New Year prediction | clivejames.com

We’ve reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as a petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet. Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece.

Something very distinctive about the short sentence ‘There will be another madness, but not that one.’

Interesting to see Clive without the ‘comedy’ glasses in the portrait, right.

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Liberal humanism, at least in its popular incarnation, has always insisted that while the human body is imprisoned by circumstance, the soul always remains free. Niedzviecki draws heavily on Foucault’s famous assertion that the reverse is actually true: Every human being possesses at least some physical freedom to do what he will with his body, but the soul is an “instrument of a political anatomy,” impressed upon us by the institutions and ideologies around us. We are free, in other words, to become Pilates enthusiasts, drag queens or debauched junkies. We are not free, Niedzviecki writes, “to evoke an individuality that has not already been implanted in us by a combination of state-sponsored regulation and the wish-fulfillment fantasies of our pop culture.”

More re-hashing of stuff explored more interestingly by Debord (and, as the article points out, Adorno + Horkheimer before him) – salutary nonetheless. It’s not tagged ‘zeitgeist’ for nothing.

Peter Wollen notes,

Visual display is the other side of the spectacle, the side of production rather than consumption or reception.

Guy Debord, the theorist of spectacle, noted how, in modern times, an excess of display has the effect of concealing the truth of the society that produces it, providing the viewer with an unending stream of images that might be best understood, not simply as detached from the real world of things, as Debord implied, but as working to efface any trace of the symbolic, condemning the viewer to a world in which we can see everything but understand nothing – allowing us as viewer-victims, in Debord’s phrase, only ‘a random choice of ephemera’.

I was throwing out some semi-digested content and found the Wollen quotation above. It’s interesting in light of the ‘Person of the Year’ Time Magazine article. This view of spectacle is getting turned on its head. Technology is empowering the consumer – don’t you just love that word! – to produce the images and more widely the content which is sending shockwaves in the world of corporate mass media.

This is what Tim Evans, BT group marketing and brand director, thinks they’re up to with this campaign.

“Adam is going to be the central character of all our consumer television ads from now on. Viewers will see him thrown through life’s highs and lows and watch how BT products and services can help him with various situations. In the first TV ad we will see Adam use wireless broadband on his laptop to score much needed brownie-points with Jane’s kids. In the second, Adam uses his mobile phone to text a message to the home phone to help Joe look cool in front of his little sister Lucy.

“We wanted to connect with people as strongly as some of our great advertising campaigns of the past did… Adam is a guy in his mid-thirties, he’s someone we all feel we could know. We put him in the centre of a wider network of people, a non-nuclear but very real family unit.”

I was thinking about why I’m intrigued by this advert and I’ve decided that it isn’t really the shift from the late 70s wholesome dinner table shennanigans of the Oxo Mum, Dad and two kids to the 00s BT family, navigating relationship undercurrents with ‘cool’ BT technology.

No, it’s the central character’s soppy hairstyle. What IS that about?