Materialism might not be as bloodless a philosophy as may appear at the first instant. In fact, of the two philosophies of materialism and spiritualism, the former is the older. If Heidegger declares that we ill understand the being that belongs even to us, how can we hope to understand such alien being as that of matter? "How can we define a being whose nature is absolutely unknown to us? (1)" But it is a philosophy not as easily dismissed as the idealists would like to have, for even before Marx the materialist spectre has always and ceaselessly loomed over the horizon of human thought. The point to be conceded is that matter counts and that it must be liberated from spirit's guilt over it.
Dialectical materialism is a 'negative philosophy' on account of its inherently destructive tendencies. It is not negative in its teleology but in its methodology. All true philosophy must be negative in its methodological scope as its real function consists in evolving by negating its own moribund elements. But the history of European philosophy witnessed an insidious movement on the part of the dominant status-quoism in the form of something called 'positive philosophy.' It was something reactionary and knee jerk at that. It was the philosophy of the 'established fact,' "to counteract the destructive tendencies (of negative philosophy), there arose, in the decades following Hegel's death, a positive philosophy which undertook to subordinate reason to the authority of established fact.(2)" The idea of positive philosophy is a contradiction in terms. "The content of a truly philosophical work does not remain unchanged with time." What is true of a truly philosophical work is true of philosophy per se. The philosophical content is in the movement of thought.
The only philosophy deserving of its Greek etymology pertains immediately and directly to the needs and concerns of living men. The latter too do not remain unchanged with time; this impermanence of the human universe can only be addressed by a negative philosophy whose introspective critical power "uses the strength of the 'epistemic' subject to break through the deception (Trug) of constitutive subjectivity." "Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the non-identical via conceptual criticisms of false identification." That is why the need of the moment is a negative dialectics as the speculative identity between identity and non-identity is negated by a non-identity between identity and non-identity. This fundamental non-identity can be addressed only by a methodology of negative dialectics. It is necessary to counter, by dint of determinate negations, the sometimes inordinate and unjustified claims and conclusions of thought. But Adorno's materialism is shot through with more idealism than the idealism of most idealists. This idealism is, of course, not a metaphysical idealism, but an ethical one. The unthought of his philosophy is human suffering. This suffering is the undeniable ground of all philosophising for Adorno; somewhat akin in its indubitability to the notion of dukkha in Buddhism. But whereas Buddha, and Schopenhauer, in the wake of the Indians, launched into a negation of life itself, Adorno embarked on the project of negating the evil of suffering through the tools of critical philosophy. For Adorno, human suffering is the cardinal materialist fact and all philosophy must begin in the aftermath of this fact. The crux of his charge against materialism does not lie in the mere production of commodities but in the alienation and suffering of the producers.
The production of commodities might not in itself constitute the essence of materialism, but it definitely contains its origin. Georg Lukacs remarks that the analysis of the processes of commodity production was a necessary beginning to the Marxian enterprise of the portrayal of the capitalist society in its totality. The structure of the capitalist society is a reflection/product of the commodity structures, and not just its objective but subjective forms are comprehensible too only in terms of this materialist analysis. It is these subjective forms that concern us at the beginning of the present essay as it bears directly and immediately on the consciousness of the human beings living in such a society.
The essence of the capitalist society is the reification of the life-world. It is a space hostile to the subjective truth of a Kierkegaard; a space of 'phantom objectivity' where human relations have become reified. The cold veneer of rationality fogs the truth of an ulterior social reality. It is these social relations that form the starting point of the commodity structure, and ultimately of the whole socio-economic superstructure, and this in the last analysis results in the fetishisation of all commodities, including human beings. Lukacs demonstrates that this fetishistic character pertains not just to the objective forms of the commodities, but more profoundly, it enters into the attitude of human beings towards those commodities, other people, and the world in general. It leads to a fetishisation of the subjective stance. The modern age is characterised by an infiltraion of the inner life of man and society by the commodity structure, whereas the premodern age, despite possessing a commodity relations structure allowed the latter to manifest itself only in the shape of the external social world. It had, so to speak, not yet coloured his consciousness and become the skin of his thought. Whereas production conditions in modern times direct the social movement of humanity, that is to say, it dictates the inner movement of society.
