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An Analysis of Mass Media and Technology in Hans-Georg Gadamer Rev. Lorenzo Ruga, SMITH (PhL/Ma)

Abstract

This paper discusses the philology of mass media, the analysis on the influences to Dasein,

the results that contributes to the downfall of the beautiful and the rationality of the public absorbed

in the mass media and technologies. The fundamental understanding of what we call mass media

is the collective entities of print, radio and television. Now that we have the internet, then we shall

include this online media to the collection because it contains almost everything, the same online

print, online television and the online radio. I belong to a congregation which uses mass media as

our apostolate. I choose this topic in order to know the nature of mass media, to set my foot upon

my limitations and to align myself to what I should be doing lest my mass media will fall into the

categories of Heidegger as the most brutal sources of objectification.

However, with the pastoral vision of Vatican II, the church cannot just be a sleeping giant.

She had been hiding in her sacristies contemplating God and polishing her golden vessels and

candelabras. The church must go to the world and preach the Good News. I will not enter into the

boundaries of theology but I wish to take the command of God to preach and use the screens and

radio booths as pulpits rescuing the secular in the world losing its meaning. I argue media is neutral

which means it can be used for evil and can be used for good. Just as a knife can cut your fruits

and vegetables for your cooking moments, it can also be used to stab you to death.

Inter Mirifica of the Vatican II document says the church will be at fault if she will not use

this wonderful media gifted by God to mankind. Let this be handed not for the advantage of evil

men. The church must expand its pulpit by sitting in radio booths with headset on her head, to

project herself before cameras of television, establish its own offset machines and communicate

to her children throughout the world hungry for her teachings.

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Keywords: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Martin Heidegger, mass media, objectification, Dasein,

inauthenticity, natural sciences

Mass Communications in Heidegger and Nietzsche

I started from Heidegger because he is the mentor of Gadamer to which he was influenced

in his line of thinking. Actually, three of them, Husserl, Dilthey and Heidegger were very much

mentioned in the Truth and Method as having to be very much indebted.1 Nietzsche had long ago

criticized journalism as the “prostitution of the spirit.”2 Again in the Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he

says, “Do you not see the souls hanging like dirty, limp rags? And they also make newspapers

from these rags.” In the Human all too Human, he commented that the media is more than a

permanent false alarm that leads the ears and senses off in the wrong direction.

When journalism was already much spread and became inseparable in the coffee of the

each morning in Europe, it was in this time to which Nietzsche gave the impression of judging that

age of more danger and problems and the creeping will to power is again alive. Not that the will

to power is already dead but the will to power creates more ways in order to be more alive. He was

correct to sadly say that the will to certainty is the will to power. He who uses the mass media is

the proud man who prints his ideas in order not to try to persuade others but to subjugate and shape

them. The will to power is the source of constituting the human, thus swaying him away from

authentic subjectivity. The one behind these newspapers, radio and television is the verbose self

as dirty rags who will not stop in expressing himself and be affirmed by his readers and viewers.

1 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (London:

Continuum, 1975), xxiv. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 103.

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Thus what the expressive and the verbose vomits is fed to the people thus presides the collective

in their everyday breakfast and their everydayness.3

Heidegger, coming from Nietzsche, says “Our age is an agitated one… In our time it is

merely by means of an echo that events acquire their greatness – the echo of the newspaper.”4

Because of the newspaper, we had learned to be lazy and no longer be a Dasein. We are again

trapped to mere signification, mere printed things where we do not discover truths by themselves.

We had surrendered our judgments to the will of the authors and be shaped by them, thus loses the

semantic meaning of true events and experience. No authentic experience can be derived from

reading these signification than in being Dasein. The echo produce no true meaning nor does it

brings truth to the self. By being passive, we are drawn to be objectified. One can never arrived to

correct impressions and ideas but like a balloon, we float in the hubris and vomits of the

expressives, thus we are shaped by them. Heidegger blatantly pronounced, “The mass media is an

idle talk worthy of despise.”5 I was hurt by these statements because I am using mass media and

he equated it as mere idle talk.

From a glance and from its effects, our local ABS-CBN and GMA, is guilty of this. Many

of what is projected is but mere idle shows where people spend their precious time as never a

leisure but an offense against the spirit of truth. It offends our behavior and it is never a leisure.

