The spectacle not only expands the profits and power of the capitalist class but also helps to resolve a legitimation crisis of capitalism. Rather than venting anger against exploitation and injustice, the working class is distracted and mollified by new cultural productions, social services, and wage increases. In consumer capitalism, the working classes abandon the union hall for the shopping mall and celebrate the system that fuels the desires that it ultimately cannot satisfy. But the advanced abstraction of the spectacle brings in its wake a new stage of deprivation. Marx spoke of the degradation of being into having, in which creative praxis is reduced to the mere possession of an object, rather than its imaginative transformation, and in which need for the other is reduced to greed of the self. (85)
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. "From the Society of the Spectacle to the Realm of Simulation: Debord, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity." The Postmodern Turn. New York and London: Guilford, 1997. 79-123.
Most of the texts I'm reading on consumer society and capitalism never go into what happens when people are not simply not satisfied by the objects of desire they are presented with, but when they don't have the opportunity to amass all those objects of desire. But then... it's the humanities. And we all know the humanities don't actually have anything to do with real life. :p
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2012-02-15 03:37 pm (UTC)The spectacle not only expands the profits and power of the capitalist class but also helps to resolve a legitimation crisis of capitalism. Rather than venting anger against exploitation and injustice, the working class is distracted and mollified by new cultural productions, social services, and wage increases. In consumer capitalism, the working classes abandon the union hall for the shopping mall and celebrate the system that fuels the desires that it ultimately cannot satisfy. But the advanced abstraction of the spectacle brings in its wake a new stage of deprivation. Marx spoke of the degradation of being into having, in which creative praxis is reduced to the mere possession of an object, rather than its imaginative transformation, and in which need for the other is reduced to greed of the self. (85)
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner. "From the Society of the Spectacle to the Realm of Simulation: Debord, Baudrillard, and Postmodernity." The Postmodern Turn. New York and London: Guilford, 1997. 79-123.
Most of the texts I'm reading on consumer society and capitalism never go into what happens when people are not simply not satisfied by the objects of desire they are presented with, but when they don't have the opportunity to amass all those objects of desire. But then... it's the humanities. And we all know the humanities don't actually have anything to do with real life. :p