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October 16, 2007
Marx’s critique of political economy was based on the fact that all the mechanisms of the capitalist economy and its extended social relations were based on a specific illusion: things appeared to relate to each other as things, when the reality consists of relations among people.
He argued that capitalism has to find a way to extend the relations of production forged at the workplace to the rest of the human world. Consequently, a “culture of representation” is forged as the relations of production already established at the workplace are extended to the entire social world. We are cultural beings and no economic or political process can ever take place without culture.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Banksia, Victor Harbor, 2007
The quintessential space of representation of late capitalism is the screen. In the contemporary global form of late capitalism the large screen of the cinema has yielded centrality to the small screens of television and computers that have become inserted into the domestic flow of everyday life. The television captures the viewers’ undivided attention by fixing the consumptive process of mass communication to a single point in space.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, rocks, Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor, 2007
Television creates a new practice of domestic space, in which activities must be interrupted or altogether abandoned because one must stay pinned to a single place, paying attention to the screen. With television entertainment becomes interspersed with commercials and attached as a form of programming flow to the stream of everyday life activities.
The point to this flow is to gather and hold the attention of a stable percentage of the viewing audience in order to lure advertisers to that network. Programming is simple filler between commercial breaks, and mass audiences are the actual commodity that is being “sold” to the advertisers.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, rocks, Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor, 2007
Over the past two decades we have seen a transformation of mainstream television in which news and “reality” shows take up greater parts of the schedule once reserved for narrative (drama and comedy) and variety programming.The greatest impact that cable has had is in the all-news area, where the lines of demarcation between reality and televisual representation, and between awareness of real events and the construction of this very awareness(if not of the events themselves), becomes highly blurred.
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