This is why our degree of rationality is very low because we spend so much time listening to these

idle shows and newspaper who has nothing to do with our rationality. Imagine how many Filipinos

spend their precious time and judgments before the television and this television becomes a habit

3 David Dwan, Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger. Accessed February 14, 2015,

http://www.naturalthinker.net/trl/texts/Heidegger,Martin/textsonHeidegger/ DwanDavidHeideggerOnOntologyAnd

MassCommunication.pdf, 114. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid.

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of “pagpapalipas ng oras.” Is it not that time is gold? And we have learned this “pagpapalipas ng

oras” in the most brutal manner that sickens our rationality and intellectual rise. Seldom do I hear

a person answering me with expectation and hope, “What are you doing now?” “Ito, nagpapalipas

ng oras sa library.” Wow! The mass media greatly offends the innocence of children for having

been shaped by them and no longer of their parents and teachers. How could they become good

citizens? Thus Gadamer pronounce the same radical act of leaving the television alone.

How do you turn off a thing like that? How do you get the box to be quiet? I pressed every

imaginable button, to no avail. Finally, I was the last to leave the nothingness of the empty

room. Such is the extent of my expertise.6

What then the media does to our speech environment? In Heidegger’s eyes, technologies

such as radios and newspapers distorted social interaction and damaged the communicative tissue

of our world.7 The mass media interferes in our heart to heart communication especially inside the

home. This is demonstrable. The father is in his newspaper. The son to his radio exclusive in his

room. The daughter to his pocketbooks. The mother in her favorite telenovelas. Where families

then face each other while in their meals and discusses issues of healing and love and problems to

be addressed, now new scenario entered in this media-saturated stage. We eat with the television

as the presider of our everyday meals. We no longer eat as a family. We go to sofas and position

ourselves in almost disrespect. It is no longer giving thanks to God for the blessing of food but

giving thanks to the television for entertaining a meaningless life.

Thus Heidegger says newspaper and radios are the symptoms of the das Man. It is the

medium where the das Man moves. A kind of black hole predicates as the loss of meaning. Oswald

Spengler described the press as ‘a monstrous intellectual Something’ and Heidegger’s das Man is

6 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Culture and Media”, Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of

Enlightenment, Axel Honneth ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 171. 7 Dwan, Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger,115.

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characterized by an equally sublime anonymity.8 The media is the site of indeterminacy, thus

inauthentic being. If you don’t take this action of going away from media, it will objectify you and

will consume your spirit. Authenticity can only be reclaimed when Dasein rescues itself from this

anonymous verbal drift and grounds itself as a self-determining and self-accountable entity.9

Heidegger returned to this point in a later lecture and insisted that the ‘superman’s appearance

is… inaccessible to the teletypers and radios dispatches of the press’.10 In order to be authentic

again, like the superman who went up the mountains and meditate, the man who wishes a true

rationality shuts away from media.

What is the meaning of all these and what is the concern of Heidegger? The newspaper

colludes with the modern subject for the purpose of objectification and representation. The modern

subject bearing the title of “will to power”, this kind of self-empowerment which he calls self-

fulfilling dominion of the subject, extends this dominion through the mass media. The proud man,

in the name of creating a “useful paper”, something an aid for everyone to know the current events

in our society and in the world, actually targets objectification thus forecloses the so many

becoming. The reign of the modern subject is the reign of the Ge-Stell- the subjectivist ordering of

the world. Oswald Spengler had already outlined the way newspapers ‘determine “the truth”’,

insisting that what it obtains is ‘just its truth’.11 They do not really determine the truth but only

determine their truth.

Newspapers reify the world through language. Heidegger says,

Everything is levelled to one level. Our minds hold views on all and everything, and view

all things in the identical way. Today every newspaper, every illustrated magazine, and

every radio program offers all things in the identical way to uniform views … The one-

sided view… has puffed itself up into an all-sidedness which in turn is masked so as to

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 118.