Lukacs makes the case for a qualitative shift in the basis and character of social relations; for a world where commodity exchange has become the catalyst for social change; for a society that has commodity production as its prime mover; indeed for a world whose telos itself is its total reification. The subjective phenomena of such a society make for a most interesting study. "As a matter of fact the exchange of commodities originates not within primitive communities, but where they end, on their borders at the few points where they come in contact with other communities. That is where barter begins, and from here it strikes back into the interior of the community, decomposing it." The ruinous influence of commodity exchange on societies is the consequence of the degeneration of the inner processes and subjective phenomena of society; of the qualitative alteration and reification of man's consciousness. 'A commodity exchange directed in upon itself' becomes one vicious circle of a raison d'etre of the capitalist society and results in the alienation and dehumanisation of its members who are reduced to the state of objects in a network of commodity relations.
The qualitative difference of pre-capitalistic economies of commodity exchange from the capitalistic ones lay in the fact of this exchange being a trait of the former as opposed to being the latter's very essence, its constitutive force. Lukacs uses a telling theological metaphor to delineate the nature of this difference. It is needful "for the commodity structure to penetrate society in all its aspects and remould it in its own image" to constitute a capitalist society. "Remould in its own image." In the capitalist society, commodity makes society (and man) in its own image. The theological extent of the metaphor underlines the extent of the constitutive power of commodity in modern society. Man's relation to commodity is no longer an external one; he has rather internalised the very form of the commodity and the interior mould of his consciousness has been cast in the shape of a thing. The distinction between the capitalistic and the pre-capitalistic society is that between commodity as a universal and commodity as a particular. The universal is the essential form in which all its particular instances are cast and disclosed. The critical commonplace regarding the commodification of society refers to a stage in world-history when the universal soul is fashioned after the form of commodity. Matter, soul and their interrelations are reified, culminating, eventually, in the depersonalisation of economic relations and the reification of consciousness itself. Interpersonal relations were substituted by interrelations of commodities, which directed in upon themselves, spiralled into an uber-complex hyperweb that has cloaked human relations to the extent where it is impossible to percieve them amidst the fog of multilinear, multi-layered, and multidimensional movements of commodities. Human relations, in the form that they existed prior to the dawn of capitalism, are dead. Marx labelled this destructive beclouding of human relations as 'economic mystification.'
Commodity has become a category of consciousness. The latter has become a prisoner of the forms of commodity causing the descent of human subjectivity into reification. The evolution of the merchant's capital from a mere "intervening movement between extremes which it does not control and between premises which it does not create" to a universal category of society is the story of transformation of society from its barter stage to a capitalistic one. In the latter stage capital creates the premises and controls the conditions of its own production. In the antiquity and during the middle ages, there still subsisted in the conditions of production a kind of direct human communion, even though it be in the form of the relationship between the master and the serf. But with the all-comprehending realization of capital, the concealment of human relations has been rendered complete.
The human consciousness is endowed with capacity for impressionistic absorption where by the structure of commodity relations is impressed upon it with the substance and form of a weltanschaung. The consciousness then becomes the subjective manifestation of the commodity. This alienates man from the natural universe and his own original nature of immediate spiritual and physical activity. From this alienation emanates the conundrum of human condition wherein instead of being the proprietor of his own labour man is possessed by it; from it also stems man's divided socio-economic self wherein the man himself and his labour are two discrete and independent entities, undetermined and detached from each other.
The capitalist society thrives on the economic mystification of the commodity. "A commodity is a mysterious thing" because it takes on a life of its own; social relations get substituted by commodity relations; because the labour of man whose quality is blood, sweat, and tears is equalized by the commodific value of the product he creates; because commodities determine the socio-economic value of a man's time and work; because a commodity is an object of utility whose power extends beyond its utility for man, which, on the contrary, determines the utility of the man and his activity.
