Bringing functional background culture into the foreground paradoxically destroys its original function

Evidence

A paradoxical impulse lies behind Brooks’s work. He is fascinated by functional culture – that which we don’t consciously hear or see but which shapes our experience of environments – yet the attention on what was background necessarily pushes it into the foreground. … It’s those things lurking at the background of attention, things that we took for granted at the time, which now evoke the past most powerfully. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 325

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s running theme of functional background music becoming haunting foreground — ch18 claimed the same about music designed for the periphery. — connects to: Nostalgic pasts serve as fantasies where duty and enjoyment coincide — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 269; What was background attention now evokes the past most powerfully — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 325; Learning why cultural rituals differ breaks functional fixedness (+1 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: what happens when background culture (Muzak, signs, service stations) is foregrounded — the aesthetic capture of infra-structural media and how curation changes their meaning.

Broader Connections

• Learning why cultural rituals differ breaks functional fixedness #expands (0.72)
• Functional language dissolves concepts by identifying things with their functions #corroborates (0.72) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 399