Hype - Formulas for Attracting Attention

hype 1 (hp) Slang

n.

1. Excessive publicity and the ensuing commotion: the hype surrounding the murder trial.
2. Exaggerated or extravagant claims made especially in advertising or promotional material: "It is pure hype, a gigantic PR job" (Saturday Review).
3. An advertising or promotional ploy: "Some restaurant owners in town are cooking up a $75,000 hype to promote New York as 'Restaurant City, U.S.A.'" (New York).
4. Something deliberately misleading; a deception: "[He] says that there isn't any energy crisis at all, that it's all a hype, to maintain outrageous profits for the oil companies" (Joel Oppenheimer).

tr.v. hyped, hyp·ing, hypes

To publicize or promote, especially by extravagant, inflated, or misleading claims: hyped the new book by sending its author on a promotional tour.

No! THAT is Disgusting!

from Science Report

There’s a reason that we have a physical reaction to men like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Anthony Weiner, and John Edwards. There’s a reason why we can dismiss the death of Osama bin Laden with a, “he got what he deserved”, but seethe with hatred for someone like Dominique Strauss-Khan. It’s the same reason that liberals look at photos of Rush Limbaugh or Mitt Romney and become inflamed in the same way that conservatives may physically react to pictures of President Barack Obama. Our perceptions guide our moral and physical “disgust centers” in our brains, and often, those two neural networks overlap.

The widespread use of fMRI (functional magnetic imaging) has allowed researchers to watch as sensory stimuli literally “light up” various areas of the brain, which has lead to some very illuminating understandings of how our brains actually work. One of those areas, our “moral” center, is actually closely connected to the area of our brain in which physical revulsion is located. In other words, according to our brain circuitry, morality and disgust are closely related.

To illustrate this, researchers have conducted a commonplace study in which pairs of individuals are given $100 to share. However, only one of the individuals has the ability to decide how the cash is divided among them, with the other person having the ability to accept or reject the offer. If the offer is accepted, they both get the money. If the offer is rejected, they both get nothing. If the deal is rejected, fMRI scans show that the person rejecting the offer shows pronounced activity in the disgust center of the brain. Generally, any deal that offered the second person less than 43% of the pot was rejected, meaning the “rejecter” turned down a free $43 simply because the other person was going to get $57; a moral judgement that triggers feelings of physical disgust.

Jonathan Haidt, of the University of Virginia, told TIME, “There is literal disgust and moral disgust, and the two overlap. Betrayal, hypocrisy, certain kinds of baseness trigger the brain's moral response." In fact, so powerful is this mechanism in our brains that we even physically respond to witnessing someone else get cheated. The more honorably the victim responds to being taken advantage of, the more visceral our reactions are. In the case of John Edwards, who had an illegitimate child with his mistress while Elizabeth Edwards was dying of cancer, makes the bile rise in the back of the throat because we are powerfully morally reactive, and subsequently disgusted, by the behavior. In a sense, our physical reaction to those things which we deem immoral, serve to gird our moral code and make us even more morally reactive.

Perhaps this explains the vehemence and apparent inflexibility with which some, those who believe they are in the moral right, pursue their own personal, political, and social agendas. If we understand that the physical reaction is just a trick of brain chemistry, we may be able to approach moral questions more objectively, and more reasonably.

