The easiest way to exemplify what Godard's Weekend (P207) may be seeking to redeem is with Hyborian exemplars.
'Neutral value', for a start, is not physical but mental, in that our own world is ruled by the brain (of acolytes of the mirror of illusions or inductive logic.)
Capitalism is the practice of inductive logic. In other words, it's the obsession with numbers (monetary). Grace Slick recalls in her memoir (HB62/1)
Then, on
October 30, 1939, at Chicago Hope Hospital, Virginia Wing gave birth to Grace
Barnett Wing at 7;45 A.M. Well, not really. I don’t actually know my actual
time of birth or the name of the hospital, because they weren’t written on my
birth certificate. Back then, record keepers weren’t as anal-compulsive as they
are today, so I’ve always made up my own stats when it was time to fill in the
blanks. (page 12 – compare
with Lindsay Anderson quote on ‘numbers’ Alternates 4)
The 30s/40s/50s obviously wasn't as 'bad' as the 90s when the book was written, and not so bad as today. Why? Because numbers are algorithms and we now live by algorithms. We are all machine-code.
The mental attribute is hard-wired and leads to ever more sameness. In the opening car jam in Weekend, the irony is that all the people strive to be different while they are all in the same predicament (of being in the same intractable situation.)
So the open question has to be: are the compulsions of capitalism and consumption the same as those of the inductive parallel reality? I think they have to be, since capitalism is simply the practical application of induction on the population.
Induction has a neutralising influence, whereby psychic reservoir is gobbled-up by goods in the capital system (P207). News is likewise the domain of expertise and 'neutral facts' that cannot be challenged.
Inductive wizardry goes right back to Newton, which Blake's print captures -see P201 - the body becomes almost an outgrowth of the dominant head, and the compulsion of the ego is oblivious to primal surroundings. This parallel reality is compulsive and ineluctably attracts the ego to its sterility.
The body contains reciprocal value in the opposing elements of the physique, but the universe of primitive action occurs outside the parallel universe of numbers and algorithms.
Sorcery is the expertise that delves more and more into this illusory reality. The reality of the brain is electro-chemical impulses as opposed to the physical reality of the fertile universe.
At this point, one has to state what the fertile universe is! It's not simply a case of being erotic and frolicking in the woods; it's the large-scale similarities that are apparent in nature.
Different things grow irregularly, and irregular lines create vibrancy of colour and mottled ochres.
A line can go left or right, so there is a continual vibrancy in the way it moves. There tends to be a sense of casual degradation, that the natural world is trying to get in there. The worm wriggles in the nooks and crannies.
The physical ease of such settings has an effect on the psyche, much like a campfire that soothes the vagabond after a day's exertions. All that is seductive to the area of bodily and psychic ease. Cynthia Harnett's illustrations to The Wool-sack (prev) are another case-in-point.
In the fertile universe, metamorphosis is allowed, which means that degradation and decadence are part of the scene ,a sign of the powerful forces of nature in operation.
Before going full-on into Hyborian motifs, here are another two pictures that speak of dim lights, mottled hues, frayed fabrics and an old-time vibrancy of decadent living (P202)
Syrian refugees
It's a type of casual attitude to living in nomadic ways of a 60s hippy/beatnik culture; a Bedouin tent come VW campervan ethos.
The big question is, why did this ethos decline and capital surge forward once more following the '68 fracas in France, Woodstock and all that jazz? It seems that people honestly believe in the benefits, but it seems also that a half-truth is being promulgated.
Optimism is electric and the future we are being sold is essentially 100% electric that one's brain then plugs-into, one with the machine. But as has been noted previously, this implies the stories we are told do not broach the dark side of existence; expressive algorithms (prev) will only tell optimistic stories.
The Noto-esque, dark and bestial underworld of debauched metamorphosis is totally not there (see The Rape of Europa, Titian.) You will only get it in fantasy; you will get it in Grant Morrison and Ye West, the mainstream will blithely stay the same.
The problem is, without the dark underworld of the carbon-based soil that harbours things living and decaying, there can be no revival (no Dionysian rites of jollity.)
The half-truth is that the psyche is much more like an algorithm - humans become half-machine, while algorithms become half-human. In a quest for sameness and what 'they' call camaraderie, one gets stories of optimistic nothingness.
The parallel reality can give stimulation (and simulation, natch), but not the casual sense of being freely active in the animal sense.
"A lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies.." (Beast from animated X-Men 'Weapon X, Lies and Videotape', quoting Alfred Lord Tennyson.)