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look harmless and natural. But this all-sided view which deals in all and everything with

equal uniformity and mindlessness … reduces everything to a univocity of concepts and

specifications the precision of which not only corresponds to, but has the same essential

origin as, the precision of technological process.12

This industrial circuit is a result of industrial revolution. Its real nature is to set public

opinion to swallow a configured opinion to configure the public, burning them in an available

conflagration. This is all the sickness of the modern man – to extend his purpose of objectification.

The method is repetition. As the saying goes, repeat what is wrong and soon it becomes a law. The

media is indeterminate to truth but determinate to the workings of objectification of the subject. It

is not a help to man but of losing its origins. Words are no longer used in order to understand

ourselves and our needs but words are merely used as a tool in order to be lost. ‘Words are

constantly thrown around on the cheap, and in the process are worn out’.13

By mass media through its idle talk, does an infinite passing of words and infinite passing

of idle talks and offense against the spirit of truth. The chatter is the hero as Kierkegaard says in

The Present Age, where the das Man creeps, all kinds of media, publicity and advertising that

burdens the Dasein’s true being. Daily is a flow of idle talk, flow of indeterminacy, flow of

inauthenticity, of objectification and representation. The media creates an infinite offense and

infinite regress. Through this technology, the communication of errors of the dominating modern

man multiplies itself so easily in all houses and in all countries. Dasein is left absorbed. When you

ask someone, “Eh, bakit daw ganun?” “Eh kasi yun ang sabi ng balita sa telebisyun.” Our

generation is media-saturated. Repeating Heidegger’s words, he says, “The metaphysics of

subjectivism and its counterpart, technology, culminate in the brutal objectification of the world.”14

12 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. E. D. Wieck and Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and

Row, 1968), 33-34. 13 Dwan, Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger, 127. 14 Ibid.

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Having all these said and looking at our apostolate, I am bit disheartened. We shall then

proceed to the thoughts of Gadamer.

The Philology of Mass Media

Gadamer, like many philosophers, would always start philosophizing by never neglecting

to explain the history of the word’s origin and its first meaning. This is philology. Philology is the

study of the structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or languages.15 It is

his favorite style which is very helpful, for our sake. In the Truth and Method, he did the same

thing. He started discussing the origin of bildung, erfahrung, erlebnis, play etc. To start this, he

split the mass media by first discussing media, then the mass and then communication.

Media means to mediate or to act as a mediator. It mediates yet its addressee is anonymous

or rather it addressees everyone. It is that which is between us, connects us with one another, but

also carries us in the way that water unites and carries fish.16 The crowd of onlookers and curious

bystanders who turn on the television set every night is a kind of trap which is characterize by an

element that surrounds and carries a flood of information, and we are all swimming in it as though

it were water. It has the function of mediation and has the additional connotation of being that

which is between us in such a way as to surround and carry us all.17 If Heidegger tells us that media

is only a flow of idle talks, Gadamer sees it as a flood. In short, by turning the television, with the

intention of knowing maybe news or whatever, we allow information to come to us and since it is

15 Catherine Soanes and Angus Steveson (ed.), Concise Oxford English Dictionary 11th ed. (Oxford

University Press). 16 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Culture and Media”, Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of

Enlightenment,173. 17 Ibid.

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a flood of information, we died from drowning. Our spirits experienced death because of these.

We thought we are regularly swimming but in truth, we are being objectified to our death.

The mass is a dough. It is given a particular shape by the cook. But it is now associated to

a mass of people as for example a mass traffic. It connotes a certain heaviness on the part of

humanity. Communication, which appears in Karl Jaspers, according to Gadamer, came from the

culture of the Romans. Communication refers to public debate on matters at hand. It is a living

conversation for the assembled masses which has nothing to do with what we called mass media

or mass communication today. These three connotes a depart from the original and is highly

chaotic: the media that drowns, the mass that is heavy and communication that do not debate. Thus

he asks,

To an unthought-of extent, information is being pumped into our lives, and this flood of

information must be channeled such that it does not destroy our culture, the cultura animi,

the culture of the human soul and mind, but fosters it. Are we not exposed to an excess of

mediations?18

What is critical about mass media is the excesses of mediations, excesses in the use of

language which bears no significance to real issues. The media is a kind of filling up the boredom

in this life and the solution is to refire it. There is no concern for intellectual rise. Evident to this

are the jokes on the radios or the advertising which terminates to excesses of lies. The sorrow it

shares is a chain that binds the shaping of our lives. The augmentation of mediations and the

immediacy it has (agad-agad) is what sickens the souls in the world. When you turn on the internet

or television, the information is immediate and it immediately drown you to its world. The

mediation is super immediate. This immediacy, its spontaneity, according to Gadamer, is what we

should be aware of.

