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advertising is about the structuring of demand via the structuring of desire.
the fact that is is ubiquitous does not mean that we are terminally screwed, nor does it mean that there is no possibility of getting at least some handle on its effects--but if you set for yourself a goal of full transparency, then you are going to fail. in this, advertising is not any different from many other sets of rules that taken together define what a functional subject is.
recognizing that there is a problem with the manipulation of your frame of reference leads you to having to think, to undertake thinking as a project (not as a series of discrete steps that will lead you to a definite result, as if thinking was a recipe)....
for example, that you internalize social rules, that they disappear as rules, is not surprising--on this, wittgenstein's philosophical investigations is a great help.
it also makes some sense to read some texts from the threshold of the television age, written from a critical viewpoint--strange as it seems, i like j.g. ballard's atrocity exhibition and to a lesser extent burrough's ticket that exploded as examples--i use them when i teach often. neither offers a complete description of the situation in which we find ourselves: rather they make explicit some of bigger effects from viewpoints that still see them as effects (as something alien, as something being imposed)---for ballard, the problem with advertising culture (well one of them) is the colonization of your dreams, the looping-into-itself (as reprocessed through advertising) of your ability to fantasize, to imagine something other than what is.
one way you can read atrocity exhibition is as a charting of the effects of this looping-back into what is of your ability to fantasize run through a particular vision of what that means--capitalism as fixated on sex and death, for example...interesting stuff.
but if this problem--advertising--really bothers you, the least you can do is unplug your television--or at least loose your cable service, throw away your antenna. do something other than watch tv. use it to watch films or something. if you want to see something particular, you can always make arrangements to do it, but get the television out of the center of your life.
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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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