Sunday, November 8, 2009
Daisy, 11/8
In class on Tuesday, we discussed the theorist Jameson and his ideas of our postmodern culture. Like Lyotard, Jameson believes that it is impossible to be avant-garde in our society. We are living in a world where almost anything is acceptable to be seen in the media, images that would have seemed extreme years ago, no longer do. The media has made it possible and acceptable to watch violence from your home. Just the other day, when there was the shooting in Downtown Orlando, the news was showing the injured people being taken out of the building on gurneys and put into the ambulance. I couldn’t believe it, I felt terrible for the poor woman being plastered all over television, but yet I’ve seen it before. This reminded me of Jameson’s quote, “The underside of our culture is blood, torture, death, and horror” (485). We are used to seeing the violence on television. Baudrillard said that media is part of the terror, and it is not hard to believe when you turn on the news and see these types of images. We no longer need to leave our homes to experience the world; the media does that for us. Unfortunately, when we trust the media, we begin to develop a tainted picture. The media is producing what they want us to see, never giving us the full story. Chomsky’s fifth essential ingredient of the propaganda model, anti-communism, goes along with this. Now instead of anti-communism, it seems that our society is anti-terrorism. The media is giving us something to agree to be scared of. The media starts fear campaigns, using the word terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Zizek would agree with Chomsky and say that the media is responsible for creating this fiction by spinning stories certain ways. As the media does this, we never question is, we accept it.
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2 comments:
Just to let you know that there was no required post-class blog because you were meant to take this time to study for the exam, but it's always good to review and think about these people. Jamerson is a difficult theorist to wrap your head around and so you do a good job describing what he discusses and how it applies to our culture. And with your Zizek connection to fiction, wasn't it Baudrillard who discusses fiction and reality? Maybe you should to back just to review these theorists. :)
Oh and also I like your analysis of the way that culture ignites an equal fear among us all of terrorism - what does this do for control and nationalism? :)
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