CMNS 223 Introduction

1. CMNS 223 Introduction • Analysis of the nature and role of advertising in the historical and cultural period of Modernity

2. Culture • Value system • The ‘water we swim in’ • Ideology -- Mythology – Dream World • “Religion is the opiate of the masses” – Karl Marx • Thesis: Authentic living culture and historical consciousness have been distorted, manipulated, high-jacked, obscured by a specific social-economic formation – modern industrial capitalism.

3. Guiding metaphors • Mask, camouflage, illusion, Plato’s cave, phantasmagoria, the Paris Arcades, the mall world, the labrynth

4. ... • “Bourgeois ideology continuously transforms the products of history into essential types. Just as the cuttlefish squirts its ink in order to protect itself, it cannot rest until it has obscured the ceaseless making of the world, fixated this world into an object which can be forever possessed, catalogued its riches and embalmed it ...” (Roland Barthes)‏

5. Week 2 Key Concepts • Capitalism – 500 or 5000 years old? • Commodity fetishism • Use value, exchange value • Materialism, the “thingness of things” • Human nature, second nature • Models of the psyche

7. ... • “We as human beings are out of balance. We are constantly approached and evoked in our ‘eros’. The human being is seen as a constantly unsatisfied animal, driven by its needs. Our driving force is never ending shortage.” • “Within the value system of the ancient Greeks, the concept of ‘Thymos’ was much more important. ‘Thymos’ is our independent source of energy which is linked to our feeling of truth and to our feeling of justice.” (Sloterdijk)‏

8. Plato's Chariot Model of the Psyche • ...

9. Behavioural Psychology

11. Life After the Industrial Revolution • 1760-1850 in England • Before the Revolution, land was the primary source of wealth. The land-owning aristocracy held enormous powers in this “feudal system” • Industrialization brought major changes • People moved into cities to work in factories • The system of “mass production” came into being

12. Mass Consumption • Industrial mass production depended on a continuous cycle of production and consumption • Mass production needed a “mass” of consumers ready to buy the products and sustain the system (selling only to the rich would not work)‏

13. How is a consumer created? Create the conditions for consuming: shorter hours, increased wages Associate consumption and products with self improvement and “moving up” Advertise! Assign products qualities they don’t possess

14. Marx, Labour, the Commodity • Industrial society is not a natural state of affairs • Inequality for Marx arises from one group owning and controlling the means of production and another group selling its labour (working)

15. Workers and the Commodity Workers no longer own their own labour, instead they have to exchange it for pay Farmers and artisans and tradespeople had strong connections with the products of their labour Industrial Workers felt no connection to their products nor to their labour They are “alienated” from work and each other

16. How does a society make inequality acceptable? Relating to “the Commodity” A commodity is an object (specifically a product of labour) that has an exchange value and that, because of this exchange value, mediates or determines social relations What are some examples? Are commodities always “things”?

18. The Commodity Fetish Fetish: in Freudianpsychoanalysis it refers to an over-investment of meaning in an object (a shoe, a pet, a baby blanket) Commodity Fetishism invests and assignsmeanings to consumer goods that they do not possess (Diamonds = Love?, no Diamonds = old, shiny rocks)‏ It also obscures the social relations involved in creating the product (we think of abstract concepts such as high class beauty and not the real African diamond mine)

19. Meaning, beauty, class and identity could all be achieved through the commodity Mass production therefore changed people’s perceptions and attitudes about consumption “Conspicuous consumption” led people to buy things to show off their wealth or give the illusion of wealth Workers: Happy Consumers?

21. Following Adam Smith, Marx formally distinguishes a commodity’s ’use value’ (its natural capacity to satisfy certain human wants) and its ’exchange value’ (its social capacity to be exchangeable for other commodities in certain ratios).

22. The value of a commodity is totally separate from the physical or intrinsic qualities it possesses.

23. Use-value is an intrinsically rooted property of a product with regard to it’s physical qualities to satisfy determinate human needs. Exchange-value is an expression of a social relation: "The mystical character of commodities does not originate in their use-value, no matter if I look at it in its relation to gratify human needs by way of its qualities, or if these qualities are a result of human work."

24. What does the "mystical character", the "metaphysical subtleties", "the sensory supernatural character” and the "theological manners" of the commodity specifically consist in?...

