And it is no secret that in the production of instrumental images, a production within which the world’s poor are not so gainfully employed, there is simultaneously a mass production of ignorance. There is an economics to this ignorance as well. The Bush administration has provided ample evidence about the profits that can be made with socially produced stupidity: Americans are stupid by design. Never perhaps have forms of ignorance that include carefully calibrated racism, historical, economic and political blindness, and a sheer inability to analyze or even retain the simplest facts been turned to such productive ends. This essential ignorance marks a deeper failure (which pays those who fail with the coin of success) on the part of our political, economic, and media theorist-practitioners to conceptualize the economic parameters of the media-environment. Philosophically speaking, it represents a higher level of intellectual failure, one that leaves the question of social justice conveniently on the side of the unconceptualizable. Here we have the philosophical and political consequence of the mediatic capture and incorporation of understanding and imagination. As one of my own teachers once remarked, “Today we can more easily imagine the death of the planet than we can the end of capitalism.” This formulation is not merely a rumination on politics or aesthetics, nor a simple refashioning of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the aesthetic under fascism in which we can experience our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order; it is the outline of the social imaginary fundamental to the regime of production characteristic of and indeed constitutive of postmodernity.And it is no secret that in the production of instrumental images, a production within which the world’s poor are not so gainfully employed, there is simultaneously a mass production of ignorance. There is an economics to this ignorance as well. The Bush administration has provided ample evidence about the profits that can be made with socially produced stupidity: Americans are stupid by design. Never perhaps have forms of ignorance that include carefully calibrated racism, historical, economic and political blindness, and a sheer inability to analyze or even retain the simplest facts been turned to such productive ends. This essential ignorance marks a deeper failure (which pays those who fail with the coin of success) on the part of our political, economic, and media theorist-practitioners to conceptualize the economic parameters of the media-environment. Philosophically speaking, it represents a higher level of intellectual failure, one that leaves the question of social justice conveniently on the side of the unconceptualizable. Here we have the philosophical and political consequence of the mediatic capture and incorporation of understanding and imagination. As one of my own teachers once remarked, “Today we can more easily imagine the death of the planet than we can the end of capitalism.” This formulation is not merely a rumination on politics or aesthetics, nor a simple refashioning of Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the aesthetic under fascism in which we can experience our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order; it is the outline of the social imaginary fundamental to the regime of production characteristic of and indeed constitutive of postmodernity.
As an American, I felt very attacked by this passage! While I do not completely disagree, I wonder where the author himself is from. It is also of interest because this passage has a sociological approach. It is saying that a lot of the problem America is facing with our art scene and “imagination” is an intellectual failing. I think this stance views the artist in a very arrogant lens, but again I cannot truly disagree. Perhaps artists should be actively trying to create an impetus for change, instead of sitting a top their high horses claiming that Americans don’t understand or are literally too dumb for the art world. I do not think that artists need to dumb down their work or become more accessible, I am simply acknowledging the problem and saying that artists themselves could be striving to correct this issue socially rather than simply being the victims of a culture that is intellectually failing them.