18 Ibid., 176.

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The Concept of Play19 and Mass Media

We shall go back to the ontology of play of Gadamer. What is then the relation of play to

mass media? In play, it is neither the player nor the spectator that is the most important but it is

the play. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Play is independent of the

consciousness of the player - it has its own essence. Its goal is “redemption and transformation

back into true being.” Instead the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an

experience that changes the person who experiences it. The play is characterized by the to and fro

movement and is irrelevant whether or not there is a subject who plays it. The play has its primacy

than the players. Thus, whoever tries is the one tried, whoever plays is the one being played. We

have seen that play does not have its being in the player's consciousness or attitude, but on the

contrary play draws him into its dominion and fills him with its spirit. In re-presenting, the work

of art performs a "total mediation", that is what has been "transformed into structure" is made fully

available to us once again.

This is precisely what mass media does. The play was used by Gadamer in order to show

us that by gazing into the beautiful, in the art, the result is redemption of souls and transformation

into the original which is a very beautiful explanation of Gadamer. In the play, the players are lost

in the spirit of the game but it results to a return in one’s true being. I would say that players

becomes a child again, happy and innocent while playing. I think this is the goal of our daily life.

Do not forget to be a child no matter how intellectual you are. The play changes the person, it tries

the person, it is absorbed the person in its spirit thus performs a total mediation. What happens is

transformation or a new structure is built in our understanding or consciousness. This is precisely

what happens before the beautiful or before an art.

19 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 102ff.

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This is negatively and precisely what happens to us before the mass media. The great

difference I suppose is the immediacy. The art reveals its meaning later and is not immediate.

Maybe to some, it is immediate but it reveals something more for a beautiful art reveals more. The

mass media is immediate. Borrowing the different conditions from the ontology of play, the mass

media creates havoc after all. From the same analogy, we can say that because of the media, the

person is changed. Have we not noticed the same attitude children or adults nowadays? Have they

not been changed a lot having been so exposed in the media. The mass media tries the person and

absorbed their spirit. Mass media performs this total mediation, forming a different structure that

do not contribute to understanding and meaning of this life. If the art’s ultimate goal is meaningful

understanding, the mass media is chaos and inauthenticity.

Mass Media and Technology

By the use of technologies, people nowadays no longer treasure the wonders of the

alphabets. Gadamer would like us to reminisce the importance of writing using our hands rather

than through mechanical means in our computers. I can be guilty of this because I am doing my

paper through a computer. Nevertheless, our generation nowadays appreciate more the advent of

computers and the different kinds of technologies, a life so mechanical – a kind of triumph of

science over the human sciences. But to the extent of meaning, I knew it is still meaningful to write

letters by our own handwriting than by just typing them. Remember the days when you first learned

to write maybe in Nursery or Preparatory, crooked it may be.

The exercise of handwriting is still more beautiful than the mere printed one. How the past

and the discovery of the alphabet made a great leap in our being, the start where our tongue started

to speak and we can understand each other rather than by just symbols, to whom our generations

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have abused them. People no longer cherished of what we called communication. It is no longer

an exchange of what is beneficial but a horrendous condition of idle talks and intellectual demise.

See the many comments in the internet and evaluate how conversations are done. Remember how

the alphabet had brought us the stories of the past, their lives totally dedicated to handwriting. We

had not appreciated music nowadays because we have not played any single instrument. We do

not even know how to play them. We have been lazy in music and we have depended ourselves

from music stored in our cellphones or DVD’s.

To the extent that all these technologies unlikely brings us freedom which is actually an

enslavement of our spirits. When everything can be immediate nowadays, we have lost the

meaning and the history of all these important leap in our lives. Technology had been hailed as a

great leap but in truth actually we are in the road to fatal mistake and dark fate. When children

nowadays just use keyboards and have not learned how to write poetry, to be creative and to keep

the fire of philosophic discourse, we have entered into a paralyzed conditions.

