"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."
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.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
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.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
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].
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.