#robert pfaller

[codeandcanvas]

While I am loading up my handheld with music, I came across The Book of Ive talking about Solarpunk and how it relates to Cyberpunk.

At first I was passively listening to it, as you do while doing something more important but still need to occupy your inner gremlins, but then he mentioned a word I have not heard before: interpassivity, a word linked to Robert Pfaller’s philosophy of media, and also the title of his 2017 book, and I paused and took note.

And this is how the book and its topic is described on its page on De Gruyter:

“A radical criticism of current assumptions in the field of cultural theory today

Why do people record TV programmes instead of watching them? Why do some recovering alcoholics let others drink in their place? Why can ritual machines pray in place of believers?

Robert Pfaller advances the theory of ‘interpassivity’ as delegated consumption and enjoyment. Applicable to both art and everyday life, the concept allows him to tackle a vast range of phenomena: culture, art, sports and religion.

Pfaller criticises dominant assumptions, offers an escape from prevailing ideologies and exposes how cultural capitalism promotes commodities with the promise of happiness.”

Interesting take, right?

[henriduree]

Zitat d. W. 43

[museenkuss]

Marie, angel! Do you have any recs for books in German? Danke schön! 💖🍰

Darling!! I do indeed! I wasn't sure whether you meant by German authors or whether translations were acceptable, as well, so I included some of each <3

Two Nonfiction books

Robert Pfaller - Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt (a philosophical quest for a good, elegant life, highly enjoyable but should be enjoyed with a grain of salt)

Stefan Zweig - Die Welt von Gestern (not just an autobiography but rather a portrait of an era. incredible book.)

Two Classics

Thomas Mann - Der Zauberberg (atmospheric, at times meandering and philosophical tale of a young man going up a mountain to visit his sick cousin. THE book. words don't do it justice)

Christa Wolf - Medea. Stimmen (a retelling of the Medea myth in monologues, with themes of feminism and East/West Germany)

Two Recent books

Christine Wunnicke - Die Dame mit der bemalten Hand (ost-west Verständigung im 18.Jh, astronomy and maths, religion and languages.)

Dana Grigorcea - Die nicht sterben (vampires, the undead, tourism, capitalism. opulent language, delicately woven.)

bonus: Julja Linhof - Krummes Holz (which I talked about in my March favourites!)

Two really nice translations

Patrick Modiano - Unsichtbare Tinte (tr. Elisabeth Edl, "Encre sympathique")

Michail Bulgakow - Meister und Margarita (tr. Alexander Nitzberg, "Мастер и Маргарита / Master i Margarita")

[carvalhais]

But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalism realism. A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. Mark Fisher. 2014. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zer0 Books.

[howieabel]

“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[mbvvacationbibleschool]

Precorporation and the Impotence of Leftist Counterculture

In the internet age, politics and hysteria seem to be divorced from reality- often, our rage is genuine, and potentially, it is even directed towards a genuine issue- it is just that our ability to express our frustration and anxiety against such abstract, distant and absurd issues make it seem impossible to have a meaningful influence on any of the circumstances surrounding us. We call this learned helplessness. Impotent in any meaningful way to affecting moral outcomes. In a video essay on The Simpsons in a post-irony world, I found somebody saying what I had felt about the counterculture, liberalism and satire more succinctly than I had thought possible, see here;

The sources of the video here are Jean Baudrillard (for his work on simulacrum, or hyperrealism, in post-modernity) and Mark Fisher's work on precorporation in what he called "Capitalist Realism," Robert Pfaller, Noam Chomsky, I'm sure there are others.

This may appear to be a takedown of leftism, but it's mostly a lament in the inability to enact reasonable change as autonomy and reason is eroded, to be replaced by hedonism, tokenism, nilhism, and a kind of reduction of all ideological nuance into a kind of post-meaning aesthetic. That is to say, our emotions and political zeal are only played for revenue and are often ultimately trivialized. Consumer capitalism has a nefarious way of mass appropriation, where everything can be held at an arms length by the consumer and their so called values are reduced to a marketable style- an aesthetic, or a at best as catharsis. There are three main ways that the outrage of the citizenry is dealt with- scapegoating and infighting, red herrings or distraction (as Aldous Huxley illuminated), and by appropriation or precorporation, the latter of which I will expound upon here.

