The Post-Caturday Condition

Deconstruction and string theory

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soundtrack

It’s impossible to exit the Caturday aesthetic because it creates its own cuteness-power which is self-feeding and locked into the logic of the Caturday narrative structure.

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Translation: “I own ‘cuz of my brains” “I’m rich because I deserve it” etc.

“Meow” operates as a floating signifier; and by deploying its polysemic versatility – its bricolage chaton – it constructs its own situated censorship through a meta-appropriation of all potentially oppositional narratives.

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Feline Cuteness Hegemony alters the socially-constructed operations of signifiers and adult suspension-of-disbelief.

To accomplish this, the kitty is first cast as an object of pity. And then – through the perverse dialect of Cuteness Hegemony – Caturday is molded into a subject of religious prostration because of the cat macro viewer’s instinctive urge to protect smaller creatures. The prostrate viewer is then rendered submissive to a furry meme – he is “blinded by the light” – and this “light” is manipulated like a remote-control drone by the Caturday author/pilot. This has ominous consequences for the viewer’s psychological agency.

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Feline Cuteness Hegemony elevates the kitten to a deity/cartoon character whose CENTRAL TEXT redefines the viewer’s static meaning of everything around IT. Reality becomes the surreal appendage of a narcissistic central myth.

Caturday transmogrifies vocabularies by imposing itself as a novel defining icon of physical reality (cats, nature, the environment). The irony, of course, is that the cat macro itself has been made “necessary” by the repression of human instincts that have been transformed into a fake self which “requires” tokens of emotional sacrifice, like Caturday.

The closed triangular dynamic of the construction/consumption/transformation of meaning in Caturday is infinite and ultimately totalitarian. The viewer’s craving for “moar” renders him both parasitic and politically mute. Feline Cuteness Hegemony enslaves the viewer via a charade of pity that is constructed in a self-interested way for private gain by an incompetent oligarchy of fur.

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It is only through the reappropriation of Feline Cuteness that the audience is able to free itself, and this can only transpire after the newly liberated viewer has negotiated with the syntax and context of kitty terror.

Is “it” meow or are “we” meow? And is the pronoun that we attach to the meowness even relevant to the debate?

The recontextualisation of the feline aesthetic that audience response provides – Reactive Feline Cuteness Panic – actually reinforces the narrative structure with a “spontaneous” representation of enfer alternatif. This type of mediated text “riot” provides a power vacuum into which any real criticism of the original narrative structure falls, only to resurface as a meek confirmation of the legitimacy of the purring hegemon.

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Tags: "Blinded by the Light" Michael Mind, caturday, Das Qaturday, feline cuteness, hegemony, lolcats, macro, media, post-structuralism, postmodernism, pretentious, propaganda, qatzelok, satire, scientificish, semiotics, theory