(Media)tion

Between the centralized networks in control of systemic change and the great mass of flesh, there exists a superstructural entity of language which moderates the two, in any corpus. The human body uses the mind’s interior directives for this function, control-faculties and the body itself modulated by emotions, beliefs, irrationalities, etc. The social corpus works in the same way, with the Marxian schema of the church’s function performing this for the same reason, its linguistic being existing as a spiritual entity between the networks of power and the minds of the people, ordering and coordinating both into one.

Part of the problem of such an entity is that it must cope as well with exterior threats, linguistic abnormalities arising from outside of its own purview. It’s through this that linguistic immune systems emerge, defense and sublimation mechanisms against that which cannot be tolerated by one or the other on either side of itself. The linguistic system is always first-in, last-out in this regard, taking input immediately before any other and being the final arbiter of exput. 

Night court shows this eloquently, in regards to to social phenomena in the United States. The court exists as an intermediary space for the claims of the great fleshly mass of the city, a vector of contagion for exterior phenomena. The court then moderates and sublimates such phenomena, mocking them in order to fit them into a greater schema of understanding, allowing their existence to be given life within the dominant media narrative. Such is the purpose behind the obsession with “representation”. Those demanding it desire assimilation in the most terminal fashion, to turn the identities they speak for into a fully woven-in part of the larger fabric of meaning created as the social superstructure.

It’s here that the trajectory of television over the years shows itself. Reality TV and investigative journalism have both been on a dual quest to expose and digest every last niche of the national body beneath itself. Louie Theroux and Vice travel to distant corners, picking up subjects into the machine, turning their individuality in a 45 minute morsel to wash down with a smooth glass of every fifteen minute ad breaks. Reality TV always seeks out the chaotic in order to contain it, treating like a trophy each new specimen it can find to sensationalize, by being a further out example of what has been captured.

For that uncapturable, figureheads countlessly appear to give face to things with no vertical order. Trends and memes are given faces, names, mascots in order to allow the media to sublimate it into its machine. We see it time and time again, as Richard Spencer emerges to give face and name to the nebulous and some would argue non-existent “alt-right”, as Fuentes attempts to do today with less success. Debate shows propped up similar figures from the 1960s, shows like Firing Line taking whoever could put on a suit and defend the contents of some best-selling book, in hopes of putting a person in front of a movement, and in doing so, give that movement a shape and size so it can be slowly but surely digested and absorbed.