The interesting thing about scapegoating and neo-tribalism is that a lot of people seem to be unaware that they are doing it, or unaware of the cultural utility of this practice. The ancient Isrealites used to put all of their problems, curses, grudges, etc onto a literal goat that was kicked out of the town to wander the hills. This provided a kind of catharsis. The modern man has scapegoats- be they outgroups or villains of a wide variety. Our anxiety had evolved to deal with tangible problems, our anger evolved to give us motivation to act when we feel we are being wronged. The problem here is that our scapegoats are typically politicians, political parties, and corporations that are so out of our reach and nebulous that we really have a hard time finding closure when we perceive injustice. We claw our arms in the air in fury, or as William Corgan put it; "Despite all of my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage." A good example has arisen in Alberta, where a large group of oil companies have done their extracting and left wellsites abandoned with equipment or spillage on the site. Trying to pin liability on companies that have merged or split or exchanged employees and executives countless times, all while having to deal with an agonizingly cumbersome government run justice system and corporate lawyers who really are just to sides of the same coin is pretty much impossible. The people responsible aren't affiliated with the same companies, and the company is a disembodied entity. The consequences of bad behaviour are too nebulous to pin, and it is by design. Another big problem is that societally, we tend to put our hands behind our back in the face of large systemic problems, because institutions, and corporations especially, are designed to be only motivated by profit and their own self preservation- thus, it is always in their best interest to externalize cost (or ignore problems). Individual citizens opt to try to use their voice online or to discuss with their associates in person for an attempt to acknowledge or spur societal changes - often hoping the heavy lifting will be done by someone else or especially by an organization. Individualistic citizens often lack the will or the ability to address serious systemic issues, especially with the amount of red tape provided by the institutions that create the problems, and the threat of punishment (typically, loss of access to social or economic opportunities for particularly rapacious individuals).

Red herrings and distraction are pretty self-explanitory strategies for dealing with citizen unrest. Brave New World? A few textbook examples of this may include Nestle trying to bury human rights violation lawsuits with their story of the green MnM's sexy boots being exchanged for white sneakers, and a story bubbling up that a tailings pond in northern Alberta had been leaking millions of gallons over many months without being addressed or even reaching the public's awareness. The most amusing and dubious example is Disneys' alleged cover up of the fact that their proud founder Walt Disney had cryogenically frozen his head. The theory is that the movie Frozen was a marketing ploy to bury the public's ability to find that information about their founder- try googling "Walt Disney Frozen."

Instagram and Tick Tock are the obvious examples of information floods that delete attention spans and time. Television has been the drug of choice for Americans and western civilization ever since the post-war era. The episodic nature (as pointed out by J. Ceika) was a useful aspect of television in that it reduced moral lessons to a 22 minute hand-wave and the return to status quo a method of instilling nilhism and trust in authority- as these early sit-com shows tended to be focused on the "traditional" values of trusting police, military, teachers, or other figures to effectively solve problems and provide security. As I addressed earlier, even Liberals who think of themselves as quite politically active tend to believe that institutions will change if they make enough of a fuss online. The internet at large is the macrocosm that mirrors an apt description of 4chan.org- posting here is equivalent to pissing in an ocean of piss. Huxley feared no one would bother to read a book, that culture would be consumed by vapid values. I think this kind of Brave New World type approach to media oversaturation is one of the main drivers deleting the original western culture, along with everything else- a force we call "appropriation."

Appropriation is a relatively well-known term, referring to a superficial version of a cultural artifact being co-opted by an outside group- typically in the context of colonialism and consumerism and its subsuming of other cultures. This process is strongly linked to consumerism and the cultural traditions and sacred beliefs, values, artifacts, landmarks and historical events of any European or American white group is also currently being subsumed. Such is nearly inevitable in Capitalist Realism, which Mark Fisher described as "absence of radical politics, lack of political imagination [...] and a preeminent belief that there is no alternative to Capitalism." All the signs have been there since the post-war era when Post-modernism really got its footing, but it's getting a bit harder to miss. The post-modern philosphers didn't make this happen, they simply describe the processes they were observing.

All of these ideas are post-colonial in a snake that is eating itself as it eats every culture it touches. My psychedelic forefathers Tim Leary, Lorenzo Hagerty, Terence Mkenna, among others described this phenomenon, in the context of cultural revolution and an American brand of Eastern mysticism- albiet optimistically. "All flows." It turns out the dissolving effect of technological advancement and commodification of culture is just as easily coopted by the powerful as would a stagnant regime. Maybe my cynicism stems from watching the Occupy movement or Y2K or 2012 pass with fanfare and little else. Seeing the Canadian truckers or Antifa or many other groups rise up, be vilified, be infiltrated, lose focus, and dissolve. Many people are clinging to or grasping for antiquated versions of the past- the revival of occultism in the new age, the "trad" movement, the fundamentalists. All of this is dissolving, we need something authentic. It's hard for me to believe that anything is immune to being dissolved, especially if someone can make money off of it. The problem here is exacerbated when beliefs are provisional and talk is so cheap. You're more or less free to think or say anything you want, as long as you tow the line and buy things, and work for somebody, or create capital in some way. The technology that was supposed to provide infinite freedom, IE, the internet, now seems more like a totalitarian's wet dream. It is as if we have put our brains into a vat that contains whatever hallucination the algorithm thinks we want to see, or what it thinks will benefit some targeted advertising the most. Sure, we can connect to fringe groups and spout whatever nonsense we want, but as our lives move to be increasingly online, we think we are doing something by adding the great garbage patch of the blogosphere. I'm aware of the irony.