A commodity has two aspects: perceptible and imperceptible. The perceptible aspect lends to the commodity its spectacular quality imbued with deceitfulness But more pernicious still is its imperceptible aspect which evades all point-blank intelligibility and works its societal and psychological effects from over and under the radar of window displays. Its activity is subterranean in the figurative sense of subconscious forces which shape the impulse of the human conscious and the sovereign directive will of society. "It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." That mysterious quality of the commodity dwells in the relational character it comes to acquire in an exchange economy where man's activity is rendered a passive objective value and objects shed their passivity to acquire the selfsame economic agency of which man has been denuded. However, there is nothing fantastic about the palpably hard impact of commodity relations on human lives. The impact is hard partly through the fantastic form of these relations which appear so unaccountable and mysterious - a game of chess where human beings are pawns moved by the ineluctable force and logic of capital.
Man's labour is freed from his agency, realizes its sovereignty in the form of the commodity, and then begins to hold man in its sovereign thralldom. Man becomes bonded to his own labour whose product is only ontologically liberated from man's labouring self, but to which man is still tied by the umbilical cord of his economic need; tied up by questions of economic, social and spiritual survival. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an extreme, but on multiple attributes, a competent metaphor cut out for commodity, especially from the all significant perspective of possessing agency and the potentiality to delimit its creator's freedom. Has man created a monster in the economic evolution of commodity?
How can man exist in relation to his own labour (and its concomitant product) in an unestranged mode? Heidegger's elucidation of the origin of the work of art is a revelation of such a relationship between the creator and his product. "The work, according to common understanding, springs out from and through the activity of the artist. But through what and from what is the artist what he is? Through the work; the saying that the work commends the master, says: The work first lets artist emerge as a master of art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." This is remarkably similar to Pope John Paul the IInd's pronouncement upon work (albeit in theological and humanistic terms) in his Laborem Exercens: "As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity." Which in turn is remarkably similar to Hegel's theorization of the subject as one who realizes his content by "translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality." Work is a way for man to realize himself. He constitutes himself as subject through self-activity. But the capitalistic society has witnessed an ontological reversal wherein man exists for work and not work for man.
In this new economy of exchange objects exceed their purposed boundaries. The self-activity of man transcends his self and becomes imbued with its own motivational spring and goes beyond him in the guise of an independent entity called commodity or the product of his labour. Just as the economy of commodification has alienated human beings from their true selves, objects too have acquired proclivities and powers alien to the one originally envisaged for them in an instinctive socio-economic order of things. In this economy of objects, it is human beings rather which fall to a mediating position between the objects and their environment; the two primary elements of the dialectical exchange are still the object and the environment (through the via media of persons). It is a political economy of objects and, hence, an economy of signs or a semiotic economy where use-value is a pretext, but not the reason, for the object to exist. The ontology of commodities 'exists' at two levels - the first and more obvious dimension is that of the luminous simulacrum, the salient ocular object (its raw evidentiary aspect); the second is the semiological level at which the socio-economic discourses surrounding the object are generated. The second dimension has a further twofold character: a primary or ostensible one and a secondary or real one. Depending on one's epistemology, the reality and the ostensibility of the semiotics at this level are two mutually exchangeable criteria, or rather, open to determination and allocation. The two parallel semiotics at work here pertain to the raw commerce of exchange economy circumscribing the object at the primary level and the economy of symbolic exchange of multiplex significations invested in the object at the secondary level. The production of goods in the consumerist society is not dictated by necessity; it is rather governed by laws inherent in the nature of commodity itself, thus, creating a phantom world of objects whose ineluctable force is nevertheless felt very palpably by individuals and societies. Man does not eventually remain unscathed from the influence of the commodification of the non-human world which comes home to roost by fetishizing human consciousness. The first step towards this reification of human subjectivity inheres in the commodification of man's activity, which, like a phantom Frankenstein is gifted by the market economy with the energy of disengaged (from the actor) economic motility. Man and his activity each stand over against the other, independent but reciprocal. They belong to each other in a relationship of reciprocity where the one trades in the worth of the other. The power of agency belongs equally to both, and given a situation of economic equivalence, the commodity can fetch the time and value of man's activity just as adequately as man can barter his labour for the commodity.
