Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
> Michael McIntyre wrote:
> >
> > Brad, have any of the economists you know engaged
> with Jon Elster's argument that consumption is an
> "opponent process" (something that over time
> gradually moves from an act motivated by utility to
> an act motivated by avoiding disutility) while
> self-realisation through activity in which utility
> is essentially a by-product have the opposite
> characteristic?
Debord, _SOS_, thesis 69:
The image of the blissful unification of society through consumption suspends disbelief with regard to the reality of division only until the next disillusionment occurs in the sphere of actual consumption. Each and every new product is supposed to offer a dramatic shortcut to the long-awaited promised land of total consumption. As such it is ceremoniously presented as the unique and ultimate product. But, as with the fashionable adoption of seemingly rare aristocratic first names which turn out in the end to be borne by a whole generation, so the would-be singularity of an object can be offered to the eager hordes only if it has been mass-produced. The sole real status attaching to a mediocre object of this kind is to have been placed, however briefly, at the very center of social life and hailed as the revelation of the goal of the production process. But even this spectacular prestige evaporates into vulgarity as soon as the object is taken home by a consumer -- and hence by all other consumers too. At this point its essential poverty, the natural outcome of the poverty of its production, stands revealed -- too late. For by this time another product will have been assigned to supply the system with its justification, and will in turn be demanding its moment of acclaim.
[But wait! There's more!]
> Within which category does reading and responding to
> maillists fall? Are
> we consumers or self-realizers here?
Let's not leave out the commodity. It needs self-realization, too, you know.
thesis 66 (dedicated to Carrol):
Each individual commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others and aspires to impose its presence everywhere as though it were alone. The spectacle is the epic poem of this strife -- a strife that no fall of Ilium can bring to an end. Of arms and the man the spectacle does not sing, but rather of passions and the commodity. Within this blind struggle each commodity, following where passion leads, unconsciously actualizes something of a higher order that itself: the commodity's becoming worldly coincides with the world's being transformed into commodities. So it is that, thanks to the cunning of the commodity, whereas all *particular* commodities wear themselves out in the flight, the commodity *as abstract form* continues in its way to absolute self-realization.
[end]
All right, I'll put the Debord down now.
("When I am laid, am laid to rest, let my wrongs . . .")
Alec
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get personalized email addresses from Yahoo! Mail http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/