Endless Progaganda
"Endless Propaganda, by Paul Rutherford, underscores the presence of advertising rhetoric, even it the context of apparently non-partisan collective health issues such as cancer. Throughout this book, Rutherford argues that the public sphere has been transformed into a huge marketplace of goods and signs. Civil advocacy has become a special art of authority that subjects politics, social behavior, and public morals to the philosophy and discipline of marketing. Without suggesting that there is one simple way to understand the transformation that democracy has undergone because of this phenomenon, Rutherford introduces and applies the cultural theories of several important philosophers: Hanermas, Gramsci, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Baudrillard. The reader is thus given the necessary tools to critically examine the pages of this study" (Rutherford, intro). This book entails many examples of the idea that what once was private, has now become public. This was argued by many of the philosophers, specifically, Foucault in chapter four, where he discusses the initial models for power in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The conclusion of this book revisits Habermas idea of the public sphere being
"Foucault was wrong. Not completely wrong, because the 'panoptic machine' certainly did work to discipline the individual, but wrong about spectacle, a power which has waxed greatly in the twentieth century" (Rutherford, pg. 230). In conclusion, this book in its entirety draws upon enlightening theories to explore the history and evaluate the phenomenon of public advocacy. It scrutinizes how advocacy, populized the political, social and moral realms of the public sphere in the affluent democracies during the past three decades. Although difficult to follow at times, this book allows its audience to broaden their minds concerning propaganda, advertising, politics and many other issues. It indeed goes on to show how propaganda is in a sense, endless. "Political propaganda has increasingly become a kind of noise that people may watch but only some will attend to. This may explain the steady increase in non-voting: it is not evidence of paralysis, or even of alienation in the classic sense, but rather of disdain, a resistance through evasion of all of the demands to believe and speak and perform which the political elites makes of voters" (Rutherford, pg. 255). In the following paper, I will focus on chapters nine and ten, which discuss Foucault's discussion of the 'panoptic machine', and the issue of politics becoming advertising. The idea of Foucault's "panoptic machine" caused me to wonder about our society and its need to be watched.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Endless Propaganda, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Home Video's, Paul Rutherford, Panoptic Machine, Ricoeur Baudrillard, Chapter Ten, panoptic machine, rutherford pg, public sphere, Kern French, rutherford pg 230, World Fox's, endless propaganda, pg 230, propaganda advertising, conclusion book, society watched, 'panoptic machine', advertising politics,
Approximate Word count = 1184
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
