Tactical Media POEM #4 :: Towards a Technical Semiotics of Persuasion Foucault shows so well, while arbitrary to each other, each historical framework had an internal rationality- reasons to believe, reasons to act.
Each revision to our categorizations of things, in any domain of human investigation, does not simply refine what came before, vectoring towards something better- a new day- an end, but rather mutates its predecessor. Claude Levi-Strauss in Totemism (1967), describes a twofold approach to cultural study. He compares two cultures as two systems of difference, rather than two different systems. Each culture, taken alone, has a unique set of relations between meanings, impossible to directly compare without metaphor. Levi-Strauss compared cultures as relations between objects of meaning, rather than comparing the objects themselves. The objects of persuasion change greatly from place to place, from person to person. What then is a technical language to describe how objects of persuasion create changes in behavior? In "Century of the Self" (2002) writer/director Adam Curtis cites Paul Mazer, a Wall Street banker working for Lehman Brothers in the 1930s. "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed... Man's desires must overshadow his needs." The approach involved: + organized media distribution with regimented persuasion-based communication + a mythology of common purchasing power, e.g. Middle Class + privatization of lifestyle + increased expendable income + a focus on unique identities and unique choices The specific Objects of Desire- a faster car, a bigger home- were irrelevant to their ability to manufacture desire and engineer consent. Moreover, the relationship between the person and the constructed social reality the object represented, remained consistent. All humans wanted a better life.
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