Ways of Seeing (John Berger)
Well worth reading.
It is important here not to confuse publicity with the pleasure or benefits to be enjoyed from the things it advertises. Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure’s own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of other. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. The look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.
The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product. She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself. One could put this another way: the publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
Filed under: Books, Politics | Leave a Comment
Tags: Capitalism, John Berger
That is the title of my first post as a guest blogger for The F Word. You can read it here.
Filed under: Blogular, Feminism, Politics | Leave a Comment
Tags: Migrant Workers, Singapore, The F Word
Another Morning Stoner
Their last album was unconscionably bad, but I do still love Madonna and Source Tags and Codes. What is forgiveness? / It’s just a dream / What is forgiveness? / It’s everything
Filed under: Music | Leave a Comment
Tags: Trail of Dead
More Byatt love
From this Guardian interview.
‘Do you know what her children call her?” a mutual friend asked me when I said I was going to see AS Byatt. “You’ll never guess. Not in a million years.”“Antonia? Mum?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “They call her ‘AS Byatt’.”
Ha! And then this:
I read Possession years ago, I tell her, but a passage has stuck in my mind. One character makes a sneering remark about another “taking himself rather seriously”. Their interlocutor replies briskly: “There are worse things human beings can do than take themselves seriously.”“Yes,” she says. “I’ve been saying that all my life.”
Filed under: Books | 1 Comment
Tags: A.S. Byatt
News to me
A news programme I was watching this weekend devoted nearly a third of its time to the football results, with detailed analysis of each game. This was more than was given over to any of the other stories featured, barring perhaps the rescue of a survivor from the Hati earthquake; and certainly the depth of coverage far exceeded, for example, the cursory two or three lines in which the Tory proposal to resurrect prison ships was communicated.
I understand that football is of great interest to many people, but this strikes me as rather poor prioritisation – especially given that a specialist programme dedicated purely to the sport followed immediately after.
Filed under: Politics, Television | Leave a Comment
Guest-blogging
I will be guest-blogging at The F-Word in February.
Filed under: Blogular, Feminism | Leave a Comment
Distance
Moving away from home, far enough that geography forces the lines of your life to separate significantly from what you grow up with, is commonplace in some communities, unusual or even unthinkable in others.
Of course, in some contexts, especially urban ones, lives can avoid entanglement even without physical separation – it’s typical in many cities not to know your neighbours. Only in the tiny college town of my undergraduate days have I felt a close linkage between the physical and social/psychological spaces I inhabited, for example expecting to be stopped for a chat numerous times on a short trip to the supermarket. (I’m not sure if the deep, in-the-moment happiness of that time is in any way related to this.) But even so, beyond a certain point simple distance must have an effect: moving away draws an emphatic line between oneself and adolescent connections, even if vague, co-located attenuation could achieve a similar result, and even though the Internet fuzzes the edges of that line slightly.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying I was back in Singapore for a visit last week, and felt that distance surprisingly keenly. You forget how far paths can diverge. It’s not disorienting to encounter cultural gaps when you’re expecting them – it’s when you think you’ll understand, or be understood, and don’t, or aren’t, that it’s confusing.
But to return to the start of this entry: it’s also confusing to live a lot of your life believing it doesn’t matter so much (it’s normal, here, after all, to move away), and then find one of the curious things you’ve left behind is the idea that it should.
Filed under: Personal | Leave a Comment
Tags: London, Singapore
Docteur Qui
I had the very great pleasure of seeing Bill Bailey live recently. What I really like about him is how he combines high levels of verbal, musical and physical comedy so effectively. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a feminist, either: not once in the entire evening did anything he said strike me as off-colour, which just gives the lie to the claim that you need to be offensive to be funny.
Filed under: Comedy | 2 Comments
Tags: Bill Bailey
What’s also terrible
What’s also terrible is some of Doris Lessing’s prose. And how long this book is. Look, I like dense material (see also: Byatt, Hardy). But ploughing through some of this is a struggle. Especially when blatantly homophobic material appears (as with the appalling description of Anna Wulf’s lodgers). This has been so enthusiastically recommended to me, though, so I remain in hope of more pay-off.
Filed under: Books | Leave a Comment
Tags: Doris Lessing
Search
-
Blogroll
