Why Johnny Can Dissent

Advertising is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The production of a hipper, more subversive mousetrap-as-commodity doesn’t necessarily signal the downfall of collective, subversive action, nor does it mark the death of dissent as we know it.

Subversiveness through consumption relies on a myth of our past, produced through a nostalgia industry, that internalizes a particular view of the essence of American identity. The commodification of subversion should be seen as part of a cultural environment that similarly commodifies the past as nostalgia and cultural identity. We accept a variety of identity founding myths in the consumption of places like Celebration, Florida (merely an extension of the similarly powerful myth of authentic home-life at the center of most suburban development), as well as in the consumption of tourism, the visual commodification of particular cultures, which we imagine as frozen in time, unaffected by our gaze. Where we believe ourselves to be coming from produces our imagination about where we need to go. There is a movement of puritanical right-wing morality in this country; the catch is that they are just as duped as the lefty-quasi rebels reading Burroughs. Both strategies sustain each other, and should be understood as part of the same media environment

However, the strategy of rebellion eventually produces its own destruction. The effective advertisement of dissent does actually make people want to dissent. Particularly with the development of pastiche techniques as dissent (I wrote about this in the post about Chuck Taylor’s), it encourages consumers to be subversive readers of cultural artifacts: they recognize weaknesses and points of appropriation of images, becoming a strategy of deconstruction. This ultimately manifests in something like the ‘fair trade’ movement, which undermines the commodity fetish structure by explicitly politicizing the means of production in the act of consumption.

This is not to say that the undermining of capital through advertising is necessarily inevitable. The language of dissent in advertising comes steeped in highly-individualistic terms, and collective action most likely is required of substantial social change in terms of the means of production. Also, the politicization of consumption itself needs to come fill circle, from blind consumption, to wary consumption and non-consumption, back to a strategic use of advertising and cultural symbols in commodities to produce social change. By making advertising a total-social-experience – a lifestyle, a steady supply of malleable and highly potent symbols has been placed in the hands of people merely living their everyday lives. No image will ever totally determine how people use it, and the potential for meaning slippage increases as advertising more totally defines our entire lives (the Far Side cartoon “Giorgio Armani at home” applies here). Even as ads come to encompass both assent and dissent, third-ways open at every turn.

Duncan

fetish objects

The celebrity souvenir is the document of copresence, the embodiment of a mode of association that animates how we demonstrate authentic connection while simultaneously mediating our relationship with death. Memorials to a person inevitably come to objects of personal worth, objects that spent time on or around someone, more solid than they but slyly imprinted by their transient touch. We seek out objects of our heritage because they embody something that survives, that imprints our identity onto a linage stretching backwards and a future stretching indefinitely forward. The associations we make to specific people through objects derive from the power of being there in communication. We imagine that a more authentic connection comes as we approach each other physically, and owning Elvis’ hotel towels tell us that we have brought ourselves all the closer to some form of communication that defines intimacy. Not only are there less of the memento we seek, but they also signify something like a conversation with the king. Just as email or phones mediate an irreconcilable distance, the mass produced object implies a gap formed by the death of someone we with to memorialize: the objects don’t require the body of the idol and in fact hint at their death in their finitude. It implies a subtle contradiction between the need to embrace the finitude of one person, at one time in a unique connection produced by co-presence. Alongside this there is a need to exceed death by tying memory to a stable object, embodied in a photograph or similar fetish object.

Duncan

Dreaming ourselves

In many surprising ways, the new age practice of mythic dream interpretation relies on popular modern myths concerning subjectivity and communication. First, the whole processes, particularly that of the use of lucid dreaming as a mode of self-discovery, seems radically committed to the processes of recovering a unified subject from the divisive, fragmenting power of the unconscious. The unconscious reveals that egoistic rationality necessarily fails to describe the whole range of human emotion and psychic activity: more than we care to admit, our thoughts have no basis in abstracted rationality. The process of translation (which I will talk about later) commits dreams and ideas back to a ‘one mind’ with desires, goals and needs understandable in terms of an ego. It recovers the unknown, unreflexive nature of self into an empirical practice

The process of translation reveals its own difficulties and missteps. First, the commitment to determining objective symbols suggests a misplaced faith in human grammar to explain the world. The recovery of the unknown into nouns with qualities and verbs with desires prioritizes a form of knowing composed in the massive process of organizing human relationships on a large scale. The process of producing meaning through a regular means discounts the idiosyncrasies and selectively communicative nature of dreams. The description of the world dream interpretation provides scripts unconscious desire in the garb of a specific language with a specific grammar; in the case of English, this becomes the noun – verb – object form, with a myriad of implications concerning human agency’s relationship to a lived (static?) world. this plays an important role in the appropriation of the unconscious into the conscious world, a process of escaping and losing meaning perhaps best left unsaid.

