news media and social soma

["Gregoire de Nowell (ci-devant)" <GN842@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I do think it is appropriate to talk about why
relevant ideas for social change, whether we're talking
about atlernative fuel vehicles or shemes for full
employment or redistribution, get such short shrift in the
media.

Essentially the "left" position articulated by many contributors
argues that there is a kind of suppressed or latent
demand for such news, and that if one could creep in
edgewise and "break the hegemony" we would find that it
would sell well enough.

I don't know Isaac's personal politics, but I suspect
they are to the right of many of us and to the left
of much of the rest of the world.  In sum, he's probably
what in europe would pass for a workaday, nonremarkable,
social democrat.  But it is of course senidng up
the flares to argue that the current media system
"reflects what people want" in a totally non-problematic
sense; it can be seen as an argument that the "system
is working" and that "there's nothing wrong with it."

I think that Isaac may have put this view forward
either deliberately or by accident.  He seemed, judging
from his response to my post, not hostile to the soma
argument.

The soma argument is an important twist on the whole
issue under discussion.  *The people want their soma.*
That's the first point.  The second is, *when they get
their soma desire for anything else disappears.*  It
is therefor wrong to think of a latent demand when in
fact the question is much more subtle.

The left argument is really a kind of Platonic one.
It rests on the assumption that people "want what is
good for them" and that this desire is "frustrated"
because all they get instead is soma.  It is a varient
of the class consciousness argument advanced by Marx.
The problem with soma, however, is that as an opiate
it really does latch onto the endorphinr receptors and
satisfy a "genuine need" which, in satisfying, it also
creates the need for the next round of satisfaction.  This is
the importance of Huxley's perception that a social system
could becvome indefinitely  stable if it succeeded in delivering
right drugs.

Fossil fuel recreation, sports, sex--the saturation of
demand for these things does not, as it were, put itself
"in front of" the real demand which is latent (yes,
there are a few souls who have such latent demand). But,
on the whole, what is going on is that the satisfaction
of these desires *annihilates* all other desires.

Buying a car gets the man who wants a nice car a girlfriend
who wants a man with a nice car, which usually implies
employment.  Owning the nice car requires maintainging the
nice car and being aware of when a nice car is no longer
a nice car.  Therefore when not working one reads about
how to keep the nice car working or what other cars are
being made that one should think about buying.  Go
look at the Store 24, 7-11, or other 24 hour chain
magazine racks.  The individual who gets "into" this
automotive world finds that in fact it *satisfyies
all his needs* and provides him with a social world,
sexual partner, and a purpose for his job.  This is a
totally consuming world.    There simply is no or very
little time for reading about East Timor or worrying
about Keynesian versus Marxist prescritptions for
solving injustice.

The demand for the alternative is not "latent," it
is annihilated so long as the system delivers a job
and a car.  Thus Isaac is right to say that "there is
no demand" for news alternatives.  It is also right
to point out that here and there are some people--
someone who sees a favorite piece of wilderness
destroyed, someone who is out of a job--who feel "lost"
in this social system and who would indeed call a
KPFK fundraiser and express gratitutde.

Nonetheless, one cannot, as I do, see undergraduates
lining up on a Thursday night in zero degree weather
to get into the local beer watering holes to see
that the people who like to right and read materials
of any sort are, as it were, social freaks who are
at the margins of society.   The more one becomes
immersed in thinking and reading, both of which
are transformative acts, the more marginal one becomes.
Part of the "energy" of this debate comes precisely
from the fact that the highly literate and well
educated members of the list are, relative to the
dominant social system, marginal.

But all we have to offer is critique, thinking,
p[roblems to be resolved, and very little by way
of solutions; or more to the point, the solutions we have are
to issues which are not even considered problems elsewhere.
We don't even begin to satisfy the network of needs which
for example are met by car addiction or sports addiction
or other consumerism.  Writing and reading and thinking
are their own aesthetic.  Part of the "fallout" of
partaking of that aesthetic is an acute awareness of the
deficiencies of a sytem which produces the multiple
forms of consumerism.  But that system is for the most
part satisfying the demands that it teaches.

Consider, if you will, a tribal society which practices
extensive ritualistic scarring of young males.  We
might argue that "objectively" there ought to be a
"demand" for non-mutilation.  But there is no such
demand.  By enduring the rituals the young men become
accepted and achieve their goals for success as defined
witin the culture.

The insane perfection of the capitalist consumerist
society is that it has taken such basic impulses
and transmuted them into forms which perpetuate the
system of production.  What scarring does in some societies
vehicle ownership does in ours.  A thoughtful tribesman
might have met, over the hills, anothe tribe where
initiation focused on collection of various jewelry
rather than scarring; and might entertain the notion,
that it coudl be done another way.  But we are exactly
in that position.  Instead of "over the hills," we have
ideas we have read about and other countries some of us
have been to, or read about.  we think it could be done
another way.  But these ideas are largely irrelevant
to the society in which we live, and the chief reason
is, the system in satisfying certain basic kinds of demands
annihilates all others.

Isaac is right to point out that "there is no demand" for
publications such as LBO, in the same sense that in
a tribe that scars its young men there is no demand
for cosmetic surgery to remove scars.  The others are
right to point out that this does have the characteristics
of an ideologically hegemonic system.  But it is wrong
to think that this system derives its power merely from
its ability to suppress alternatives; that is really
to misread it.  *NO effort is put into suppressing
alternatives*--or, precious little.  *The system largely
works because the left alternatives are so irrelevant
that theyare not even perceivable* to the soma craving
masses.  I twould be as if I went to a bar where my
undergrads were lining up and offered a copy of
Gibbon's Declline and Fall of the Rloman Empire as
an alternative way to spend weekend nights.  this
would simply not register in the consciousness as
a thing to do.

greg nowell