This is the classic documentary based on Noam Chomsky’s work based on “the political economy of mass media.”
This is a clip from the Glenn Beck
“All that was once directly lived has become mere representation”
Ostensibly, this is all about America’s much vaunted, mythologized, and commodified history of civil disobedience involving caffienated beverages. Hilariously, G-Beck or Ol’ Blue Eyez, claims that he has no role WHATSOEVER in stoking this “revolt”. Is this revolting? Yes, but actually not much way in the way of disobedience. There is no longer an “outside” of images. There is no, was no “real historical moment” that we can have direct access to: “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Society of the Spectacle). So, the mediated relationship here is between folks who find the US government in its current incarnation especially, to be a little too tax-y and oppressive-ish.
Althusser’s definition of ideology is useful here:“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”
Or, going back to Biel: what actually happens in history isn’t what counts. It’s that the supposed “external” “true” “objective” “historical” “collection of facts” are actually a narrative that we tell about ourselves. In this case, the myth of this economic collapse, with Iceland as its starting point is one we tell ourselves, on the surface, about “greed’ and “irresponsiblity”. But where it really fits in is in a larger conversation about what makes a nation state– what does it mean to be part of a larger collective identity in an increasingly homogenized place that is forcibly leveled by economic entanglements. Anxieties surrounding national, personal autonomy are the flip side of the practically compulsive need to accumulate that the crisis has forced us all to radically reconsider, as if by getting enough stuff we could create a permanent sculptural spatial sense of self in this ethereal world. Taking clothes as a paradigmatic example, stuff literally secures the borders of our fleshy envelopes.
Society of the Spectacle and W. mashup:
