/lit/ - Literature

>>10980123
i'm going to post the graham ward essay glass refers to - 'the commodification of religion or the consumption of capitalism' - on that page you linked to here. it's absolutely worth reading for anyone following this thread or interested in these topics and ideas.

http://iasc-culture.org/THR/archives/Commodification/5.2FWard.pdf

some excerpts:

>While this is not an essay on Castoriadis, his work reveals a tension inherent in critiques of reification. This tension focuses around an
understanding of what it is to be human. On the one hand, there is no place outside the immanent cultural logic of production. On the other,
in order for there to be real transformation of and critical engagement with this production, a point has to be insisted upon that does lie outside this immanence—namely (here) “genuine humanity.”

>The question of what is genuinely human is, in fact, the crux of the matter. In order to vouchsafe the possibility of resistance, the logic of capitalist
production cannot be allowed to be a logic that subsumes all things. But the very inability to give an account of what is genuinely human
raises the question of whether this logic does subsume all things, of whether the consummation of that logic is, in fact, the subsumption of
all possibility of there being an externality, a transcending means of resistance, a dialectical other. Marx himself writes: “The inherent tendency
of capitalist production does not become adequately realised…until the specific mode of capitalist production and hence the
real subsumption of labour has become a reality” (1037). Antonio Negri argues convincingly that this “real subsumption” that “reduces dialectical
possibilities to zero” now has occurred.

>What I am wondering, in effect, is what Castoriadis would have made of a film like The Matrix. For capitalism to be possible, human beings must be impossible to reduce to productive-economic abstractions. In
Marx’s terms, neither they nor the products of their labor can simply become bearers of exchange-value. This is, of course, precisely what
Morpheus makes Neo see in the film: that human beings do need saving from their advanced reification and the advanced commodification
that maintains all their illusions of free, autonomous individuals making significant choices about lifestyles. The truth is that human beings are farmed in order to be used as batteries to power a matrix that generates their own false consciousness of living in a Western liberal
democracy.

it's still art, i would say, that gives us the required symbolic touchstones and referents we need to explain the theory and vice-versa. and maybe all of it so that we don't find all significance in politics.

anyways. major thanks for showing the way to a brilliant essay. cheers anon.