biding historical
> mysteries: it relied on an opaque 'standards-setting' process involving
> tacit, backroom coordination between campaigns and national TV networks.
> I'm sure that when the GOP captured the red flag in 2000, it was due in
> part to a few GOP's power-brokers at the time who just liked red more than
> blue. But it was also a deliberate political strategy. It allowed the GOP
> to simultaneously *appropriate* the color associated with political threat
> — insurgency, revolution, and communism — while *negate* those same
> discourses. And it's on that basis that, a decade and a half later when the
> alt-right 'took the red pill,' we can see what they were up to: they tried
> to do to the GOP what the GOP had done to 'the left.'
>
> But wait! There's more!
>
> You cite Philip K. Dick — much as you cite Robert Smithson — more or less
> randomly, as someone who decades later thought "in similar terms" to
> Benjamin. But PKD figures much more directly in this: in the mid-'60s he
> wrote "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" on which Total Recall was
> based. If I remember rightly, there's no pill in that story, but there's no
> need to be so literal. His last novel, The Transmigration of Timothy
> Archer, hinges in part on the proposition that eating red things was
> central to Christian beliefs about the Resurrection. That novel drew
> generally on PKD's long-standing interest in gnosticism, but it drew very
> specifically on John Allegro's theory that Jesus wasn't a historical figure
> but, instead, was a mythological figure that originated in the ritual use
> of psychoactive mushrooms — Amanita muscaria.
>
> By academic standards, this kind of associative chain is erratic to the
> point of madness. It leads everywhere and nowhere, unconstrained by logic,
> definitions, context, or method. And it drifts and leaps from one context
> and scale to another: from kooky theories to cinematic fragments to
> backroom agreements on the fringes of governmentality. But these delirious
> landscapes are *precisely* where and how memes operate. I don't think
> Benjamin's theories have much to say about this all — not without doing
> serious theoretical violence to the myriad specificities at play. And you
> concede:
>
> One need barely ask how Benjamin would react to the film’s Platonic
>> allegory. Of course Benjamin would take the red pill.
>>
>
> But we know how he reacted, don't we? I dimly remember — as if through a
> glass (or maybe a scanner) darkly — that his suicide involved a glass of
> wine, and even more dimly that it was said to be white, not red.
>
> ❤️
>
> Ted
>
> On 4 Apr 2018, at 2:46, Geert Lovink wrote:
>
> Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters
>>
> <...>
>
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Ivan Knapp
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