When Karl Marx said something like, 'people are ultimately tied to their economical desires'. I absolutely believe this to be true today. It amazes me how he could foresee the future. We always associate ourselves with commodities to create our "identity". Your average American teenage girl wants to show her "fashion sense" by wearing a tanktop and a pair of tight pants that she bought for 100+ dollars. She makes her eyes more "beautiful" by wearing some kind of eyeliner or whatever. She is holding her Rogers cellphone, listening to her new ipod video, carrying her huge bag that can hold hockey equipment. You get the point.
I think it's really crucial to realize how much of our identities are defined by the stuffwe buy. "This is who I am. I live on 123 street, drive the souped-up subaru, I wear a lot of jeans and skater shoes...". I even heard someone say, "I'm a nice guy because I buy my friends food". 90% of the time, we really didn't need to eat that burger, bag of chips, chocolate, etc.
Too many times, I see people between the ages of 13 to 20, or even older, try to establish their image in public with their clothes. If you need proof, go to the mall, or go on the public bus. Wait. you dont' need to, because you know in the back of your mind that what I am saying is true.
The most disturbing thing about this for me, is how normal this is. This is "how the world works". It's natural. It' supposed to be like this. But then I took a step back and asked, "who's doing the supposing? Who said it was natural?"
Advertisers. Media. Celebrities. They are the core elites of our Western society today. I now understand what Chomsky meant when he said that North America is, in fact, facist in terms of economic and social relations. There are "high-ranked" people who decide what people should like and want. As a side note, I think this is why the United States are so powerful. When historians claimed that Rome was much more powerful during their time than the United States today, they failed to see what kind of power was influential. Rome was its ability to politically influence a huge amount of countries and nations. The fact is, however, that politics only go so far. Opinions will change, the positions will change, and sooner or later, there will be some kind of mistake that ruins the power. As we all know, the Roman empire exists no more.
In contrast, the United States hold a powerful position such that people cannot change its influence. The fact is, every human being that knows the "American dream" really wants at least some of it. Despite one's religious views, moral beliefs, or political side, we want to buy things. America took great advantage of this, and by spreading capitalism, it told what we wanted to hear: "buy, and be happy". Why not? It sounds good.
Moreover, this kind of influence has spread to the East. Almost all of Europe has some type of capitalism established. They have their own celebrities and the media in which they are represented. Daniel Radcliffe, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley. Asia has much of this influence as well. In China, Jay Chou. In Korea, DBSK. They are usually shown wearing expensive clothes and accesories, in expensive events such as award shows. And we want to look as good as they do. We want to be beautiful, attractive, content, etc. No matter what we say to deny that we don't get influenced by television or the internet, the fact is, this type of influence is subconscious in such a way that we are not aware of our assumptions and our realities become based on the things we see and hear on the media.
Sure, there are variations of this influence. Some girls like to starve themselves to look beautiful and to fit in a certain sized pants or dress. Is there something wrong with that? You're buying less food and clothes, right? But then you're obviously overlooking the fact that you're killing yourself.
Let's move on to a story as an example of what I'm trying to say.
Ben is a 15 year old student. He is underweight for his age, has rumpled hair, large glasses, $15 shoes and usually wears a shirt he got from a charity event. He liked this girl, but according to other kids, she was way too popular for him. People made fun of him. In Gym class, he could never kick the soccer ball far enough or hard enough to score a goal. Other guys bullied him in the change room, laughing at his inability to be phsyically active.
In English class, however, he was an excellent student. He would answer all the teacher's questions about Animal Farm correctly. Some of his classmates, who tried to hide thier one ipod earphone in their ear with their hoods, wearing $200 shoes, armani shirts and American Eagle jeans, snickered and whispered words such as "nerd", or "loser". Ben didnt' understand. All he wanted to do was get a good grade, not be labelled as some kind of a geek. He really was interested in literature, and wanted to be an author some day. Why was he ridiculed for trying to do something he was happy with?
Typical high school story, right? My point is that some people are condemned in society because they don't act the way people are supposed to act. In high school, you can't be accepted as a normal human being if you don't spend enough money on clothes and accesories. If your interests are not the same with the rest of society;s interests, then you are unimportant. Undermined. Ridiculed. My story was a parallel to society today. You will be laughed at if you're not the way people expect you to be. You can be yourself, as long as you follow certain guidelines. Buy this, buy that, then you'll be accepted. Normal. Happy. It's an interesting dichotomy of normality and abnormality. The only ones who are excused from this are those with mental disabilities, religious fundamentalists, or people in third world countries.
Showing posts with label commodity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commodity. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Some quotes from journal articles and my explanations of them.
This is about how the author thinks porn is an extension of fundamental Christianity. It's pretty persuasive.