The political economy of capitalism is that of a materialist self-aggrandizement or a semiotics of prestation. Materialist self-aggrandizement is the unconstrained expansion of the capital as a manifestation of the grandiose expression of the self. This same self-grandiosity is mirrored at the micro level in the prestation or prestige-significations inhering in the commodities one chooses to consume; a choice reflective of the hierarchical function of the commodity and the consumer's comparative position in his society. It is in fact a necessary component of the logic of capitalism that commodities be invested with prestige significations that inscribe within the object the signature of the pre-existing capitalist social order; that commodities engraved with a mini-architectural impression of the social hierarchy be produced, reproduced, exchanged and consumed. It is a necessary part of the perpetuation and amplification of the status quo - an inertia intrinsic to the essential reproductive trait of all social states including the capitalist one. Prestration is an unpercieved dimension of marxist sociology unveiled by Baudrillard's semiological researches. Chanel, Baduet, and limited editions are some of the densest metaphors of prestration in contemporary society. This semiotic economics is a fundamental driver of the capitalist enterprise by whose agency objects perpetuate and multiply themselves through a process of infinite differentiation. The rallying cry of the prestrationist philosophy would be a negation of Shakespeare's fabled epigram, "That which we call rose would smell just as sweet by any other name." As the current expression has it, it's all in the name; it is either a Gucci or a Prada, or nothing. In fact, the latest advertisement of Jockey doing the rounds on Television communicates precisely this message of either this brand or none at all.
The primary driver of capitalism is the self-differentiating activity of the object. Social discourse transpires on a discriminatory basis analogous to language in Saussurean linguistics. Much the same as the functional value of commodities is a matter of economic necessity, their semiotic import is the collective product of the hierarchical interactions within the social order. Commodities acquire their significations in a relational chain of conception. Capitalism is an endlessly proliferating system like language in which the particular commodity gathers all of its significance from being situated in a comparative context populated with other commodities; the fetishistic worth of the object resides in its differential value with respect to the other objects surrounding it in the economy, rather than in some inner substance or intrinsic property of the object itself. It is what it is not which defines the object - its ontological difference from all the other objects in the totality. The basic function of the commodity is to differ. Operational here is the notion of differance with its Derridean furnishings of distinction, inequality and discernibility. The visibility/evidentiality/conspicuity of objects in an unequal economy of individuals is a critical marker of the consumerist discourse. The irony of the capitalist society is that it thrives on a discourse of nonidentity to perpetuate an order of the same. The statism of the order is secured by the entrenched base/root that holds erect the differentially fructifying socio-economic-politico-cultural superstructure.
It is an order of things that perdures by necessitating the unnecessary. "With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play (jeu) of differences." In macroeconomic terms, the Marxist base would be that origin productive of differences in the economy of objects which go on self-differentiating ad-infinitum (in a language of historical semantics), generating differences between difference, to produce ever more homoousiae of the commodity; differences which return to constitute the subject in its self-differentiality, grafting an alien nature upon consciousness through the implanting of abstract differences imported from the commodity.
There can be no prescriptive closure to the order of things but their limits can be reset from the extremes of desire to the golden mean of necessity. Capitalism, however, is the discourse on the boundless production of productions themselves, culminating in the form of the fetish being abstracted from commodity and incorporated into consciousness. It is this abstract form of the commodity in consciousness that allows for the conception of commodity as a universal category enabling the "equal exchange of qualitatively different objects." The exchange, however, we know, is far from equal and commodification is an endeavour in equalization that is predominantly reinforced by the abstract violence of economic coercion. In such a context, human labour takes on a formal quality of equivalence that serves as the ratiocinative principle for the systematization of commodity values. This formal quality is a function of the reification of human subjectivity and the consequent isolation and atomisation of labour which masquerades itself in the name of emancipation or free labour. This labour is free in the reverse sense of a gift to the capitalist. The economics of labour is the epitome of precision as as its value is calculated to the nicety of decimal points of currency and moments. This level of abstraction of labour where its comparatizations and equalizations are a matter of inexorable and utmost accuracy reflects an advanced stage in capitalist production whose originary premise and quintessential product are both human labour in its objective existence.
