Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 07:49:57 -0500
Subject: Re: And afterward?



> I am currently writing a passage in my thesis about Lawrence 
> Grossberg's conceptualisation of 'mattering maps' and the radical 
> potential of popular culture on the affective level. My impression of 
> Fahrenheit 9/11 is that it (obviously) disrupts the hegemonic mattering 
> maps that reproduce a layering of patriot fervour with political 
> conservativism. Your discription of the 'unusually emotional and 
> hysterical' reaction by right-wing talkback radio listeners suggests 
> that perhaps Moore's film is operating as affective virus that disrupts 
> conservative mattering maps. By appearing on the MTV awards I think it 
> opens up the possibility that millions of young and impressionable 
> types will have the opportunity to map their own matterings that 
> connect the fabricated cool of MTV with Moore's critical representation 
> of events, hence, multiplying the potential power of Moore's message.
> 
> Ciao,
> Glen.
> PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural Research
> University of Western Sydney
 
Glen/All, 

 Your work w/ Grossberg and MTV's role as a possible affective virus brings up 
a few things.  First, so far as Grossberg is concerned, I like his second 
chapter in _We've Gotta Get Out of This Place_ on mapping popular culture where 
he describes a kind of Deleuzian-Heideggerian conception of affect that is 
a "perpersonal intensity" that takes up the stuff of daily life.  We see this 
both in the possibility that Moore will be taken up in the latest "birth of 
cool" as well as in one of the mo(o)re harrowing scenes in the movie where 
those young US tank soldiers play heavy metal as they fire on Iraqi 
villages.  ...Moore brings us up-to-date w/ what Coppola's Apocalypse Now 
Flight of the Valkiyres-style sequence means and sounds like to a current 
generation of the military.      

In some ways it's the collision of MTV-video sensibility and the possibility 
that Moore's film will have some impact that interests me.  Judy brings up a 
Moore being okay w/ his film already being distributed/pirated on the Internet, 
and while one can appreciate Moore's personal take on that, perhaps the broader 
implication is whether such file sharing doesn't suggest itself to a 
sensibility that makes Moore's film merely more of the same so far as one's DVD 
collection is concerned.  I would like to think otherwise, but during the show 
I attended there was as much talk about the prospect of Spiderman 2 coming out, 
and whether that would be any good, at the end of F911 as anything else. ...

best,

Geof