Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Marx. Show all posts

Saturday, April 25, 2015

How nice it is to go struggling and grasping for things

Giotto: Expulsion of the Money-Changers
In an article contributed to Art Futures (2010) Bernard Stiegler summarizes Marx's view of labour ... "With general proletarianisation, human knowledge is short-circuited as a result of its technological reproduction and implementation," and then sets out how consumerism takes the disenfranchisement to another level: "In the consumerist model it is not only the know-how (savoir-faire) of workers that becomes obsolete, but also the knowledge of how to live (savoir-vivre) of citizens, who thus become as such mere consumers a good consumer is both utterly passive and irresponsible."

"Consumerism tries to bind consumers and make them submit by producing dependence, that is, addiction". But we have been in this bind a long time. In his 1909 book Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser observes: "Man hat es hier allgemein eilig, weil man jeden Augenblick der Meinung ist, es sei hübsch, etwas erkämpfen und erhaschen zu gehen. " ...  "There is such a general hurry here because people think every moment how nice it is to go struggling and grasping for things."