Enlightenment as Mass Deception (last)

Look at that, ‘culture’ is so involved it can even become paradoxical. Gets Derridean; kind of useless. Then comes marketing. Advertising a monopoly is especially depraved. Its very superfluity promotes gluttons for coldness. Using its own devices to try and correct this on a large scale, as one might imagine, only makes things worse. When a product is commodified, a certain promise of use value—for the culture industry, enjoyment—results. Advertising used to be deceptively informative: Now that the free market is being obliterated by becoming hegemonic to the exclusion of alternatives (blogal), its most ardent practitioners are mobilizing to cover it’s ideology. Mass production, even of ads, is a bit self-selecting; it is usually just a front for maintaining control over affiliated industry. Anything which doesn’t step in line with marketing dictates is held as suspect. It doesn’t even really, for all its competition, inform that many people of a product’s existence; more or less just constitutes the means by which the few detain the consent of a many momentarily to keep capital as their authority. Like propaganda: Every product required to use makes it the uniform ’style’ of the industry (but its most visible monuments may be free of this since it has permeated all other facets of society). The traditional is co-opted for the purpose of exploitative sales; art and ads, hard to distinguish. The synthetic mass production of all creative expression as a function of promoting trade takes an air of apparent importance in any isolated instance with no means of connecting the inverse of meaning. It is a slick effect of tricks repeatable in a metonymic process of blurring the line between public persona and private imagery. “Advertising and the culture industry merge technically as well as economically.” One become many in reduplicative integration of human and technological into a manipulative procedure. The consumer is either a pawn or subversive. Whatever we say in an influential capacity gets appropriated for the purpose of selling products, ideas, ideologies. Words become mere signs reflecting immediacy in their supposed containment of content: The things represented become cult value incarnate. “Anything in a determined literal sequence which goes beyond the correlation to the event is rejected as unclear and as verbal metaphysics.” Semantics has become semiology in their refusal to correspond. Objects turn into extrapolations out of the metaphors abstracted around them becoming unreal does the “demand for ruthless clarity from expression” come to mean only the summarily enforceable interpretation dictated by the closest authority having usurped its power of determining. Terminology becomes the code words for coven-like relations of mutual suspicion’s exclusion; titles and ability to designate now are made the inverted rule of law. “This practice reduces relations between human beings to the good fellowship of the sporting community and is a defense against the true kind of relationship.” Here has semiology come to compare access of interpretation to meaning and semantics made solely the abstraction of rigid designation converted into purely ascertainable symbol. Culture speeding up has become more manic, consumerist in jumping from one fad to the next, the next day ‘intolerable‘.Buzz-words and the newest catch phrase replace real communicating to promote false senses of familiar intimacy. “The blind and rapidly spreading repetition of words with special designations links advertising with the totalitarian watchword.” ‘Language’ is what the billboards use as “reality” from solely what the news says it did. The masses soon parrot formulaic words in expression which used to have meaning, but which become linked to whatever the most habitually signify as their original value loses sense: A word to get used for their power instead of the force of its statements in connected relations. Idealized parodies of actual human experience are paraded out for their former capacity to evoke, by turns provoke, thought or feeling divorced. You don’t need a Hitler when technology and isolation allow us all to be our own. “The War, the Empire, will expedite such barriers between our lives. The War needs to divide this way, and to subdivide, though its propaganda will always stress unity, alliance, pulling together. The War does not appear to want a folk-consciousness, not even of the sort the Germans have engineered, ein Volk ein Führer—it wants a machine of many separate parts, not oneness, but a complexity. . . .”But, as against that, the language and gestures of the audience and spectators are colored more strongly than ever before by the culture industry, even in fine nuances which cannot yet be explained experimentally.” Building your culture on commerce and the drive to go west is perhaps not the finest means of attaining a sensitive and intellectual culture; perhaps why ours tries to do either and fails for both. You may perform specific actions as one sees fit, but in terms of selecting your own components of ideological dictates to fuse into a synthesis of discursive analyses… that’s when people start feeling threatened and generally tend to drug and shove things inside of you: Gestapo Nazi Justice. We are, of course, all products of an industrial culture and also of the society this makes possible for each; but that does not mean one must let its ‘alternative’ as presented bring any force to bear on opting against the dictates of “common”, its sense, in opting for your own path or combination of them. What you know or feel something wrong and persist to keep doing or saying that is when all autonomy is relinquished in the hopes that whatever it is just happens & to not be evil; not a gamble I’m willing to take nowadays.
 

www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_industry_7.shtml

www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_1984.html