Week 7



§Discipline
§Gaze
§Discourse
§Power
§
§Film

§
§


Image result for visual culture images



Image result for narrative storytelling



§Spectacle – Commodities have supplanted human relationships
§Obfuscates history/past – the ever-present
§Yesterday’s religion is today’s advertising
§Quality of life, knowledge, critical thinking is degraded; “what was lived is now represented”
§Mass media stimulating consumer culture and commodity fetishism serve to stupefy public
§What binds the spectators together is the very center which maintains their isolation. The
spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate" (29) With people trying to understand
themselves through a representation, they in fact lose all hope of coherently and unitarily living
their own life. "This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is
everywhere" with representation ruling over "the society of the spectacle", the unified direct
human relations are replaced with the fragmented adherence to the spectacle which isolates us
§A society which no longer needs a developing economy for its survival, but rather one which has to
provide for the survival of the ever developing economy

§Deeply distressed by the hegemony of governments and media over everyday life through mass
production and consumption.
§Criticized both the capitalism of the West and the dictatorial communism of the Eastern bloc for
the lack of autonomy allowed to individuals by both types of governmental structure.
§Postulated that Alienation had gained a new relevance through the invasive forces of the
'spectacle = a social relation between people that is mediated by images" consisting of mass
media, advertisement, and popular culture
§a self-fulfilling control mechanism for society
§notions of reification; semiotics
§probed the historical, economic, and psychological roots of the media and popular culture
§alienation is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization that has reached its
climax in capitalism

§History & Discourse; Transition to Consumer Society; Pros/Cons
§Shift in Techniques; shift in Experience; Promoting Values
§Shift to Visual Culture; Target marketing; Cultural Differentiation
§Ad Agencies: Size, Structure (demographics, lifestyle brands, produser incentives
§Techniques: snob-appeal, bandwagon, hidden-fear, irritation, association principle
§Stereotypes, Myths and Stories, product placement
§Limitations: Children, Schools, Health, Politics

§Self as something produced discursively
§Different form of exploitative labour: “If we see the self as both a product and a reflexively
constituted brand subject to a transaction and exchange, we see a notion of self deeply marked by
the discourses and practices of post-fordist modes of capitalist production” §Brand =ultimate
image-commodity; value-generating (logics of capitalist accumulation); empty language (flexible)
§Sits at the nexus of discourses related of neoliberalism, flexible accumulation, radical
individualism and spectacular promotion
§Entrepreneur of the self; whole way of life;
§Reality TV, Media Life