[iDC] The politics of cultural production

[saul ostrow]

Critical culture as a mode of production stands in contradistinction  
to those practices that would reduce human possibility to a finite  
number of principles and conceptual categories. Those who manage and  
maintain capital understand the significant role cu this critical  
culture plays in constructing and sustaining our Subjectivity.   
Consequently  over the last 60 years having  perfected mass media,  
they have  made a concerted effort to integrate all areas of cultural  
production into their mechanism of social control.  To create a  
counterbalance, rather than merely slowing the progress this efforts  
to order all aspects of everyday life  requires an aesthetic and  
political ideology capable of generating embodied experiences that  
leave us with the ability to make judgments upon which we may act  
imaginatively/ creatively rather than merely reactively. To achieve  
this objective, we must rethink our critical criteria and aesthetic  
practices, so that our intellectual and material production are  
capable of consciousness "building" rather than consciousness  
‘raising.’  As such, rather than constituting a space of marginalized  
engagement, critical culture duly reordered can afford a space that  
permits us to step outside the existing reactive social model ordered  
by the instrumental logic of either/or - for/ against that dominates  
our present culture of opposition. This obliges us ethically to  
abandon the fruits of many hard-won victories  and modes of  
resistance because their underlying assumptions no longer correspond  
to the actual conditions.  The present logic of exposing  "truth" in  
order to form communities of the like minded, ignores the fact that  
Capital in its corporate form exists independently of any class, and  
its dementia is a structural condition rather than merely one of  
individual, or even collective ignorance, abuse, or malfeasance.  
Consequently as an autonomous system (an artificial intelligence),  
Capitalism can no longer be addressed by the traditional forms of  
social protest, intervention and opposition or the implicit goal of  
such practices.








-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/attachments/20060825/2a9452bc/attachment-0002.html