entertainment
Well-known member
by Michel de Certeau.
I think this book would resonate with some of you. Has anyone read it?
I can't describe it that well, but it's about how in the act of consumption is a hidden process of production, through which the consumer is able to create his own autonomous space. So the consumer is not a passive, submissive drone, but a creative agent, hiding in plain site from the 'technocratic rationality' of the dominant cultural economy. He agrees with Marxists that capitalism is inseperable from these practices of everyday life, but he believes that subversive tactics exists and are carried out by everyone constantly and that exposing and making known these tactics would help people in finding a reliability and solace in their spaces.
It's very difficult reading, I don't understand half of it. Here's a passage about how the act of reading is more than a mode of consumption.
I think this book would resonate with some of you. Has anyone read it?
I can't describe it that well, but it's about how in the act of consumption is a hidden process of production, through which the consumer is able to create his own autonomous space. So the consumer is not a passive, submissive drone, but a creative agent, hiding in plain site from the 'technocratic rationality' of the dominant cultural economy. He agrees with Marxists that capitalism is inseperable from these practices of everyday life, but he believes that subversive tactics exists and are carried out by everyone constantly and that exposing and making known these tactics would help people in finding a reliability and solace in their spaces.
It's very difficult reading, I don't understand half of it. Here's a passage about how the act of reading is more than a mode of consumption.
From TV to newspapers, from advertising to all sorts of mercantile epiphanies, our
society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability
to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visual journey. It is a sort of epic
of the eye and of the impulse to read. The economy itself, transformed into a
"semeiocracy" (26), encourages a hypertrophic development of reading. Thus, for the binary
set production-consumption, one would substitute its more general equivalent: writingreading. Read-ing (an image or a text), moreover, seems to constitute the maximal
development of the passivity assumed to characterize the consumer, who is conceived of as a
voyeur (whether troglodytic or itinerant) in a "show biz society."
In reality, the activity of reading has on the contrary all the characteristics of a silent
production: the drift across the page, the meta-morphosis of the text effected by the wandering
eyes of the reader, the improvisation and expectation of meanings inferred from a few words,
leaps over written spaces in an ephemeral dance. But since he is incapable of stockpiling
(unless he writes or records), the reader cannot protect himself against the erosion of time
(while reading, he forgets himself and he forgets what he has read) unless he buys the object
(book, image) which is no more than a substitute (the spoor or promise) of moments "lost" in
reading. He insinuates into another person's text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation: he
poaches on it, is transported into it, pluralizes himself in it like the internal rumblings of one's
body. Ruse, metaphor, arrangement, this production is also an "invention" of the memory.
Words become the outlet or product of silent. histories. The readable transforms itself into the
memorable: Barthes reads Proust in Stendhal's text;28 the viewer reads the landscape of his
childhood in the evening news. The thin film of writing becomes a movement of strata, a play
of spaces. A different world (the reader's) slips into the author's place.
This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment. It transforms another person's
property into a space borrowed for a mo-ment by a transient. Renters make comparable
changes in an apartment they furnish with their acts and memories; as do speakers, in the
language into which they insert both the messages of their native tongue and, through their
accent, through their own "turns of phrase," etc., their own history; as do pedestrians, in the
streets they fill with the forests of their desires and goals. In the same way the users of social codes turn them into metaphors and ellipses of their own quests. The ruling order serves as a
support for innumerable productive activities, while at the same time blinding its proprietors
to this creativity (like those "bosses" who simply can't see what is being created within their
own enterprises).29 Carried to its limit, this order would be the equivalent of the rules of
meter and rhyme for poets of earlier times: a body of constraints stimulating new discoveries,
a set of rules with which improvisation plays.
Reading thus introduces an "art" which is anything but passive. It resembles rather that art
whose theory was developed by medieval poets and romancers: an innovation infiltrated into
the text and even into the terms of a tradition. Imbricated within the strategies of modernity
(which identify creation with the invention of a personal language, whether cultural or
scientific), the procedures of contemporary consumption appear to constitute a subtle art of
"renters" who know how to insinuate their countless differences into the dominant text. In the
Middle Ages, the text was framed by the four, or seven, interpretations of which it was held to
be susceptible. And it was a book. Today, this text no longer comes from a tradition. It is
imposed by the generation of a productivist technocracy. It is no longer a referential book, but
a whole society made into a book, into the writing of the anonymous law of production.
Last edited: