The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium (again) by Mark Dery
“The increasingly black comedy of American society is writ small in the information flotsam that drifts with the media current…”
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”The primacy of images in the new mass culture, a sea change that inverted the traditional hegemony of reality over representation, was especially disconcerting. In his hugely influential 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon argued that the crowd ‘thinks in images,’ confusing ‘with the real event what the deforming action of its imagination has imposed thereon. A crowd scarcely distinguishes between the subjective and the objective. It accepts as real the images evoked in its mind.’ Coney represented the apotheosis of the fake, and critics like Huneker were unsettled by its perverse mockery of palpable fact and visual truth, from its impossibly opulent ‘marble’ facades (a mixture of cement, plaster, and jute fibers) to the larger-than-life spectacles of its staged disasters and simulated adventures. Confronted with the ‘jumbled nightmares’ of Luna’s architecture—a proto-postmodern melange of baroque grotesques and Arabian Nights—Huneker observed, ‘Unreality is as greedily craved by the mob as alcohol by the dipsomaniac.’”
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”Our transition from book culture to screen culture is marked by the collapse of the critical distance between the inner self and the interface, by our immersion—perhaps even dissolution—in the ever-accelerating maelstrom of the media spectacle. In Postmodernism, Frederic Jameson characterizes this shift as one in which ‘the alienation of the subject is displaced by the latter’s fragmentation.’ The book gave us the bounded, centered self; interactive, immersive media like hypertext, multi-user domains (MUDs), and virtual reality give us the unbounded, decentered selves postmodern theorists are always talking about. The psychology of the modern age—Munch’s age—was centripetal; postmodern psychology is centrifugal.”
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”All over the world, America stands for fun and death: Disneyland and the death penalty, Big Macs and murder (the highest rate in the industrialized world). It’s surely significant that, as of 1992, America’s top two export items were military hardware and ‘entertainment products,’ in that order.”
-Mark Dery, 1999
