creed of reason

It’s two years later, and nothing much has changed. Blacks, Women, Gays, it doesn’t matter—the roadblocks to civil liberties, freedom, and human rights will always be manned by the same kind of people: people fighting for their rights to remain bigoted and racist, to bypass the Constitution and ram their bronze age superstitions down everybody’s throats and into everybody’s bedrooms.

How about alleviating human suffering? You can’t possibly put it better than this:

“Eternity”—With Maggie Gallagher

Don’t be fooled into thinking this was exaggerated; just go to Wikipedia and take a look at Maggie Gallagher’s “social views.” To whet your appetite:

She believes the sole purposes of marriage are procreation and rearing children exclusively by heterosexual parents[,] has compared winning the fight to ban same-sex marriage with the fall of communism, [and] advocates litigation against spouses who commit adultery[.]

And what’s worse, she’s not an outlier. Not by a far cry. The GOP’s been taken over by this exact creed, and losing against these people might come to mean losing really, really big. People always ask me, how can you be pro-Second Amendment? And I say, make an educated guess, my friend.

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creed of reason

Another great skit by the great stand-up comedian George Carlin who died about two years ago (the one I already posted was George Carlin on Religion, and don’t miss out on Lewis Black either). I saw this one—on rights and customs—long ago and then managed to completely forget about it until Helly :-) recently refreshed my memory by sending me the link.

The unauthorized transcription, as always, is mine. Enjoy!

George Carlin—You Have No Rights

Here’s another one of these civic customs: swearing on the Bible. Do you understand that shit? They tell you to raise your right hand, place your left hand on the Bible. Does this stuff really matter? Which hand? Does God really give a fuck about details like this? Suppose you put your right hand on the Bible, you raise your left hand. Would that count? Or would God say: “Sorry, wrong hand, try again!” And what… why does one hand have to be raised? What is the magic in this gesture? This seems like some sort of a primitive voodoo mojo shtick. Why not put your left hand on the Bible, let your right hand hang down by your side. It’s more natural. Or put it in your pocket! Know what your mother used to say? “Don’t put your hands in your pockets!” Does she know something we don’t know? Is this hand shit really important? Let’s get back to the Bible, America’s favorite national theatrical prop. Suppose the Bible they hand you to swear on is upside-down. Or backward. Or both! And you swear to tell the truth on an upside-down backward Bible. Would that count? Suppose the Bible they hand you is an old Bible and half the pages are missing. Suppose all they have is a Chinese Bible—in an American court. Or a braille Bible, and you’re not blind! Suppose they hand you an upside-down backward Chinese braille Bible with half the pages missing. At what point does all of this stuff just break down and become just a lot of stupid shit that somebody made up. They fucking made it up, folks, it’s make-believe! It’s make-believe.

Now… alright… ok. Let’s leave the Bible aside we’ll get back to the science fiction reading later. The more important question is: What is the big deal about swearing to God in the first place? Why does swearing to God mean you gonna tell the truth? Wouldn’t affect me! If they said to me, you swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God, I’d say yeah! I’ll tell you just as much truth as the people who wrote that fucking Bible, how’d you like that, hm? Hah? Swearing on the Bible doesn’t mean anything. It’s, it’s kid’s… swearing to God is kid’s stuff! Doesn’t you, do you remember when you were a kid if you… if you told another kid something he didn’t quite believe he said, you swear to God? I would always say yeah, swear to God, even if I was lying. Why not? What’s gonna happen if I lie? Nothing! Nothing happens if you lie! Unless you get caught and that’s a whole different story.

Sometimes a kid would think he was being slick with me, and he’d say, you swear on your mothers grave? I’d say yeah! Why not! First of all, my mother was alive, she didn’t even have a grave. Second of all, even if she was dead, what’s she gonna do—rise from the grave and come and haunt me? Come and haunt me? All because I told a lie to an eight-year old? Get fucking real will you! Sometimes I would say, I swear on my mothers tits. Kids are impressed with things like that. I mean I don’t care about my mothers tits either, I don’t care if they fell off, fuck her. Not my problem, they’re your tits Ma, you keep an eye on ’em.

