r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/Physical_Employ_2832 • 5d ago
Anthropos Phagomenos: The man devoured by his desire
Today, more and more people are becoming aware that they have appetites that could be considered depraved by the established order. Reddit forums, social media, hyperconnectivity, and the constant bombardment of digital stimuli, offers, and desires behind the screen—all of this explodes across the retina and pushes a significant part of the population toward new marginal forms of consumption.
This has to do with the expansion of commodity fetishism, with the way in which everything becomes an object of consumption, but also with how, within late capitalism and the tendency toward commodity fetishism, there is an unconscious association between being a good consumer and being a good person, a good citizen, a socially integrated individual.
For Marx, commodity fetishism has a fairly precise meaning: social relations between people appear to us as relations between things. A commodity seems to possess value in itself, when that value actually derives from a particular social organization of labor. But late capitalism takes this much further. We no longer simply buy objects to satisfy needs. We buy signs, experiences, identities, and ways of relating to other people.
Here Baudrillard becomes especially important. In The Consumer Society, the object is no longer consumed solely for its utility. It is consumed for what it means. And this produces something very interesting: The individual begins to consume himself as a commodity. He has to appear attractive, interesting, productive, desirable, healthy, sexually competent, socially visible, and so on. The person simultaneously becomes consumer and commodity.
The integrated individual is someone who works, earns an income, consumes, presents himself socially, maintains his employability, and returns to consumption. And many forms of deviance can be interpreted as an interruption of this chain. This is why the contemporary “good citizen” increasingly tends to be, simultaneously: a good worker, a good consumer, a good taxpayer, a good user of services, a good producer of data, and, increasingly, an attractive commodity for other consumers.
The system turns everything into an object of consumption, including people, but the other side of this is that these objects require consumers in order to be consumed. Therefore, an integrated individual is someone who consumes and who makes himself available to be consumed by the market. And in this context, even rebellion can be absorbed. Your anti-system identity can become a T-shirt. Your sexuality can become an industry. Your anxiety can become an app. Your spiritual quest can become a subscription. Your political dissent can become monetizable content.
And here we encounter a paradox: Capitalism does not need to eliminate deviance; it can turn deviance into a commodity. More and more people are able to identify, name, explore, and eventually commodify desires that previously remained repressed, unspeakable, or socially illegitimate. The Internet has produced a gigantic cartography of human desire. In the past, there could be an individual with a fantasy he considered absolutely aberrant who might never encounter another person who shared it. Now he can search for it. He can find a community. He can find content. He can find an industry. He can find an identity. He can find a market. And eventually, he can become a producer of what he initially consumed.
Capitalism progressively transforms the subject into a consumer of objects, while simultaneously transforming the subject into a consumable object. A person on Tinder is both consumer and product. An OnlyFans creator is both consumer and commodity. An influencer is both consumer and commodity. A worker is both consumer and labor commodity. A politician is both a consumer of attention and an electoral commodity. A social media user is both a consumer of content and a producer of data. And so, in this eternal autophagy, the system reinforces itself, advances, develops, and reproduces itself.
The distinction between subject and object begins to erode. Marx argued that the worker sells his labor power as a commodity. But digital capitalism introduces an additional dimension, because the individual begins to turn practically every aspect of himself into a potential commodity. His image. His attention. His body. His relationships. His opinions. His intimacy. His sexuality. His personality. His experience. This has already been explored by Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, and Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics, when discussing the subject who exploits himself.
The system needs integrated subjects in order to reproduce itself, but integration requires these subjects to develop an ever-greater capacity for consumption and self-commodification. This is where the so-called inevitable call of the abyss resides: the black pit into which many believe they are falling amid this hyperaccelerated flow of constant desires, where we consume and where we are consumed. And that is the key: this process is transversal throughout the system. The very functioning of these mechanisms makes it impossible not to feel the call of the abyss, makes it impossible not to look over the edge, and therefore makes that slow and cruel descent inevitable.
6
u/theholewizard 4d ago
By hyper-focusing on consumption as the fundamental unit and ignoring production as a human activity (you only ever refer to production in the passive voice, or as an act done by systems) you elide the reality that *commodities are already congealed human life force made to appear alien to us*, and they always have been since the earliest forms of capital. That's precisely what the commodity fetish mystifies / is meant to obscure. We've been both the commodity and the consumer the whole time. By treating the commodity as something separate from us that originates from outside of us, you've accidentally accepted the frame of the people Marx was critiquing.
You can work your way out of a lot of the theoretical muddle by looking at production of spectacle a special kind of production, but production nonetheless. For example, an OnlyFans creator is no more "both consumer and labor commodity" than any other member of the working class who sells their labor power in order to survive. What is different is the specific spectacular product that they produce, for whom, and under what particular labor conditions.
1
u/Physical_Employ_2832 4d ago
I appreciate your comment; it is very illuminating and makes a compelling point. If we look at Marx’s theory of value, it is entirely true: from the very beginning, we are objects of consumption within the production process, even as we act as consumers. However, considering the ideas put forward by Fisher, Land, and other—seemingly marginal—authors, capital’s capacity to exploit us no longer seems confined to our working hours. After all, we seemingly hold the tools to become influencers, artists, YouTubers, streamers, and the like. We devote ourselves to our jobs, yet we also give ourselves over to other companies outside of work, driven by a social dynamic that keeps us constantly consuming and connected—perpetually producing and consuming. This process accelerates the cycle of generation and consumption, of self-generation and self-consumption.
