male gaze is not ‘when person look sexy’ or 'when misogynist make film’
death of the author is not 'miku wrote this’
I don’t think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts
death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what’s in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it’s utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn’t mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot’ - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn’t intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it’s worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it’s there.’ it’s important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it’s important to be able to tell the difference.
male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn’t mean 'finding a lady sexy’ or 'looking with a sexual lens’, it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it’s important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can’t get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery’, you’re really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.
:whispers: also Death of the Author means you have to exercise self-criticism and recognise the bias YOU as the audience bring to interpreting a piece of work. Yes, your reading is valid. But to what extent are you extrapolating from your own experiences, privileges & lacks of privilege, past traumas, etc.? How might this affect your interpretation of the text?
When you have to spend 45 minutes arguing the plot of a doll movie cause your political movement is definitely winning in the marketplace of ideas and you attempted to grow a beard to hide your botched lip filler in your old navy outlet Jean jacket.
Advertising is an incredibly wasteful, ecologically destructive industry that intrudes on our everyday lives pretty much constantly. We’re absolutely fucked if we can’t even question one of the most distinctly obnoxious and useless facets of the ecocidal economic system we live in. Like this isn’t even something that powers our day-to-day existence like the energy sector (literally killing us but also keeping our AC/heat, transportation, etc running)—advertising just pollutes, wastes, and annoys, yet it’s been assimilated into many peoples’ sense of self and their ability to “enjoy things”
Contrary to the claim of free-market ideology, supply is not a response to demand. Capitalist firms usually create the demand for their products by various marketing techniques, advertising tricks, and planned obsolescence. Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false “needs” and stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintaining planetary ecological equilibrium. The criterion by which an authentic need is to be distinguished from an artificial one is whether it can be expected to persist without the benefit of advertising. How long would the consumption of Coca-Cola or Pepsi-Cola go on if the persistent advertising campaigns for those products were terminated? Such examples could be indefinitely multiplied.
“Of course,” pessimists will reply, “but individuals are motivated by an infinity of desires and aspirations, and it is these that will have to be controlled and repressed.” Well, the hope for a paradigmatic change in civilization is indeed based on a wager, as propounded by Karl Marx, that in a society freed from capitalism “being” will be valued over “having.” Personal fulfillment will be achieved through cultural, athletic, erotic, political, artistic, and playful activities, rather than through the unlimited accumulation of property and products—the sort of accumulation induced by the fetishistic consumption inherent in the capitalist system, by the dominant ideology, and by advertising and having nothing to do with some “eternal human nature.”
As capitalism, especially in its current neoliberal and globalized form, seeks to commodify the world, to transform everything existing—earth, water, air, living creatures, the human body, human relationships, love, religion—into commodities, so advertising aims to sell those commodities by forcing living individuals to serve the commercial necessities of capital. Both capitalism as a whole and advertising as a key mechanism of its rule involve the fetishization of consumption, the reduction of all values to cash, the unlimited accumulation of goods and of capital, and the mercantile culture of the “consumer society.” The sorts of rationality involved in the advertising system and the capitalist system are intimately linked, and both are intrinsically perverse.
Advertising pollutes the mental landscape, just like it does the urban and rural landscapes; it stuffs the skull like it stuffs the mailbox. It holds sway over press, cinema, television, radio. Nothing escapes its decomposing influence: in our time we see that sports, religion, culture, journalism, literature, and politics are ruled by advertising. All are pervaded by advertising’s attitude, its style, its methods, its mode of argument. Meanwhile, we are always and uninterruptedly harassed by advertising: without stop, without truce, unrelentingly and never taking a vacation, advertising persecutes us, pursues us, attacks us in city and countryside, in the street and at home, from morning to evening, from Monday to Sunday, from January to December, from the cradle to the grave.
Ecosocialism, Michael Löwy
Legitimately abysmal. Like a dog finding a secluded place to die alone because it feels itself growing weak and you can’t explain to it that veterinary medicine exists
