Youtube: Scripted disorientation/the Gruen Transfer

Another day, another so-so video.

This concept, of being knocked off kilter and so becoming vulnerable, is core to how power works, imho.  The Christians (well, a significant subset of them) tell you you are worthless and dirty and can only be saved with God’s grace (as provided by the Church).  The advertisers say the same, from the day you can see.  Other outfits break you down and “build you up” again (Full Metal Jacket, anyone?) And this works, I reckon, cos it goes with the grain of our need to know where we are in the “pecking order.” *

So, after the waffle, my so-so attempt at explaining scripted/disorientation/the Gruen Transfer.

and a far superior effort here

Here’s a bit I cut out because I really couldn’t “illustrate” it -

The whole “disorientation/discombobulation” thing was spotted by Fredric Jameson, author of Postmodernism, or “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Writing about a particular hotel lobby in Los Angeles he observes “What happens when you get there is something else, which can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, color coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate, attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space…. postmodern hyperspace has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.”

See also
Psyops/Psywar
Non-place (Marc Auge‘s concept)

* Note,  I do not mindlessly accept the reductive socio-biologist/evopsych arguments here.

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