Shame and the Revenge of the Re-Animated Partial Object

A recent discovery of a parasite at a London fish market is the embodiment of this particular conception of the lamella at its purest. The cymothoa exigua, a small parasitic crustacean, was found inside the mouth of a red snapper fish. The isopod had attached itself to the artery under the fish’s tongue and drained the blood until the organ atrophied, whereupon the tiny parasite effectively replaced the fish’s tongue. Remarkably, the cymothoa exigua does not cause any other damage to its host and, in addition to performing all the standard duties of a tongue, actually relieves strain on the host fish’s circulatory system. Although the BBC article which initially reported the incident is careful to reassure its readers that “the creature does not pose any threat to humans and only attaches itself to fish tongues” (par. 7), one cannot help but imagine a Cronenbergian future where such paradoxically ‘benign parasites’ become fashionably healthful accessories, and where a slightly improved circulatory system warrants offering one’s tongue as a Kafkian ‘undead wound’ to a disgusting parasitic crustacean. Indeed, the scenario bears a strong resemblance to an early sequence from David Cronenberg’s 1975 film Shivers (They Came from Within). In this sequence, two doctors discuss the creation of “imitative parasites” which, much like the red snapper’s isopod, act as an alternative to organ transplants, ultimately ‘improving’ the organ that they colonize. We again return to what may be termed ‘the cultural studies lamella’ par excellence: an organ that enlists the services of the subject only to supersede his false sense of autonomy, strip him of control, and essentially “find its way” (Žižek 1996 par. 34) at the expense of the unified, ‘total’ subject which it infects.

How disgusting!

...given that Levinas connects the subjective deadlock or “radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself” experienced in shame as identical to the subject’s encounter with nausea. The means by which these analogous affections impact the subject and his self-conception are of particular interest to Žižek, whose primary interpretation of the lamella is dependent on the disorienting disgust and nausea which it inspires (the so-called “disgust with Life” or “disgusting substance of enjoyment”) (Žižek 2005: 142, 1995: 206). In other words, the disarming ‘closeness’ of our selves to our bodies which occurs at the moment of nausea (when we are compelled to expel the unbearable pain of our insides), ultimately reaffirms our “revolting and yet unsuppressible presence to ourselves” (Agamben 1999: 105). Nausea as such constitutes an intestinal overtaking (a literal ‘revolt(ing)’) or organic supremacy that renders us suddenly and traumatically aware of our bodily and psychic limitations. As Levinas emphasizes:

Nausea posits itself not only as something absolute, but as the very act of self-positing: it is the affirmation itself of being. It refers only to itself, is closed to all the rest, without windows onto other things. Nausea carries its centre of attraction within itself (Levinas 2003:68).

This definition of nausea, taken up and developed by Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz:

The Witness and the Archive, should be read alongside of Agamben’s own description of shame: Shame] is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign. Shame is what is produced in the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self- possession, servitude and sovereignty

Fundamentally, shame is “what is most intimate in us” (Agamben 1999: 105), revealing not “our nothingness but the totality of our existence” (Levinas 2003: 65), while simultaneously emptying us of the very subjectivity it forces us to recognize.

Christine Evans, "M. Hommelette’s Wild Ride: Lamella as a Category of Shame"

Designing Biga's

What could replace capital? And why would you want to put one on?

Purity of Essence

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: [very nervous] Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Uh, Jack, Jack, listen... tell me, tell me, Jack. When did you first... become... well, develop this theory?

General Jack D. Ripper: [somewhat embarassed] Well, I, uh... I... I... first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

General Jack D. Ripper: Yes, a uh, a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I... I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Hmm.

General Jack D. Ripper: I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women uh... women sense my power and they seek the life essence. I, uh... I do not avoid women, Mandrake.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: No.

General Jack D. Ripper: But I... I do deny them my essence.

The Jouissance of Reading Morrisson

Nietzsche

Wherever responsibilities are sought, it is usually the instinct of wanting to judge and punish which is at work. Becoming has been deprived of its innocence when any being-such-and-such is traced back to will, to purposes, to acts of responsibility: the doctrine of the will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is, because one wanted to impute guilt. The entire old psychology, the psychology of will, was conditioned by the fact that its originators, the priests at the head of ancient communities, wanted to create for themselves the right to punish--or wanted to create this right for God. Men were considered "free" so that they might be judged and punished--so that they might become guilty: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental counterfeit in psychologicis was made the principle of psychology itself).

- Nietzsche, "Twilight of the Idols"