Me and Commerce's Concept Cylons

Cylon Six
Lately, to take a break from my work (classes, thesis project, bread-n-butter), I have been watching episodes from the first season of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. I do not have a TV in my house; I am a reader more than a watcher, I cannot stand commercials, and I am too impatient to wait a week to get the next installment of a story. I prefer to suck down a series (TV, movie, book) in a short period of time.

I also am using this series as a way to think. I read for or work on a project for a chunk of time and then take a break by watching this bit of sci fi fluff. During this break, my brain doesn't stop; it relaxes, the ideas/concepts/problems are not completely ignored. They are in soft focus, humming softly in the background. And something about the choice of this particular series works well for me right now as I think about the ideas developed in WIP? and Advertising the American Dream.

Right now I am enjoying thinking of commerce's concepts as a type of Cylon; commerce has taken over the concept factory by sending its undercover agents in (they feel like entertainment, they sound like parables, they looks like icons). Most of the following ideas are pulled from a lecture by Ulmer: Philosophy's goal is to tell us what the good life is. Religion (connected to orality) focuses attention on an axis of right and wrong (salvation). Science and much of philosophy (connected to literacy) focuses on true and false (empirical reality). Aesthetics, which most often emerges from entertainment (advertising) (connected to electracy) focuses on pleasure and pain (well being).

Commerce tells us that we can find the good life by buying particular products and (increasingly) services. Like a Cylon, not all of what advertising does is bad. Like the humans in the series, our thinkers have cut themselves off from something vital (the affective). Advertising helps show a way toward the creation of ourselves as aesthetic people (versus literate or oral). But like the sophists, advertising focuses on rhetoric detached from the object.  Advertising has taught us that listening to the sizzle is important, we also just need to cut into the meat at stake. Killing off Commerce's concept Cylons is not as helpful as re-purposing and re-directing them.