Francesco Masci asserts that modern culture is the place where the Subject of occidental metaphysical tradition, having been expelled from the society, finds refuge as a fictitious subjectivity, meaning as an aggregate of self-referential images. The events of modern culture inscribe the subject into a neutralised temporality through which the aggressive will to tackle society inevitably turns into an apology for that same society. Works of art in the avant-garde tradition, like “installations” or “happenings” offer nothing so much as spectacular examples of this mecanism that succeeds in reconciling the rhetoric of change and the practice of powerlessness. Masci believes that culture functions as a catalyst for “events” that are always expected, consumed and then forgotten. They are not only ontologically unable to revolutionize society, they constitute the strongest justification for it. He calls “entertainment” the withering away of politics, the dispersal of the role of the State in society as it gives way to a fictitious culture, where each picture merely evokes another, leading to the utopia of difference. The overturning of the old order with the French Revolution gave way to a new power which immediately enslaved human beings: the flood of images, myths and symbols conveyed by that culture. Entertainment in fact creates perpetual waiting periods, while events proliferate ever more rapidly. To Masci, entertainment represents power which no longer rules from the top but by means of an horizontal dissemination that is another form of domination.
Quotes
- “All the promises culture makes are satisfied and cannot be renewed because, at each moment in history, it produces and exhausts its own public.”
- “Superstition reduces the world to an horizon made of predetermined waiting periods. Thanks to that, we are confident in our knowledge not only of what is going to happen but of what should happen.”
Publications
- Entertainment! A Defense of Domination, Allia, 2011.
- Superstitions, Allia, 2005.