Dialectical materialism is a 'negative philosophy' on account of its inherently destructive tendencies. It is not negative in its teleology but in its methodology. All true philosophy must be negative in its methodological scope as its real function consists in evolving by negating its own moribund elements. But the history of European philosophy witnessed an insidious movement on the part of the dominant status-quoism in the form of something called 'positive philosophy.' It was something reactionary and knee jerk at that. It was the philosophy of the 'established fact,' "to counteract the destructive tendencies (of negative philosophy), there arose, in the decades following Hegel's death, a positive philosophy which undertook to subordinate reason to the authority of established fact.(2)" The idea of positive philosophy is a contradiction in terms. "The content of a truly philosophical work does not remain unchanged with time." What is true of a truly philosophical work is true of philosophy per se. The philosophical content is in the movement of thought.
The only philosophy deserving of its Greek etymology pertains immediately and directly to the needs and concerns of living men. The latter too do not remain unchanged with time; this impermanence of the human universe can only be addressed by a negative philosophy whose introspective critical power "uses the strength of the 'epistemic' subject to break through the deception (Trug) of constitutive subjectivity." "Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the non-identical via conceptual criticisms of false identification." That is why the need of the moment is a negative dialectics as the speculative identity between identity and non-identity is negated by a non-identity between identity and non-identity. This fundamental non-identity can be addressed only by a methodology of negative dialectics. It is necessary to counter, by dint of determinate negations, the sometimes inordinate and unjustified claims and conclusions of thought. But Adorno's materialism is shot through with more idealism than the idealism of most idealists. This idealism is, of course, not a metaphysical idealism, but an ethical one. The unthought of his philosophy is human suffering. This suffering is the undeniable ground of all philosophising for Adorno; somewhat akin in its indubitability to the notion of dukkha in Buddhism. But whereas Buddha, and Schopenhauer, in the wake of the Indians, launched into a negation of life itself, Adorno embarked on the project of negating the evil of suffering through the tools of critical philosophy. For Adorno, human suffering is the cardinal materialist fact and all philosophy must begin in the aftermath of this fact. The crux of his charge against materialism does not lie in the mere production of commodities but in the alienation and suffering of the producers.
The production of commodities might not in itself constitute the essence of materialism, but it definitely contains its origin. Georg Lukacs remarks that the analysis of the processes of commodity production was a necessary beginning to the Marxian enterprise of the portrayal of the capitalist society in its totality. The structure of the capitalist society is a reflection/product of the commodity structures, and not just its objective but subjective forms are comprehensible too only in terms of this materialist analysis. It is these subjective forms that concern us at the beginning of the present essay as it bears directly and immediately on the consciousness of the human beings living in such a society.
The essence of the capitalist society is the reification of the life-world. It is a space hostile to the subjective truth of a Kierkegaard; a space of 'phantom objectivity' where human relations have become reified. The cold veneer of rationality fogs the truth of an ulterior social reality. It is these social relations that form the starting point of the commodity structure, and ultimately of the whole socio-economic superstructure, and this in the last analysis results in the fetishisation of all commodities, including human beings. Lukacs demonstrates that this fetishistic character pertains not just to the objective forms of the commodities, but more profoundly, it enters into the attitude of human beings towards those commodities, other people, and the world in general. It leads to a fetishisation of the subjective stance. The modern age is characterised by an infiltraion of the inner life of man and society by the commodity structure, whereas the premodern age, despite possessing a commodity relations structure allowed the latter to manifest itself only in the shape of the external social world. It had, so to speak, not yet coloured his consciousness and become the skin of his thought. Whereas production conditions in modern times direct the social movement of humanity, that is to say, it dictates the inner movement of society.