Swearing to God doesn’t mean anything, swearing on the Bible doesn’t mean anything, you know why? Because Bible or no Bible, God or no God, if it suits their purposes, people are gonna lie in court. The police do it all the time. All the time. Yes they do. It’s part of their job to protect, to serve, and to commit perjury whenever it supports the state’s case. Swearing on the Bible is just one more way of controlling people and keeping them in line, and it’s one more thing that holds us back as a species.

Here’s one more item for you, the last in our civics book: Rights. Why everyone in this country is always running around yammering about their fucking rights. I have a right, you have no right, we have a right, they don’t have a right… Folks, I hate to spoil your fun but—there’s no such thing as rights, okay? They’re imaginary. We made them up! Like the Boogie Man… the Three Little Pigs, Pinocchio, Mother Goose, shit like that. Rights are an idea, they’re just imaginary, they are a cute idea, cute… but that’s all, cute, and fictional. But if you think you do have rights, let me ask you this, where do they come from? People say, well, they come from God, they’re God-given rights… Aw fuck, here we go again… here we go again. The God excuse. The last refuge of a man with no answers and no argument, it came from God. Anything we can’t describe, must have come from God.

Personally, folks, I believe that if your rights came from God, he would have given you the right to have some food every day, and he would have given you the right to a roof over your head, God would have been looking out for you. God would have been looking out for you. You know that? He wouldn’t have been worrying about making sure you have a gun so you can get drunk on Sunday night and kill your girlfriend’s parents.

But let’s say it’s true, let’s say God gave us these rights. Why would he give us a certain number of rights? The Bill of Rights of this country has ten stipulations, okay? Ten rights. And apparently God was doing sloppy work that week because we had to amend the Bill of Rights an additional seventeen times. So God forgot a couple of things. Like… slavery! Just fucking slipped his mind. But let’s say, let’s say God gave us the original ten. He gave the British thirteen, the British Bill of Rights has thirteen stipulations. The Germans have twenty-nine, the Belgians have twenty-five, the Swedish have only six, and some people in the world have no rights at all. What kind of a fucking goddamn god-given deal is that? No rights at all? Why would God give different people in different countries different numbers of different rights? Boredom? Amusement? Bad arithmetic? Do we find out at long last after all this time that God is weak in math skills? Doesn’t sound like divine planning to me. Sounds more like human planning. Sounds more like one group trying to control another group. In other words, business as usual in America.

Now, if you think you do have rights, one last assignment for you. Next time you’re at the computer, get on the Internet, go to Wikipedia. When you get to Wikipedia, in the search field for Wikipedia, I want you to type in “Japanese Americans 1942,” and you’ll find out all about your precious fucking rights, okay? All right. You know about it. You know about it. Ya. In 1942, there were a 110,000 Japanese American citizens in good standing, law-abiding people, who were thrown into internment camps simply because their parents were born in the wrong country. That’s all they did wrong. They had no right to a lawyer, no right to a fair trial, no right to a jury of their peers, no right to due process of any kind. The only right they had, “right this way”—into the internment camps. Just when these American citizens needed their rights the most, their government sucked ’em away. And rights aren’t rights if someone can take ’em away. They’re privileges, that’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter and shorter.

Yeah… sooner or later the people in this country gotta realize the government does not give a fuck about them. The government doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare, or your safety, it certainly doesn’t give a fuck about you. It’s interested in its own power, that’s the only thing, keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.

Personally, when it comes to rights, I think one of two things is true. I think either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all. Personally, I lean toward unlimited rights, I feel for instance I have the right to do anything I please. But—if I do something you don’t like I think you have the right to kill me. So where you’re gonna find a fairer fucking deal than that. So the next time some asshole says to you, I have a right to my opinion, you say, oh yeah, well I have a right to my opinion, and my opinion is you have no right to your opinion. Then shoot the fucker and walk away. Thank you.

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plush bunnyisms

Heute echte Bunnehs: Die Danish Rabbit Hopping Championships 2010!

