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Michael Jackson by Andy Worhol.

 

 

Liberation, France

Michael Jackson: Mirror of Our Alienated Lives

 

"That millions of Westerners and others - the soon-to-be citizen workers of techno-democratic society - have chosen this pathetic paragon of all modern regressions, speaks volumes about the malaise in civilization today."

 

By Gilles Hertzog

 

Translated By Mary Kenney

 

August 13, 2009

 

France - Liberation - Original Article (French)

Michael Jackson's glove from his 1983 Motown 25 television special performance of 'Billie Jean', when he performed the Moonwalk for the first time.

 

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST VIDEO: Chinese fans react to the death of Michael Jackson, June 29, 00:03:37 RealVideo

There are the globalized icons of the good, like Obama and Mandela; icons of planetary success, such as Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg; icons of evil like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Bernie Madoff; and then there's the family of tragic icons, illustrated recently by Marilyn Monroe or Lady Di, into which Michael Jackson has just entered, propelled thanks to his sudden death into the firmament of shattered destinies. It was a universal tsunami of tears and lamentation; a worldwide communion ad nauseam from one end of the global village to the other; a media-mounted liturgy never before seen; a meta-spectacle that Guy Debord could never have imagined, coupled with a marketing effort from hell.   

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And then there were the innumerable masses of the weeping; the orphans by the millions of a universal big brother; the idealized mirror of their alienated lives; bearer of their dreams of escaping the postmodern condition of being nameless and faceless; and tomorrow, as such a crisis demands, without purpose or status for many. As if they had all lost a part of themselves, deprived by his death of the only transcendence still at their disposal. As if listening to "Michael" could freeze time. As if becoming intoxicated by repeatedly listening to Bad or Thriller was their last shield against the menacing void of a world on the run where youth, as sought after as it may be, is no longer invited to the banquet of life - except as a forum for pure consumerism. You want no more of us? Well, following our big brother Michael Jackson's example, we no longer want to enter a world that doesn't want us.

 

And therein lay the enigma. As acculturated as they are, how were these millions of young, immigrant, Westernized kids from Beijing or Tokyo - for the most part children in crisis - able to so fervently identify with such an anti-model, to venerate such a toxic icon? That is the question. Because ultimately, Michael Jackson is nearly the perfect repoussoir [an object in a painting to the side of the central object]. A denier of self (his color and sex), a disembodied torturer of his own flesh, his skin, body and face martyred voluntarily, an activist of infantilization, father of children conceived at random and at a safe distance, phobic in every regard. Jackson is sort of a voluntary member of the living dead, a pure social zombie. The man from Neverland embodies the crescendo of infantile regression and mortifying posturing.

 

Self-denial, rejection of others, refusal of the world, the polymorphic Bamb-ization of social practices and pre-Oedipal inveigler of the world. - and with teddy bears as the ultimate goal. And all around during this time, slow death was at work in his own life. Auto-destruction without an escape hatch. Up until the very end, a failure to respect the threshold of a spectacle that had yet to take place.  

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The artist. "He was the Mozart of the 20th century," a fellow on TV beamed (Mozart would have been the Michael Jackson of the 18th?). Less than a choreographer, he metabolized the erotic ballet of the body. He was a techno-puppet teleported onto the scene; a walking Game Boy; a Photoshoped video-clip abusing aerobic syncopations. The music? A cheap soap of supermarket kitsch, a pompous and pretentious disco-funk. Where, therefore, was the soul - the soul of which Michael Jackson wanted to make himself high priest? The "soul," in other words, the soul. As for his famed moonwalk, that feigned motion forward which makes the dancer move backward, it is the symbol in action, if there is one, of an existence turned entirely to the rear, devoted to a dreamed regression toward, "the green paradise of childhood loves" so dear to that other lover of all things morbid who was Baudelaire.

 

[Editor's Note: Baudelaire was a notoriously decadent 19th century French poet].

 

SEE ALSO ON THIS:

Le Monde, France: Michael Jackson: The Death of a Way of Doing Business
Nachrichten, Switzerland: Jackson: Symbol of a Near-Dead Music Industry
Folha, Brazil: Neverland Was Never Forever
Le Figaro, France: Michael Jackson: A Man Who Lived His Life in Reverse
Le Figaro, France: Jackson: The Tragic 'Genetically Modified' Icon of Globalization
Novosti, Russia: Russian Fans of Michael Jackson Still Devastated
El Universal, Mexico: Hugo Chavez Scolds CNN for Coverage of Jackson's Death
ZS News, People's Republic of China: 'When Michael Jackson Visited Mainland China'

 

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Such is the idol. Such is the master and role model that these countless fans are grieving for, if one can say so. That Michael Jacksons of all ranks and from all disciplines - large or small, famous or anonymous - offer public professions of their shortcomings and ill-being in these busy times when the laws of our fathers are now overshadowed - reflects an attempt to be liberated from the psychic order. That millions of Westerners and others - the soon-to-be citizen workers of techno-democratic society - have chosen this pathetic paragon of all modern regressions, speaks volumes about the malaise in civilization today.

 

In terms of collective regression, we've seen the worst in quite some time. And music, even if it has been a mask and a fiction, as it was here, never killed anyone. Better still, the trans-racial Michael Jackson, translation of skin and music from black to white, has on the contrary probably helped make possible the election of a Black to the White House. Nevertheless, that this necrophilic ecstasy has seized the global village at a time when crisis in all things has become the normal way of the world doesn't auger well. The child is father to the man, Freud said. So be it. But one needn't feel obliged to heap praise on the child-king. Particularly when he, the wretch, was day after day condemned to death for being so, to the complete detriment of himself and all others. 

 

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[Posted by WORLDMEETS.US August 15, 11:15pm]

 







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