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i dont see the questions raised here as being so easy.
information is a commodity. the space of information circulation--which should be a public sphere--is a market. a market links a dispersed public to a variety of private firms. information commodities are packaged in various ways in order to appeal to particular demographics. politics itself is a mode of accessorizing, an attitude, a disposition.
for many years, we have been informed that we exercise our political freedoms when we consume products.
that a segments of consumer preferences would take shape across political statements, and that these preferences would have the paradoxical effect of reducing politics to a type of consumer action follows in a straight line from this.
it is a frame-effect, if you like. as consumers, we adapt to the characteristics of the ideological framework within which we operate. the most effective ideological frameworks are those which tend to disappear as frameworks because they are shared across positions and are not themselves politicized. there is no counter-discourse within the ideological framework that the press has adopted for itself. and there is no conspiracy that explains this: rather, it think it is a function of this particular historical situation.
the left has collapsed long ago, the marxian frame that functioned as its dominant referencepoint dissolved along with it
(nb: this claim that does not require that all oppositional positions were marxist--rather, marxism functioned as the organizing center for oppositional politics--it was the legitimate counter-discourse within capitalism from over 150 years. as the political left imploded, so did the political legitimacy of that frame or the other way around. the relation is complicated, and the process of collapse was quite long. this is the center of my academic work, and i can blab about it at length. anyway...)
so over the past 30 years or so, and in particular since the 1980s, there a political consensus has taken shape that treats capitalism as a kind of natural horizon for political thinking and action. systen questions have been collapsed into the natural background; this collapse is reinforced continually by the dominance of television---not in itself, and not as a function of what any given series of talking heads might say---but in the illusion of immediacy it provides, of immediate connection to the world given by video footage--which i think reinforces the naturalization of neoliberalism.
so it seems that we have followed this path in general: one which no-one in particular layed out, but which functions quite powerfully nonetheless.
this is a rather deeper process than we think.
i dont think al gore or anyone else whose faces and voices circulate within the dominant ideological apparatus has anything to say about the characteristics and effects of the apparatus itself. they simply point to different types of consumer choices, which political consumers can adopt or not adopt in the way that they adopt brands of peanut butter or types of asprin.
folk who work in basic opposition to the existing order are at an enormous disadvantage now because they find themselves not only having to work out what opposition means--they are also in a position of having to invent a new frame. no matter what these frames may look like, they are not likely to be accurate or compelling straight away and even if they are, the process of taking-hold of a basic critique is not immediate.
meanwhile, shit transpires.
it is a depressing situation--and is in fact more complicated and more difficult than i make it sound here. messageboards are problematic when complexity enters.
but the basic problem--that there is no political framework that has a general purchase that enables folk to relativize the ideological order within which we currently operate, and that this order is being continually collapsed into the order of things--so that political action becomes enframed by the logic of the system that in another time much of it would have opposed--and that within this you have an informational market that treats information as a commodity and attaches various predicates to thse commodities as a way of reaching particular consumer demographics--with the effect of integrating all opposition into the logic of cultural markets--and in so doing removing the potentials for fundamental critique...this sprial is what we are living through.
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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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