Gadamer says:

Thus, you may still be accused today with the friendliest of intentions of feeling obliged to

stand up for objectivity and epistemological assurance of the foundations of scientific

knowledge in the area of the Geisteswissenschaften. What a perversion of all points of

emphasis! As though it were necessary to put up a special fight for the victory round of

modern science and of scientific research! This was the great achievement of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: to bring about the victory of our experience of the

world based on mathematics and methodology.20

With the plurality of technologies and the reach of mass media can do nowadays, we have

judged our situations as having reached quality of life. The concern about the quality of life reveals

that the increase in the numbers and kinds of possibilities that science, technology, and economics

provide does not represent an unequivocal guarantee in terms of a corresponding increase in quality

20 David Dwan, Idle Talk: Ontology and Mass Communications in Heidegger, 181.

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of life. If then they call it quality life, so the atomic bomb and weapons secured by nations are also

having to do with quality of life. Gadamer reminds us that “Mass media contain an apparatus of

endless mediation and intrication; thus the immediacy of spontaneous judgment and of

spontaneous address is threatened again and again.” Let us never be deceived by the achievement

of science. The human sciences will always be the most important to consider. “One imagines

some kind of controlling force that can procure clarity by means of measurement, weighing, or

calculation and thus assure one that everything is all right.”

The life world of today is a continuous striving for plethora of technology, from the

destructive to the useful, of the something I can do to my keyboards and keypads every second of

my life, of the humongous time spent in that box where news, telenovelas, and advertisings are

shown. The question lies why do we spend our life to these technologies? The Ecclesiastes tells

us, “Vanity of vanities.”21 Human beings do not realized that they had been trapped from the

strategy by showing him so many things to see. This strategy is marketplace strategy where like in

the market, there are a lot of clothes, food, the noise of the sellers, the sounds of horns and tricycles

so that the person is distracted from his choices. The first phase is massive production and the

second is the marketing of these materials. The wise Solomon reduced these materials as mere

toys. I was wrong to think that only children play toys but I realized that we too play toys. The

more surprising is that, we as elders would kill people just to get these toys, would rather die than

losing these toys, would steal and deceive people just to possess all these toys.

Still fresh in my memory a decade ago when me and my assistant was in a jeepney in

Buendia and suddenly two men passengers, one in the rear and another inside announced with gun

on hand, “Hold up ito. Ilabas lahat ng pitaka, alahas at cellphone.”22 Sometimes the gun is just a

21 Ecclesiastes 1:14 22 This is hold up. Give us your wallets, mobile phones and your jewelries.

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toy or real but no bullet inside but we are not really sure. In this uninvited situation, our fear first

overcomes us and we don’t anymore think if the gun is really firing or not. When it is stealing, that

is made in the Philippines and this happens often. Even in MRT or LRT, they would announce to

everyone, “Mag-ingat sa mandurukot.”23 How scandalous that was to foreigners and to children,

though this was true, because I am a Filipino and my fellow Filipino are thieves maybe that one

just right beside you. In formula, “Pilipino=magnanakaw.” Mobile phones was then seldom

touchscreen. One by one gave their phones, rings, watches, earrings and necklaces. They were not

able to get anything from us because I am a missionary and I have no phone nor jewelries. But the

woman beside me was still sympathetic to her new touchscreen cellphone and would not give it

anyway. But the gun was already pointed on her head. Other passengers advised her to give it

anyway or else she die. In short, the thirst of men today is to have all these toys.

Now why needed all these toys? Well, to fill up the boredom in life. The spending of time

in games, internet, television, and the like are manifestation of this filling up. And why fell bored?

Because the spirit is not filled. The logic of toys as a remedy is not correct. The summary is that,

if I am bored, I resort to my keypads but it does not solve my boringness. The more toys I have,

the more I am not satisfied. So why not address the spiritual needs where you could find rest?

