(365) Days of Sarah

I have an enemy. This enemy's name is "long-term goal".
We've never gotten along. Ever.
So, tonight I'm proposing a short-term goal. I will post on this blog every day this week. It might be one sentence, it might be a discourse detailing my deepest thoughts (let's hope it's the former, for your sake). But, either way, it's gonna happen.
Mark my words.

Wanna know what's on my mind right now?
A passage I'm supposed to be writing a paper on.
The only problem is I don't really understand it (and by "don't really" I mean "not at all").
Here's a taste:

"Yet it does not take much reflection to see that a process of compensatory exchange must be involved here, in which the henceforth manipulated viewer is offered specific gratifications in return for his or her consent to passivity. In other words, if the ideological function of the mass culture is understood as a process whereby otherwise dangerous and protopolitical impulses are managed and defused, rechanneled and offered spurious objects, then some preliminary step must also be theorized in which these same impulses (the raw material upon which the process works) are initially awakened within the very text that seeks to still them. If the function of the mass cultural text is meanwhile seen rather as the production of false consciousness and the symbolic reaffirmation of this or that legitimizing strategy, even this process cannot be grasped as one of sheer violence. . . nor as one inscribing the appropriate attitudes upon a blank slate, but must necessarily involve a complex strategy of rhetorical persuasion in which substantial incentives are offered for ideological adherence. We will say that such incentives, as well as the impulses to be managed by the mass cultural text, are necessarily Utopian in nature."

What the what?