TOWARDS AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF OUR PASSIONS
More than anything we resemble bowling pins. They set us up in families, approximately nine. Squat and wooden, we stand there, not knowing what to do with our fellow pins. The way has long been paved for the stroke that is to bring us down; foolishly we wait; in falling we take along as many fellow pins as we can, it is the stroke that we pass on to them, the only contact we grant them in a hasty existence. Supposedly, we are set up again. But if that is so, then we are exactly the same in a new life, only we have changed places among the nine, in the family, and not even always; and wooden and foolish we wait again for the old stroke. Elias Canetti · 1942
There is no good in love without death. Aristotle
The Grim Reaper advertisement reversed much of the conventional wisdom about television advertising. Firstly it became the primary object of attraction rather than the programming (people sat through programming in order to see the advertisement). Secondly, rather than current affairs and news programmes being designed to attract audiences to sell advertising, the subject of the news became advertising. It became a classic case of television news reporting television events, a type of hyper-reality where television reports on its own capacity to move audiences.
Thirdly, it broke at a single stroke all of the sixties and seventies rhetoric about the repressive state entering the bedroom. The state was in the bedroom (as though it had ever left) talking about sexual practices and no one was complaining. The state's intervention was suddenly welcome. The Image of the repressive state (Big Brother)... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline