“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day.*
September 10th, 2006 at 09:06pm Marique Newell
Well, I sat down to write about one topic, but then read Hemal’s post, and now I just feel flustered with everything I want to write and respond to! Bear with me…
First: I completely agree with Hemal’s assessment of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s essay and quickly want to add on to her comments about how “’cultural industry’ leads only to sanitized, safe products that lack true creativity, expression or originality” (which I don’t buy either). Kellner also alludes to this idea in his essay when he writes about Debord’s theory that spectacle is a tool “which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent task of real life–recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice.” Along the same lines, Kellner goes on to state that, as members of a capitalist society, we are condemned to “lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alientation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination.”
Well. What to say first? Yes, spectacle, in its many, many shapes and forms, can be a total suckage of brain cells, leaving us - to use just one example - at the water cooler discussing the characters on reality television shows, movies and even commercials as though we know them personally and intimately. And, yes, spectacles distract us, but that distraction is, most likely, entertainment, and is entertainment truly alienating us from our creative potential? (Broad question, I know.)
Also, despite something being “spectacle,” is it true, fair, safe to say, etc., that we unable to be inspired by it or moved to create our own artwork, poetry, pieces of music, what have you, based on our exposure to that spectacle? No, as a journalist, I don’t think “US Weekly” inspires me to be a better writer/reporter, but I guess what I’m trying to say (albeit, somewhat poorly) is that I have a hard time believing that we are just mindless, drab, creatively void consumers who, because we just so happen to live in a media-dominated society where it is nearly impossible to not come in contact with some form of spectacle, have no potential for creativity and imagination.
Second: I want to respond to Neil Gabler’s theory (discussed in Kellner’s essay) about how “life itself is becoming like a movie…’in which we become at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show’” and make “our lives into entertainment acted out for audiences of our peers.” And my response to this, simple as it may be, is WHY? Why do we do this??! Why do we want to be on reality television, when, as regular watchers, we see that it isn’t real at all? Why do tens of thousands of untalented Americans mob “American Idol” try outs — just for that 15 seconds of fame? What’s that worth? Why are we so desperate to see our lives on screen, on the page, or on the Internet, via blogs? Are all societies like this, or is the United States unique in this way?
Gabler notes that this phenomenon has “metastasized into life,” to the extent that it’s impossible to distinguish between what is real and what isn’t. Is this why James Frey lied in his “memoir?” Is the idea of reality relative? If all of our definitions of what is real and what isn’t are different, well, then, who’s right?
On that note, please forgive the randomness of quoting a children’s book here, but it’s rather fitting. The subject line on this post is from “The Velveteen Rabbit,” in which Margery Williams writes (in condensed form here), “What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
If only it was this simple…
Entry Filed under: Week 2 - Debord
1 Comment
1. Professor Sample | September 13th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
I like your question about whether it is “true, fair, safe to say, etc., that we unable to be inspired by it or moved to create our own artwork, poetry, pieces of music, what have you, based on our exposure to that spectacle?”
Many writers, artists, and musicians working today would say exactly this: they want to inspire their audience to create their own works in response to the books, art, and music they make. This is DeLillo’s point too, in the postscript to “The Uniforms,” that it is valuable to create art out of someone else’s art.
Where it gets tricky, I guess, is when the musician’s works are owned by Sony or EMI and any music created in response to it is faced with either a lawsuit or a buyout.