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I know there is a word, whether it is scientific in nature, or other for a process that is happening culturally.
Here's the idea. It used to be that postage stamps had images of ideals, whether of figures or events, and these revered by our culture. Now we have images of cartoon characters, movie actors/actresses and other icons of culture.
From a religious point of view, it used to be that many of our figures of speech came from Holy Writ. Now many figures of speech come from movie quotes or song lyrics.
Metaphors and symbolic stories used to be taken from Holy Writ to help us make sense of our lives. Nowadays such stories come from movies. Rather than "This reminds me of the story of Job..." we say "Reminds me of that scene from Caddyshack."
So we have created our own cultural religion, so to speak, the reservoir from which we draw for inspiration and understanding. Books, movies and songs now refer to other books, movies and songs in a continuing self-referential manner.
It seems to me like cultural implosion, spiraling toward an end, gasping for breath, slowly losing consciousness.
I'm not sure if that makes sense. Entropy is kind of the idea, that energy ultimately heads toward disorder but that's not quite it. It isn't disorder that we head toward but a type of suffocation or choking where even meaning itself ceases to have any external definition.
I'm more interested in a word for the process rather than the end result, if such a word in fact exists.
Desublimation is close, as well, the idea that what was once held sacred by the culture is now relegated to base or common, drained of any higher meaning or value it once held.
Sorry to be so chatty...
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You sound like Jean Baudrillard on The End of History and Meaning.Edit: I don't know of any word for the process you are describing, but I think if you follow up words that recur in Post-Modernist discourse about a similar idea of a diminishing frame of self-referentiality -- words like Hyperreality and Simulacrum -- you'll be heading in the right direction. Or perhaps you just mean secularization.
Last edited by Hydra; 08/13/06 12:30 PM.
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...a diminishing frame of self-referentiality...
That's the clearest expression of what I am getting at that I've heard. Thanks.
I'm familiar with Baudrillard's work, at least by name. I tried to read his Simulacra and Simulation and got maybe a chapter into it and almost drowned. Perhaps now I am ready for it. I will definitely make another attempt at it.
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Carpal Tunnel
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> It seems to me like cultural implosion, spiraling toward an end, gasping for breath, slowly losing consciousness.
perhaps we're just in a phase transition.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
perhaps we're just in a phase transition
Could very well be. I hope so because I'm losing my ability to breathe... 
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I hope so because I'm losing my ability to breathe... The increase in *recomposed solids floating around in the available gases will do that... 
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> I'm losing my ability to breathe...
go outside. take a walk. talk to some regular folks. climb a mountain, or at least a hill. watch the sunset. watch the sunrise.
life ain't over.
formerly known as etaoin...
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But, but... The paradigms are shifting before my very eyes. I can't keep my feet on strait.
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Quote:
But, but... The paradigms are shifting before my very eyes. I can't keep my feet on strait.
Twenty cents on the move makes your feet wide?
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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
Prosumer price index
Ah, another Sunday NYT crossword fan I presume?
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oh goody, another ambagious neologism. or even worser.
Last edited by tsuwm; 08/14/06 02:33 PM.
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Quote:
Quote:
Prosumer price index
Ah, another Sunday NYT crossword fan I presume?
Heh. Yep! 
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Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Prosumer price index
Ah, another Sunday NYT crossword fan I presume?
Heh. Yep!
Wednesday through Friday, too.
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> It seems to me like cultural implosion
Yes, there is hope yet.
"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness."
Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
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> a diminishing frame of self-referentiality
"The basically tautological character of the spectacle flows from the simple fact that its means are simultaneously its ends. It is the sun which never sets over the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire surface of the world and bathes endlessly in its own glory." - Debord
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A diminishing frame of self-referentiality.
What? Did we expect the advent of electronic trans-personal communication to leave us as it found us?
Big events have big effects and so we are now in the throes of the most remarkable cultural transition since the invention of language.
Behold, fellow creatures, the sublimation of the individual and the coming of the Milum.
That is the phrase you seek, aortomus; The Coming of the Milum.
Last edited by themilum; 08/15/06 10:56 PM.
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Quote:
Behold, fellow creatures, the sublimation of the individual and the coming of the Milum.
Interesting you bring up the word "sublimation". Several months ago I struggled with a phrase seeking to understand how the sacred secular has been watered down and devalued. The example I am reminded of is the use of songs in commercials. What were once considered works of art, "sacred" in a sense, has been sampled out into a soundbyte that fits into a commercial to sell a product that, in essence, has nothing to do with the "meaning" in the songs and this in a product that is ultimately just stuff.
I was looking for a secular parallel to sacrilege. Desublimation was the word that was discovered.
So I am now intrigued by "The Milum". Care to elaborate?
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While I will agree with you about the annoyance factor when art or classical music is downgraded to a background score for a commercial (Pachelbel's canon for coca cola); still, maybe there is someone who finds the tune so entrancing, that he searches for it and gets introduced thus to the original composer. It all comes around somehow in the larger scheme of things. And yes, our iconography seems to increasingly lack an aspirational value. Maybe that is because there is so little to aspire to in a globalised world with an information overload, where most things seem attainable.
Democratisation of high culture, is one way of looking at it. Desublimation, another. The former seems somehow like a better thing and less angst ridden, wouldn't you say? :-)
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"I was looking for a secular parallel to sacrilege. Desublimation was the word that was discovered." - aortomus
"Democratisation of high culture, is one way of looking at it. Desublimation, another" - Dharma
I don't know boys, you can "desublimate" if you want to, but I'm afraid that the cultural changes that we all see as a descent from a higher intellectual depth and acuity towards banal and shallower thinking is simply social evolution at it's best.
And lo! The train she runs, and like it or not, we are along for the ride.
