roachboy

you can also look at "the media" or mass visual culture more generally as the colonization of your dreams and desires: you must desire and you must desire commodities otherwise the socio-economic system would not function; you are interpellated as desiring particular things in particular ways; you are staged as desiring images associated with particular things in particular ways; you are shown via repetition that there are not only normative images of that which is desired, but also normative images of yourself as desiring, and by extension of yourself as desirable. your relations to the commodity spectacle are staged in this manner over and over and over and over again, and across a field defined by repetition questions intent(s) (of those who produce and/or disseminate advertising material) become increasingly irrelevant.

this much in the way that one's relation to a beatles song in 2007 is conditioned more by its repetition than by that which is repeated.

repetition acquires autonomous functions. repetition generates autonomous functions, which generate autonomous effects.

intent as it plays out in systems of production and distribution rely upon psychological sorting mechanisms deployed by the audience in ways that they do not and cannot control entirely. this because the conscious level of interaction with this material is only one level: as memory, as material of dreams, it acquires other meanings: advertising images come to refer to other images derived from other sectors of experience; they get tangled up with norms of beauty, norms that shape one's sense of adjustment to the context through which one moves. in the space of unconscious repetition and cross-referencing, genre distinctions no longer matter.

i sometimes wonder if one's body image operates at some lizard brain level in between cognitive and kinesthetic functions, and whether this image is perpetually that of a child, animated by some strange residual desire for approval from some spectre of one's parents and the mechanisms for self-punishment that accompny real or imagined failures to gain this approval like some strange extension of the superego. i know from my own experience of having lost alot of weight that one's body image can be very strange indeed and quite of out phase with one's physical being. and i also know that making adjustments to this image/these images can be a very tricky matter, more an ongoing process than anything on the order of a tv set on which one can simply change the channel.

whether its meant to do so or not, these images operate as elements within a system that is amenable to a type of domination, a particularly american type of domination characterized by the wholesale internalization of the fact of one's domination, so that one does it to oneself. which is a pretty cost-effective way of managing a population. you can even convince people that this system of domination is the best of all possible worlds.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite