English 680V: Visual Rhetoric in a Technological Age (Purdue)

What Warhol and Lanham both are decrying is the fascism of imposing one meaning as Truth. The model I'm playing with here only works if the value of meaning is determined by use value rather than by the law od scarsity. Can there even be scarsity in an attention economy?

This may seem too abstract if you take it to mean that the value of meaning is independent of social and cultural forces. Quite the opposite, what I'm saying is that, since there is no physical limit to the meaning(s) produced, the only criteria by which to judge meanings are (and I'm just taking a stab at this) their use value in a real world where attitudes have consequences, communities, accountability, actions. Again, I'll refernece a work of fiction that explores this: Ian McEwan's Atonement.

I've had thoughts along these lines, in fact, they led to my thesis. When looking at tattooing, one of the things that most fascinated me was the evasion of consumer/commodity binaries. A tattooed body is a spectacle that interrogates and enjoys itself; it is also the canvas on which the artist works, a scare commodity in itself; is also the commodity/art work that was purchased; it is a hybrid of the design desired and the artist's skill to impliment someone else's plan; finally, the meaning of the tattoo is, like any work of art, dependant on the spectator.

In my thesis, I came down to the conclusion that our investment in Freud's (but maybe not Lacan's) oedipal complex is the false premise which tattooing undermines. While I think that's a bit too much of a stretch to make on a blog, I think the tattoo example is relevant. What's at stake here is our commitment to the subject/object binary, in its countless, sometimes subtle or convoluted, manifestations. As with ethics or, since we're talking about Foucault, power, what we need to reconsider is our assumption that it is a uni-drirectional flow.

Again, I reference Borges (because he helps me think about all this stuff) - On the planet Tlon, they don't have nouns or verbs. Language is based entirely on adjectives, to indicate an object (noun), you define all of its subjective relationships by a triangulation of adjectives. English (our biological hardwiring?) is a noun and verb based language, always subject-object. This is why I love Foucault, Lacan, Levinas and Deleuze, (and Borges and Calvino) because they give us glimpses to what the world would look like (pun intended) if we could get around our language.

Wealth is a multi-fascetted good - A person wealthy in an attention economy would have, as Ryan suggested, the leisure to pursue only relevant information and she or he would have useful meanings that enriched his or her quality of thought, if not life.

The person dispriviledged in an information economy would the person, such as myself, who opens an internet browser and doesn't know where to go, our attention is spent before we even know what we're looking at.

Perhaps the person who never gets on the internet to begin with would be wealthy so long as, as Amy opints out, they had sufficient attitude to faciliate action. Consider the non-academic intellectual. Those are the elite. They have lives full of action where the dilution of their attention doesn't interfere and at the same time, they have the tools necessary to produce new meaning and thus, more attention, and they have the meaning system in which to contextualize, and thus select new information.

"But it is also our job in an economy of attention is to gather information. In an attention economy, those who can sort through millions of pieces of information and find relevant ones are the real resources." (Ryan)

So, after we collect all of this information, compile it with our wonderful brains, pay attention to all the right things, and make "meaning"--then what? While I'm fine with temporarily saying there has been a change in Attitude, I'm still all about Action. Once we master attention, what are we going to do with it? I see a dystopia in the future...

Now see, I didn't want to try and justify those claims because I liked them being blatant and suspect. But if you're gonna ignore my "Yes, I know I'm buying into the Percy aesthetics of priviledge" final point and call me out, I guess I'll jsut have to theorize.

The important thing here is to consider the economic model. What would be deficient in a "low quality" meaning? Well, we could start with the McDonalds analogy and claim that mass culture is not nutritious. Perhpas we'll say in the sense of nuturing new meaning development. To me, low-quality means (as I believe I said) that it is not integrated into a wholistic meaning system. When meaning production becomes alienated from the meaning-producers and the consumers, (making assumptions about the universiality of its own culture like a freshman paper) then what we get in exchange for our attention is a meaning that may conflict with our localized experiences.

I think this is a legit distinction, but then again, I'm ideologically inclined towards communes. And the McDonalds is just my top-of-the-head response. There might be more to mine out of the analogy.

Anyone else wanna give it a shot?