Seite 79 [79]
CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
the data that needs processing is corrupted. Hood states that “our brain fills in
missing information, interprets noisy signals and has to rely on only a sample
of everything that is going on around us. We don’t have sufficient information,
time or resources to work it all out accurately so we make educated guesses
to build our models of reality”.’” This still leaves open the question of what
the brain’s guesses are based on.
There are a number of studies pointing to how commodity culture exploits
that the created nature of the subjective reality goes mostly unquestioned.
Naomi Klein’s book No Logo examines commodity centred fiction building.
She discusses the impact of the ‘branding revolution’ on the economy,
on consumers and our culture. Klein argues that companies are not selling
artefacts anymore, but narratives, because brands are “not a product but
a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea”.?”? Klein claims
that brands sell stories of lifestyles and we buy in to these narratives even
if we are just purchasing clothes, as they become socially identifiable
through advertisement. In her research of ‘lifestyle media’ — all sorts
of make-over shows, from gardens to personality — Jayne Raisborough
reaches the conclusion that formation of the self is strongly dependent on
consumption. The value of products is recast according to their symbolic
efficacy, their ability to “circulate within the symbolic domain, investing
and being invested with meanings and emotional attachments to the degree
that even the most mundane of purchases can, and do, say something about
the self”.?”? Even though usually these programmes are present in the lives
of most of us either literally or culturally as background noise, they still
enter “the cultural imagination to help a dislocation of compassion and
political passion from the self, a degradation of those most vulnerable in our
societies and a renewed shaping of the cultural fiction of gender and gender
differences”. Richard Sennett writes about the change in capitalism that
can be linked with the move from profit to share prices in rating companies.’”
He sees a general move towards the virtual, not only in the corporate world,
but also in its impact on everyday life. He studies the field of advertisement
where cars ranked in different categories share 90% of their build, so it is
the narratives they are sold with which have to make up the much bigger
difference in their price. Sennett points out that “the realm of consumption
is theatrical because the seller, like a playwright, has to command the willing
271 Bruce Hood: The self illusion, xi.
272 Naomi Klein: No Logo, UK, Flamingo, 2000, 33.
273 Jayne Raisborough: Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self, Houndmills, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011, 30.
74 Ibid., 164.
75 Richard Sennett: The Culture of New Capitalism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006.
9
9
078 ¢