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it's interesting the effects of having so many threads that focus on similar issues--you find yourself thinking across them, posting one bit here, one there...its kinda like tv.
not sure how to address this: i remember a story i read somewhere about simone de beauvoir: she went to talk to the folk behind partisan review i think, back when it could have been confused with something interesting--at the start of the meeting, she asked if the nyc collective had read sartre, presumably because it formed a base for conversation---the new yorkers thought she was obnoxious for even considering that a possibility. so it goes.
i have been trying to say the same thing that trisk ended with---"the media" does not create the rule-sets through which people live as "normal" subjects--it reinforces some, formalizes some--and adverts of course try to play off some in order to sell you stuff. the problem are the rules themselves, which means that the problem is the culture generated by american-style capitalism. that should be the object of analysis. the mass media is simply an expression, a symptom.
to keep this shorter and avoid repeating too much, i'll just point to one problematic attitude:
passivity.
the happy acceptance of a total lack of political power.
you are free one day every four years.
no problem.
now whats' on comedy central? this guy simone is bumming me out, man....
the illusion that consumerism is a political act and that your level/intensity of comsumption indicates your degree of political freedom or autonomy.
if you think about it, this is insane.
so why think about it?
add these up: you have no political power--events that happen always happen outside your control and, thanks to how tv covers things, seemingly without cause.
scary.
better to stay home.
while you are cowering in your living room, you might consider compensating by buying a few things. dont worry, however--you can have beer delivered if there is a terror alert involved or something. no need to go outside.
you might, for example, buy some budweiser because it will make you more sexually attractive, because that is how it works in the adverts. bud is a good example, because you know that it cannot be sold on the basis of qualities particular to beer.
budwesier adverts might stage a particularly ridiculous convergence of illusions:
about itself
about sexuality
about the relations of external characteristics to inward ones
(pretty people must be smarter, no? doesnt it always work that way? in this, the best of all possible worlds, outer and inner are always perfectly aligned. does that not correpsond to your experience? have you not found that drinking crappy beer makes you smarter too? you can tell by hanging out in a tavern--everyone thinks they are smarter after a few beers--and if everyone thinks that, it must be true, no?), about
about the association of depressants with a more brightly colored and action-packed life
(hey why not--nothing makes you more chipper than a good depressant, no? by slowing yourself down, you speed everything else up. does that not correspond to your experience? isnt it great how advertising agency employees hired by budweiser know so so much about you? its a kind of intimacy, no? like having a close friend out there whose name you dont quite remember....)
however, adverts create none of dispositions, they just stage convergences.
to think that adverts create these dispositions is like blaming a red balloon for the color red.
the convergence above runs into other issues, some of which i'll mention:
--the fetishization of commodities.
this runs lots of different ways--what i have to say about this turned up in the thread about theft of the scream, actually
(cantor: look there...
congregation: sure thing, simone).
--reinforcement of the reactionary illusion that society is made up of a series of isolated individuals.
these link to what i take to be the worst feature of televisionland:
the systematic assault on the capacity of the citizenry, however construed, to formulate coherent judgements on political matters. now this is something i see tv as actively doing, but not in adverts. rather, like i sadi earlier in the thread, it happens through the breakingdown of any clear distinction between adverts and information.
the creation of junk science, for example, the blurring of thinktank press releases with information, these are but a small and fetid selection of the activities undertaken by the right media apparatus....for data, check out the disinfopedia site linked earlier in this thread.
for neoconservatives, there is nothing but commodities:
information is a commodity
opinion is another commodity---abstract objects to be molded and traded.
you are a commodity.
your dreams are a commodity.
your desires are commodities.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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