Duncan

Monuments and Plots

What do you do at the point of your own dissolution? The problem I have with meaning is the deterrence of deconstruction, the ability to systematize everything into causes, effects and trends of power which subject our bodies to forces beyond control. I feel an inability to realize meaning in something that has no origin in self. I’ve found myself engrossed in reading about the spaces I inhabit, the modes of presence I practice – I always do these readings on the top floor of the library, looking down, silently. The monuments here capture you: somehow, their scale as a backdrop transposes onto the scale of your actions, the decicive texture they render on our bodies signals the experience of meaning in its own right. They say: “nowhere else but!” “no place other than!” to your every move, somehow their declarations of where fill in for answers to why. The monuments, the size and scale themselves help to erase what is human between us. They draw your attention towards achievement and permanence in the singular sense, the embodiment of phallic individualism, each erection of concrete and marble secure in their significance and inevitability (with no damage extracted by the photos and films in their various idolatries). It is this final analysis, of the absurdity of practicing self-performance under the tutelage of such immensities and mythical significations leaves me disarmed in purposes, at a cross-ways for understanding meaning: before me lies the massive promises of a world without doubts, behind lies the peculiar isolation of non-participation through deconstruction. Each plays off each other, constructs lurid tales of power, between that of the wise and detached and the engaged and overcoming. Neither seems to respect the immediacy and absence I feel at a point of articulating where my life will lead: predictions for the future tend to ignore us now.

Plots tend towards death: we act on them with an eye towards exceeding ourselves in death, to overcome it by killing others or monumentalizing ourselves. We attempt to rebel from our subjugation to the powers of annihilation in the historical memory. Killing someone else is the final imposition of order, the indisputable mark of potency that also demonstrates our overcoming of that act of death. Disorder, then also signals the inability of any force, including ourselves to produce meaning: there are no economies of attention, no reason to pay attention to any one part before the other, all elements reduced to the same by fact of their mutual irrelevance toward each other. The plot organizes, it draws power between elements to create ourselves anew, now in the eyes of those around us, the co-conspirators as well as those whom we plot against. Deconstruction is the attempt to hatch plots around us in everything we see or do. Deconstruction is the plot without promise of death.

Duncan

Mind the posting gap

I believe that the notion authenticity produces itself as a photo-negative to the ‘cartoon’ of reproduction technologies in a given era. Scott McCloud made the point that every representation cartoonally (yeah, I said it) is a selective choice that represents particular salient features of the world in a way that suits the author. In a similar way, technologies of reproduction (mechanical or otherwise) selectively ‘cartoon’ the world to produce salient or what we perceive as real, representations of reality. Inevitably, reproduction leaves something out – it can never capture everything we know about the world through embodied experience, and so it selectively incorporates important objects. The photo-negative of ‘authenticity’ emphasizes the terms or fields of knowledge under- or un- represented in the act of reproducing (something). So, when visual elements were subject to reproduction, as described by Benjamin, what became important to ‘authenticity’ was an author, situated in time with the aesthetic werewithal to create an original document – an idea situated within the analog reproduction technologies which required some form of physical correspondence to create a copy. What cannot be reproduced in the copies becomes the foundation for ‘authenticity.’

So, what cannot be reproduced in an age of digital reproduction? In a consumer society tactile objects are subject to mass production, as are sounds sights and even tastes (ever tried ‘real’ Bertie Bott’s Every-Flavor beans?). What remains elusive to reproduction is the non-sensory: in this case, the most important feature is time. Indices of recency, originality, and time of creation produce what we know as an original document: no matter how fast transmission occurs, the display of certain media events occurs in at least one place before transmission, and that then becomes the standard of authenticity. Before the age of mass reproduction, artists working in isolation could simultaneously produce similar/identical works of art and still be considered original, or even masters in their work. With mechanical reproduction, and now digital reproduction, the simultaneous ubiquity of ideas and images accelerates the production of ‘authentic’ works by drastically increasing exposure to individual pieces of art, and so increasing the body of work against which ‘authenticity’ sets itself. When art can be copied and reproduced with great ease, the measure of authenticity becomes one of primacy: of being first, before the copies, before the imitations.

Duncan