Je Suis ‘Not Jeremy’?

[Michel]

 From Paul Nightingale's most recent blog post, on Corbyn, Je Suis ‘Not 
Jeremy’?, this excerpt:

The hysterical language of the so-called War on Terror can be adopted 
and adapted without ridicule and might pass without comment, so 
established is it as common sense. And so, by way of conclusion, it is 
worth thinking here about Thomas Pynchon’s take on the manufactured 
response to the attack on the World Trade Centre (aka ‘9/11’, nothing if 
not a branding exercise, arguably the reason why he refused to use that 
term in /Bleeding Edge/). In his 2003 Foreword to a new edition of 
Orwell’s /Nineteen Eighty‑Four/, Pynchon addressed precisely this issue 
when he wrote of the modern surveillance state (part of what Foucault 
would call a disciplinary society) and ‘social control on a scale those 
quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy mustaches could 
only dream about’. He is making a point that invokes the enforced 
conformity Delphy and Todd describe when they discuss ‘Je Suis Charlie’: 
the kind of totalitarian society that we might have in mind when we 
think of ‘quaint old … tyrants’ isn’t what we should expect to see 
today. If Conservatives do currently dream of ‘destroy[ing] the Labour 
brand’, their fantasy is given substance by the logic of advertising: 
the Labour Party could disappear as easily as did Woolworth’s if, 
indeed, it is no more than just another brand.

Complete: https://isread.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/je-suis-not-jeremy/

Schoenberg's Favourite Colour: https://isread.wordpress.com/

Michel.
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