Mutilating the Stars: Digital Iconoclasm
At the speed in which virtualized narratives and sign-regimes move through different platforms and “communities”, they inherit or shed properties through a kind of digital friction— undergoing a type of metamorphosis. People are more familiar with this process through memes, which are a kind of sigil in which we Sign with highly-coded imagery that function as a type of apparatus of capture— a vessel— for certain sentiments and communications. Some operate as more of a floating signifier such as Pepe, where nearly anything can be injected into him and he’ll simply reflect it back to you, while others are more specific and time-bound that are useful for imbuing events and shifting things in the moment (a type of cybernetic chaos magic).
People aren’t separated from this transformative act. Avatars, profiles, bios, selfies/pictures, your voice, your face— all can be captured via their respective recording devices and broadcast to others, creating an image of you. Some people choose for this to be as representative of their “actual” self as possible. Others make pseudonymous egos or anonymous phantoms in which they try hide their digital self from their “real” selves— the question then being if they’re simply hiding their identity but still “being them”, or being an entirely different entity through the account.
In order to keep this succinct, I’m just going to have to totally omit several issues that in trying to get ahead of them here, would just turn this into pages of conflict which escape the interesting details. The entire act described above of the recording of “you” to then be observed by others gets entirely complicated if we inject something like phenomenology in which direct perception is disregarded— that even in reality we never REALLY see each other, and it’s all projections and images that we render— making the methodologies in which we do this via the internet just a more complicated and inexact process of beholding our ghosts.
So how am I going to reconcile this moving forward? I’m just not. Check out Husserl, Kant, whatever. The Noumena and knowing the “Thing in Itself”? Cool. Perhaps we’re in the butterfly’s dream. You may be walking through the remnants of the real after Descartes moved the world interior so far into the mind that he was unable to ascribe consciousness to others. Simulation, etc etc. Choose your existential nightmare and let’s move on.
The real intent is this: however we choose to regard these projections and appendages of our consciousness in our layman technological contexts that we engage with through social media and the internet now, there’s a fascinating and even problematic question of changing that image. There’s endless art, literature, religious guidance, and so on that questions what it is to change as a human being and to move on— how to love and grow, heal and deal with loss. Cultures and faiths inform and dictate how to deal with the transformation of our soul’s incarnation, but an interesting question arises: what of the digital “soul’s” change (or the image of it)?
This isn’t a new question really, in fact it’s pretty simple marketing and branding. Really what we’re dealing with is the initial intent of just being somebody online— in practice— is really the realization that people’s digital image is going through hyperreal brandification whether they want it to or not. Brands are even becoming personified in some hyperstitional nightmare. There’s countless articles dealing with the perils and the analysis of social media in regard to things like FOMO (fear of missing out), that people are posting highlight reels of themselves that aren’t really representational of their actual life, and even leading up to the point of where people are transforming their physical bodies in order to cultivate a more ideal digital image of that body to be captured.
I viewed part of a harrowing event that I truly think marks the end of an epoch shorty after COVID was in full gear, in which to fully appreciate its horror, one would need to understand something about "the Stars". Hollywood celebrities and the use of "Stars" is interesting, but the component that we're concerned with here is one of distance. The stars are far away from you, they are above you, they are elevated. They are elevated to a nearly (explicitly?) godlike distance in which cultures have developed their own mythopoetic epics in order to anthropomorphize and contextualize the cosmos and the GOD(s). Celebrities act as a kind of icon or idol in this same context. While there have always been famous people, the "neoliberal" global order has special need of them to be almost explicitly godlike for endless reasons we'll be passing over, what matters is the medium. Argue with it if you want, but within this point, the medium is the message.
What Marshall McLuhan ultimately meant with "the medium is the message", is that the the content within the message is largely secondary to the influence of the environment the content is on, which is more concerned with the CULTIVATION of the IMAGE. The content can nearly be anything, and is certainly secondary. Poets of old were considered IMAGE TRAINERS of the empire. Virgil, Homer, Milton -- all participated in the creation of an eternal image, in which their cosmography was ensconced into the empire, and then into the people as an ethnogenesis.
In globalization, ours are celebrities. Hollywood celebrities.
The HORROR arrives when these stars lose that TRAINED IMAGE. YOU have been trained to view television and see it as from the beyond, it's not near you. The studio creates distance. The lighting creates mystique—distance. The way they speak is trained to be hypnogogic and inviting— distant. Everything renders them into a separate image from your reality so that you put them in not just an elevated place, but a distant one. This is their image.
They mutilated that image.
Due to COVID shutting a lot of studio productions down for a while, a lot of these "stars" found themselves STREAMING, out of a perceived obligation to "create content". This was an iconoclastic process. As described above with Pepe as a floating signifier to hold whatever content and mirror it, these celebrities are culminations and assemblages of trained image-distance. The stars came down to Earth. Why is that? Because everyone streams. 9 year olds stream. Your mom probably streams. Everyone does. The internet is the public space now. They mutilated their television image to fit in an internet image. What does this do? Why does this matter?
If you're Ellen and you can go a shitty webcam with the mic barely working, stuttering and stammering while not being funny or amusing to save your life, you know where you are? You're in the wrong hood. Every random hottie in Nebraska with a TikTok is now lateral with you. Every guy cracking jokes is lateral with you. Everything on the internet is now lateral with you. For reasons I'd like to explore further another day, the image of television does not fully transfer to streaming. It gets translated into content completely. Ellen is not Ellen, Ellen is content. The distance by the analog television has been lost. It's no longer from the beyond. This is actually so palpable that there's actually a genre of "analog horror", such as Gemini Home Entertainment and Local58. Watch them on YouTube, they're important pieces of art in this context.
With so many things being translated into content, everything is now entering this liminal twilight. This dark hallway with no discernable exists, where there's inertia without movement, where there's time without moments. Content makes everything lateral into quantity of content, like it's the virtual Prima Materia. These "Stars" were above us, they were even admired at one point as a reflection of the popular culture of the society—be that cynical or not. Now they're perceived (rightfully) as a propaganda wing of a nefarious entertainment complex in which you are to be harvested, and that hole in your heart will be filled with content.
In a way, it was like they were the last living things. We were all in the twilight, where culture feels stuck for almost two decades now. Television was *almost* outside of it, though content was bleeding in. With the stars mutilating their digital image, it was like watching an angel blow its brains out. They were one of the last living virtual things— not real, but not quite content yet. They're just content now.
Interesting note: Why did GOD command us to destroy false idols? Why do ISIS destroy statues the same way the Greeks did with Minerva in Troy? It's because the statue was the medium in which the ethnogenesis— the TRAINED IMAGE and the archetypal representation of the soul—was manifest. In the destruction of these idols, was the destruction of a trained image, and in the destruction of a trained image was the destruction of a people. Statues and icons were always targets, and not because of religious stupidity like we idiotically attribute to it now. They were a target because if you destroyed the images, they would forget who they were. A century passes, the storytellers are dead, there's no written script, the images are gone— the people are gone. As we forget who we were in this liminal twilight, new poets are going to come out. Virtual shamans, digital seers, keyboard illusionists—they will inherit the Earth (which is captured in this virutalized techno-capital singularity to the fullest) and create the new cosmography— the mythopoetic structure in which the transcendent will break through the material-cybernetic structure and actually enter into the soul. You're watching the breakdown of the old poets, and like how the Hellenic world slowly began to dim, they took the image of Aeneas— that hero of Troy— and founded Rome.
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