Soweit ich weiß, haben unsere kleinen Stoffhäschen die Jury als Hoppel-Experten beraten.

Enjoy!

Danish Rabbit Hopping Championships 2010

Und wer nicht genug bekommen kann: Nicht Plüsch, aber Flausch, gibt es Sonntags regelmäßig bei Stefan Niggemeier.

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collateral tales

This is the final part of my ongoing review of Galen Strawson’s critique of the “psychological Narrativity thesis,” the first part of which (“Setting the Scene”) you’ll find here, the second (“Checking the Evidence”) here, the third (“Reading Literature”) here and Strawson’s original essay (“Against Narrativity”) here.

It’s like flogging a dead horse alright but let’s try and collect Strawson’s self-observations and see if we can find something useful there. He doesn’t make it sound like that at all but, all things considered, this is where his baseline argument resides. All his purported pieces of “evidence,” in contrast, are so fluffy and far-fetched that they seem to have the label rationalization stamped all over them. But let’s follow his self-observations, one bit at a time:

I need to say more about the Episodic life, and since I find myself to be relatively Episodic, I’ll use myself as an example. I have a past, like any human being, and I know perfectly well that I have a past. I have a respectable amount of factual knowledge about it, and I also remember some of my past experiences ‘from the inside’, as philosophers say. And yet I have absolutely no sense of my life as a narrative with form, or indeed as a narrative without form. Absolutely none. Nor do I have any great or special interest in my past. Nor do I have a great deal of concern for my future.

To put it bluntly: this sounds suspiciously like an outlier rather than a mainstream phenomenon which would be frequent enough, not to speak of common, so it could put a serious dent into the psychological Narrativity thesis. What the psychological Narrativity thesis doesn’t say is that diachronic self-experience is what every person on earth experiences; no psychological thesis in its right mind would say such a thing. (We’re not in the realm of mathematical proofs here where one counter-example would falsify the theorem.) What it claims is that it might indeed be true for most of the people most of the time, and there’s room aplenty to acknowledge that people exist whose self-experience turns out to be different. Maybe even a substantial number of people, but not as a systematic difference—which is what Strawson is trying to prove but with an example that, without strong corroborating evidence, must be argued as a special case.

But let’s proceed:

That’s one way to put it – to speak in terms of limited interest. Another way is to say that it seems clear to me, when I am experiencing or apprehending myself as a self, that the remoter past or future in question is not my past or future, although it is certainly the past or future of GS the human being. This is more dramatic, but I think it is equally correct, when I am figuring myself as a self. I have no significant sense that I – the I now considering this question – was there in the further past. And it seems clear to me that this is not a failure of feeling. It is, rather, a registration of a fact about what I am – about what the thing that is currently considering this problem is.

This might not make much sense on first sight, but here comes the magic trick:

I will use ‘I*’ to represent: that which I now experience myself to be when I’m apprehending myself specifically as an inner mental presence or self. ‘I*’ comes with a large family of cognate forms – ‘me*’, ‘my*’, ‘you*’ ‘oneself *’, ‘themselves*’, and so on. The metaphysical presumption built into these terms is that they succeed in making genuine reference to an inner mental something that is reasonably called a ‘self’. But it doesn’t matter whether or not the presumption is correct.

So: it’s clear to me that events in my remoter past didn’t happen to me*. But what does this amount to? It certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t have any autobiographical memories of these past experiences. I do. Nor does it mean that my autobiographical memories don’t have what philosophers call a ‘from-the-inside’ character. Some of them do. And they are certainly the experiences of the human being that I am. It does not, however, follow from this that I experience them as having happened to me*, or indeed that they did happen to me*. They certainly do not present as things that happened to me*, and I think I’m strictly, literally correct in thinking that they did not happen to me*.

If you think this through, it’s not clear whether you can make this stop in time—in order to prevent slipping into an infinite regress. I think Strawson comes dangerously close to what has come to be called the Cartesian Theater, which would inevitably lead to little Strawsons in his head who observe the observers observing the observers etc. I might be mistaken in this case, but the Cartesian Theater has a way of slipping in unnoticed with theories like these, and some tell-tale signs are attached indeed.

