roachboy

one interesting subplot in all this: connecting this status of the maps with the assumptions about documentary film that underpinned the recurrent f911 threads.

using conservative responses to moore's film as anecdotal evidence, i can say this: the folk who invest in that space seem to want to naturalize images that they are presented in the context of "informational" programming. they like to believe in "objectivity" and its correlate, that a camera would not distort what it filmed. that there are not problems with the relation of spectator to world, understood as accumulation of objects. it seems a kind of enforced naievte. total faith in genre rules--if it is "news" it must be presented as "objective"--the curious twist in this--and i think this particular feature is not specific to the right--is that what is understood as "objective" is that which correlates at the level of assumptions/framing gestures to the political predispositions one brings to watching in the first place. "objectivity" then is about the desire to have one's politics written into a logic of nature, to make them not problematic, to remove them from the space of argument.

if that is true, then the problem with the map conflict comes from the status imputed to the objects by viewers. i do not think that the folk who channel information into right media in particular are bound by the same relation to what is broadcast as those who consume it--for the former, images are images and can be manipulated--for the latter, images--presented in certain contexts, with the "correct" political assumptions built into it--are reflections of nature.

if this is accurate, then it means that the viewers in this ideological space are motivated at some level by anxiety and that the contents of this space function at some level as reassurance. if this is true, then the reassurance would tend to override or exclude a critical relation to images. which would mean that graphics like the maps slot straight in as enframing a vision of the "nation"--and that you would not expect a critical relation to that enframing to emerge from within this space.

this would in turn run into a space where competing maps--as reduced versions of cometing visions of "the nation"---juxtaposing them would not engender a meaningful debate about what is a stake across the question of maps as elements in an ideological campaign--instead you woudl get an exchange of defenses of the spaces within which the maps are situated, performed more or less automatically.



all this as a way of suggesting that this matter--what is going on with these graphics--can be framed in a way that does not require we try to take on the general question of television and its relation to patterns that shape its usage in spaces that you classify in extremely general terms.

i sometimes wonder about this in myself: the desire to be able to shift to an extremely high level of abstraction in analysis is a function of the desire to occupy a kind of super-spectator relation to the social processes in which one is, in fact, embedded. whether the same set of relations i outlined above inform everything about the relation of a Theorist to the objects theorized--in a direct or inverted way, it comes to the same thing.

just wondering.
but maybe it is the coffee i am drinking.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite