abstract historical consciousness and the inchoate demands of the present. Rafman was amongst the first to recognize surveillance as a mass aesthetic phenomenon. The way that people pose for the camera, the ways that the masquerade is changed by the mere presence of being watched. Traditionally, you’re either in the ritual or you’re not, every ritual demands that observation is left at the door. Eyes are checked along with the coats.
Mirroring is a central phenomenon in a society undeniably made up of all different kinds of narcissists, short narcissists, fat narcissists, tall and thin narcissists, preferring specific shades of hair or colors of skin, and so on and so on. And yet a society of narcissists is a self-contradiction. Soon enough the species will have to decide on one or the other, society or narcissus. Or perhaps the antagonism is itself vexed, a puzzle prized because it’s unsolvable. Identity politics chooses narcissism, where each person can admire what they were born with until they die lonely and unfulfilled. And that choice is tragic. But Society tries to rescue Narcissus from herself by manufacturing new masks while not discontinuing old models.
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Castrated Funni Boys
It was Varys alone, the eunuch, who first saw clearly the violent tyranny of his Queen, because he had seen it before in his youth.
In Dream Journal, an Incel gives up an isolated life, shooting his penis off and proclaiming “I’m never going to use it anyway”. He occasionally has an ass’ head — a foolish, ashamed donkey — is he sick to death of being burdened with this confused sexuality? This is a symbolic image of sexuality today — helpless, frustrated, too confused to even imagine a life in which pleasure exists.
There are no words to describe the nebulous paranoia in what feels like a gender war in the 21st century. Millenia-old gender antagonism, are now inflamed by every miscommunication, with every failed movement, by every sex panic spectacle of the last half-century. The stalemate of this fake war calcifies into pathologically unsolvable antagonisms that can only appear to those who have ever desired to move beyond it as expressing a lust for war. Certainly no intent for treaty will be found in the rabid zealot’s eyes of those who identify as sexually persecuted. Regarding ‘men’ after 1970, the type of ashamed ass portrayed in Dream Journal, a fake knight, they were generally born canceled and are missing in action. Cancel culture is not new, it just has a formal name and a militarized program now. But young boys after 1970 surveyed with their fearful, unblinking OCD eyes various abstract criticisms lodged against an identity they did not possess, inflamed by the fallouts and callouts of the falsely titled “Women’s Liberation Movement”. To those who see the forest through the trees, and they are many, women in the 21st century are not more liberated because they perceive themselves as just as helpless victims of a social conspiracy as do Incels. With the child’s gut they felt their castration anxiety double, first from one parent to both, then from the parents to the clan, then exponentially compounding into a mass carnival of public shame that only the most psychologically enslaved of the unfree could find solace in. Women’s Lib and Incels each have noble origins, but have been rotted out by poverty of experience — life in the era of sex panics and sexual frustration. It takes a special type of eunuch, an alien hybrid of sorts, to perceive the stalemate at hand in the current form of appearance that the ‘gender struggle’ engenders into rigidified, entitled, self-canceling sectarians. Ultimately they react to, in every way imaginable, a deeply ingrained neurotic and partially unconscious fear of life-and-death, using the most powerful tool available: persecutory delusions. Who suffers more? Many today say that men are freaking out in response to #MeToo, but in truth men born in the neoliberal era are born freaked-out, paper-thin sacks of nerves frayed by the imminent threat — or paranoid fate — of being exiled, and adjusting their behaviors through distortion, displaced rage, total submission, positivized misogyny, brutal violence, and much stranger, oblique pathologies. War takes many forms. Psychological warfare, economic, etc. But men aren’t afraid of cancel culture because cancel culture changed their diapers and circumcised them with a safe, smiling face, it reared them in the nursery schools, and it (mal)adjusted them through high school, college, and the workplace. All of which has been internalized into new, pseudo-artful psyches with no clear outlet. In an artless world sexual frustration finds outlet in violence. As portrayed in Dream Journal this occurs as suicide, at least twice. Human life, hollowed of all that is human in the resentment fantasies projected onto other sectarian groups who are supposedly the cause of their frustration, and when like the infantile child they still harbor internalizes that projection in turn, plummets in value. It is tragic not merely because it happens, but because a malicious worldview amongst the experientially impoverished that may only have a fragment of a kernel of truth amidst a labyrinth of delusion is given room to flourish its toxic malady.
But a subculture of Varys’— of weirdo independents not content to accept a lame masquerade at face value, nor to harbor a dull, dramatized resentment fantasy but heroically like Xanax Girl break through the smokescreens with a cool, scientific clarity of sight, and so to swiftly slay that monster — is a product of failed gender politics. And Varys feared nothing, the worst had long ago occurred and no more mutilation could be done. He went to the stake bravely, unsurprised but cruelly disappointed at the persecution fantasies he observed growing in his Queen. The seer had seen it before, but was just as helpless before it.
