[lbo-talk] school uniforms

Brian Siano siano at mail.med.upenn.edu
Mon Aug 25 09:18:30 PDT 2003


Dwayne Monroe wrote:


>Brian Siano wrote:
>Doesn't this
>indicate that some kind of snobbery is at work behind
>this "corporate yoke" theorizing?
>
>
>
>Probably.
>
>Also, I think a lot of folks don't really see the
>nuances of the world we're living in. This is why,
>for some types of info, I trust novelists like Bruce
>Sterling or William Gibson and comic artist/writers
>like Warren Ellis before traditional Marxist/Socialist
>or just general lefty commentarians.
>
And sometimes it's just attitude without context. If someone tells me that the range of fashions available in America is just another kind of uniform, an example of corporate oppression, another technique of mind control, I learn a lot-- about how that person wants to be perceived. That's the attitude part. The attitude evaporates once we place Western consumer culture into context, i.e., showing how it offers a far greater range of choices than nearly any other culture before or current.


>There's a tendency to believe that people who do not
>see the world through the necessary theoretical
>framework are trapped in a wholly false consciousness;
>hence the snobbery towards clothing consumers.
>
Once again, it's attitude over anything else; it's also amazing how people who talk about techniques of domination, corporate control, cultural hegemony and the like sound more mechanical than Disney audio-animatronic creations.


>That is, while it's certainly true that large firms
>dominate the manufacturing, marketing and product
>placement channels, making the "corporate domination"
>argument not quite a fully straw man (after all, they
>do set the initial 'look' agenda), it's also true that
>people - young people in particular - do with these
>products whatever they want.
>
>Clothing manufacturers watch what people do - by, for
>example, sending buyers to Warp Tour shows to observe
>what kids are wearing - and alter their product for
>the following season accordingly.
>
>So there's a sort of feedback loop in effect.
>
Clearly, that's true. The comment I was responding to, however, wouldn't even grant that much autonomy to people. That's another feature of many self-styled Leftists. They don't seem to argue from anything like an independent spirit, but from a stance of how oppressed, limited, and demoralized everyone's supposed to be. Frabkly, if you've been beaten _that_ easily, why the hell should I join that particular crusade? It'd be like shipping off to Iraq with a platoon of severe depressives.


>Have you heard about the homebrew digital film makers
>who, disgusted with George Lucas' ineptitude,
>'re-made' the new Star Wars films using computer based
>editing tools?
>
>This is another example of people taking a corporate
>product that many might sneer at as mindless corporate
>drone entertainment and tweaking it to their own
>tastes.
>
I'm of two minds about that. On the one hand, I don't mind it being done to stuff I dislike, like the last coupla Star Wars movies. And other than the re-edit, Lucas's people have actually been pretty encouraging of people who want to make their own Star Wars short films (offering sound effects for dubbing, etc.) But it bugs me if people decide that they're going to "improve" on something that doesn't need it, or something that's already better than their meager talents. For example, someone's come up with an re-edit of _A.I._ that they're presumptuously calling "the Kubrick edit." Never mind that Spielberg followed Kubrick's project very closely and, I think, did an admirable job of it.

It's as if Ted Turner's misbegotten effort at "colorizing" movies can now be done by anyone. I could easily imagine someone deciding that _2001_ needs a faster pace, or that _Lawrence of Arabia_ needs more blood, or that Rick Blaine in _Casablanca_ should be seen stroking a fluffy pet cat because that'd make him more likeable. But, since nobody's forcing me to watch the alternate version, and the originals are still available, such "re-edits" are just a minor annoyance.



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