Priests, prophets & the peasant congregation
Many mass media critics have decried the age of mass mediated imagery as the age of stardom, of celebrity as the new idol worship. Clearly, Benjamin's analysis of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
resonates with the emphasis on star "aura." However, the situation, I believe has moved beyond a simple worship of celebrity - as neil Gabler points out in Life: The Movie it is all about entertainment, of which celebrity is only one part of the total marketing formula. I have termed this the rise of marketing culture where the only important things left
are to: 1) attract attention, 2) brand identification, and 3) hold attention. I work with my students to point out how this leads to "public relations thinking" as opposed to "critical democratic thinking." Everything is subjected to cluster analysis and niche marketing - ideas, values, experiences, cemented with images and sound are dissociated and recombined to encourage subject identification and increas brand recognition. There is a cognitive price to be paid in all of this. In other words, ideas are only celebrated for how they can accomplish these three
basic business points. It is all simply about making money. All other
ideas will remain marginalzied and or assimilated. I am reminded of
Adorno's warning that there will come a time when the bourgeoise will
rejoice in the pleasure of their own self-destruction, a product of their
absolute alienation from human values, and latent sado-masochistic
tendancies. From this point of view one can see the extremes of
contemporary religious movements as a viseral understanding of this
phenomena, a backward reaction to the forces of contemporary capitalism
even while they practice the same techniques as corporate marketeers. I
still hold out hope that art, the art world can provide some relief from
this crap, even if only a marginal relief.
Lakoff's moral politics, the connection of cognitive styles of rhetoric to
self, is one area which needs much further development on the Left. This
could go a long way in at least providing an understanding of the change
in cognitive processes brought out by contemporary mediated marketing
imagery. When you have a society such as ours (the US) experiencing
increasing income and wealth polarization, with alienated jobs, cutbacks
in health care, and job outsourcing - the collapse of critical democratic
reason into mere entertainment spells a possible period of violent
unrest as people play out their three learned forms of marketing culture.
Baudrillard's thesis of a society moving from a society of the spectacle
to one of simulation is not exactly correct. We moved way beyond simulation
in the 1980s. Both spectacle and simulation presumed a "real" world which
could be refused, accepted, struggled over, etc. The tendancies, and
noticed I said tendancy, not fate, however, are to abolish the very
capacity to reason critically which would make such understandings
obvious. The movement is no longer to one of simulation. It is now to
annihiliation - the elimination of thought and feeling - the pleasure of
such a culture comes in its ability to produce numbness - the promise of
immortality. Perhaps this depressing analysis sounds a bit overwrought.
If so please give me a reason why I should think otherwise.
Best Wishes, Talmadge
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* Talmadge Wright (773) 508-3451 *
* Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology FAX:(773) 508-7099 *
* Loyola University Chicago *
* 6525 N. Sheridan Rd. *
* Chicago, Illinois 60626 *
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__________
bwanika
url: www.idr.co.ug
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