And yes, there are other “special cases” out there, certainly interesting ones which, naturally, are often more interesting than the “regular cases” the psychological Narrativity thesis describes. A friend of mine, for example, remembers strongly the emotional substance of events and experiences, e. g., that a past vacation with a former boyfriend had been “terrific,” or a certain phase in her life had been “terrible,” but is utterly unable to substantiate these memories with actual details on why she had experienced these events as being terrific, or terrible, or boring, or whatever. She said it took her quite a long time until she found out that other people remember the past in a substantially different way than she did, and still does.

Would her experience count as diachronic self-experience? Or episodic self-experience? I think this question makes sense only if asked from a meta-perspective, and I also think that the psychological Narrativity thesis indeed is such a meta-perspective which connects both diachronic and episodic self-experience—much like in modernist and postmodern literature, as already mentioned, where episodic narrative serves as a technique to make the overall diachronic experience more in-depth, plausible, and vivid.

From the last quotation onward, Strawson lapses into a heavy-handed buddy-ish Q&A with himself, a technique you will see enthusiastically employed everywhere on the Interwebs when someone can’t bring themselves to coherently develop and water-proof their line of argument but resort to dealing with possible objections rather lazily in piecemeal fashion.

Some final bits:

I’m well aware that my past is mine in so far as I am a human being, and I fully accept that there’s a sense in which it has special relevance to me* now, including special emotional and moral relevance. At the same time I have no sense that I* was there in the past, and think it obvious that I* was not there, as a matter of metaphysical fact. […] The way I am now is profoundly shaped by my past, but it is only the present shaping consequences of the past that matter, not the past as such.

“Metaphysical fact”?? I wonder.

What I left out, among other things, are the numerous strawmen Strawson attacks, often in tandem with other stark assertions of his, equally unsubstantiated. Like, that the psychological Narrativity thesis would claim that “people are fabulists all the way down” and that this were not true because there are people whose “autobiographical memory is fundamentally non-distorting, whatever automatic processes of remoulding and recasting it may invariably involve.”

What I did not leave out is the methodology of his self-observation. If there were any, I’d put them here. But there aren’t. As a matter of course, every self-observation must answer a number of questions about its methodology, but not so Strawson’s, it seems.

Actually, Strawson’s essay is a very good showcase for one of the reasons why literary critics have gotten such a bad rap, not only among scientists. (There are much worse examples, though, like Fish, or lately Eagleton). So I will leave Strawson at this point, but I will get back to the topic of narrativity in self-experience soon.

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Inception

Much has been said how Inception combines different genres, i. e., science fiction, heist, and action (or thriller). It’s certainly also classic cyberpunk which has begun to enjoy its well-earned renaissance lately.

I’ve watched the movie twice so far, and it went straight from love at first sight to serious engagement. I started to try and sketch the dramatic structure (in words, not in pictures), for which I’m going to need a little more time. But this greatly helps: Co.Design’s Inception Infographic Contest (tip o’ the hat to Tim)!

The most amazing piece, of course, is the winner: “Inception: The Architecture” by Rick Slusher (click to embiggen):

The contest started off strong with Dehahs’s Inception: Timeline, also an amazing piece of work, which makes use of the Escheresque never-ending staircase, or “paradoxon”:

And there’s also miscellaneous runner-ups, some of them extremely complex, which you have to check out for yourself.

Christopher Nolan’s screenplay is fiendishly clever; I said so already, and how clever it is became even more clearer after watching the movie a second time. Some see faults and some see flaws where there aren’t any, but I also think I understand why the movie does not resonate with everybody. Nevertheless, I want that dreydl!! :-)

One of the things that make the screenplay tick like clockwork and proceed like a well-oiled machine, I think, is that the story is structured like the rules of a game. But not a regular game, and not a fixed set of rules, but like a roleplaying game and different sets of rules that get progressively complex depending on the difficulty level, escalating in perfect tune with the plot points in the script.

