'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
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Google and unfreedom
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February 24, 2009
Tony Curzon Price in The freedom of the networked (pt 3) says that
Google's business model is to sell your screen-space to advertisers and swap you free-search in exchange.... Centralisation of information is a business necessity for Google as it optimises click-through. Whatever services can capture large portions of the data relating to who, what when, where and how about every habitual human activity will be sitting on an advertiser's dream. The commercial incentive to build large information collections is huge.
Underpinning this is the legitimating, ideological function that Western capitalist culture invests in the idea of history seen as a continuum "progress" that affirms the present as its culmination. A dialectical critic is one whose task is that of being constantly engaged in deciphering the material and historical conditions of the objects which form our everyday life. According to Susanna Scarparo Benjamain held that:
the wishes and desires of the collective unconscious are displayed in a mediated manner through images. Thus, according to Benjamin, the images created by past generations contain the desires of those generations which are still "true" and relevant for us today. As a result, then, the objects of the past are not important for themselves, but for what they stand for, as they can help us to reach an understanding of the world in which our wishes and desires are not distorted by the bourgeois and capitalist society. The basic structure of capitalist society, in fact, distorts objects as it abstracts and, therefore, renders invisible the labor that goes into their making. When the object lacks the mark of the labor which went into its production it bears the mark of commodity, and when distorted desires are projected into the commodified object, this object becomes a fetish. Thus, as the object invested with false desires becomes a phantasmagoria produced by the distorted desires of the collective, the world becomes an aesthetic spectacle of itself.
Walter Benjamin's approach to critical discourse, together with his view of the world seen as a textual construction involves hermeneutic approach. In Paris Capital of the World, where the dialectical critic has the task to discover the "truth" contained in the urban architecture of Paris, which Benjamin believes to be a revealing text or record of historical forces. However, the purpose of interpreting the world (or the urban architecture) as a text is to show the ways in which the social and cultural forms of expression and of organization in the 19th century are, in all of their manifestations, distorted by the basic structure of the capitalist social system.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:38 PM | Permalink |
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