#commodity society

“The crisis of a commodity or the commodity of a crisis?”

It is for objects such as this that I created this tumblr.

"Let’s be clear: the concept of the YoungGirl is obviously not a gendered concept. The nightclub-going jock conforms to it just as much as the second-generation North African girl painted up to look porn-star old. The spirited telecom retiree that splits his leisure time between the Cote d’Azur and the Parisian offices where he’s kept a footin the door, and the metropolitan single too caught up in her career in consulting to realize that she’s already lost fifteen years of her life to it—both obey the concept. After all, how would it be so easy to see the secret connection linking the plugged-in, puffed-up, civil-unioned humanity from the hip neighborhood and the petty-bourgeois americanized girl in the suburbs with her plastic family, if it were a gendered concept?

In reality, the YoungGirl is only the model citizen such as commodity society has defined it since World War One, as an explicit response to revolutionary threats against it. As such, she is a polar figure, guiding becoming more than predominating in it.

At the beginning of the ’20s, in effect, capitalism noticed that it couldn’t maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor without also colonizing everything found beyond strictly the sphere of production.

Faced with the socialists’ challenge to its dominance, it too needed to socialize itself. It thus had to create its own culture, leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education, and morals, and also create a disposition towards their perpetual renewal. This would become the Fordist compromise, the welfare state, family planning: social-democracy capitalism. And now, submission by work, limited because the worker is still separate from his or her work, has been replaced by integration through subjective and existential conformity, meaning, at root, by consumption.

From being merely formal, Capital’s domination has become little by little real. The commodity society now seeks to find its best supports in the marginalized elements of traditional society themselves—women and youths first, then homosexuals and immigrants.