Media juxtaposition conceals the dialectical links between seemingly unrelated events
Evidence
The Alaska oil spill thus sits cheek by jowl with the latest Israeli bombing or search-and-destroy mission in southern Lebanon, or follows closely on its heels in the segmentation of television news. The two events activate altogether different and unrelated mental zones of reference and associative fields, not least because within the stereotypical planetarium of current “objective spirit,” Alaska is on some other side of the physical and spiritual globe from the “war-torn Middle East.” No introspective examination of our personal history, but no inspection of the various objective histories either (filed under Exxon, Alaska, Israel, Lebanon), would in itself be enough to disclose the dialectical interrelatedness of all these things, whose legendary Ur-episode can be found in the Suez War, which determined the building of larger and larger oil tankers to circumnavigate the Cape of Good Hope, on the one hand, with its sequel, on the other, in 1967, a sequel that fixed the political geography of the Middle East in violence and misery for more than a generation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 797
Categorization
- QUESTION: A concrete case study (Alaska oil spill, Lebanon, Suez) waiting to be unpacked — is this dialectical connection genuinely unavailable to introspection, or only hidden by media framing?
- XREF: connects to: Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187; Representational media blur dialectical method by sliding form into content — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 46; News aggregators strip away the visual and contextual cues that once signaled reliability — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 193