If media is
a propagandistic tool (Mechanisms of Propaganda were the title of
these lectures) Edward Hermann and Noam Chomsky methodically set
out to demonstrate how it functions as such. How are the interests
of media Empires such as Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner best served
in their control and dissemination of information? Who sends information?
Who receives it? How is it received? Can this model of propaganda
occur in New Zealand? If so, how? Is propaganda really such a strategic
and calculated model where large Western ominous firms regulate
and control the fate of an entire population? Perhaps. Or does the
ideological "control" of thought operate in a more complex
fashion. Joanna Harvey carefully, yet
cautiously, charts the news media coverage of the recent crisis
in Zimbabwe. Through a reading of ChomskyÕs and HermannÕs model
of propaganda as well as the more culturally critical analyses of
colonialism in Edward SaidÕs work, Harvey reveals the tightly formed
alliances and ideological differences between the media of the United
Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States. Propagandistic media
and neocolonialist activities share very complex and often insidious
ramifications.
Does ideological
saturation vis-ˆ-vis media perhaps re-shape not only the contours
of our mind but that of our body as well? McLuhan problematizes
the relationship between media and body. Like Andy Warhol and (more
recently) David Cronenberg, McLuhan considers media as an extension
of man. The metaphor is loaded with multi-layered textures of meaning
and, more relevantly, may actually be more than just metaphor. What
might McLuhanÕs theory suggest about cyborg culture, commodity culture,
the work of art, and media spectacle with regard to our homogenized,
technologized, everyday lives? McLuhan (as well as Warhol
and Cronenberg) offer some intriguing, funny, and frightening possibilities
for our frenetically paced world. For Warhol and McLuhan bodies
are sensually entangled with mediaÑhomogenization is the sensual
experience.
Several essays
address this troubled arena of technology and pleasure. Rowan
Laing draws together the important connections to be made between
the work of McLuhan and Cronenberg. While Laing clearly highlights
the obvious mappings of this relationship, he also emphasizes the
scintillating and perverse that often goes unarticulated. Clearly
CronbenbergÕs work raises the ante on the issue of technology as
simply negative. Indeed, the entanglement of the body within commodity
culture proffers some perverse possibilities both on the body and
the creative practices in which it engages. Anna
Pritchard and Jeremy Young draw
upon the reconfiguration of what the work (both as labor and
object) of art signifies in the age of the mechanically reproduced.
Pritchard rigorously traces WarholÕs deconstruction of the work
of art while Young explores the possibilities of the work of art,
cultural practice, and the use of the internet in the Whitney MuseumÕs
most recent Biennial exhibition.
But the commodification
of and spectacle in a McLuhanesque era is not without its critics.
Guy Debord challenges the so-called benefits of the society of the
spectacle while writers as diverse as Andrew Ross and Walter Benjamin
(although Benjamin wrote several decades before McLuhan) suggest
some interesting possibilities for our troubled mechanical age.
The spectacle of the commodity has importantly led feminist and
post-structuralist thinkers to a critical engagement of the spectacle
of the body-this is especially true of scholarly work done in relationship
to the cinematic medium.
