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July 26, 2004

Heidegger, Reality TV and Blackness

I've always dug the single idea I know of Heidegger. I found it expressed another way over here.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out how human beings tend to look at the world as a standing stock of material, ready for us to use. As inventory to be processed into something more valuable. Trees into wood. Animals into meat. He called this world of raw natural resources: bestand. It seems inevitable that people without access to natural bestand such as oil wells or diamond mines, that they’d turn to the only inventory they do have—their lives.

More and more, the bestand of our era is our own intellectual property. Our ideas. Our life stories. Our experience.
What people used to endure or enjoy—all those plot-point events of potty training and honeymoons and lung cancer—now they can be shaped to best effect and sold.

The trick is to pay attention. Take notes.

The problem with seeing the world as bestand, Heidegger said, was it leads you to use things, enslave and exploit things and people, for your own benefit.

With this in mind, is it possible to enslave yourself?

Without going too far in that direction and back to my original premise, I don't think that blackness online has degenerated into a stock premise. Yet I think that it's overwhelmingly clear that the Hiphop nation is precisely an overexploited resource of low ordinal dimensions. The very fact that some of its biggest stars are dead is proof enough. But hiphop is not the only victim of cannibalization, I would venture to say that much of America suffers the same problem. What could be a greater testament to that than our recycling of superhero sci-fi?

Last week on NPR, I heard about a poor woman from a South African township who is suing Disney for the rights to the melody to 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' which her father wrote back in the 40s or 30s. Are we so starved for experience that we must rob the Third World for the stuff that excites? Perhaps. So maybe this explains our constant exploitation of the internal Third World for storytelling material - there is no future. There is only reality enhanced hindsight.

We are the victims of our own curiousity because we fail to physically explore.

Posted by mbowen at July 26, 2004 10:35 AM

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Comments

"the lion sleeps tonight" melody having been used in another song is not a case of a grand european theft. it is the natural order of things, everything created is based on all that has come before. this applies to all things, including bloggers. or do you feel that your thoughts are originally unique to yourself alone? that you are not a product of your environment? that rappers are not 'stealing' from musicians that have come before?

Posted by: otto at July 26, 2004 12:22 PM

just because the penis has evolved over millions of years and mine is just like 2 and a half billion others, does not make my orgasms any less special to me. if you hear my wife tell it, they're the only ones i pay any attention to, and while i don't concede her point completely, i understand.

i too think that intellectual property is something of a limitless economy but not everything that is stimulating has lasting value. hmm. like orgasms. nevertheless, so long as all of our brains work the same, there will always be an endless supply of stimulation for sale. hmm. like orgasms.

the salient point to be considered here is not that of the bona fides of originality but how a lack of imagination has us necessarily going to extremes. or to extend the metaphor, how an excess of masturbation has made us stick our dicks into every hole.

somehow along the way we have forgotten what our brains are for, and even when we keep sampling all this exotica (which we're not really processing) we are not doing ourselves any good. it's like that maori chant i heard not 20 minutes ago on the radio, with a 4/4 beat mixed in with turntables. is that real?

if we don't do genunine exploring we lose the facility to determine whether we're jacking off. it all feels the same. if we can be contented with a little bit of spice from disney or south africa, what's the difference? the licensing machine is all about putting butts into theatre seats. it's not a problem that the woman from the township does or doesn't get paid, it's a problem that we pay disney to bring the song to us instead of us going to south africa ourselves.

if, in the end, we determine that we don't really want to go to south africa to hear different music, all we want is a little variety in our movie 'experience', then we're just masturbating with a different set of fingers.

Posted by: cobb at July 26, 2004 01:19 PM