April 29, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:I find this really fascinating. It's a debate between James Twitchell, a Columbia professor who writes books on popular culture, most recently the brilliant Living It Up, a book about American's attitudes about luxury; and Sut Jhally, a marxist media critic. It starts out about advertising, but what it comes down to is Twitchell pointing out that the dreck critics complain about is the stuff that a majority of Americans want to watch, read, etc. It's a powerful sermon on revealed preference:
TWITCHELL: Here's my idea for an independent film. I want to set a camera on the head of my colleagues. And then I want to see what they do when they're left alone, to study the difference between saying and doing. It seems to me that reaching into the wallet is a much more powerful articulation of desire and belief than delivering the lecture. In that area, I think the market essentially shows this. What is being consumed is what people really do think is entertaining them, satisfying them, making them happy. It may not be what you and I like, but it is the illusion perhaps that is so powerful. And this illusion seems to be making American culture incredibly attractive to others and making other cultures essentially mimics of American popular culture. Whatever this stuff is in advertising, it's incredibly powerful. It's pushed all these other things aside. Literature, art, religion. It's eating everybody's lunch. Maybe that's because most people most of the time want that for lunch. Maybe it really is resolving the concerns that they have, as hard as that is for us to believe.
Jhally ends up essentially arguing that we should use the power of the state to force the networks to carry things that people don't want to watch, chosen on a different hierarchy of values that Jhally, presumably, will be in charge of articulating. It encapsulates for me the observation I've repeatedly made that the biggest problem the leftists are dealing with now is that with the end of the industrial era, they've lost any claim to the goodwill, or even the welfare, of the majority; they're down to claiming the anti-democratic, authoritarian right to make people stop living the way they've chosen to and start living some other way because, even though they don't actually want to go live in a communal house and work in a hemp factory, in some metaphysical sense, it will be better for them. Given that we've already seen what the gulag looks like, this is not an easy sell. Hence the squishy language about modes of power and manufactured consent, the new code-words for "unsufficient proletarian consciousness". But if you force them to speak plainly, it's the same old totalitarian impulse peeking out at you.
Posted by Jane Galt at April 29, 2003 4:21 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksIn my experience, many of the marxists at college went into marketing at FCG companies like P&G, retaining their contempt for the public's taste.
The net is broadening the possibilities available to all. regulation of broadcast airwaves has plenty to learn from this.
“But if you force them to speak plainly, it's the same old totalitarian impulse peeking out at you.”
Sut Jhally is nothing more than a discrete totalitarian. This individual most likely praises Fidel Castro and other Leftist dictatorships.
Further comments of Sut Jhally on advertising:
http://www.sutjhally.com/onlinepubs/onlinepubs_frame.html
"In my experience, many of the marxists at college went into marketing at FCG companies like P&G, retaining their contempt for the public's taste."
This may very well explain why so many advertisements fail to accomplish their central purpose: selling the goods and services of their clients!
I'm a little astounded that Jhally had astudent who never would have thought to buy a diamond engagement ring until he saw a DeBeer's ad.
Jhally is engaged in the standard failed-leftist tropes. Specifically, the intellectual left never questions that "the people" want whatever the intellectuals happen to think they should want. So when the intellectuals find an instance where the people are clearly demanding something they think bad, they freak. That's when they start inventing fantastic theories life false consciousness. Or the idea that people could somehow watch ads in social conditions of their own choosing. Sorry - there is no veil of ignorance. We are born and raised for years before we can choose much of anything.
One of the most insidious and strongly-promoted movements by the Knowitalls is what we in Washington know as the Growth Management Act. Others fawn over the concept as 'smart growth'. Essentially, the anointed have cancelled a citizen's ability to choose where to live, "even though they don't actually want to go live in a communal house...", by forcing newcomers to the state to live inside tightly inscribed boundaries around already densely populated centers. Anti-democratic? The GMA provides political appointees with veto power over the elected bodies who make land use decisions in civilized states.
