| Abstract |
"We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and ultimately our judgment. The transgressive nature of these scandals leads many to understand them in revelatory terms: as offering a tantalising glimpse of what really goes on, cutting through the multiple layers of artifice to reveal an underlying 'truth'. Others, however, contend that these routine transgressions simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet there exists today another, far more insidious form of scandal, one that is concerned less with the direct accumulation of capital than with shoring up the base mechanisms of power. Here, the scandal paradoxically replicates the disruptive effects of radical creation (without, for all that, presenting anything new) in order to produce its very opposite: stasis. What we instead bear witness to is the production of the simulacrum of novelty, the sole purpose of which is to stand in for - and thereby neutralise - the very possibility of real creation and the threat it entails. From Donald Trump to Kanye West to the Academy Awards, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas like art, advertising, social media and politics actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creation as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy"-- Provided by publisher. |