But I’ll keep the details for another post.

(Oh, and wouldn’t Inception make for a fantastic pen-and-paper roleplaying game?)

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the one and twenty

This is amazing, and it’s amazing because it’s so easy, and fun. Take the Social Web, RFID, and a brand people can identify with, and combine everything into a world that’s every bit as exciting as it is frightening in its prospects.

Not that the “Coca-Cola Village” Social Media/event concept by Publicis E-dologic, Ramat Gan, would be in any way ueber extraordinary. But that’s the point.

The life that you love is the life that you fear.

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Next10

Die deutsche Version dieses Eintrags gibt es drüben beim Werbeblogger.

All #Next10 posts at between drafts so far are here, at Werbeblogger here.

The gist of Stowe Boyd’s presentation at the Next10 conference can be summarized as follows. What we think of as Social Media is constituted by different media and different channels, this much is obvious, but there have been three distinct phases so far of actual social media channels and how media got “socialized” the historicity of which we often fail to notice—hence “The Social Media Blur” as the title of his presentation.

Here it is:

The first phase, by the end of the nineties, was initiated by blogs, written by a “couple hundred people” labeled “fringe lunatics” (and worse) often and especially by the mainstream media. This phase, and that was not at all obvious at the time, was going to have an enormous impact, but this impact was delayed. Also, blogs really aren’t all that “social”; all things considered, they’re better described with their former label “personal publishing.” But blogs had a huge impact toward the “democratization” of the media and the shift in people’s perception about what constitutes social discourse. Toward and from every direction: Boyd’s example is the New York Times where it’s become increasingly nonsensical to differentiate between “articles” or “blog entries” in the online edition.

The second phase was the rise of social networks. Which seem already ubiquitous to us, and whose graphs in terms of participation indeed seem set to approach actual ubiquity. When Boyd says that tweens are “connected almost every waking minute of their day” through social networks, he might have the NYT article “If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online” in mind, which I briefly mentioned here and here. But despite their enormous numbers of participants, these networks are still made up of personal relationships and still “based on social scale” instead of organizations broadcasting to people, and that’s where this phase stands out in terms of “social.”

The third phase is what Boyd calls “the rise of streams”: microstreaming, microblogging, mini-feeds, and complete services like Twitter which do nothing but. Their major impact in terms of social discourse and how we perceive information is the “open model,” i. e., the asymmetric follower model, which has replaced RSS feeds as the primary means for accessing information in only a few years. It has a major impact on how new businesses are working and on the “rise of social television”—where people not only watch and tweet about sporting events in real time, but the entertainment industry tries to loop these feeds back into their networks. And, of course, it has a major impact on how we affiliate and how we create identity.

And there are two recent developments which will take this even further. The first are streaming apps that increasingly integrate and resolve information (images, videos, newspaper articles, etc.) within the stream into what Boyd calls a “Web of Flow” where everything is “pulverized” through the speed of the stream, with an archive layer beneath.

The second development is that all this, again, is in the process of being integrated into hardware and software in such a way that most of these streams soon won’t be delivered through “devices” or “applications” anymore but be as fully und fundamentally integrated into our hardware and software environments “as the Finder on Apple computers.”

People who attend enough meetings and conferences often voice their misgivings that they meet the same speakers again and again, but that certain speakers get invited again and again often happens for a reason. None of what Stowe Boyd talked about in his presentation is essentially “new,” but it’s the perspective that is most valuable here. If you start to unravel the “lost history” of Social Media, vertigo sets in, or at least it should set in. This all happened within a time frame of about ten years. And not only is it just the beginning, we’re still accelerating, and on a massive scale, and even this acceleration is accelerating. Moreover, “integration”—as it does in computer architecture—not only integrates elements, it also adds abstraction layers to our social and mental environments which have a profound impact, again, on how we operate in the social space and how we create identity.

