Re: Adorno on TV

[simon smith <clov@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In article <Pine.SUN.3.96.990607094236.10244A-100000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Matthew Levy <mlevy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes
>
> An aesthetic and political-psychological critique of what it is
>that "happens to me" when i watch television has to go beyond these
>simpleminded skinnerian ideas of passive conditioning to offer any insight
>whatsoever ... what the discourse of addiction does is just replicate a
>longer tradition of protestant guilt, not give me any critical ammunition
>to understand my situation.

Well clearly we have to understand *why* people become addicted to
things, but I don't see why addiction should not be a good description
for what is going on. I tend to believe people when they tell me they
are soap-opera addicts, and addiction to me is not a moral category.
>
>
> I really don't
>believe addiction is too strong a word for
>the > need one may have for that kick or thrill to punctuate their working
>> week.
>>
>> When someone regularly watches MTV and tells everyone what crap it is, I
>> cannot believe that what must be the most violently authoritarian pop
>> cultural form yet created is not damaging their ability to think in more
>> than spasmodic jerks.
>>
>
>Now I am irritated and am going to borrow one from Ralph's book ...please
>demonstrate to me what sort of thinking you are capable of and if
>sufficiently impressed I will consider switching to your favorite cultural
>forms.  Or are you implicating yourself in this?  Why is it that you see
>audience participation in popular commodity culture as a greater danger to
>enlightened democratic thinking than your self-righteous alienation?  And
>what do you know about the way the human mind works that I don't, that you
>can actually describe anyone's thinking as "spasmodic jerks" and mean
>something by it other than a pointless insult?

Discussion as challenge... no. Also I am not self-righteous - I hardly
believe that I am one of the 'alienated' few, railing red-faced, brow
furrowed, at the ignorant masses. Of course I am absolutely implicating
myself in this. I only know about these things from experiencing them
myself and through self-reflection. As I said in another post, all I'm
interested in is understanding my own experience of the world. I feel
physically ill when sat in front of a music video, so I do it only about
once a year. When I do, I feel reduced exactly to the status of one Of
Skinner's poor rats, responding in spasmodic mental jerks to the
overwhelming assault on my senses - the desperate fast cutting, the
techniques of disorientation... These videos are a war on consciousness.
(I think this is a banal observation, to be honest.) This is very
frightening to me when so many millions of people watch them, with the
advertisements and the films made by the people who learned their trade
on the videos and the adverts.

I have no favoured cultural forms to give you.
>
>
> I essentially don't believe that the word
>"stupid" has any useful meaning.

The loss of the ability to think, to let the world speak, to not be
merely self-identical - those things we have to do every day to keep
ourselves vaguely human.
--
Simon Smith