>
>Doug, I recall that you once said that "the media can't tell you want to
>think,
>but can tell you what to think about." Polls work the same way, it seems
>to me.
>Which, ironically, is the point (so far) in Jonathan Lear's book Happiness,
>Death and the Remainder of Life --> Aristotle can't tell us what happiness
>is,
>but does "inject" a concern for happiness into our living and
>understanding of
>what that means (happiness is an "enigmatic signifier").
>I'm reminded of a friend who wrote a paper on Marcuse... who was asked a
>question: So... what does Marcuse mean by happiness?" The, rather clever
>if you
>ask me, response: "If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands?"
>
>ken
and yet, what y ou describe seems to me to be basic to the human condition. the media is a cultural institution. its job is to define what we think about. but, there is no way to create a world in which the terms of our discourse aren't delimited. we're finite, fallible human beings. it's called culture. thank all known deities that it probably won't ever go away after the revolution. so the question to devolves to the one i wrangled with long ago here and at pulp-culture list. the question is, who controls those mechanisms, why and how?
i maintained that many of us want to create a kind of "conscious social reproduction" in which we better understand and participate in the creation of and control over the rules by which we live together.
and yet, to say that is to claim that can amount to a kind of (arguably) tryannical, subjection of our selves and our daily practices--everything---to scrutiny in order to ask if we assent to those rules, if they are "good", etc.
i used to explain it to my students by telling a story of how a woman who was recently divorced, decided to do something rather symbolic at dinner to celebrate the event. whereas they had always sat with father at captain's chair, mother across, children between, she implemented a kind of weekly musical chairs. multiple that kind of thing many many times to think about what our daily lives might be like under conditions of "conscious social reproduction". (and don't forget that mom was the one who defined the new terrain (parameters) within which family meals took place).
hobbesian,
kelley