roachboy

art--am in between things so only have time to write something quick....

i know that miller did not draw out of the air his position, that it relies on folk like sontag and barthes...but what i was interested in the specific analysis he develops of tv as form--which taken together is one of the better i have encountered.

i was also interested in his position because i think it poses problems for some of the central distinctions you introduced earlier---the anarchic element you attributed to "the media" as formation, that is in itself, would, following the argument above, would be understandable as a formal effects/formal effects (in this case of the medium tv)---these effects might give the impression of being more than that as a function of the genre of images you refer to (that is why i went to an article about coverage of war, not something else...)

i do not see how you can move from a list of these formal effects to a justification for imputing political agency the "the media". nor do i see how you can oppose "the media" to the state, if the latter in some sense relies on the effects generated by the former to legitimate a right drift.

what i wrote was directed at a specific conversation---i am a bit confused about things moving to such a general level in response to it, but tant pis, let's see how the pieces fall here.

if the question really is about the problematic division between ways in which the world is staged conceptually as over against some notion of "the real" then we are either in a kantian or nietzschean space.
either way, it does not work to simply assert the linkage between representation *as such* and either the need for social or political hierarchies (the obvious objection would be how would you know if you own situation is conditioned by the same problems you point out...in which case we bend back round to the arguments you posted above again)...or any particular kind of hierarchy.

instead, i would argue that representation/concept/words are a baseline condition for being-human--this is not to say that this baseline condition is not problematic, and we could talk abotu that if you like--but i think questions about desirable social order are open and the arguments for or against a particular conception are political--and the political is a particular semantic region.

[[note: i edited this post heavily about an hour after i put it up...]]

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite