La societé du spectacle
1973, by Guy Debord
“A black and white film by the Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same name.”
(via yurig)
in a local library 画
Okay, sure. But natural scientific knowledge is also both contingent and ideological too.
- Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance (1965)
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The purpose of culture (art, music, literature) is to render the impossible possible, to offer alternatives to existing social conditions. In advanced societies, however, culture has become synonymous with industry and subject to the rule of efficient production and standardization. Individuals are left to consume mass produced, prepackaged ideas that instill an uncritical consensus that strengthens established authority. Hit songs and movies are not the making of popular tastes but of marketing campaigns that predetermine what will be heard and seen, while excluding potentially disruptive alternatives.
The categorical imperative of the culture industry doesn’t have anything in common with freedom. Its message is conformity to that which already exists. The culture industry has replaced consciousness with conformity. While the culture industry claims to be a producer of choice, freedom, and individual identity, it provides its customers with a conformist social landscape.
The pseudo individualization endows cultural mass production with the halo of free choice. Here is the “parade of progress,” the world of the “new and improved” that masks an eternal sameness. Deodorants and shampoos, hit songs and movie formulas, cars and soft drinks—each is made to closely resemble its competitors in order to conform to the consumer’s pre-given expectations, but offers just the slightest difference in order to capture the consumer’s attention.
"- Adorno, Theodor. 1975. The Culture Industry. New York: Routledge.
- Herbert Marcuse
“How can you watch people die in the streets?”
“You don’t look, you close your eyes.”Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times journalist, is often hailed as a defender of the downtrodden, courageously reporting those man-made events that “shock the conscience.” As he traipses the globe to report on its most grisly moments, Kristof is followed, physically and digitally, by a significant swathe of educated upper-middle class America: 200,000 people like his Facebook page, a million track him on Twitter, and that’s not to mention his column in the Times. He even periodically holds a contest to allow young journalists to follow him in the field. Hence, whether decrying sex work in Cambodia (Kristof once bought a young girl out of sexual slavery) or relaying images of hacked-apart bodies in Congo, Kristof’s witnessing reaches a significant number of people. His words diffuse through book clubs, church groups, and even think tanks and governments to shape grassroots activism and policy alike. On the issue of civilian deaths in Darfur, for which he won his second Pulitzer, both critics and supporters cite Kristof’s importance in shaping both the Save Darfur movement and the U.S. President’s opinion.
Kristof’s ability to frame and deliver the world’s horrors to millions — in a way that keeps those millions coming back for more — seemingly should make him worthy of the hero worship that has attended his rise. Indeed, what is worse than a privileged bourgeois population that knows nothing of the way the other half (or rather the other 99 percent) lives? And yet the devil as always remains in the details — or in Kristof’s case, the lack of details. For, when exploring why Kristof has become a high priest of liberal opinion in America (arrogating the right to speak on almost any sociopolitical phenomenon, provided it involves an easily identifiable victim), we crash into what can be called Kristof’s anti-politics: the way his method and style directly dehumanize his subjects, expelling them from the realm of the analytical by refusing to connect them to systems and structures that animate their challenges. Kristof’s distancing double move provides us with precisely what is worse than a bourgeois not knowing about the world’s horrors: knowing about them only enough to simultaneously acknowledge and dismiss them, to denude them of political and moral demand, to turn them into consumable and easily digestible spectacles. We are encouraged to look only so we can then close our eyes.
You should probably be reading The New Inquiry. It is a fantastic website.
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Conserving the self in a culture of productive narcissism
by Rob Horning
The cluster of ideas, meanings, and implications associated with Web 2.0 has been amalgamating for the better part of a decade, steadily consolidating to the point where few would deny its cultural significance. The development of more sophisticated search engines and the promulgation of social media have combined to turn casual computer users into simultaneous producer-consumers with an ever-intensifying incentive to weave digital interfaces into all facets of their everyday life. The ubiquity of broadband access and the onslaught of gadgetry has allowed the internet to take on the characteristics of what autonomist Marxists like Paolo Virno and Toni Negri call the social factory, in which the effort we put into our social lives becomes a kind of covert work that can be co-opted by the tech companies that help us “share” and “connect.”
Those nice-sounding words mask the potentially exploitative aspects of the process. In “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Tiziana Terranova argues that “the internet is about the extraction of value out of continuous, updateable work, and it is extremely labor-intensive.” Nicholas Carr has described Web 2.0 as “digital sharecropping,” a way of putting “the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work.” The internet thereby becomes “an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few.”
But if it is so exploitative, why do we bother with all the “sharing”? It may be because we don’t experience this effort as work but instead as simply being ourselves, which Web 2.0 seeks to make synonymous with digital participation. Services like Facebook succeed by making the process of ordering our social lives much more convenient — an apparently irresistible lure, as the site has recently passed the 500-million mark in users. Its ubiquity makes it hard to refuse to use it, as such a refusal becomes tantamount to rejecting sociality itself. But the service also has the effect of getting us to restructure our social life and our identity in its image, making us acutely self-conscious of identity as a strategic construct even as it grants us the opportunity to actively manage it more efficiently.
