Posted on 03/19/2005 9:20:27 AM PST by Thebaddog
TWENTY YEARS AGO the late social historian Christopher Lasch memorably lamented that American culture was turning its children into self-absorbed consumers who relished their self-preoccupation. Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism (1979) bewailed the prevalence of what he called "the banality of pseudo-self-awareness." In a crowded field, his chief examples were the trivialization of politics and art as forms of celebrity spectacle. Capitalism commodifies everything that it touches, he observed. Commercial society bombards its customers with images of consumer goods and convinces them that exchange value is the only value that really matters. Increasingly the standards and ethos of commercial advertising pervade the rest of culture: "We live in a swirl of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion."
snip
The next step in this cultural process was self-parody. Commercials began to spoof commercials; Westerns made fun of westerns; in 1979, soap operas were especially knowing. Some of the most popular shows on television were soap opera parodies: Fernwood, Soap and, above all, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. These shows assured soap opera viewers of their own sophistication by mocking the conventions of soap operas. Lasch shook his head: "The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvements in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life."
(Excerpt) Read more at findarticles.com ...
"...the trivialization of politics and art as forms of celebrity spectacle."
The merging of DC and Hollywood smacks of the clintonian milieu. The shallow, plastic, narcissistic self-aware. Trivial indeed.
Sounds like it would be an interesting topic if they didn't intellectualize it so much as to make it so obscure and inaccessible. That is the the fatal flaw in most academically written books; they're written for an audience of five -- to impress, rather than to share information as peers in society. That is the distinctively academic style of writing -- this implied elitism -- while this guy actually discusses this false notion of superiority in society causing isolation and alienation. The reviewer and the author seem to know the words but I don't see their lips moving:
"The recent cult of ironic detachment struck Lasch as an especially notable example of the narcissistic trend. He attributed this phenomenon to the degradation of work. "As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday discourse," he observed. People coped with lousy jobs by affecting knowing superiority over them. Popular culture increasingly deflected their boredom and despair by adopting the same trope of ironic detachment. "Many forms of popular art appeal to this sense of knowingness and thereby reinforce it," Lasch noted. "They parody familiar roles and themes, inviting the audience to consider itself superior to its surroundings."
The degradation of work is this very notion that work is beneath them -- that is propagated by the unions, schools, and pseudo-sophisticated people of this ilk who think their lot in life is to get a cushy job doing nothing but pontificating as proof of how important they are. Meanwhile, they constantly knock the people working hard to earn an honest living -- and make them out to be fools for working so hard. Then they turn into these bloated parodies of self-important people with faces contorted into hideous masks and wonder why all the self-serving contradictions and hypocrisy of their lives have not made them happy.
It doesn't take a Ph.D.
"Man is a luxury-loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turm him into a dull, sluggish creature, scarcely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rationale or too serious to be tempted by baubles."
I also think that Derrida is off in the cosmos laughing at all the fools in NYC and Boston that he fooled. I know that he took apart the arts and Architecture where I reside. I blow gas in his general direction and I don't think its up.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.