Re: [-empyre-] Do You Still Own Your Reality? (forwarded from GeriWittig)

[Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>]

surely selling ideas is as much about marketing as selling brand-marks,
love-marks, signed works. Surely popularising ideas that are - with the best
of intentions and in the public good - against the status quo relies on the
strategies of what has been called advertising. A smart argument has limited
market appeal. If I am appealing to middle America I'll probably want to hit
them in their stomaches but then do they need my message? Machiavelli is for
marketing execs. The slow and good way is culture building and cultural
context building, properly micro-cultural. Bush is in through - as has been
said - what in any other country would be called a coup d'etat. Bush is out
in the long term through a strategy of micro-cultural transgressions against
what peoples, states, communities and societies mean and can claim
responsibility for: ethical action. Of course there is a poetics to the
struggle, a rampant embracing of Magogs and Gogs in rapturous
shopping-malls. But if there is a short-term solution it is simple and it
works by repetition and it costs more than the national debt. I don't think
that's diogenetical cynicism - images of hairy philosophers masturbating in
public places is surely part of the struggle (in terms of getting that shit
to air) and art is only patronising when it is bad on somebody else's
behalf, demoralising; kitsch is something quite other but there all around
in the American reading of power in cultural artefacts, Shakespeare, for
example, Disney, for example. I can't quite understand this cultural
blindspot, regardless of the academy's re-education: cultural production
does not appear to reflect on - or recognise - Realpolitik in the way it
does in Europe. Anyway, to return to the theme: it's hip to vote anti-Bush,
it's bad and phat and numm and dogged by the cynicism of underdogs, dog: but
you're gonna sell it how?
yours
simon