The advent of these technologies was brought to us by science. The medicine for the

restlessness of human is technology. The laboratories and factories are anywhere in the world. The

schools supported these current by providing all kinds of computer courses to students. The reason

is that you can never get a job unless you have no knowledge in operating a computer. The

surprises we have is that very few enroll in history, arts, literature and philosophy because they

call it as nonproductive sciences therefore a waste of time and waste of tuition fees. I went to

23 Beware of thieves.

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Ateneo a couple of months to submit my final paper to Dr. Garcia and found a poster there in the

Philosophy Department which says, “If you want to disappoint your mother and your father, your

friends, your grandfather and grandmother etc., take philosophy.” And I thought why? Well, there

is no much money in becoming a literature or philosophy teacher. It is disappointing to those who

expect me and you that after college, I can provide more money to them but sorry deep in my heart

and my profession, I am a philosophy teacher with no much money to give because I am striving

to be human.

The honorable CS Lewis wrote about heaven and hell and entitled that work The Great

Divorce. The human and natural sciences to me is also The Great Divide and a losing divide. This

is not saying that that heaven in the Great Divorce was philosophy and hell is the natural sciences.

But the current of students today is that and no one can deny it. The fault can be accused to our

educational systems. The highway is occupied by the natural sciences and the narrow gate to the

human sciences.

Since the natural sciences produced something physical, then we call it the productive

sciences and since humanities do not teach something practical, then it must not be recommended.

For the natural sciences, the study of literature today is a waste of time and scandalous. Seeing a

man in quite places and reading for instance a novel or a philosophy book, that scene can really be

agitating to a hardworking man. Why? Because reading does not produce a breakfast. Only by

working does you have something to eat. Remember the story in The Little Prince of the merchant

and the resting man. He told the man, “You could have been like me if you just work.” If you

work, then you can earn money. Then if you have money, you can buy a land. If you have a land,

then you could build a house. And if you have a house, you can rest.” And the man said, “That is

what I am already doing, I am resting.”

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Now, why reading, why arts, why philosophy? Because life is not modus vivendi alone as

Habermas points out. The act of reading, of writing may not be a massive production of something

graspable, but by literature, we end up understanding what life is all about. It is by contemplation

that we grow in understanding. Our hearts and our soul are filled with motivations and

understanding to keep going which technology cannot produce. Reading is a divine time. Time

and again, as Gadamer says, we must forget ourselves, because to be truly human is to forget the

self. Only by the forgetting of the self we are able to understand the other.

Technology tries to satisfy our physical needs and our cravings by producing something

we can enjoy and grasp. Globe Telecom texted me these. “Enjoy and have digital fun using your

postpaid.” “Fill your world with wonder. Enjoy GoSurf and all-day music.” “Globe Gadgetcare is

a Worry-Free way to protect your gadget.” The mindset we are given is almost terrible which we

do not realized. This is precisely the problem that dominates the whole world today. This was

produced by the natural sciences. The centering to a life of technology for the satisfaction of our

physical needs and we have neglected our spiritual needs, thus affected our whole being craving

for more. The spirit is not satisfied, the human craving craves for more. The unsatiated craving

results to all crimes. The point is that if we do not treat this carnal cravings, then problem will

continue in the world.

Gadamer's linkages between truth and wirkungsgeschichte, bildung and phronesis may

become lost in the concern for technology and how the present generation utilizes it to construct a

future.24 Rahner and Gadamer have the same profound concerns about the impact of propaganda

and mass-advertising in consumer-dominated societies: 'What one has to exercise above all is the

ear.'25 A fortiori the worlds of virtual reality and the social constructions of the web and internet

24 The Future as Gift, 122. 25 Ibid., 124.

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provide models which may well generate even more pragmatic, instrumentalist scepticism.26 Thus

David Harvey suggests that the culture of rapid industrial mass production, of the instant and the

disposable, of ever changing fads and fashions, has inculcated a wider sense of the insignificance

of the particular and the intrinsic ephemerality of much else in life (including values and codes of

behaviour), and has heightened our sense of the prospects for the instant obsolescence of human

life itself. In related vein Richard Kearney reminds us of the effective commodification and

marketing of such simulacra as the image and other virtual substitutes for reality.

26 31 Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination (London 1994), 359. 32 The phrase is David Harvey's. See

The Condition of Postmodernity, e.g., Ch. 16. 33 See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 286. 34 See Kearney Wake

of Imagination, 37 If. See also Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 289f 63ff

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