>However, the human mind is ever fertile, and we now have the
>phenomenon where the two have collapsed into infomercial reality,
>where the foreground and the background become the same thing,
>and an enthusiastic, bought and paid pseudo-audience applauds
>wildly for the latest tire inflator like romans at the circus.
What is the 'interior economy' of this collapse? All is collapsed into
the surface of the image--nothing can escape its gravity anymore. But
is there a kind of interior, social field that opens up, a field of
struggle that is then externalized in the production relations between
image, consumer, and product? I'm thinking of David Harvey's
discussions of flexible accumulation and its space-time compressions and
how these might apply. Reductions in production and turnover
time--through new technologies and organizational forms like
inventory-reducing just-in-time assembly and delivery systems--are met
with corresponding reductions in consumption time. The shelf-life of
products has been compressed from Fordist regimes average of 6 years to
months, even weeks, today. The way that this has been achieved is by
reducing the materiality of the product, projecting it into the ream of
pure image and information. So contemporary relations , struggles, are
located there, but also in terms of its unpacking, its space of
reception.
What I'm thinking is that this innocent, relentlessly fussed-over tire
inflator, is a powerful social actor with an economy that is not a part
of what we 'see': the landscape has shifted, there is a playing field
here whose modes are not immediately recognizable. There is a
displacing of the privileged site from which we are able to view it.
It's as if we have to channel the viewpoint into the object, see what
the tire inflator sees.
I'm trying to think about this in relation to Andreas Pfluger's comments
here on value.
(also emerging from the timewarp of cwduff's poetic ramblings on
capitalism and commodification, which briefly catapulted us back several
decades)