But this accelerating acceleration might not be the only problem we have, and maybe not even our most important one. On the one hand, there are these tremendous attempts on a global scale, corporate, politically, legally, toward mounting a “Restauration” with the potential to tear everything apart and pulverize much more than just pieces of information—think of it as stepping with exponentially increasing force on your brake and your gas pedal at the same time. On the other hand, it has been observed that our fundamental modes of communication seem to resist these changes, being increasingly at odds with our rapidly evolving means of communication.

It becomes progressively likely right now that we will approach the answer to the question “Where do we go from here?” only through an ever escalating run & tumble motion.

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collateral tales

Huh, I barely remember this poem! It just popped up in the process of reorganizing my documents after migrating to Mac. I’m a writer, not a poet, and I regard any poem that I topically or accidentally compose, and which is not intentionally satirical, as derivative of some poetic style or other by default. It creaks & grates, and it sounds like song lyrics but I at least remember that it wasn’t written for a song. But that’s all I can remember, and I have only the most vague idea about what it could possibly mean or be about.

Angels

Let’s meet where all them angels dwell
with money changing hands;
Where superstition haunts the haunted
ones with heart-shaped blanks.

Then walk along this disconnected
line to where it bends,
Toward the gentle reach where no one
shows up in the end.

Yet laughter-woven ghosts create
themselves with sudden skill
To weave sophisticated views
from April window sills.

“Angels” by J. Martin (5/1997) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

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collateral tales

This is the third part of my ongoing review of Galen Strawson’s critique of the “psychological Narrativity thesis,” the first part of which (“Setting the Scene”) you’ll find here, the second (“Checking the Evidence”) here, and Strawson’s original essay (“Against Narrativity”) here.

So what does it mean when Strawson claims that “Petrarch, Proust, Parfit and thousands of others have given this idea vivid expression,” i. e., the idea of episodic self-experience without the diachronic narrative strain the thesis presupposes? Strawson doesn’t explain. All he does is giving us another list:

Among those whose writings show them to be markedly Episodic I propose Michel de Montaigne, the Earl of Shaftesbury, Stendhal, Hazlitt, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Borges, Fernando Pessoa, Iris Murdoch (a strongly Episodic person who is a natural story teller), Freddie Ayer, Goronwy Rees, Bob Dylan. Proust is another candidate, in spite of his memoriousness (which may be inspired by his Episodicity); also Emily Dickinson.

Proust, as you can see, counts among his most detailed examples; an important witness indeed since he’s not only mentioned twice, but also graced with both a subordinate sentence and a parenthetical remark.

Besides being devoid of any evidence whatsoever, this is, of course, as fallacious an argument as you can get in the neighborhood of literary criticism. Let’s brake it down to three objections.

First of all, you can’t just take a writer’s text and claim to know something about the writer’s character based on the way he or she writes. Episodic writing is a writing technique, for goodness sake! And not just a modernist technique, by a far cry. What Strawson’s “literary witnesses” amount to is a thoroughly romanticist argument that makes Formalism look bang up-to-date in comparison.

Then, what does episodic writing mean, as a writing technique? We can assume that Strawson has a certain kind of “fragmented” episodic writing in particular in mind which, again, isn’t exclusively modernist (even if it’s come to be identified as such), and has been further developed into collage, cut-up, pastiche, pastiches-within-pastiches, and other forms of “guerilla writing” techniques in postmodern literature, most prominent in many texts by William S. Burroughs or Kathy Acker. But does that mean that such texts do not tell a diachronic narrative? Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway, for example, employ episodic narrative techniques to make character development or character sketches, respectively, more vivid and three-dimensional than ever, and the overall experience is very much diachronic, not episodic. By the way, one can get easily confused into assuming episodicity when a character doesn’t change, but a so-called “steadfast character” has everything to do with story structure, and nothing with diachronic vs. episodic self-experience.

Lastly, what’s Proust doing here as a material witness? At all? À la recherche du temps perdu’s massive effort toward retrieval of everything that has been lost? À la recherche du temps perdu’s retracing of each and every memory which, in an intricately choreographed dance between the metaphoric and the metonymic, constitutes a narrator as his (arguably) diachronic master narrative, composed of countless (arguably) episodic narratives? Is this really the best witness Strawson can come up with?

