the consumer is the consumed

I was talking to a friend yesterday evening and he mentioned that Facebook was for sale, or was it being floated, not sure. Impressed buy the high valuation he had heard reported we discussed how Facebook made money. He spoke about the value of information relating to the likes and dislikes of the members of Facebook which was saleable commercial knowledge. His main point however was that he found the inversion fascinating whereby the customer of Facebook had become the product itself. He said this as if it was something particular to Facebook or perhaps by implication more broadly to contemporary web business practices.

I suggested that his point was a perfect example of a philosophical statement and it seemed that this was the general situation pertaining to all commodities – the consumer becoming the consumed. It may even apply to collecting wild fruits but certainly with loaves of bread the producer becomes the baker, there may even be a discreet set of desires that are proper to the bread maker. The car I own was not made for me to drive but for me to buy to drive, the emphasis on buying being the point here: clothes are made for us. The consumable item makes the consumer, we take on aspects of identity that come with the items we believe we are consuming. Continue reading “the consumer is the consumed”

christ the worker

I was in Truro yesterday morning and I saw a painting. It is in the Chapel of Christ the Worker in Truro Cathedral. It really caught my attention because it was so well set in that realist art of the thirties. I love the way it remarks the Soviet realism of the period and found it hugely enjoyable to see. So it is a crafting of a practice isn’t it? It must be. I was laughing to myself in a sort of post-theological way, thinking that the painting is imagined to avoid the sanctimonious praise of figuring the rich and powerful in religious art (as in the Italian renaissance etc) and showing us the workers at their toil. Maybe it was sensed as somehow revolutionary even at the time with its echoes of the Soviets. However she was adumbrating, indicating before its time, the descent of the church to a point that it is only by offering images of the poor (and noble) that the church is validated in a very material, financial way. You don’t get lottery grants by promising to be nice to the local Dukes do you???

institutes

There is a great wealth of institutes in Cornwall.  The countryside is densely populated compared to many areas of rural Britain, there were so many small mining communities that there are Insitutes dotted all over the place.  These two are nearby. I know nothing about them as yet, I’ve seen them for years.  The first one is now a garage and was at one time I am told a snooker club, apparently there is a history of it but I have yet to locate it:

The second is being restored and is near one of the entrances to the Heartlands Project in Pool.  I’ll write more about that later.  Anyway, nice buildings and homes of learning and self improvement, I assume…

preparing a new paddock

There is land across the road that has been contested for many years, it is poisoned from earlier periods of mining and the dumping of various wastes and is heavily contaminated in places with arsenic amongst other things.  It has also become home to a vast and expanding colony of Japanese knotweed.  It was owned by a Cornish farmer who finding himself short of money tried a variety of ways to make the land productive over the years; some of these were very unpopular locally, like when he wanted to allow a landfill site to be created on the land.

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300

Well what am I to make of the 300?  Second time I’ve seen it and a very different watching in some ways and not in others.  This time too I hear the entirely fictional and impossible speeches made by Spartans about saving ‘little Greece’, that home of ‘reason and justice’, setting out to defeat the Persians, the most orientalised orientals possible, those who keep slaves, those who have the good music, who offer protection to the malformed, the perverse.

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The Hoe, the Barbican and Ale

It is funny what you learn, or maybe remember. On a train travelling to the south west longing for privacy I am interrupted by three revelers returning from a drinking birthday celebration at the Tom Cobley, a pub outside Exeter. One of the best pubs in the world I am told and we talk about this and that and drinking.

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Dogville

Dogville (Lars Von Trier) allows interpretation from many perspectives.  As SP said, it is like a Shakespeare play in that respect amongst others.  I focus below on a set of ideas, perhaps more words, I encountered in Lacanian writing about the film.  Zizek refers to Dogville in A perverts guide to Cinema, and elsewhere other writers pick up on his ideas to develop further a Lacanian interpretation.  I have little or no understanding of Lacan and all of that second hand, but the film did allow me to entertain the thought that there was something that I could draw from it about the other, the encounter with the other and how that founds essential elements of our lives and can act as an explanatory framework for understanding.

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