The video's updated.

One of the men in the videos is on the board of the local chapter of NOW.

It's depressing, but it continues the delusions of bourgeois self-regarding "progressivism". "The lowest of the low" is the new normal; "failure" is the new success; "anti-social" is the new social. That they're all pathetic isn't the issue; the issue is their need to impose their fantasies on others, and the response of their enablers.

Liberal individualism is stupid. But I'm wondering if "communitarianism" was just a way to reconstruct community after individualism won out over republicanism: a Hobbesian tribalism on the frontier, a community of individualists who are stuck with each other. It's Puritan. References to the "revival of communitarianism" are absurd. It's a modern invention. Republicanism doesn't destroy the private realm; back to Arendt again.  All of this shit—not just the last video—is masturbation in public.  

in re: masturbation in public. I said it all before.

The experience of the sex act is social, formal, communicative, and if the world is seen as the social realm, world-creating. The moment of orgasm as reflex is aformal, asocial (isolate), ecstatic and if the world is seen as social, world destructive. Sex as performance is a form of communication; orgasm is artless. The pretense of an ‘art’ of orgasm is vulgar. The popular understanding of Pollock’s work is as an ‘act’ of ‘expression,’ as orgasm not structure. Mondrian saw structure. Duchamp thought nothing about cutting off a few inches of Mural (1943) because it was too big for Peggy Guggenheim’s wall. And Pollock didn’t complain. The what and how of communication for Pollock’s work are complex; as complex in their way as the question of orgasm in Beethoven.

What Rosen is debating with Brendel then is the increasing presence of instrumentalism in form: the growing tendency to craft to reflex that reaches its apogee in the illustration and the false community of the fetish: of pure instrument. Wagner is preaching to the choir (and Pollock is in there somewhere); Gerome is a soft-care pornographer playing to an audience, Newton and his audience are almost interchangeable, his form of communication identification with the masturbator which is to say barely communication at all, one step away from the final shift, the final descent from interpersonal communication to masturbation in public.

If communication is a circuit, reflex is a short. The fantasy of the premature ejaculator is a state of eternal orgasm. The mania for progress becomes no more than simply the desire to go faster. If knowledge is measured in conclusions not in processes then the shortest distance between two points, the short circuit, is the obvious choice. This is the crux of the struggle over the human imagination that begins in the 18th century.

Someone should publish it. I've given up trying.