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art: on your post above: i am not sure i see this opposition as functional---government vs. media, both tending toward total psychological control, one socializing, one anarchic....so i have a few questions:
some of this is terminological, for which i sort of apologize, but i am trying to clear the ground a little bit so i can work out what is happening here...so bear with me.
i do not see the clear seperation between state and press. even in my most marxist moments, i would not have gone so far as to posit either a complete identity or a total seperation. could you clarify the basis for the distinction?
does it come down to a matter of ownership?
ownership is not as simple as it was in marx's time as a simple function of the diversification of ownership brought about by public stock offerings.
public vs. private sectors?
this would seem a distinction that moves around quite a bit, is a function of ongoing conflict over the question of the airwaves/cablewaves, whether the space occupied by the major broadcast media is or is not a public sector/good and what obligations follow from so defining it. in other words, if the distinction between entities lay here, i suspect you might be reifying an ongoing political boundary conflict,
i do not see the basis for imputing a discrete or even coherent policital agency to "the media"--it seems (take tv) to be broken up into political factions that snipe at each other and try to frame an audience that agrees with their general viewpoint in terms of content so that audience will be consistent in viewing and thereby in submitting to patterns advertising delivery.
when i looked through the mass media thread last night, i noticed that much of the energy you devote to the matter of "the media" seems to stem from a tendency to see it as being responsible for a certain type of cultural "degeneration" that you support by equating the development and usage of what amounts to a visual rhetoric (intertextual relations across/between adverts for example) and "mind control".... i wonder if this is the central tenent behind your position, that you see as unified this entity called "the media" as a way of explaining a set of effects--and then oppose to this agent a counter to which you attribute a series of counter values. (this is my actual hypothesis)
further, i do not see the distinction between the state as "socializing" and the media as "anarchic" given that both derive their legitimacy (and direct their approaches to maintaining that legitimacy) from a largely atomized public, the normative conception of which is a suburban nuclear family whose sense of community is to a significant extent fashioned through relationship with television. it seems to me that they are both exploiting a particular social-geographical model (fordist, american, whatever you want to call it) that has developed over the history of the us since maybe ww2 (insofar as it is after the war that fully prefabricated housing starts to penetrate the american market)....and that insofar as they are both reacting to a particular geography/socio-geographical model, they would tend to have similar outcomes with reference to actors who frame their lives within them. in other words, i think that the suburban model in its american variant is the prior condition that you react against, and the opposition you pose tends to obscure this assumption and to push thinking about the consequences of it into a place it need not go....
still thinking.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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