from: Martha Rosler - "For an Art against the Mythology of the Everyday Life"

How does one address these banally profound issues of everyday life, thereby revealing the public and political in the personal? It seems reasonable to me to use forms that suggest and refer to mass-cultural forms without simply mimicking them. Television, for example, is, in its most familiar form, one of the primary conduits of ideology, through its programs and commercials alike. One of the basic forms of mass culture, including television and movies, is the narrative. Narrative can be a homey, manageable form of address, but its very virtue, the suggestion of subjectivity and lived experience, is also its danger. The rootedness in an I, the most seductive encoding of convincingness, suggests an absolute inability to transcend the individual consciousness. And consciousness is the domain of ideology, so that the logic of at least the first-person narrative is that there is no appeal from ideology, no metacritical level. Given the pervasive relativism of our society, according to which only the personal is truly knowable and in which all opinions are
equally valid outside the realm of science, the first-person narrative suggests
the unretrievability of objective human and social truth. At most, one or another version of the dominant ideology is reinforced.