Tiresias was struck blind for answering a concern central to the ancient world: Which gender derived more pleasure from sex?
Today it is reversed: Which gender suffers more from lack of sex?
But where no gods exist to punish us, sectarian wars are lustily invented to blind us.
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Narcissists at The Ball
There are no placid rivers to gaze into one’s reflection; industrial society displaces Narcissus into the movie sets, spits him out into the eternal reproductions of arcades.
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Cancel Culture Sociopathy
Psychologists observed that the tendency to ‘exile’ people is a characteristic of psychopathy or certain types of narcissism. Similarly, studies show that cancel culture is the perfect mask for narcissists, who use victim culture as a cover to manipulate. Ie they easily play the victim to advance their own agendas without ever being checked. Cancel culture might merely be traditional psychopathy veiled by neoliberal dogma. A recent study shows that tendencies towards victimization and persecution fantasy in particular are the playthings of narcissistic personalities. Eerily, they find that sociopaths with entitlement issues have found the most robust manipulative device in playing the victim card. They camouflage as a victim, as a means to an end. The overprotection of victims in our culture offers a venue for their true motives to slip by undetected, because their accusations cannot be questioned without a public shaming or exiling of the questioner. The circumvention of the legal process is also a norm here, and is probably a form of concealing its sociopathic nature. When cancel culture circumvents the legal system, the result is the establishment of show trials where the accused is always denied due process. The absence of due process is not a perfunctory symptom, it is exactly the veiled intent behind the sociopathy of cancel culture, insofar as the accuser can project anything onto the accused without it being challenged. It is indeed a safe space... for authoritarianism. Cancel culture is perhaps nothing but the ancient social activity of exiling people from a community — which would have led the exiled to almost certain death or regression to an animal state — but with a militarized dimension of neoliberal justification. Ancient communities may have mourned the exiled afterwards in rituals, while also seeing it as socially necessary. Nascent contradictions of civilization: Countless academic justifications of groupthink defend the community’s decorum instead of unmasking it. Anti-scientific. Neoliberalism’s boring rituals are less sympathetic than the ancients to the transgression of taboos by the exiled, if only because its totalitarianism cultivates fundamentalist thinking, strict adherence to propaganda, and a growing scroll of thought taboos consigned to an existence behind the mask. Humans are now Capital and are exiled by unemployment primarily, sexism being vestigial. As Joan Robinson says, “The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”
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Controversy & Arousal
When the technocratic state needed a spokesman for the new, democratic Internet, it found one in a new type of young, castrated artist, educated to the gills, and prepared to survey the land. When reports from the frontier portrayed — in glittering detail — a social misery too glitzy for the state’s dull taste in persecution fantasy art; when the internet proved not to be a controlled haven for the passive agreements it wanted from its citizens; where incels and deplorables were shown to merely exist, if only as abstractions of avatars made real by paranoid flame-fanners aroused by controversy; sexuality was equally the parlance of inhuman Furries as girls-holding-hands-with-girls-in-the-suburbs; and videogames portrayed gun violence and dinosaurs with phallus heads instead of Lana Del Rey’s 60s nostalgia; the state’s volunteers, drills in their hands instead of guns, were at the ready to deinstall the democratic platform and return it to the state’s storage facility. Hell, they’d work overtime or volunteer to do it. Projections onto the night sky are not soap boxes stacked on platforms. The frontier is simply too complicated a place for minds reared on propaganda to synthesize into any meaning other than the one they know best — persecution fantasy. Millennial-brand persecution-plagues fantasize about firing and eternally unemploying the projectors of imagery. If the phenomena had a symbolic image it would be the cultural workers smashing the apparatus of the culture industry in a fit of displaced rage, as the projector screens replays of ancestors smashing machines. The imagination reels at what kind of distorted tapestries were created as the looms were being smashed. We wonder what broken collection of fantasies in refracting lightbeams are projected onto the smogscreens of the culture industry’s threshing floors. Projector fires always happen in the dark. Projectors do not contain the imagery though. The thing about replacing one with another is that the content isn’t changed. //
[1] Skodlar B, Dernovsek MZ, Kocmur M. Psychopathology of schizophrenia in Ljubljana (Slovenia) from 1881 to 2000: changes in the content of delusions in schizophrenia patients related to various sociopolitical, technical and scientific changes. Int J Soc Psychiatry. 2008 Mar. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18488404/.