Porn is merely an extension of traditional Chrsitianity, in which the male is given the dominant role; there is a "sex-role discrimination that relegates men and women to specific roles on the basis of their supposed divinely assigned natures...continues to tell Christian women that God designed them for subservient roles...It is not far-fetched to say that pornography is an intensification of the gender differences in traditional Christianity. 'Good Christian businessmen' who spend their lunch hours in 'adult' bookstores live not in two worlds but in one, single universe in which men dominate women. Pornography, therefore, does not grow at the expense of traditional Christianity but as a further distortion of the already distorted social rolse embodied in its own religious vision." (Weaver, 1998, p. 238).
So basically, porn is a parallel of traditional Christianity. There is a flaw in this argument, for it fails to review the Bible as a whole; the latter chapters in the book emphasize equality among men and women. In fact, the idea of women as being subordinate has been identified as a cultural convention that the Jews have created socially.
This is about how advertising has constructed socially conventional beliefs of women.
Representations of women in "advertising's construction of women...postions them as finding ultimate pleasure, and indeed power, in catering to men's desires...They have also [been] identified by reducing them to bodies and body parts such as lips, legs, breasts, hair and finger nails. Women are encouraged to believe that the adornment of these body parts will make them more sexually attractive" (Carter et al, 2003, p.122).
This quote is very easy to understand. In short, women are turned from subjects to objects - mostly associated with sexual pleasure - in which both men and women indulge.
This is about how representations of minorities in the media should look like.
"The objective is not just to increase numbers. The focus is on harnessing power so that minority women and men can determine what is shown and how. For in the final analysis, inclusiveness goes beyond removing barriers or improving representation. It is about power-sharing and structural changes to ensure full, equal, and valued participation." (Fleras, 2003, p.304).
To put simply, the ones controlling the distribution of the media (such as television stations, magazines, newspapers, internet information), should be structured such that minorities are allowed to represent themselves. There is no point for a rich White man to display his perspective of what minorities experience, when most likely such point of view may be distorted, misunderstood, and/or biased. Thus, it is about sharing power within media organizations equally such that representations are unbiased and democratically acceptable.
This is about our understandings of "normality" and "intelligence" is blinded by social conventions, when in reality, such terms equate with uniformity.
"...we behave in uniform and continous patterns, [and] [the] literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visul and typographic technology as victims of injustice. On the other hand, in a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people - the warf, the skew, the child create their own spaces. They are not expected to fit into some uniform and repeatable niche that is not their size anyway. Consider the phrase 'It's a man's world.' As a quantitative observation endlessly repeated from within a homogenized culture, this phrase refers to the men in such a culture who have to be homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all. It is in our I.Q. testing that we have produced the greates flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man." (Mcluhan, 1964, p.17).
Mcluhan, arguably the greates commuincations theorists of all time, has pointed out a very crucial issue that is nearly invisible in the North American society. As much as we seek individualism, we construct our singular identities by conforming to certain groups and values. For a very simplistic example, we treat people who don't own ipods or mp3s as "losers". It may be a joke, but in the long run, it continues to become a societal norm to make fun of those who have not bought such commodities. To add to his point, a social group will not allow another to join the group unless he/she has conformed to their beliefs and values. Only then, will they accept the differences, as long as the differences do not intervene with the conformities in which they have indulged.
This is about Karl Marx's famous statements about "commodity fetishism".
There are two forms of value in a commodity. The use-value and exchange value. For instance, athe transformation of a piece of wood into a chair through human labour is the chair's use-value. The exchange-value is the value in the marketplace. "That is, the connection to the actual hands and experiences of the labourer is removed as soon as the...[chair] is connected to money...In a capitalist society people therefore begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labour expended to produce the object. 'The mysterious character of commodity-form consists thefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characterstics of men's own labour as objective charactersitics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things', as Marx explains...A relation between people the labourer and the capitalist) instead assumes 'the fantastic form of a relation between things'...In this, the real producers of commodites mostly remain invisible...we forget the underlying factor which alters the value of the commodity, the actual labour of the producer." (Paterson, 2006, p.17).
*This is an extremely difficult concept to understand...a good example would be a pair of jeans...who made them? How much wage do the producers recieve? How much do the owners of the big companies receive? What is the condition of the work terms?*
This is a paraphrase of Noam Chomsky regarding Capitalism and Democracy.
"Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -there's little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy" (Chomsky, n.d., n.p.)
Basically, he is saying that capitalism and democracy cannot co-exist, because their fundamental principles are in disagreements such that they can be labelled as near-opposties of each other.
These are some concepts I've been constantly thinking about. I want to emphasize the Mcluhan quote about intelligence and conformity. This happens everywhere: In a group of friends, at school, work, church, even at home. People have a tendency to follow what other people are doing, and those who are smart enough to realize this hypocritical state of mind are labelled as dumb, pathetic, useless, and are even condemned. As one philosipher said, "genious is the art of non-habitual thought".
Until next time.
Porn is merely an extension of traditional Chrsitianity, in which the male is given the dominant role; there is a "sex-role discrimination that relegates men and women to specific roles on the basis of their supposed divinely assigned natures...continues to tell Christian women that God designed them for subservient roles...It is not far-fetched to say that pornography is an intensification of the gender differences in traditional Christianity. 'Good Christian businessmen' who spend their lunch hours in 'adult' bookstores live not in two worlds but in one, single universe in which men dominate women. Pornography, therefore, does not grow at the expense of traditional Christianity but as a further distortion of the already distorted social rolse embodied in its own religious vision." (Weaver, 1998, p. 238).
