Dallas Smythe sure is pessimistic for a Canadian,
and that's not a bad thing. Along with Thomas and Kurt, I think his analysis of mass com is revelatory. His vision is not a bright one though; I felt just as trapped as I did at the end of Althusser, if not more so, if you take that whole "mind slavery (a tendency towards ideological tunnel vision) thing at face-value. (121) I have a criticism about his defintion of "conscious labor", but maybe it's just because I've been reading too much French theory.
His main addition is the damning claim that "all non-sleeping time of most of the population is work time...[which] is devoted to the production of commodities- in-general" (3). He explains this with Guy Debord's (similar to Mao Tse-Tung) society of the spectacle, when you are busy consuming your don't have time to overthrow capitalism. But, my question is why does this process stop when you are sleeping? He seems to be mapping desire onto commodification as a form of labor, which I think is a great addition, but I don't think it ends when you pass into sleep. Any psychoanalytic theory of desire (vulgar or not) or even of film, indicates that the unconscious time, such as sleep, contributes as much, if not more, to desire than your waking life. Even the most cursory investigation of mass-com will return plenty of sexual imagery which clearly helps motivate the labor of brand-identification, and the primacy of advertisement over narrative, another unconscious motivation.
Think also about how many of us fall asleep to the tv, or the radio, or wake up to an iPod clock alarm, or whose apartment mate won't shut off their Metallica even when we tell them we are trying to sleep. Superstructural immersion in our lives, and the obliterating of "leisure time" doesn't stop, the ideological city never sleeps. Maybe a personal example can really bring this home: My father is the perfect embodiment of Smythe's citation of Linder's term a "rationale of irrationality" (12). My father loves cheap shit more than anything: I've had a long-running joke that he thinks "we'd lose money if we didn't buy" product x. His purchases single handedly clothe all the Wal-Mart employees in Sichuan Province. But really, he's admitted that he dreams about good deals, about fixing his car instead of bringing it to a mechanic. He calls this process "grokking" it out from Stranger in A Strange Land. The thing is, I don't think my dad's that strange, he's really just good at this craziness: he travels at warp speed through the ideological tunnel vision of the consciousness industry. Smythe offers probably the most satisfying of the constructions of b/ss for me, and don't know how much wiggle room that leaves us. There's definatley something active about his construction audience labor, but I don't think it's that liberatory.
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