We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Engaging Media Spectacle

Click here to access article by Doug Kellner from Heathwood Press. 

Kellner describes how media uses spectacle entertainment to induce passivity among its viewers. I have a problem with this limited portrayal of media. This use of spectacle just doesn't happen by accident--it serves a ruling class interest which the author completely ignores. It serves the ruling class by inducing acceptance of a passive citizen role in society which allows the ruling class to rule.
Capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, art from life, and consumption from human needs and self-directing activity, as individuals passively observe the spectacles of social life from within the privacy of their homes. The situationist project by contrast involved an overcoming of all forms of separation, in which individuals would directly produce their own life and modes of self-activity and collective practice. 
Then he could have followed this up with a development of the concept of "situationist project". Apparently he does this in the book he's authored entitled Media Spectacle.
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