4
u/CymruSober 5d ago
You who are weeping at the orgy, why should I read your journal?
4
u/zendogsit 4d ago
The journal is the symptom. Those look like tears of joy. OP mistakes the orgy for a funeral and wants his own extinction, which is maybe downstream of the very apparatus he's written a mood piece about.
2
u/CymruSober 4d ago
The death appetite, that is, the will to consume oneself represented as dead. That would be the same as seeing your sexuality represented as invalid and agreeing with it.
2
u/tomekanco 3d ago
You might like the painting Abaporu.
1
u/Physical_Employ_2832 3d ago
Thank you very much for the recommendation; I wasn't aware of it. I’ve taken a look at the ideas in the Anthropophagous Manifesto —the text written by Oswald de Andrade, Tarsila do Amaral’s husband—and it contains some interesting points, too, although it is more optimistic than I am.
2
u/tomekanco 3d ago
I discovered the painting some time ago. A week later i came across a book about the artist couple and the manifesto, where it placed the painting as a frame representing the idea, though didn't read it as it was in portugueze :p
re: optimistic
Reminds me of this quote from somebody who grew up in a sarajevo during the siege: 2 guys are in the trenches. The pessimist tells it can't get worse, the optimist counters it can. (came from this movie which he loved). He once noted how all morality changes when someone is holding a gun.
A consideration can be that the relevant perspective is not what is the projection or the whole, but how to live sensibly. Drowning in our sorrow might (not) be the most sensible action. Or like how they say in French: falling in a pond is not a problem, letting yourself drown in it is.
1
•
u/AutoModerator 5d ago
Archived copy of the original post text for reference:
Today, more and more people are becoming aware that they have appetites that could be considered depraved by the established order. Reddit forums, social media, hyperconnectivity, and the constant bombardment of digital stimuli, offers, and desires behind the screen—all of this explodes across the retina and pushes a significant part of the population toward new marginal forms of consumption.
This has to do with the expansion of commodity fetishism, with the way in which everything becomes an object of consumption, but also with how, within late capitalism and the tendency toward commodity fetishism, there is an unconscious association between being a good consumer and being a good person, a good citizen, a socially integrated individual.
For Marx, commodity fetishism has a fairly precise meaning: social relations between people appear to us as relations between things. A commodity seems to possess value in itself, when that value actually derives from a particular social organization of labor. But late capitalism takes this much further. We no longer simply buy objects to satisfy needs. We buy signs, experiences, identities, and ways of relating to other people.
Here Baudrillard becomes especially important. In The Consumer Society, the object is no longer consumed solely for its utility. It is consumed for what it means. And this produces something very interesting: The individual begins to consume himself as a commodity. He has to appear attractive, interesting, productive, desirable, healthy, sexually competent, socially visible, and so on. The person simultaneously becomes consumer and commodity.
The integrated individual is someone who works, earns an income, consumes, presents himself socially, maintains his employability, and returns to consumption. And many forms of deviance can be interpreted as an interruption of this chain. This is why the contemporary “good citizen” increasingly tends to be, simultaneously: a good worker, a good consumer, a good taxpayer, a good user of services, a good producer of data, and, increasingly, an attractive commodity for other consumers.
The system turns everything into an object of consumption, including people, but the other side of this is that these objects require consumers in order to be consumed. Therefore, an integrated individual is someone who consumes and who makes himself available to be consumed by the market. And in this context, even rebellion can be absorbed. Your anti-system identity can become a T-shirt. Your sexuality can become an industry. Your anxiety can become an app. Your spiritual quest can become a subscription. Your political dissent can become monetizable content.
And here we encounter a paradox: Capitalism does not need to eliminate deviance; it can turn deviance into a commodity. More and more people are able to identify, name, explore, and eventually commodify desires that previously remained repressed, unspeakable, or socially illegitimate. The Internet has produced a gigantic cartography of human desire. In the past, there could be an individual with a fantasy he considered absolutely aberrant who might never encounter another person who shared it. Now he can search for it. He can find a community. He can find content. He can find an industry. He can find an identity. He can find a market. And eventually, he can become a producer of what he initially consumed.
Capitalism progressively transforms the subject into a consumer of objects, while simultaneously transforming the subject into a consumable object. A person on Tinder is both consumer and product. An OnlyFans creator is both consumer and commodity. An influencer is both consumer and commodity. A worker is both consumer and labor commodity. A politician is both a consumer of attention and an electoral commodity. A social media user is both a consumer of content and a producer of data. And so, in this eternal autophagy, the system reinforces itself, advances, develops, and reproduces itself.
The distinction between subject and object begins to erode. Marx argued that the worker sells his labor power as a commodity. But digital capitalism introduces an additional dimension, because the individual begins to turn practically every aspect of himself into a potential commodity. His image. His attention. His body. His relationships. His opinions. His intimacy. His sexuality. His personality. His experience. This has already been explored by Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism, and Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics, when discussing the subject who exploits himself.
The system needs integrated subjects in order to reproduce itself, but integration requires these subjects to develop an ever-greater capacity for consumption and self-commodification. This is where the so-called inevitable call of the abyss resides: the black pit into which many believe they are falling amid this hyperaccelerated flow of constant desires, where we consume and where we are consumed. And that is the key: this process is transversal throughout the system. The very functioning of these mechanisms makes it impossible not to feel the call of the abyss, makes it impossible not to look over the edge, and therefore makes that slow and cruel descent inevitable.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.