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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 ¢
