Page 142 - Šolsko polje, XXVIII, 2017, no. 3-4: Education and the American Dream, ed. Mitja Sardoč
P. 142
šolsko polje, letnik xxviii, številka 3–4
commodities and those who purchase them do not act differently than
when they are looking around for the most promising and satisfying pro-
vider. The radicalness of this new kind of passivity lies in the fact that
when the purchaser starts to rely entirely on the supplier, in order to be
supplied with something that once resided in his most human capacities,
he ceases to be genuinely active in any regard. Instead, his behaviour is a
mere reaction to external causes and can easily become conditioned by a
variety of stimulus. After some time, his passiveness makes him also inca-
pable of any spontaneous activity and in the end he cannot recognize any-
more the need to be. The consumerist society appears to be the latest stage
in the development of the social realm, since the public sphere were peo-
ple could actualise their political mode of being, appear in front of others
and distinguish themselves with outstanding achievements, disappeared
completely, while the only notion of “public space” that society was able
to recognize and preserve was that of an exchange market.
The activities of manufacturing and consuming, selling and buying,
traditionally valid for exchanging of goods and commodities, also start-
ed to determine the sphere where people could primarily exercise their ca-
pacity of speaking and to exchange, judge and form their own opinions
in dialog and discussion with others. Bernays (1928) already demonstrates
that there is absolutely no difference between a political idea and a com-
modity, both are products that can be arranged and sold while everything
that is left to the demos is a customer’s choice. But only in a mediated so-
ciety, once amplified with patterns of mediated experience, when expe-
rience of the world became something made by someone else, produced,
accustomed and delivered to every household, this kind of bargain and
trade with ideas unfolds mostly one-way, impersonal, at distance, on the
terrain of a dispersed and atomised mass audience. The mass-man of to-
day is produced differently than in totalitarian strategies of manifest mass
movements, he or she is self-produced, while consuming mass products
at home, in solitude, as Anders (2014) showed in his insightful analysis.
Conformism lost its decisive characteristics precisely because it unfolds as
regular consumption, as a provision, as s satisfaction of everyday needs, as
a leisure time amusement. And most important, it unfolds in our privacy,
where we are most vulnerable.
Product suppliers, especially in the case of phantasm-products promot-
ed by media, do not recognize that through their supply they make us
deprived and incapable of experience, depriving us of freedom to for-
mulate judgments, that they shape and dominate us. Rather, they think
they’re suppling us and that is all. And we consumers too are blind be-
140
commodities and those who purchase them do not act differently than
when they are looking around for the most promising and satisfying pro-
vider. The radicalness of this new kind of passivity lies in the fact that
when the purchaser starts to rely entirely on the supplier, in order to be
supplied with something that once resided in his most human capacities,
he ceases to be genuinely active in any regard. Instead, his behaviour is a
mere reaction to external causes and can easily become conditioned by a
variety of stimulus. After some time, his passiveness makes him also inca-
pable of any spontaneous activity and in the end he cannot recognize any-
more the need to be. The consumerist society appears to be the latest stage
in the development of the social realm, since the public sphere were peo-
ple could actualise their political mode of being, appear in front of others
and distinguish themselves with outstanding achievements, disappeared
completely, while the only notion of “public space” that society was able
to recognize and preserve was that of an exchange market.
The activities of manufacturing and consuming, selling and buying,
traditionally valid for exchanging of goods and commodities, also start-
ed to determine the sphere where people could primarily exercise their ca-
pacity of speaking and to exchange, judge and form their own opinions
in dialog and discussion with others. Bernays (1928) already demonstrates
that there is absolutely no difference between a political idea and a com-
modity, both are products that can be arranged and sold while everything
that is left to the demos is a customer’s choice. But only in a mediated so-
ciety, once amplified with patterns of mediated experience, when expe-
rience of the world became something made by someone else, produced,
accustomed and delivered to every household, this kind of bargain and
trade with ideas unfolds mostly one-way, impersonal, at distance, on the
terrain of a dispersed and atomised mass audience. The mass-man of to-
day is produced differently than in totalitarian strategies of manifest mass
movements, he or she is self-produced, while consuming mass products
at home, in solitude, as Anders (2014) showed in his insightful analysis.
Conformism lost its decisive characteristics precisely because it unfolds as
regular consumption, as a provision, as s satisfaction of everyday needs, as
a leisure time amusement. And most important, it unfolds in our privacy,
where we are most vulnerable.
Product suppliers, especially in the case of phantasm-products promot-
ed by media, do not recognize that through their supply they make us
deprived and incapable of experience, depriving us of freedom to for-
mulate judgments, that they shape and dominate us. Rather, they think
they’re suppling us and that is all. And we consumers too are blind be-
140
