fashion spectacles

I'm at the Sonics/Synergies: Creative Cultures conference in Adelaide. Douglas Kellner's keynote paper kinda underlined the bankruptcy of much well meaning, "progressive" cultural studies. I found it vacuous and descriptive, with a fashion-victim tendency to follow the most obvious example of memetic icons. If you wanna talk media spectacles, be my guest, but to overdiagnose these as the pulse of late capitalism by offering some run-of-the-mill liberal media criticism just strikes me as woefully overrated. To classify this as a particularly critical or even theoretical project is, well, just silly. Nice enough guy, though.