Lukacs makes the case for a qualitative shift in the basis and character of social relations; for a world where commodity exchange has become the catalyst for social change; for a society that has commodity production as its prime mover; indeed for a world whose telos itself is its total reification. The subjective phenomena of such a society make for a most interesting study. "As a matter of fact the exchange of commodities originates not within primitive communities, but where they end, on their borders at the few points where they come in contact with other communities. That is where barter begins, and from here it strikes back into the interior of the community, decomposing it." The ruinous influence of commodity exchange on societies is the consequence of the degeneration of the inner processes and subjective phenomena of society; of the qualitative alteration and reification of man's consciousness. 'A commodity exchange directed in upon itself' becomes one vicious circle of a raison d'etre of the capitalist society and results in the alienation and dehumanisation of its members who are reduced to the state of objects in a network of commodity relations.
The qualitative difference of pre-capitalistic economies of commodity exchange from the capitalistic ones lay in the fact of this exchange being a trait of the former as opposed to being the latter's very essence, its constitutive force. Lukacs uses a telling theological metaphor to delineate the nature of this difference. It is needful "for the commodity structure to penetrate society in all its aspects and remould it in its own image" to constitute a capitalist society. "Remould in its own image." In the capitalist society, commodity makes society (and man) in its own image. The theological extent of the metaphor underlines the extent of the constitutive power of commodity in modern society. Man's relation to commodity is no longer an external one; he has rather internalised the very form of the commodity and the interior mould of his consciousness has been cast in the shape of a thing. The distinction between the capitalistic and the pre-capitalistic society is that between commodity as a universal and commodity as a particular. The universal is the essential form in which all its particular instances are cast and disclosed. The critical commonplace regarding the commodification of society refers to a stage in world-history when the universal soul is fashioned after the form of commodity. Matter, soul and their interrelations are reified, culminating, eventually, in the depersonalisation of economic relations and the reification of consciousness itself. Interpersonal relations were substituted by interrelations of commodities, which directed in upon themselves, spiralled into an uber-complex hyperweb that has cloaked human relations to the extent where it is impossible to percieve them amidst the fog of multilinear, multi-layered, and multidimensional movements of commodities. Human relations, in the form that they existed prior to the dawn of capitalism, are dead. Marx labelled this destructive beclouding of human relations as 'economic mystification.'
Commodity has become a category of consciousness. The latter has become a prisoner of the forms of commodity causing the descent of human subjectivity into reification. The evolution of the merchant's capital from a mere "intervening movement between extremes which it does not control and between premises which it does not create" to a universal category of society is the story of transformation of society from its barter stage to a capitalistic one. In the latter stage capital creates the premises and controls the conditions of its own production. In the antiquity and during the middle ages, there still subsisted in the conditions of production a kind of direct human communion, even though it be in the form of the relationship between the master and the serf. But with the all-comprehending realization of capital, the concealment of human relations has been rendered complete.
The human consciousness is endowed with capacity for impressionistic absorption where by the structure of commodity relations is impressed upon it with the substance and form of a weltanschaung. The consciousness then becomes the subjective manifestation of the commodity. This alienates man from the natural universe and his own original nature of immediate spiritual and physical activity. From this alienation emanates the conundrum of human condition wherein instead of being the proprietor of his own labour man is possessed by it; from it also stems man's divided socio-economic self wherein the man himself and his labour are two discrete and independent entities, undetermined and detached from each other.
The capitalist society thrives on the economic mystification of the commodity. "A commodity is a mysterious thing" because it takes on a life of its own; social relations get substituted by commodity relations; because the labour of man whose quality is blood, sweat, and tears is equalized by the commodific value of the product he creates; because commodities determine the socio-economic value of a man's time and work; because a commodity is an object of utility whose power extends beyond its utility for man, which, on the contrary, determines the utility of the man and his activity.
