Window Shopping
The phrase "the desert of the real" conveys that ‘the real’ is the destroyed world, gloomy, fantastical, inexplicable through language, especially when viewed from the ordered world. In Indonesia, we are actually in that ‘desert’: with incessant floods, landslides and earthquakes.
Goenawan Mohamad
March 1, 2021
WE are missing window shopping. The experience of shops and malls is becoming rarer. The months-long pandemic is making us used to taking a distance from things as spectacle.
But why should we miss it? Taking a distance does not mean letting go. We still live surrounded by what Guy Debord half a century ago called “the society of spectacle”: a collective life of what he called degradation from ‘being’ to ‘having&rsq
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