Fiction and Privacy

some brief notes:

The increase in police and military surveillance has been precipitious. But something of a blow back has occured….as electronic snooping has increased, CCTV cameras everywhere, wire taps, etc, so has the public gained access to cheap video cameras, and of course their cell phones. So police brutality, something which has always gone on, is now being filmed. The police want laws to stop you filming them. They want to curtail the very thing they (well the system) have pushed through as part of the today’s urban landscape. Suddenly they feel the loss of police privacy.

Now, another topic comes to mind, which is connected to the two previous postings, but I suppose also to notions of police powers. The media pushes along the value of these invasions of privacy — the media, the studios and networks, reflect the values of the people making the product. The world view is that of the creators of these films and shows. One aspect has been a subtle consolidation of cultural participants, and a narrowing of this view, often I suspect without the creators quite knowing it. The world created by the culture industry is ever more proscribed. I suspect this partly (only partly) explains the rise of comic book characters and fantasy.

A friend related a story — she works for a network in marketing. She told of a young pretty intern being interviewed in the bosses office. The intern was asked, do you like this particular show of ours. The intern answered, no, honestly, I’m not a big fan and here is why. Now the intern was nervous….for she was saying you know, I dont like this show …..so I might get fired. At the end of it the intern added, ‘of course I dont think I’m the audience they are targeting’.

Thats it. You are either the audience targeted or you are not.

However, I also saw Mammie Gummer is the lead in a new awful doctor show….Emily Owens MD. Now Gummer is the daughter of Meryl Streep and some east coast patrician (er…sculpter…..er……ah……) and grew up in Conneticut and LA. So this show reflects one more time, the most kitsch vision of an air brushed world of ersatz problems, and liberal sensibilities. Even more than before though, such shows are formulated on the most simplisic, almost childish or infantile structures. In this show, Gummer is a doctor, an intern, at a Denver hospital. Her “med school rival ” also works there and her a young male intern who she had previously had a crush on. BOY….wowza….that sounds pretty scintillating. Gummer herself is this awful cheery, cutesy, well, just grating personality. But…my point is that nepotism has always existed, but its far more inclusive in a sense, than ever before. What I found last time I made the rounds in Hollywood, was that outsider’s are not welcome anymore. I once was the organ grinder’s monkey, a novetlty act. You could get a brief pass to tap dance in the halls of cultural power. You would get a gig or two, thrown some coins, tolerated for the brief shelf life of organ grinder’s monkeys, and then be gone. No more. The consolidation of economic power is relfected back in narrative; the cultural wagon circling — the TARGET audience is more specialized, and the world view more and more restricted. The worst shows and films that liberals do are those that they try to do the proletarian world view…the ghetto or barrio or even rural wastelands of the US. One can quickly think of many examples. The Blind Side, to whatever the latest ‘bubbie’ boilerplate might be, starring whatever black or chicano actor currently has heat — which is really the slaves adapting the voice of the plantation owner. It would be interesting to dissect the few examples of corporate product that actually depict something of working class existence and then see in what ways they are mediated.

The increasing difficulty of paying for a good education means only Streep’s daughter and her pals get to go to major universities. And the uni system is more and more balkanized anyway. Florida State is a huge school, but football players go there, or if you are majoring in hospitality management. You go to Yale or Harvard, or Sarah Lawrence or Stanford or wherever if your parents live in Conneticut and Beverly Hills. Hey, “sculpter” Don Gummer went to Yale….quelle surprise. Anyway, the point is that cultural balkanizing is happening at an accelerated pace. Exceptions obviously exist, but really, it only proves the point. The under-class is ever more skilled at adapting a version of their own reality that’s been mapped out by mass culture.