A commodity has two aspects: perceptible and imperceptible. The perceptible aspect lends to the commodity its spectacular quality imbued with deceitfulness But more pernicious still is its imperceptible aspect which evades all point-blank intelligibility and works its societal and psychological effects from over and under the radar of window displays. Its activity is subterranean in the figurative sense of subconscious forces which shape the impulse of the human conscious and the sovereign directive will of society. "It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things." That mysterious quality of the commodity dwells in the relational character it comes to acquire in an exchange economy where man's activity is rendered a passive objective value and objects shed their passivity to acquire the selfsame economic agency of which man has been denuded. However, there is nothing fantastic about the palpably hard impact of commodity relations on human lives. The impact is hard partly through the fantastic form of these relations which appear so unaccountable and mysterious - a game of chess where human beings are pawns moved by the ineluctable force and logic of capital.
Man's labour is freed from his agency, realizes its sovereignty in the form of the commodity, and then begins to hold man in its sovereign thralldom. Man becomes bonded to his own labour whose product is only ontologically liberated from man's labouring self, but to which man is still tied by the umbilical cord of his economic need; tied up by questions of economic, social and spiritual survival. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an extreme, but on multiple attributes, a competent metaphor cut out for commodity, especially from the all significant perspective of possessing agency and the potentiality to delimit its creator's freedom. Has man created a monster in the economic evolution of commodity?
How can man exist in relation to his own labour (and its concomitant product) in an unestranged mode? Heidegger's elucidation of the origin of the work of art is a revelation of such a relationship between the creator and his product. "The work, according to common understanding, springs out from and through the activity of the artist. But through what and from what is the artist what he is? Through the work; the saying that the work commends the master, says: The work first lets artist emerge as a master of art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other." This is remarkably similar to Pope John Paul the IInd's pronouncement upon work (albeit in theological and humanistic terms) in his Laborem Exercens: "As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity." Which in turn is remarkably similar to Hegel's theorization of the subject as one who realizes his content by "translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality." Work is a way for man to realize himself. He constitutes himself as subject through self-activity. But the capitalistic society has witnessed an ontological reversal wherein man exists for work and not work for man.
In this new economy of exchange objects exceed their purposed boundaries. The self-activity of man transcends his self and becomes imbued with its own motivational spring and goes beyond him in the guise of an independent entity called commodity or the product of his labour. Just as the economy of commodification has alienated human beings from their true selves, objects too have acquired proclivities and powers alien to the one originally envisaged for them in an instinctive socio-economic order of things. In this economy of objects, it is human beings rather which fall to a mediating position between the objects and their environment; the two primary elements of the dialectical exchange are still the object and the environment (through the via media of persons). It is a political economy of objects and, hence, an economy of signs or a semiotic economy where use-value is a pretext, but not the reason, for the object to exist. The ontology of commodities 'exists' at two levels - the first and more obvious dimension is that of the luminous simulacrum, the salient ocular object (its raw evidentiary aspect); the second is the semiological level at which the socio-economic discourses surrounding the object are generated. The second dimension has a further twofold character: a primary or ostensible one and a secondary or real one. Depending on one's epistemology, the reality and the ostensibility of the semiotics at this level are two mutually exchangeable criteria, or rather, open to determination and allocation. The two parallel semiotics at work here pertain to the raw commerce of exchange economy circumscribing the object at the primary level and the economy of symbolic exchange of multiplex significations invested in the object at the secondary level. The production of goods in the consumerist society is not dictated by necessity; it is rather governed by laws inherent in the nature of commodity itself, thus, creating a phantom world of objects whose ineluctable force is nevertheless felt very palpably by individuals and societies. Man does not eventually remain unscathed from the influence of the commodification of the non-human world which comes home to roost by fetishizing human consciousness. The first step towards this reification of human subjectivity inheres in the commodification of man's activity, which, like a phantom Frankenstein is gifted by the market economy with the energy of disengaged (from the actor) economic motility. Man and his activity each stand over against the other, independent but reciprocal. They belong to each other in a relationship of reciprocity where the one trades in the worth of the other. The power of agency belongs equally to both, and given a situation of economic equivalence, the commodity can fetch the time and value of man's activity just as adequately as man can barter his labour for the commodity.
