oneironazi

Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty. Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes. The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it. It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.

I'm torn by the feeling that the narcissism of documenting your life on the Internet can be a great form of self care but also feeling like it's a lot of work and nobody's damn business.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for your own pleasure.

The screen of cinema, video, and the computer is a threshold that divides the ordinary and the everyday from other realms that seem truer or larger than life. The interface between this world and the other world of imagination is a culturally produced and historically shifting construct that has taken many shapes and forms. Masking off part of the world permits images and symbols to invoke the other scene—not what is, but what could or might be or what was in some other time and place. Like a semi-permeable membrane, the screen filters out some things and not others, conjuring an auratic gleam from signs and symbols. Clearly, the alchemy of the screen is in the service of power as well as desire.

We grasp external spaces through our bodily situation. A “corporeal” or postural schema gives us a global, practical and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, and our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or “motor projects” radiates from us to the environment. Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It implies itself to space like a hand to an instrument and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object.