In the city, we are barraged with i

In the city, we are barraged with images of the people we might become. Identity is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearance; and a very large proportion of the urban landscape is taken up by slogans, advertisements, flatly photographed images of folk heroes – the man who turned into a sophisticated dandy overnight by drinking a particular brand of drink, the girl who transformed herself into a femme fatale with a squirt of cheap scent. The tone of the wording of these advertisements is usually pert and facetious, comically drowning in its own hyperbole. But the pictures are brutally exact: they reproduce every detail of a style of life, down to the brand of cigarette-lighter, the stone in the ring, and the economic row of books on the shelf.

Even in the business of the mass-production of images of identity, this shift from the general to the diverse and particular is quite recent. Consider another line of stills: the back-lit, soft-focus portraits of the first and second generations of great movie stars. There is a degree of romantic unparticularity in the face of each one, as if they were communal dream-projections of society at large. Only in the specialized genres of westerns, farces and gangster movies were stars allowed to have odd, knobby cadaverous faces. The hero as loner belonged to history or the underworld: he spoke from the perimeter of society, reminding us of its dangerous edges.

The stars of the last decade have looked quite different. Soft-focus photography has gone, to be replaced by a style which searches out warts and bumps, and emphasizes the uniqueness not the generality of the face. Voices, too, are strenuously idiosyncratic; whines, stammers and low rumbles are exploited as features of “star quality”. Instead of romantic heroes and heroines, we have a brutalist, hard-edged style in which isolation and egotism are assumed as natural social conditions.

In the movies, as in the city, the sense of stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted; we no longer live in a world where we can all share the same values, and the same heroes. (It is doubtful whether this world, so beloved of nostalgia moralists, ever existed; but lip-service was paid to it, the pretence, at last, was kept up.) The isolate and the eccentric push towards the centre of the stage; their fashions and mannerisms are presented as having as good a claim to the limelight and the future as those of anyone else. In the crowd on the underground platform, one may observe a honeycomb of fully-worked-out worlds, each private, exclusive, bearing little comparison with its nearest neighbour. What is prized in one is despised in another. There are no clear rules about how one is supposed to manage one’s body, dress, talk, or think. Though there are elaborate protocols and etiquettes among particular cults and groups within the city, they subscribe to no common standard.

For the new arrival, this disordered abundance is the city’s most evident and alarming quality. He feels as if he has parachuted into a funfair of contradictory imperatives. There are so many people he might become, and a suit of clothes, a make of car, and a brand of cigarettes, will go some way towards turning him into a personage even before he has discovered who that personage is. Personal identity has always been deeply rooted in property, but hitherto the relationship has been a simple one – a question of buying what you could afford, and leaving your wealth to announce your status. In the modern city, there are so many things to buy, such a quantity of different kinds of status, that the choice and its attendant anxieties have created a new pornography of state.

The leisure pages of the Sunday newspapers, fashion magazines, TV plays, popular novels, cookbooks, window displays all nag at the nerve of our uncertainty and snobbery. Should we like American cars, hard-rock hamburger joints, Bauhaus chairs…? Literature and art are promoted as personal accessories, the paintings of Mondrian or the novels of Samuel Beckett “go” with certain styles like matching handbags. There is in the city a creeping imperialism of taste, in which more and more commodities are made over to being mere expressions of personal identity. The piece of furniture, the pair of shoes, the book, the film, are important not so much in themselves but for what they communicate about their owners; and ownership is stretched to include what one likes or believes in as well as what one can buy

Kết quả (Việt) 1:

