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first foray...i think gingibus gives an interesting place to try to jump out from...since even olympic high jumpers get three tries to clear any given bar, i'll assume the game works that way here.
in general, i would think that an authoritarian form would rely on cultural domination---a hegemony shift--a shift in either the set of signifiers or logic for framing/rules of combination across which people would organize their sense of the world around them. it would seem to me that television would be the primary--but not exclusive--mechanism for providing elements of the shift and putting it in motion.
entropy is simply a feature that affects any process that unfolds in time. domination unfolds in time, and i see it as something that (in the present context) would come about partially as a function of state actions, but in the main as a function of people knitting themselves into a framework of consent using material that would be provided and reinforced by the elements of their interactions with the dominant media--those elements that shape their sense of being-in-the-world, being-in-community, being-in-a-polity.
i would think that this mode of transmission for the mental apparatus of domination would be necessary were such a regime to put itself in place in the states----this as a function of the main socio-geographic models that shape this place (e.g. the suburban model, the particular american mode of urbanization...) in my more paranoid moments, i think that the geography is about the abolition of the public in any traditional/capitalist sense, and its transfer to a kind of flickering virtual community---tv functions as a large-scale framing device and a complex set of cultural reference points and mediate experiences of collective involvement (both as such and by providing fodder for interpersonal activities within them)...
to reall think about how this might work requires (well, for me anyway) that you address the general problem of how you would refigure your conception of the world to accomidate the basic fact that any such conception unfolds in time--to actually do it would require an overthrowing of the conventional modes of staging the world, which still sit on observing subject--resolved/stable object--intentional relation models. when historians address questions of time, the do it by staying well within this world-as-picture framework, and add time as a dimension by attaching lists of particular frame-shifts that account for continuities/posit discontinuities....it would require that historians break with a commonsense mode of staging being-in-the-world---which would run directly against the vocational imperative to provide a nice yarn for readers...but i digress.
preliminary point: i think that when art and, in a related way, gingibus stage their understandings of the mediascape, they focus on elements of fragmentation--in the mass media thread, you, art, focus considerable attention on advertising, while in the above post, gingibus focusses on entropic features--i wonder if this explains the split that i am uncomfortable with here on its own--what i would propose is not a simple inversion (exclusive focus on medium as such as a way of unifying what would otherwise appear dispersed) but on questions of whether there exist hierarchies within this seeming field of scatter--and whether these hierarchies remain implicit during "normal" periods but snap into play during period of real or perceived crisis.
i am thinking about the development of the massive group-hate that was the "hostage crisis" in 1979 or so, and again of the months following 911---in both cases, you had news programming operating as a kind of reference-point that posed a question of injury to "the nation", framed the interpretation of that injury (tipping it in the direction of an injury done to this abstraction called nation and away from any alternative analytic possibility that might have called american actions into question)--in both cases, news programming operated as a kind of generator, the effects of which ramified across other genres of programming--comedians late night and otherwise, in their efforts to be topic, function as transmission belts---references turn up in very distant areas of infotainment thereafter---the most obvious to me was the superbowl that followed 911, in whcih the networks tried to turn the event into an enormous, tasteless telvised nuremberg rally, preceding the game with a potted videohistory video of the Nation that posited military values as central to it, a National Destiny, unity---the entire history of the states culminating in the military, who were in turn watching tv in tents in afghanistan....the same material became cental reference-points for other areas of experience as well--in classrooms, in churches, in conversations more generally---the ability of this (informal) system to generate high levels of consent no matter how goofy the narrative being consented to might be (bushwar, for example) is to me telling on this matter.
stopping for the moment, backing up to the start of the run area, waiting for the bar to be reset, thinking about jumping again at some point.
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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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