What happened to the left? The left has been placated in many regards, as a watered down consumer version of "wokeism" has been embraced by multinational corporations for its' percieved safety- we can thank cancel culture for that. The mass consumption of woke media, delivery services, junk-food and junk-food veganism, alternative music, and countless other things shows that ideals are often more a fashion statement for many people than anything, a conformist neo-tribalistic shadow of its former ethos. Punk music and satire were the examples used by Jonas Ceika-whether these things lose their edge through mass appeal by accident or design, there is no difference.

It just seems a little strange that justice and equality has been reduced to pissing off "bigots" in exchange for tokenism, while giving all your money to global conglomerates and believing that farmers and other working class people are your enemies - often, because of their beliefs, race, or sex. In fact, I've even heard it said that "being right wing feels punk as hell." There are content creators, T-shirt brands, . . . eating beef, gluten, etc, people and industries whose revenue is dependent on opposing "wokeism," just as much as advertisers or content creators, musicians, clothing brands or toothpastes or commercialized marijuana products specifically try to cash in on the so called "woke" crowd.

It's exasperating to perceive it and be powerless to stop it, this is what really killed Kurt Cobain.

In the case of satire, the kinds of originally satirical media become trends- punk, comedy, etc, until they reach a point of impotence through saturation. No one can even tell if Homer Simpson is a parody if all other TV dads use him as a template, or as a consequence of the length of the series' run, becomes more in reference to himself than to the source material.

In Jonas Ceika's essay, the thing being abstracted was satire and characters that originally represented archetypes within society- as satire becomes bubblegum cynicism and the characters just become referential to their status as a cultural icon and ability to sell merchendise. Ceika from CCK philosophy quotes Peter Halley's book Essence and Model;

"In post or neo-modernism, the syntactical elements to not change. The vocabulary of modernism is retained, but its elements, already made abstract, are finally and completely severed from any reference to any real.... Elements of modernism .., are re-deployed in a system of self-referentiality, which is in itself a hyper-realization of modernist self-referentiality - though now it is detached from the modernist dream of revolutionary renewal. "

There seems to be a supreme lack of moral courage here. In the American situation comedy "The Good Place," the point is made that morality is so grey that you can't take a sip of water without genociding thousands of euglenozoa and bacteria. We live in a crapsack world, ladies and gentlemen, and the response from the public is ether apathy or an online activism that is almost entirely symbolic and self-congratulatory. The reason why we have free-ish speech is because the establishment know that it is generally just a load of hot air. There is no rebellion if scalpers entrepreneurs are waiting with rebellion kits, magazines are showing rebellion hairstyles. So called rebellious media or figures can be backed by the same big corporations that they tirade against, more or less as a form of commodified catharsis for the masses to feel their outrage and cynicism mostly vicariously. I remember hearing people say that the protesters should protest in non-invasive way, like why do they have to block traffic, or break things? I believe protesters should sit on their hands quietly in their homes on their time off.

[eternal-dannation]

It is also just materially disconnected from the reality of art being produced within the empire. Disney produced Black Panther and Andor, Apple produces Severance, Amazon produced The Expanse. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut:

During the Vietnam War every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

And Mark Fisher:

A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

^ this shit is so embarrassing man. "destroy artists because they may inspire resistance." not a single fucking bullet point about actual labor concerns. when i say that most anti-ai sentiment is driven by reactionary "art must have a soul" fandom-as-politics shit this is what i mean. and why is there a maple leaf

[codeandcanvas]

Update: State of my Website

Over the last few days, I went from not having a website to having my own website, having a social wall, having a blog, and basically linking everything to everything.

I have also added a blogroll, so that people can actually leave my website following their own urge to surf the web.

But I think the most radical thing I did was take inspiration from an ebook I am currently reading: Interpassivity, by Robert Pfaller, or rather from the way it looks and reads, if this verb allows for being changed into something an object does, instead of being something done with an object you can read.

Ebooks are, similar to how apps are these days, wrapped web pages: they are basically html and css (and javacript, if you look at apps).

So I studied why I found this ebook such easily readable, and it turns out that it is for the simple fact, that, all by itself, it was set to display in Times New Roman. Should that typeface not exist, then it would be displayed in Times, and if that, too, should fail, just a Serif typeface (like I first tried with Georgia, but I really didn’t like Georgia’s bombastic medieval numerals, it felt like a winery!).

