I feel that I am not alone when I say that I struggled this week with unpacking Jameson. Although I felt that I could read is prose well, he was incredibly fast in his transitions from topics, and to use Hania's word, "dramatic" in his explanations of these topics. With that being said, I was able to pick out one idea of his that resonated with me, this being that he feels postmodern culture has reached a level of passivity, whether this be in our consumption of goods or in how we live our everyday lives. We chose to accept how our society is rather than questioning how it functions. When talking about the photo of Britney Spears in class, rather than questioning the reality of that image and the methods with which the image is created, women across America feel pressured to assume this type of physical look because of how prevalent it is in media today. We are taught to believe that this is the "ideal" body type simply because this image is always surrounding us. Then, rather than realizing the inaccuracy of these images and questioning them, we continue to consume the image and try to change ourselves to be the image through the consumption of this media and the products associated with it. For example, it can be assumed that most people associate corsets with having a negative impact on the health of the human body, but now, it has become a trend within the fitness world.
The level at which we consume, and the recklessness with which we consume is both astonishing and disturbing. Not only does it represent a brain washing of the American and Western culture, but it skillfully avoids and disguises the negativities associates with this consumption to the point where we do not even notice it; it truly has become a part of our culture and there are many people within this society that take pride in this. It is true that the ability to have an abundance of personal items is a sign or luxury and success, but the need for these items has created an undermining for where the products come from and how they influence the rest of the world. Sweat shops, for example, are a well known consequence of retail consumption. Here, you could argue that the negativities associated with consumption are known, but the need for consumption is so engrained that people have reached an extreme level of passivity in that they choose to ignore these. As Jameson states, "the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror," (410); a fact that truly cannot be denied.
When you brought up the notion of a sort of recklessness to media consumption, I cannot help but be reminded of something that was said in class on Thursday: "We don't want your culture, and yet we can't avoid it." The permeation of the American culture is worldwide and unmistakably thorough; popular American magazines line the shelves of petrol stations in Singapore. It is evident that geographical distance does not impede American ideologies from spreading. I've spent a good portion of my early teenage years reading teen magazines, columns of useless information about what Jesse McCartney's favorite Pinkberry order was (I didn't even know what Pinkberry was in the first place) or who Taylor Swift had just recently dumped. Despite living halfway across the globe with no connection whatsoever to the American world, I felt like I was somehow part of the culture after consuming issue after issue of pointless media. I became attached from a detached plane.
ReplyDeleteLike a colonizing dictator rampaging other countries and invading them with his ideology, American culture takes over the world in a plague-like manner. The very problem lies in the fact that media consumption is difficult (or near impossible) to avoid. We have discussed that the act of consuming is definitely a right and a freedom, and I believe that everyone should have to the choice of what they want to consume — but just how realistic is that? Media is all-encompassing and as much as we'd like to cease and control our consumption, we are constantly being bombarded by it. We do not live with media, but instead live in it. Perhaps the only way of ever avoiding it is to live in a cave; someone should begin a Kickstarter for it.
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ReplyDeleteYou both bring up really good points about the pervasiveness of media consumption and American culture, but the point I'd like to address is the concept of the passive consumer in contemporary society. I agree that most people don't question the media they consume or acknowledge (or even think about) the consequences or the underlying messages, but there is a definite reason for that, and the alternative isn't so simple.
ReplyDeleteEven in actively attempting to resist media consumption or in challenging the consequences of media consumption, we are still engaging with it—and in many ways even products of it ourselves. Consumption has become a prerequisite of living in today's society, and the media machine is inescapable through the ideologies it instills in all those who are subject to it. It's almost as if there's a forced passivity at work in today's culture, because mainstream media continues to be isolated to only those who can afford the costs of production. This point harkens back to a point made by Horkheimer and Adorno: "Only those who can keep paying the exorbitant fees charged by the advertising agencies...That is, those who are already part of the system...Can enter the pseudomarket as sellers." Anyone who may attempt to break out of the role of the passive consumer finds extremely limited opportunities for meaningful resistance on the basis of exclusion from mass media.
On another note, Jameson's view that modern day culture is representative of "the end...of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal..." is definitely well made. All the texts are coming together, because Hebdige’s points about subculture are essential to understanding exactly why this end of truly unique style is occurring. Even subcultures are products of the same ideology that shapes mass culture, which makes true uniqueness nearly impossible. Even in attempting to resist or challenge the system, you are in some ways remaining passive and completely entrenched in the ideology and reality produced by the media machine. Kind of depressing, eh?