Trong thành phố, chúng tôi barraged với hình ảnh của người dân chúng tôi có thể trở thành. Danh tính được trình bày như nhựa, một vấn đề của tài sản và xuất hiện; và một tỷ lệ rất lớn của cảnh quan đô thị được đưa lên bởi khẩu hiệu, quảng cáo, các hình ảnh chụp ảnh thẳng thừng của anh hùng dân gian-người đàn ông đã trở thành một dandy tinh vi qua đêm bằng cách uống một thương hiệu riêng của thức uống, các cô gái người chuyển mình thành một femme fatale với một mực rẻ hương thơm. Những giai điệu của từ ngữ của những quảng cáo này thường là pert và khôi hài, comically chết đuối trong khoa trương pháp riêng của mình. Nhưng những hình ảnh brutally chính xác: họ sao chép mọi chi tiết của một phong cách của cuộc sống, xuống đến các thương hiệu của thuốc lá bật lửa, đá trong vòng, và dòng kinh tế của các cuốn sách trên kệ.Ngay cả trong kinh doanh mass-production hình ảnh của bản sắc, sự thay đổi từ tướng quân đa dạng và đặc biệt là khá gần đây. Xem xét một dòng tĩnh: trở lại ánh sáng, tập trung mềm chân dung của các thế hệ đầu tiên và thứ hai của ngôi sao điện ảnh tuyệt vời. Đó là một mức độ lãng mạn unparticularity khi đối mặt với mỗi một, như thể họ là ước mơ-dự xã của xã hội. Chỉ trong thể loại chuyên ngành của Tây, farces và gangster phim là sao có thể có odd, knobby khuôn mặt cadaverous. Anh hùng là đơn độc thuộc về lịch sử hoặc địa ngục: ông đã nói từ chu vi của xã hội, nhắc nhở chúng ta về các cạnh nguy hiểm.The stars of the last decade have looked quite different. Soft-focus photography has gone, to be replaced by a style which searches out warts and bumps, and emphasizes the uniqueness not the generality of the face. Voices, too, are strenuously idiosyncratic; whines, stammers and low rumbles are exploited as features of “star quality”. Instead of romantic heroes and heroines, we have a brutalist, hard-edged style in which isolation and egotism are assumed as natural social conditions.In the movies, as in the city, the sense of stable hierarchy has become increasingly exhausted; we no longer live in a world where we can all share the same values, and the same heroes. (It is doubtful whether this world, so beloved of nostalgia moralists, ever existed; but lip-service was paid to it, the pretence, at last, was kept up.) The isolate and the eccentric push towards the centre of the stage; their fashions and mannerisms are presented as having as good a claim to the limelight and the future as those of anyone else. In the crowd on the underground platform, one may observe a honeycomb of fully-worked-out worlds, each private, exclusive, bearing little comparison with its nearest neighbour. What is prized in one is despised in another. There are no clear rules about how one is supposed to manage one’s body, dress, talk, or think. Though there are elaborate protocols and etiquettes among particular cults and groups within the city, they subscribe to no common standard.For the new arrival, this disordered abundance is the city’s most evident and alarming quality. He feels as if he has parachuted into a funfair of contradictory imperatives. There are so many people he might become, and a suit of clothes, a make of car, and a brand of cigarettes, will go some way towards turning him into a personage even before he has discovered who that personage is. Personal identity has always been deeply rooted in property, but hitherto the relationship has been a simple one – a question of buying what you could afford, and leaving your wealth to announce your status. In the modern city, there are so many things to buy, such a quantity of different kinds of status, that the choice and its attendant anxieties have created a new pornography of state.The leisure pages of the Sunday newspapers, fashion magazines, TV plays, popular novels, cookbooks, window displays all nag at the nerve of our uncertainty and snobbery. Should we like American cars, hard-rock hamburger joints, Bauhaus chairs…? Literature and art are promoted as personal accessories, the paintings of Mondrian or the novels of Samuel Beckett “go” with certain styles like matching handbags. There is in the city a creeping imperialism of taste, in which more and more commodities are made over to being mere expressions of personal identity. The piece of furniture, the pair of shoes, the book, the film, are important not so much in themselves but for what they communicate about their owners; and ownership is stretched to include what one likes or believes in as well as what one can buy