The white Conneticut families, the Bevery Hills kids, who grow up to become studio execs or whatever, are part of a marketing apparatus, whether they know it or not, which also appropriates the (what they would call) street culture. But this cultural enclosing is operating on a couple levels. It happens with “style”, and it happens with jargon, and slang, and more insidiously it happens as part of this erasure I speak of. It also appropriates adolescence. The marketers invade the previously private worlds of teenagers and even pre-teens, and burglarize this culture. Doesn’t matter really if its Red Bluff, CA, it Pensacola FL, or its suburban Chicago. Or inner city Philadelphia or Oakland. Appropriate, sterilize, and mass produce. Now, this has gone on for fifty years, but its now a process that excludes all others. Its hegemonic. The structure of appropriation itself, the mechanisms, and the thematic materials — the style codes, the grammar, is all absorbed and reproduced in this cleansed version. Where once an oppositional artistic vanguard served to critique, but also to explore and expand utopian dreams — as well as exercise an inventory of sorts for the psyche, today you have simply KITSCH. The oppositional has become oppositional code and oppositional style. In other words, NOT oppositional. Post Modernism in that sense is a by-product of marketing efficiency. However, as the mental enclosures keep bringing the fences closer (spatializing is just impossible to avoid…and its a problem because they are also extending the fences ever wider) the cycles of reproduction circulate more and more rapidly. As the “street” itself gets used up, the marketing apparatus starts to canniblize itself. Arts do this, and in a sense, the morbidity of academic arts programs and writing programs is both a result and a cause of this. The state surveillance system is worth writing about at length, but for right now, Homeland Security’s budget, per se, is pretty modest….however, the monies that pass through it are comparetively large. They go elsewhere. For neo-imperialism remains the primary focus of the state. (Widening the fences the better to tighten the mental enclosure…something like that). As I’ve said before, the financialization of the economy has a number of effects, and I don’t think it’s yet been determined just what the far reaching implications are.

The high pressure steam cleaning of the unconscious, or what the culture industry, de facto, thinks is the unconscious (for really, clearly, they don’t think in these terms) can be seen in any number of trends. I mentioned before the “take you behind the scenes of movie making” spots on gossip shows is just one example of the somewhat contradictory forces at work here. Erase the illusions by showing you the magician’s tricks, while constantly propping up more illusions. The derivitives market, the Wall Street crash of 2008, all of that was a form of of pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The hand is quicker than the eye. Which cup is the pea under? So, in a sense, the mandate for artists at this point, it seems to me, is to reclaim a landscape not mediated, to establish methodology outside a system of commodities. Its almost the only strategy left. Thinking outside a commodity form is nearly impossible on one level, but there are demands to be made that would at least form a sort of bulwark against this. The creation of artworks designed to be commodity resistant is meaningless if the thinking still clings to notions of value based on exchange value.

The mediated world of daily life, now ever more influenced and shaped by mass cultural product, and mass cultural product ever more self consuming and curcumscribed, ever more a reflection, too, of economic theory, financialization, and of risk management; these are assaulted by ever more material instability, enviornmental and political — the contradictions are massive, and perhaps already at a point where desire and pleasure have been altered, malformed at their fundamental level (if that is even possible to identify)that the road to liberation from social domination probably lies on paths not yet found.

There is something in the post modern face that gives me pause. In the same way one can identify a French speaker, or a Russian, in a room, because the speaking of that language changes the facial muscles, and somehow imprints a ‘look’, the face of today’s western citizen seems to be synched up wrong — there is a surface patina as well, as if the cult of youth and the shifts in ideals of beauty have suffered a systems crash and people are left looking somehow neurologically stalled. They speak but the sound is almost literally delayed a nano-second, and the cunning (or lack of) of the marketers reaching ever further into a stockpile of autistic aesthetic models — the selling of product means you must minimize risk, must control ever more totally the picture, and the result is a sit com reality, and audiences, trained since birth, to channel their emotions toward commodities, willingly ask for this charade. Even the outlets for the inevitable surplus aggression are given targets. Obama, Zizek, the Koch Brothers….Goldman Sachs, the Pentagon, all of it is obviously sick and contagious, infected, and yet people ask for it.

Fictitious capital, fictitious work, and fictitious “reality”. The entrapement of consciousness in the commodity form will, eventually, end in fascism.

There is resistance. Its everywhere, but its NOT part of the spectacle. To ask people to give up their favorite commodity causes spasms of rage, fear, revolt, panic. Yet, that might be the first step needed.