So basically, porn is a parallel of traditional Christianity. There is a flaw in this argument, for it fails to review the Bible as a whole; the latter chapters in the book emphasize equality among men and women. In fact, the idea of women as being subordinate has been identified as a cultural convention that the Jews have created socially.
This is about how advertising has constructed socially conventional beliefs of women.
Representations of women in "advertising's construction of women...postions them as finding ultimate pleasure, and indeed power, in catering to men's desires...They have also [been] identified by reducing them to bodies and body parts such as lips, legs, breasts, hair and finger nails. Women are encouraged to believe that the adornment of these body parts will make them more sexually attractive" (Carter et al, 2003, p.122).
This quote is very easy to understand. In short, women are turned from subjects to objects - mostly associated with sexual pleasure - in which both men and women indulge.
This is about how representations of minorities in the media should look like.
"The objective is not just to increase numbers. The focus is on harnessing power so that minority women and men can determine what is shown and how. For in the final analysis, inclusiveness goes beyond removing barriers or improving representation. It is about power-sharing and structural changes to ensure full, equal, and valued participation." (Fleras, 2003, p.304).
To put simply, the ones controlling the distribution of the media (such as television stations, magazines, newspapers, internet information), should be structured such that minorities are allowed to represent themselves. There is no point for a rich White man to display his perspective of what minorities experience, when most likely such point of view may be distorted, misunderstood, and/or biased. Thus, it is about sharing power within media organizations equally such that representations are unbiased and democratically acceptable.
This is about our understandings of "normality" and "intelligence" is blinded by social conventions, when in reality, such terms equate with uniformity.
"...we behave in uniform and continous patterns, [and] [the] literate man is quite inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. Especially the child, the cripple, the woman, and the colored person appear in a world of visul and typographic technology as victims of injustice. On the other hand, in a culture that assigns roles instead of jobs to people - the warf, the skew, the child create their own spaces. They are not expected to fit into some uniform and repeatable niche that is not their size anyway. Consider the phrase 'It's a man's world.' As a quantitative observation endlessly repeated from within a homogenized culture, this phrase refers to the men in such a culture who have to be homogenized Dagwoods in order to belong at all. It is in our I.Q. testing that we have produced the greates flood of misbegotten standards. Unaware of our typographic cultural bias, our testers assume that uniform and continous habits are a sign of intelligence, thus eliminating the ear man and the tactile man." (Mcluhan, 1964, p.17).
Mcluhan, arguably the greates commuincations theorists of all time, has pointed out a very crucial issue that is nearly invisible in the North American society. As much as we seek individualism, we construct our singular identities by conforming to certain groups and values. For a very simplistic example, we treat people who don't own ipods or mp3s as "losers". It may be a joke, but in the long run, it continues to become a societal norm to make fun of those who have not bought such commodities. To add to his point, a social group will not allow another to join the group unless he/she has conformed to their beliefs and values. Only then, will they accept the differences, as long as the differences do not intervene with the conformities in which they have indulged.
This is about Karl Marx's famous statements about "commodity fetishism".
There are two forms of value in a commodity. The use-value and exchange value. For instance, athe transformation of a piece of wood into a chair through human labour is the chair's use-value. The exchange-value is the value in the marketplace. "That is, the connection to the actual hands and experiences of the labourer is removed as soon as the...[chair] is connected to money...In a capitalist society people therefore begin to treat commodities as if value inhered in the objects themselves, rather than in the amount of real labour expended to produce the object. 'The mysterious character of commodity-form consists thefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characterstics of men's own labour as objective charactersitics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things', as Marx explains...A relation between people the labourer and the capitalist) instead assumes 'the fantastic form of a relation between things'...In this, the real producers of commodites mostly remain invisible...we forget the underlying factor which alters the value of the commodity, the actual labour of the producer." (Paterson, 2006, p.17).
*This is an extremely difficult concept to understand...a good example would be a pair of jeans...who made them? How much wage do the producers recieve? How much do the owners of the big companies receive? What is the condition of the work terms?*
This is a paraphrase of Noam Chomsky regarding Capitalism and Democracy.
"Personally, I'm in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions of society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism, we can't have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level -there's little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until the major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy" (Chomsky, n.d., n.p.)
Basically, he is saying that capitalism and democracy cannot co-exist, because their fundamental principles are in disagreements such that they can be labelled as near-opposties of each other.
These are some concepts I've been constantly thinking about. I want to emphasize the Mcluhan quote about intelligence and conformity. This happens everywhere: In a group of friends, at school, work, church, even at home. People have a tendency to follow what other people are doing, and those who are smart enough to realize this hypocritical state of mind are labelled as dumb, pathetic, useless, and are even condemned. As one philosipher said, "genious is the art of non-habitual thought".
Until next time.
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