What Strawson seems to be taken in by is a tendency to equate plot & (character) development with diachronic narrativity and self-experience, while equating the absence of plot and (character) development with episodic narrativity and self-experience. (He never mentions “plot” and only talks about “story,” which confuses matters even more; that he’s even prone to equating plot and story comes to mind but might go a little far.) But such an understanding of plot, or story misunderstood as plot, is a rather narrow one and (character) development, as mentioned above, is simply one option—and not even the default option: just go and take a look at blockbuster screenplays.

While some objections raised by Strawson against certain assumptions and conclusions with respect to the psychological Narrativity thesis are certainly valid and should be answered, he hasn’t come up so far with one striking argument, one shred of evidence, one plausible witness for his own theory of episodic self-experience. What’s left, finally, is his own testimony on behalf of his own self-experience, and I will try and dissect that in another post.

brand meets world

Über Shockvertising schrieb ich nicht nur auf between drafts, sondern auch regelmäßig auf dem Werbeblogger; interessante Einträge und Beispiele zu diesem Thema siehe finden sich auch auf dem Ghost of the Movie-Blog von Timo Maier.

Shockvertising in den klassischen PSA-Bereichen wie “Don’t Drink & Drive” arbeitet gewöhnlich mit Pseudo-Punchlines: Eine Geschichte wird erzählt, von der wir genau wissen, wie sie überraschend enden wird. Dies gilt zumeist auch dann, wenn der Spot zum ersten Mal und ohne Vorinformationen angesehen wird, da die „Marker“ für den Aufbau der Geschichte so vertraut sind, daß sie das Genre sehr früh offenbaren. Zum echten Schock im Sinne einer echten Punchline und einer tatsächlich unerwarteten Wendung kommt es dabei nur selten. Die Bandbreite möglicher Erzähltechniken und Erzählstrukturen für 30- oder 45-Sekunden-PSA-Spots sind in dieser Hinsicht stark begrenzt.

Ausgeglichen wird dies in der Regel mit starken emotionalen und/oder visuellen Schockelementen, mit Hilfe derer die für dieses Genre unverzichtbare „unerwartete Wendung“ faktisch simuliert wird; Ziel dabei ist es, die Schockeffekte so zu verstärken, daß die Erwartungen übertroffen werden. Genau dies zählt möglicherweise zu den Gründen, warum Shockvertising nicht oder nicht ausreichend wirkt oder nicht von dauerhafter Wirkung ist. Denn für alle Erzählformen, zu denen strukturell eine unerwartete Wendung gehört, gilt letztendlich, daß sie ihre Wirkung nicht durch die Intensivierung des Erwarteten, sondern gerade durch das Unerwartete entfalten.

Möglichkeiten aber gibt es, wie dieser PSA-Spot von der offenbar webauftrittslosen Agentur Advantage Advertising, Jakarta, für Qtv zeigt:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwpgSJBh9MU

Der Trick besteht zunächst darin, das Zentrum der Geschichte von den betrunkenen Fahrern und Fahrerinnen auf die Personen zu verlagern, die sie nicht am Fahren hindern. (Ein Ansatz, nebenbei, den ich generell für sinnvoll halte.) Auf diese Weise wird ein Spielraum gewonnen, der andere Lösungen und damit auch unerwartete Wendungen ermöglicht. Der Schockeffekt wird in diesem Fall auch nicht nur vorbereitet und verstärkt durch emotionale und visuelle Rhetorik, sondern profitiert auch gerade von der oben erwähnten Erwartungshaltung, die auf eine Pseudo-Punchline vorbereitet ist.

Interessant wäre es, zu untersuchen, ob, wie und in welchem Umfang die „unerwartete Wendung“ jenseits des Shockvertising-Genres in aktuellen Werbespots eingesetzt wird. Ich vermute, daß ein nicht unerheblicher Teil ebenfalls mit verschiedenen Formen von Pseudo-Punchlines arbeitet, und davon wiederum ein nicht unerheblicher Teil mit der Pseudo-Überraschung „Preis“.

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