The upshot after ten years of this is seething urbs for the proletarians, surrounded by unsubdivideable large parcels for the leafy estates of the anointed.
Sure, Jhally seems silly, and would perhaps be scary if he represented the views of anything more than the small fraction of 1% of the population that he actually reflects. But that hardly constitutes much of the left of the American political spectrum. If anything, I would guess that there is a much larger group on the right that actually does find much of popular culture deplorable and would, if they could, use the power of the state to stop it. Or perhaps this is just my jaundiced view as I am surrounded by a family of Republicans. The main point is that this is not a left vs. right split, both ends of the spectrum have "allies" that would seek to restrict individual marketplace choices. And I hope neither group ever has the opportunity to do so. But I fear that the right is more likely to do so than the left (or at least is more likely to be in a position to do so).
Actually, I disagree; I think certainly as large a portion of the right would like to see television taken over by the government and regulated to produce the "right kind of programming". I referred to "leftists" not the left; I wold have said Marxists, but I think it goes beyond that small demgraphic.
So your disagreement is only to my suggestion that there are probably more on the right who would like to regulate programming? Possibly, I don't really know and have no evidence on that matter but my own (admitedly small-N anecdotal) experience suggests otherwise. But does this mean that you think the right (rightists?) are as likely to push totalitarianism of this form as leftists?
And I guess I am just missing something here but how does my use of the term left really differ from "leftist?"
Do I understand this correctly, Marxists go "beyond that small demographic" of Leftists? I would consider "Leftist" or "Left" a genus and "Marxist" or "Marxism" a species.
There is also an inbalance in influence. The "paleo-Right" certainly would impose a "moral" order in the media if they could. But Leftists of many stripes (post-structuralist, deconstructionist, disciples of Said or Chomsky, none of whom, I believe, are Marxists) pretty much have a monopoly on U.S. campuses, not to mention campuses elsewhere. They exert much influence on young minds and while the extent and nature of that influence are hard to quantify, it is hardly "the small fraction of 1% of the population" noted in the entry above.
Jhally may be quaint but he's symtomatic of the school of thought, espoused by many latte liberals in urban settings, that America is the problem. Multi-nationals, not Islamists. U.S. "unilateralism," not the U.N. Bush, not Castro. Bush, not Saddam.
The extremism on campus has trickled down to otherwise well-meaning Liberals. No, not all of them. To be sure, there are also independent Leftists like Chirstopher Hitchens. But if you discuss the war in Iraq with your average Upper West Side Manhattan liberal, much of what you'll hear is Haliburton, the Carlyle Group, and oil. Never national security. Never a long-term strategy in fighting the war on terrorism.
So while Jhally knows what's best for you and me and the rest of the lumpenproles, and that we should listen to the likes of him to know how to live meaningful lives, you can also visit almost any cafe on Columbus Avenue and be assured upon inquiry that you are only being duped by the Bush/Oil-regulated media and the seduction of overly-zealous patriotism to believe a war against Saddam could ever be justified.
We've seen the Gulag, but we've also seen the BBC ...
Hmmm...none of my buds on the VRWC Committee want to take over the media. But now that you bring it up...
*evil cackle*
dsquared:
Huh?
How in the world does the Gulag compare w/ the BBC?
I think the idea is that left is family, leftist is genus, and marxist is species :)
I ranted in a similar vein in a post a few weeks ago (all the way back on the 17th). Here's the link, if you're interested:
http://brain.blogmosis.com/archives/2003_04_16.html#009934
The salient paragraph:
"So here's my major problem with socialism/communism: it can only work
with 100% participation. That means 100% of the people put out 100% to
make it work. That will never happen. Ever. The only way communism
can ever come about is by force. Most of the people who socialism
claims to help would be (and actually were) jailed or executed in true
socialist regimes. Shall I state it more clearly? Socialism purports to
help the people who cannot or will not take care of themselves. But when
full socialism is instituted, those people are seen as a drag on the
system. The feeble are sterilized or euthanized, and the ones who will
not participate are executed or persecuted as dissidents."
Comments are Closed.