What not to do

Read Frederic Jameson and then watch The Wedge on Much Music. Here’s an excerpt from Jameson to illustrate my point:

When the links of the signifying chain snap, then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers. …. If we are unable to unify the past, present and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life. …. The schizophrenic is reduce to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time.

Jameson kicks the feet out from under the iconoclastic pastiche inspired indie-post-punk-rockers. Music videos that were already void of meaning are exposed as just that: being void of meaning. Fragmented images of androgynous musician-types flash across the screen in sync to monotonous beat-types; the empty vocals and generic instrumentals dissipate into un-meaning slipping further and further into the simulacra abyss. All of a sudden it’s just not good enough to only not be something pop. All the while...

Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existences, but they no longer need to impose their speech; and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only an absences of any great collective project but also the unavoidability of the national language itself.

The “we’re fuct” that howls perpetually in the back of all our minds impregnates my conscious, but only for a moment; I’m going to an artsy party tonight and I’m excited.