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first off, i agree that the decline of newspapers is not adequately explained in the article--but it was not set up to provide an explanation for it, but merely to note it as a factor. i picked up on it because i wanted to focus a bit on the centrality of television as an ideological relay system--newspapers have the advantage of providint at least some context for events reported, while television notoriously and continuously substitutes an illusion of "being there" as over against "being informed"...
within that, there's a more fundamental matter that i'm not sure i set up well enough.
ideology refers to the ways in which experience is staged--the mix of images and discourse that mediate relations to one's experience, the role of which becomes increasingly prominent as information refers to the "experience distant"---the narratives and/or explanations that these signifiers are linked to---the notions of causation and time that underpins them---all of which converge on the way "we" understand ourselves (as spectators) interacting with (typically watching) events which unfold in the world (the big movie)...
what i've been thinking is that the relation of a spectator to television is that of agency in the world.
so if people are apathetic about the implosion of the neoliberal order--if they see it as a natural phenomenon and not as the result of a long series of political choices made by particular actors operating with particular interests in mind, the advancing of which has had and will continue to have direct, ugly material consequences for the spectators themselves---and if the above is accurate, then this "apathy" is an ideological effect.
this is as much a mapping of the relation to the medium as it is a relation shaped by the explicit contents within it. see what i mean?
so there's a structure of passivity, of spectatorship, that's modelled on watching television, in the context of which one watches one's own life.
the existing order is naturalized because it appears as the underlying logic that informs any given sequence of footage.
causation--and by extension political action or choices--are reduced to abstract features that impinge upon the picture of the world in ways that erase any sense of agency or volition.
change is typically rendered arbitrary or violent because television footage provides no context and there's no interest on the part of the talking head class in providing context because the purpose of news is to keep viewers engaged from one sequence of commercials to the next, so anything too dense or long runs the risk of viewers switching off to something else thereby missing vital adertising. (you can see the difference in something like pbs' news operations, which are not so motivated and which therefore operate with more freedom to provide context. the idea that things happen in the world as a function of particular choices made by particular agents emerges from context--it is not immanent to imagery)
so the basic ideological situation, it seems to me, is one of spectatorship. people watch their lives happen like they're watching tv. they have no power because they cannot imagine taking any. social relation collapse onto natural features---so there's no agency to be taken.
within this, you have the problem of political shifts unfolding in response to the rapid implosion of neoliberalism.
that's the focus of the opening post, really--what amounts of superstructural adjustments, hedged round with problems, in a context of a substructure of spectatorship/passivity.
so this loops onto the op maybe.
i think it does.
we'll see i suppose.
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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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