The political economy of capitalism is that of a materialist self-aggrandizement or a semiotics of prestation. Materialist self-aggrandizement is the unconstrained expansion of the capital as a manifestation of the grandiose expression of the self. This same self-grandiosity is mirrored at the micro level in the prestation or prestige-significations inhering in the commodities one chooses to consume; a choice reflective of the hierarchical function of the commodity and the consumer's comparative position in his society. It is in fact a necessary component of the logic of capitalism that commodities be invested with prestige significations that inscribe within the object the signature of the pre-existing capitalist social order; that commodities engraved with a mini-architectural impression of the social hierarchy be produced, reproduced, exchanged and consumed. It is a necessary part of the perpetuation and amplification of the status quo - an inertia intrinsic to the essential reproductive trait of all social states including the capitalist one. Prestration is an unpercieved dimension of marxist sociology unveiled by Baudrillard's semiological researches. Chanel, Baduet, and limited editions are some of the densest metaphors of prestration in contemporary society. This semiotic economics is a fundamental driver of the capitalist enterprise by whose agency objects perpetuate and multiply themselves through a process of infinite differentiation. The rallying cry of the prestrationist philosophy would be a negation of Shakespeare's fabled epigram, "That which we call rose would smell just as sweet by any other name." As the current expression has it, it's all in the name; it is either a Gucci or a Prada, or nothing. In fact, the latest advertisement of Jockey doing the rounds on Television communicates precisely this message of either this brand or none at all.
The primary driver of capitalism is the self-differentiating activity of the object. Social discourse transpires on a discriminatory basis analogous to language in Saussurean linguistics. Much the same as the functional value of commodities is a matter of economic necessity, their semiotic import is the collective product of the hierarchical interactions within the social order. Commodities acquire their significations in a relational chain of conception. Capitalism is an endlessly proliferating system like language in which the particular commodity gathers all of its significance from being situated in a comparative context populated with other commodities; the fetishistic worth of the object resides in its differential value with respect to the other objects surrounding it in the economy, rather than in some inner substance or intrinsic property of the object itself. It is what it is not which defines the object - its ontological difference from all the other objects in the totality. The basic function of the commodity is to differ. Operational here is the notion of differance with its Derridean furnishings of distinction, inequality and discernibility. The visibility/evidentiality/conspicuity of objects in an unequal economy of individuals is a critical marker of the consumerist discourse. The irony of the capitalist society is that it thrives on a discourse of nonidentity to perpetuate an order of the same. The statism of the order is secured by the entrenched base/root that holds erect the differentially fructifying socio-economic-politico-cultural superstructure.
It is an order of things that perdures by necessitating the unnecessary. "With its a, differance more properly refers to what in classical language would be called the origin or production of differences and the differences between differences, the play (jeu) of differences." In macroeconomic terms, the Marxist base would be that origin productive of differences in the economy of objects which go on self-differentiating ad-infinitum (in a language of historical semantics), generating differences between difference, to produce ever more homoousiae of the commodity; differences which return to constitute the subject in its self-differentiality, grafting an alien nature upon consciousness through the implanting of abstract differences imported from the commodity.
There can be no prescriptive closure to the order of things but their limits can be reset from the extremes of desire to the golden mean of necessity. Capitalism, however, is the discourse on the boundless production of productions themselves, culminating in the form of the fetish being abstracted from commodity and incorporated into consciousness. It is this abstract form of the commodity in consciousness that allows for the conception of commodity as a universal category enabling the "equal exchange of qualitatively different objects." The exchange, however, we know, is far from equal and commodification is an endeavour in equalization that is predominantly reinforced by the abstract violence of economic coercion. In such a context, human labour takes on a formal quality of equivalence that serves as the ratiocinative principle for the systematization of commodity values. This formal quality is a function of the reification of human subjectivity and the consequent isolation and atomisation of labour which masquerades itself in the name of emancipation or free labour. This labour is free in the reverse sense of a gift to the capitalist. The economics of labour is the epitome of precision as as its value is calculated to the nicety of decimal points of currency and moments. This level of abstraction of labour where its comparatizations and equalizations are a matter of inexorable and utmost accuracy reflects an advanced stage in capitalist production whose originary premise and quintessential product are both human labour in its objective existence.
No comments:
Post a Comment