Consumerist reality is knowingly self-simulated with no orchestrator behind it

Evidence

A History of Violence suggests that twenty-first century America is a less a country in which violence is a repressed underside than that it is moebian band where if you begin with ultraviolence you will eventually end up with homely banality, and vice versa. In the final scene, when Tom — now “Tom” — returns to his house, “everything appears in a totally different light, though it has stayed the same”. The images of domesticity have now become “images of domesticity”, the meatloaf and the mashed potato have become “meatloaf” and “mashed potato”, reflexively-placed icons of American normality, the very definition of the unhomely, the unheimlich, the uncanny. Such, as Žižek said in the 9/11 piece, is the nature of “late capitalist consumerist society”, where “‘real social life’ itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake”. This is a simulated scenario far bleaker than that of The Truman Show or Dick’s Time Out of Joint, since it has been freely and knowingly embraced by the subjects themselves. There is no Them behind the scenes orchestrating and choreographing the simulation. At the end of the film, everyone is fooling but no one is fooled. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 457

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Fisher’s consistent claim that adult consumer reality is itself a fantasy suppressing the uncanny; also ch.16 on the true atheist and meaninglessness. — connects to: Adult consumer reality is itself a fantasy that suppresses the uncanny — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 375; Consumer culture’s desire-production reproduces itself autonomously without needing any external cause — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 468
• DEEPTHINKING: The simulation-without-a-cheat, everyone-fooling-no-one-fooled formulation resolves and sharpens an idea Fisher has been circling all book.

Broader Connections

• Consumer culture’s desire-production reproduces itself autonomously without needing any external cause #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 468