Captain Outrageous, 11/5

My favorite part about this week happened today actually in discussing Chomsky's concept "Advertising as a primary source of income", especially when the R.O.G. talked about the coca-cola shirt. It completely justified something my family has joked about for a while when I get really into some store and shop there a lot or promote it...."They should be paying you". Today its meaning became clear, and well a little embarrassing for all of us.

Let me start with Adorno: we don't choose what is given to us in the commodity market. We choose whether or not to accept it, but we don't choose its arrival, we don't choose its normalization and globalization. So let us think about this for a second. A new brand name appears, it spreads, we buy it, we wear it, we advertise it further (making catalogue collages stuff like that) and we don't think a thing of it, really. We allow them to come in to our lives, we advertise relentlessly for them, and yet we are giving them money. I think I can say with confident assurance that if this relationship occurred between people and people not people and corporation, it absolutely, one hundred percent, no way in hell, would fly. At least, not with us postmodernists.

And the catch is, its the stuff we need right? We need to wear clothes and shoes and stuff, but we don't need them all to be embellished with brand names. That's the other thing. There's this new title of job out there called "Brand Ambasador", someone who promotes companies, like when the Redbull girls come on campus. I guess its like a buy one get one free deal: We're invading your environment (not much of a choice) but we'll give you a free redbull, simultaneously causing incentive for you to buy one from us. Its a bit of a Catch 22. Who advertises who, and who really benefits? Sure you're going to have an outrageous energy spike when you drink that can of liquid gummi bears (my personal opinion on the taste) but you are perpetuating their stupid campaign that Rebull Gives You Wings, therefore Redbull sells like crazy and school campuses because people need the energy, therefore perpetuating the idea that you're more tired than you think and sugary caffeine is the answer...in the end Redbull Gives You A Bunch of Bull and You Give Redbull money and power.

I'm lost on my conclusion here, before getting into a rant on Redbull. "Advertising as primary source of income" its absolutely correct, that's all that it takes. Its like Barthes, the tease of the gape. Advertisements are the tease. Then we go buy the product out of curiosity, just like Barthes says a reader might skip ahead to the good stuff. Someone should pay us. Our jobs pay us, but that still leaves us working for someone else.

Where is the control? Where is the top of the ladder? Marx told us that there's the people who make this stuff, create these ideas, and the rest of us accept it. Would I be the only one holding the opinion when I say that we go to college to get degrees, get jobs and be on top in some ideologically constructed point of authority, creating the idea?

Its the Myth of the Self Made Man infecting every possible aspect of our consumer lives. I feel I finally have an answer to that horrid feeling I get mid-semester when I see the sun shining and wonder why I am following the routines of cement walls and class schedules...Wage war on totality people, wage war on the Myth.

This stuff has offically driven me nuts.