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The true origins of Baudrillard and Derrida: In Europe, in certain intellectual circles, talking like that gets you laid. The big words are just used to hide the absence of a substantial idea. In reality, they're verbal games. Intellectual jokes. To repudiate language with language is to repudiate your repudiation. To announce the death of meaning is to announce the death of the meaning of your announcement. And so on. It's all a zero-sum game. The only people actually seduced by it are callow students in the liberal arts who have intellectual pretentions and no life experience.
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Allright now Hydra, don't you go being cruel to a heart thats true. Like you and aortomus and belligerentyouth, I decry the swapping of Beethoven for...uh... Elvis Presley. Anyway, the subject of this thread has been resolved quite nicely, namely, "desublimation" or the "democratization of the higher arts" both define the process of cultural dumbing that we observe in the world today. I just thought that you might like to discuss the reason why.
Last edited by themilum; 08/17/06 07:38 PM.
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Listen my dear Awad friends to the words of the newly dead R.A.Lafferty.
See...it writhes, it writhes, the coming of the Milum.
"How is a person or a world unmade or unformed? First, by being deformed. And following the deforming is the collapsing. The tenuous balance is broken. Insanity is induced easily under the name of the higher sanity. Then the little candle that is in each head is blown out on the pretext that the great cosmic light can better be seen without it."
[The process is not some great uprising of evil, easy to see, to rally against: it is insidious, it creeps, it overtakes the unwary]
"The persons and the worlds were never highly stable. A cross-member is removed here on the pretext of added freedom. Foundation blocks are taken away on the pretext of change. Supporting studs are pulled down on the pretext of new experience. And none of the entities had ever been supported more strongly than was necessary. What happens then? A man collapses, a town, a city, a nation, a world. And it is hardly noticed."
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Allright now Hydra, don't you go being cruel to a heart thats true.
I was thinking of myself at 19. Now I'm 27 and know better.
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I was thinking of myself at 19. Now I'm 27 and know better.
I know what you mean, Hydra, when I was 19 I thought a lot about myself too. Just think, when you are 54 you will have read twice as many books, seen twice as much life, and will have had twice as much time to consider life's meanings. Wow! You will be real smart then and I will be 89.
Good Luck. 
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Good Luck.
Thanks for the encouragement themilum. If I entertain any hope of becoming smart by the time I'm 54 I'm gonna need all the luck I can get! 
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I would call it trivialisation - and as the Feuerbach quote shows, it has been going on for some time. Fortunately, fresh fuel is added continuously  . "The Genes" are a likely candidate.
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Good one, Wiesber, as a verb or as a noun or as a example of its own meaning. But don't blame the genes. Genes function best when adaptation is required, like during glacial times. Good genes are not much needed in a Garden of Eden.
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This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite speeches from Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia":
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles wil turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveaal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
(notice in this metaphor that the future is behind, as was discussed on another thread at this site)
Aren't hiphop sampling techniques similar to what 13th-14th century composers were doing when they blended chant fragments and popular songs into polytextual motets? Then there's the cantus firmus mass--how many Renaissance composers embedded "L'homme armé" into their Mass Ordinary movements? How much Motown is embedded in CCM?
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But don't blame the genes - I don't! I think the concept of genes is a very powerful one. But what I meant (thus the quotation marks..) was, that this term is undergoing trivialisation, and is losing its poignancy thereby. It is being reduced to a label attached to one warring faction by their opponents.
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Quote:
But don't blame the genes - I don't! I think the concept of genes is a very powerful one. But what I meant (thus the quotation marks..) was, that this term is undergoing trivialisation, and is losing its poignancy thereby. It is being reduced to a label attached to one warring faction by their opponents.
Again well said, wiseber. Yet, I am beginning to question your good judgement, because so far, I have agreed with everything you've said.
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Quote:
This discussion reminds me of one of my favorite speeches from Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia":
"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles wil turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveaal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
(notice in this metaphor that the future is behind, as was discussed on another thread at this site)
Aren't hiphop sampling techniques similar to what 13th-14th century composers were doing when they blended chant fragments and popular songs into polytextual motets? Then there's the cantus firmus mass--how many Renaissance composers embedded "L'homme armé" into their Mass Ordinary movements? How much Motown is embedded in CCM?
Of course, speck, you make a good point, but are you up on your Gansta Rap?
The chants "Slap the Bitch" and "Death to Honkey" weren't, as a matter of course, included in 13th-14th Century polytextual motets.*
Similar things aren't necessarily comparable things, in fact, most of the time, I bet they ain't.
*Edit: Changed "Monet" to "motet" because the all-seeing eyes of Annastrophic caught my error. I can only hope that she doesn't find an error in this correction.
Last edited by themilum; 08/21/06 11:30 PM.
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... 13th-14th Century polytextual monets.
How synaesthetically anachronistically impressionistic of you, milum.
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Perhaps the feudal "armed man" corresponds in some way to an L.A. gangsta. However, I was talking about musical recycling methods, not content.
L'homme, l'homme, l'homme armé,
L'homme armé
L'homme armé doibt on doubter, doibt on doubter.
On a fait partout crier,
Que chascun se viengne armer
D'un haubregon de fer.
The man, the man, the armed man,
The armed man
The armed man should be feared, should be feared.
Everywhere it has been proclaimed
That each man shall arm himself
With a coat of iron mail.
Take cover son or you're assed-out
How do you like my chrome then I
watched the rookie pass out
Didn't have to blast him
but I did anyway
That young punk had to pay
So I just killed a man
Here is something you can't understand
How I could just kill a man
dona nobis pacem
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Again well said, wiseber. Yet, I am beginning to question your good judgement, because so far, I have agreed with everything you've said. Thank you, Milustopheles. So I actually succeeded in making life a little more difficult for you .
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