There is still some tweaking to be done (based around my knowledge of typographic detail and grids, I need to take a second look at line height and how far paragraphs are spaced out vertically), but having done this change all I can say is that I am amazed by how readable my website and my blogged articles suddenly are.

It honestly feels like doing something new, because basically everyone is doing the custom typeface, sans‑serif for everything, really, while, what I think, the eye of the reader suffers for it.

The screenshots above were made while my Dark Reader plugin was active, so don’t be surprised that the real thing looks different ;)

There is also this bonus effect of how Serifs are connected to authority, and despite what the Bauhaus nerds tell us graphic designers in a top‑down abstraction, authority is good, especially if it comes for free by increasing the readability.

[poetrylou-blog]

Wir sollten nicht glauben, dass wir die geliebte Person bessern oder liebenswerter machen könnten, indem wir ihre Abgründe tilgen. Denn, ob wir es wissen oder nicht, was wir an ihr lieben, sind oft gerade diese Abgründe - und ihre Versuche, sie zu verbergen.

Robert Pfaller

[museenkuss]

I was about to make a post about how I don’t respect vapes in candy flavours or sex scenes in films that are so concerned with not showing too much that they end up as careful choreographies or hypersexualised fashion that lacks all ease and grace, but I think I’ll just reread Robert Pfaller Wofür es sich zu leben lohnt.

[andyvantino]

i was looking for a father figure or for a figure like a professor who tries to understand the world not driven by his own affects. someone pure, a pure father. that was okay because one needs guidance and authority and today in a world of primal obscene fathers it is hard to find guidance. pure fathers are impossible but of course one form of good authority is to not pretend one is a pure father and then without this repressing of the impure sides that make us human we are less driven by them

[evakadlec]

http://evakadlec.tumblr.com/post/125784222978/smokeonthewater

VON DER KÜRZE DES LEBENS

12.1.2011, 20 Uhr, Grand Café zum Rothen Krebsen, Linz

VIVERE TOTA VITA DISCENDUM EST  ET TOTA VITA DISCENDUM EST MORI

ZU LEBEN ABER MUSS MAN DAS GANZE LEBEN LANG LERNEN UND, WORÜBER DU DICH VIELLEICHT NOCH MEHR WUNDERST: MAN MUSS DAS GANZE LEBEN LANG LERNEN ZU STERBEN.

(DE BREVITATE VITAE; SENECA)

Wie kann man sich täglich aufs Neue zum Leben motivieren, wie bleibt man aufmerksam und gerecht, und vor allem: wie kann man lieben?

mit: Marlene Haderer, Eva Kadlec und Robert Pfaller.

[irockasingranite]

From Capitalist Realism:

In fact, capitalist realism is very far from precluding a certain anti-capitalism. After all, and as Žižek has provocatively pointed out, anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism. Time after time, the villain in Hollywood films will turn out to be the ‘evil corporation’. Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/ Pixar’s Wall-E (2008). [...] A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity. [...] So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Žižek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal – we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads. Corporate anti-capitalism wouldn’t matter if it could be differentiated from an authentic anti-capitalist movement. Yet, even before its momentum was stalled by the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, the so called anti-capitalist movement seemed also to have conceded too much to capitalist realism. Since it was unable to posit a coherent alternative political-economic model to capitalism, the suspicion was that the actual aim was not to replace capitalism but to mitigate its worst excesses; and, since the form of its activities tended to be the staging of protests rather than political organization, there was a sense that the anti-capitalism movement consisted of making a series of hysterical demands which it didn’t expect to be met.

‘how did disney let them make andor omg!’ ‘lol netflix let them make blockbuster that’s so funny’

[onetwofeb]

Mladen Dolar, Robert Pfaller | INDIGO festival 2022

[buendischerwaldgang]

Far from undermining capitalist realism, this gestural anti-capitalism actually reinforces it. Take Disney/Pixar's Wall-E (2008). The film shows an earth so despoiled that human beings are no longer capable of inhabiting it. We're left in no doubt that consumer capitalism and corporations — or rather one mega-corporation, Buy n Large — is responsible for this depredation; and when we eventually see the human beings in offworld exile, they are infantile and obese, interacting via screen interfaces, carried around in large motorized chairs, and supping indeterminate slop from cups. What we have here is a vision of control and communication much as Jean Baudrillard understood it, in which subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate. It seems that the cinema audience is itself the object of this satire, which prompted some right wing observers to recoil in disgust, condemning Disney/Pixar for attacking its own audience. But this kind of irony feeds rather than challenges capitalist realism. A film like WalI-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called 'interpassivity': the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism

[knuckleduster]

why is every quote from capitalist realism i see on here just mark fisher quoting someone else. like i get that people have probably read capitalist realism and not Robert Pfaller or Jodi Dean but its still a bit weird to me