We also know that Freud and Jung ate in New York’s Chinatown that week. Four years later, he complained about patients who dreamt in mass-culture imagery, whose dream work restaged imagery from popular wood engravings by Gustave Doré. Then Freud leaves blanks in the record. We know very little about what he thought was the impact of mass culture upon the psyche. He wrote about folklore invading the collective process, about war trauma, about the ghoulish entrapment by machines, about Leonardo’s latent homosexuality, but barely a word about the visual entertainments that proliferated around him (amusement parks, illustrated weeklies, cinema, department stores, signage on stores).

Today, of course, that has been utterly reversed. From the mid-fifties into the late eighties, postmodern theory was literally a total immersion glorifying the noir acid burn of consumer culture: how it warps our sign systems, generates perverse mythemes, distorts our memory, floods us with simulacra. Mass culture took on the glamour of a collective bad acid trip, where meaning became attenuated, where nothing could be trusted.

Of course, postmodernism ended in the early 1990’s essentially. There is not even a name for our era (I like to call it the Electronic Baroque, even electronic feudalism). But one fact is dead certain: terms like consumerism and mass culture seem naive now. We all essentially live inside the stomach of the “entertainment” dragon. As a result, it would be near impossible to generate an avant-garde strategy in a world that feels increasingly like an outdoor shopping mall, what I call a scripted space.
.. read on