The pwan's weblog without a name

Wednesday, January 12, 02005

From The numbing of the American mind: culture as anesthetic by Thomas de Zengotita:

By the industrial era, a lot more was happening, and numbness became an issue then. Think of Baudelaire, adrift in the crowd, celebrating the artist for resisting numbness, for maintaining vulnerability--thus setting the standard for the genius of modernism. But a qualitative threshold has since been breached. Cities no longer belong to the soulful flaneur but to the wired-up voyeur in his soundproofed Lexus. Behind his tinted windows, with his cell phone and CD player, he gets more input, with less static, from more and different channels, than Baudelaire ever dreamed of. But it's all insulational--as if the deities at Dreamworks were invisibly at work around us, touching up the canvas of reality with existential airbrushes. Everything has that edgeless quality, like the lobby of a high-end Marriott/Ramada/Sheraton. Whole neighborhoods feel like that now. And you can be sure that whatever they do at "the site" will feel like that, too. Even if they specifically set out to avoid having it feel like that--it will still feel like that. They can't control themselves. They can't stop.

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