Angelina Jolie

Follow Angelina Jolie Updates:

. . .

Angelina Jolie against the Current World: A Brief Analysis of Motives and Effectiveness in Popular Trends

By Gray Kane on | From graykane.blogspot.com

Zizek has simultaneously achieved something and denied himself of something that many of us pursue, and fail. Kurt Cobain appealed to the desire for social change, without rhetorically changing minds; as a result, he committed suicide. Eddie Vetter likewise entered into popculture with a gradually more direct message, but at some point his message became more direct off the stage than on it, and as a result, the message became disassociated with his drive for popularity. Eminem tried to align his call for social demand more closely with his popularity, but his commentary only formed a subset of his rhymes (his call for popularity); at the height of his call for social change, Eminem retracted from the social scene to produce a less coherent and thus less effective army for that change. Angelina Jolie also entered into the scene through popculture and then, like U2, produced a secondary discourse of social change through global agencies, like the UN, but most people distinguish between the two Jolies (and U2s). Zizek has entered into popculture through his call for social change, and in this he has achieved something special. However, his call for change remains, at best, abstract. Zizek himself identifies that such abstraction produces an irreducible gap between ideas and action.

And yet, his ideas point to a way out of what so many of us try to enter into and yet fail: the unification of the call for social change with popular media. In "Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933," Zizek identifies that both Heidegger and Foucault unsuccessfully tried to make the leap from ontological analysis (the study of geneology and change of an existence) to ontic change (the call for changes in the present). In both cases, the study of the past's formation of the present produced a miscalculation of how affecting the present produces conscious change. The irreducible gap between abstraction and material actualization results in the coincidence of theoretical astuteness and material inadaptability. Unfortunately, Zizek realizes this in the midst of his having defined himself in terms of a call for the present embedded in an abstract argument about the geneological interconnectiveness of historical ideas. As a result, his argument often detaches itself from the present (ontic) state of material circumstances in an extensive debate of the relevance of materially detached ideas.

For this reason, I struggle to enter into the discourse for change, but always and consistently embedded in current material circumstances. Like Zizek, we can enter into the popular minds on the level of the critique of popular minds, but any theoretical argument always and consistently has to remain intimately tied to real material circumstances, like Jackass, Rad Girls, Brawndo, Bill O'Reilly, George Bush, current critical-thinking skills, etc.

In a significant way, we're already doing this. The special features of movies like Children of Men from the start have social commentaries now.

We need more of this. The two discourses cannot remain separate, but rather intimately tied at all times, in order to raise social consciousness and to bring about real social change.