25. ...remember, the term fetish or to fetishize, which originally derives from religious discourse, means to invest something with powers it does not intrinsically possess.

26. The commodity fetish is being realized, not created by the minds of the individual actors and thus needs to be sharply distinguished from allusions to hallucinations, false illusions and the like. The kind of fetishism Marx is describing can neither be understood as a mere individual misrepresentation nor as an abstract phenomenon of social consciousness. It has to be seen in light of the society as a whole.

27. Fetishism is not merely an ideological category. Ideology in Marx's understanding of it as "necessary false consciousness" is not confined to capitalist societies, but is closely linked to all societies that are divided into classes. The notion of commodity fetishism is a historically distinct phenomenon of capitalism -- it is inseparably linked to Capitalist modes of production.

28. [In capitalist societies] it is only the definite social relationships of men themselves, which in their eyes takes on the phantasmagorial form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world, the products of the human mind appear as independent beings endowed with life, as entering into independent relations both with o­ne another and the human race. The same way are in the world of commodities the products of men’s hands. This I call the fetishism which is attached to the products of labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which therefore is inseparable from the production of commodities.

29. “All mysticism of the world of commodities, all magic and spook, which lies at the basis of commodity production, disappears immediately if we move on to different forms of production.”

31. We have to distinguish between (a) those appearances which are false, in the sense that they are what we normally mean by the term "illusion", that they correspond to no objective reality and (b) those appearances, in which social relations present themselves and are not false as such, but correspond to an objective reality. Marx is concerned with the second sort of appearance. These appearances become mystified only by being regarded as being part of nature independent of social formations, or also as depending totally on the subjective intentions of men.

32. What is being hidden? The notion of “mysticism” can not be separated from an analysis of forms of domination. The worker, in contrast to the slave or serf, recognizes the division of income between the capitalist and himself falsely as expressing the value of what each sells at the market. It appears like he is selling only relatively cheap labor power, while the capitalist gets a much greater share or return for really producing the valuable commodities because he owns them. The resulting prices of commodities are regarded as expressing a non-social, objective relationship.

33. The worker also alienates herself from her own labor power. He regards it as something foreign, that one can be seen abstractly on a free market. He, as a human being, is alienated from his labor power and the products that he produced and therefore lives under conditions of regarding herself as ultimately exchangeable. This is the reality behind the veil of which commodity fetishism is a central part.

34. Marx presents a moral criticism of the state of illusion that is connected to the form of fetishism of the commodity that we have analyzed. It is bad (1) because it is a manipulation of people’s minds and it functions (2) in order to stabilize the structures that allow other people to enlarge profits. Even if these other people did not set the illusion in place deliberately they have a responsibility to do something against it. Or if they really purport not to know about it, they have a responsibility to find out about it. On the other hand the latter responsibility also, maybe even more so, applies to those who are deluded.

35. Marx's Concept of Human Nature Marx criticizes the traditional conception of "human nature" as "species" which incarnates itself in each individual, on behalf of a conception of human nature as formed by the totality of "social relations". Thus, the whole of human nature is not understood, as in classical idealist philosophy, as permanent and universal: the species-being is always determinated in a specific social and historical formation, while some aspects being of course biological.

36. Marx is arguing against an abstract conception of human nature, offering instead an account rooted in sensuous life. “As individuals express their life, so they are. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production” (6th Thesis on Feuerbach). History involves “a continuous transformation of human nature”, though this does not mean that every aspect of human nature is wholly variable; what is transformed need not be wholly transformed. Marx criticized the tendency to 'transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property', a process sometimes called "reification".

37. “Labour” by its very nature is unfree, unhuman, unsocial activity, determined by private property and creating private property.' Under capitalism, labour is something inhuman and dehumanising: “Labour is external to the worker – i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind”.

38. Some people believe, for example, that humans are naturally selfish - Kant and Hobbes, for example. Both Hobbes and Kant thought that it was necessary to constrain our human nature in order to achieve a good society - Kant thought we should use rationality, Hobbes thought we should use the force of the state. Marx: this is an ideological illusion and the effect of commodity fetishism. The fact that people act selfishly is a product of scarcity and capitalism, not an immutable human characteristic. Marx thought that the good society was one which allows our human nature its full expression.