In this article we talk about our time and age, how did the concept of reality and truth changed through consumer capitalism and how does the hybrid of neo-marxism and post-structuralism help us with the diagnose
If somebody makes the claims that our period is degenerated, what can support his argument ? Since we are living in a period in time, in which society has no absolute values (for example : god) there is no common dogmatic base of agreement that would be strong enough to be accepted as a parameter of judgement by everyone. That was more or less what Nietzsche meant by the death of god. Then what can we say about our time ?
At this point of time and history every argument has two sides which are equally valid. Every age has its own parameters, there is no universal and eternal truth*.
Truth is a fiction, a parametric model adopted by certain people by a certain period of time, for historical reasons, it became not relevant to the age we are living in (think about monotheism or paganism). At certain periods of history certain truths become absolute and they change, geocentrism vs Heliocentrism. Some aspects of our contemporary life in the age of information and technology were not even thinkable fifty years ago, how would you explain social media ?
*Further reading: Nietzsche and Truth, Hegel and Historicism, Foccault and archive, Lyotard, Althusser and Interpellation | Jean Baudrillard – Simulacra and Simulation, Auguste Comte Truth as metaphor
Truth & Facts
If we are looking at a picture or an article from a newspaper, does it represent facts ? is the information there credible enough to be considered as true ? This question does no longer belong in our time, since most of the information cannot be verified against what we called facts , what are facts anyway ?
What are fake news ? How are news being verified against facts or reality ? Even a person who would use the term ‘fake news’ would be anachronistic, to claim that there are ‘fake’ news is also to claim have new that are not fake – that are true, but again what is true then ? news that describe reality ? how ? how does a picture signify reality ? how do we know that it not manipulated ? is cropping the boundaries or changing colors by filter considered manipulation since its scientifically influencing our perception ? did we actually land on the moon ? against any claim or argument exists a counter-argument, it can be fake, and it can be that the discussion about what are ‘facts’ is not actual anymore, scary as it might be.
In this age there no way anymore to verify, fix, define and diagnose facts. The early Wittgenstein would challenge the possibility of the word ‘fact’ to be meaningful. Our age shows that its not.
As an intellectual movement the enlightenment had the ultimate ambition to locate and believe in only one objective reality, which is based on science, logic, rationality. The reality of the enlightenment is now extinct. During the first half of the 20th century analytic philosophy was focused in logic, language and how does it create the world and reality for us. They drew the conclusion that we people do not share one common reality. Physically Einstein showed that absolute reality exists transcendentally therefor different observers precept the same reality in different ways.
The meeting point between Neo-Marxism and Post-structuralism
Marx
In the Marx theory we have to opposed forces – lower and upper class. The ruling upper class strive to maintain its position. It can achieve it with different methods : one of them would be enforcement, such as police which cost a lot of effort, so a different method might be Ideology.
What do we mean by Ideology ? sometimes it can be religion, nationalism sometimes capitalism, those are ideologies. In capitalism the case is as following – we all want to succeed in life, since we are little we are taught to know what it is to succeed. Succes is usually materialistic, be wealthy, own things, be famous and rich. Once this ideology is being dictated to us, success is determined by a limited number of parameters, today it is more about rich and famous than finding peace, being intellectual or a talented writer musician or painter (which is not famous). All our energy is devoted into that and how we perceive ourselves as well. The parameters are determined externally towards society, because we are nothing without society.
Open IMDB, how can it be that so many films are box office hits with such low ratings ? its all about the money, or more precisely about the dream of making money. hope.
Suppression
If a country has a mixed population : a religious population, and a secular population, the secular people might claim that the religious leaders are keeping their believers deliberately ignorant, they will help them with small communal things like warm food or clothes by form of charity, but they would not give them the opportunity to know something other than religion, like secular ideology – ‘education‘- science, math, history, Darwinism – we would say, because almost every person who would come to know it would probably give up religion, to ask Orthodox religious people about Darwin and see how it goes.
A Neo Marxist will not agree to this theory, and only because we give to much credit to such idea of a leading direction or an evil master mind pulling the strings and controlling such religious population, that theological concept does not exist for the Neo Marxist. We will explain why and what.
The main lesson from the example below is how Ignorance can be used as a tool by a certain ideology. Religious people are actively take no interest in the world of actuality, for them there is one eternal theological period and not a lot around them. Why do we have this particular Ideologies then ? No particular reason. It is just showing how ideas manifest themselves through society, there is no master mind behind it. The complicated thing to understand: there is no active political principle arranging this, now one to point a finger to.
Marx himself failed twice diagnostically : he thought that the upper ruling class have enough brains to rule actively and he thought that the lower class has enough brains to read his ideology and break free.
These two suppositions are enlightenment-era in nature.
Our capitalism is not the classical one of Henry Ford (the first, Fordism). We are no longer working in a factory with bad conditions, we are not being shot by Pinkertons (read:the Ford massacre). We have our rights.
Who makes the capitalist ideology ? that machine that we call our lives within consumer capitalism. It is a brainless machine but it has its criteria, for example : rating, popularity. No specific individual have to have bad intentions in this system, everyone just want to get their salary and maybe a yearly bonus. The people of the media need rating. They are also victims of the same system. Nobody is living his daily office routine with Marxist thoughts. The only ones who still have it are some university students before they are hired to work an office job or become university lecturers.
Because we are not coal-miners of factory slaves, our needs are Leisure-Class needs, as Veblen (1857-1929) called it. In a society with abundance of products and services which we consume: Opera’s, Cinema, Gadgets, Cellphones, Instagram, Netflix etc. When we consume entertainment, it is not like we just discharge what we experienced and left with nothing, we are left with something, it shapes us, there isn’t really a barrier between the person I AM and my consumerism – that’s being naive.
Since the products we consume have to survive the conditions of the economical market, it has to have to reach as many people as possible, its all about numbers. Then we are is the domain of quantity and not quality, then we are also talking about the lowest common denominator. That means that an opera survives a lot (more) less than any new Netflix series. Its not so much the problem of watching Netflix but the problem of a Market that would make Opera’s go extinct within 20 years.
There is an organic dialectics between the consumerism, the product and the consumers. This feedback is dictating the nature of what we get from our media, if once we used to read the news to get to know about ‘facts’ or actuality it is now becoming just another product – to keep up with the competition of entertainment. And so we get news that are now ebullient, short, compressed, colorful, spicy, lowest common denominator. The representation of truth is no longer a challenge for the west, therefore boring. The parameter of succession changed from imitation (similarity) of reality to that of the extravagant of reality. More of that later.
Further reading : Thorstein Veblen – The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899)
Post-Structuralism
In 1916, post-mortem the Ferdinand de Saussure lectures were published in a book called ‘Course in general linguistics’. It is a book that changed the 20th century completely. His successors (like Roland Barthes) would develop his theory to a greater extend.
According to his theory, every lingual element in our thought does not and cannot exist independently, but it is linked to other elements close to it. For example (A cat is an animal but not a pig or a dog etc’). Language exists only between a group of people. Linguistically we don’t have independent existence of our own, there is no private language (Wittgenstein) for us, but only the one we learn as part of a collective. This is called by Saussure structure or a system. Our thoughts are not our own, because the map of our thought (the definition of our terms and the links they have with other terms) are dictated to us from birth. We are baptized into it. Language is a product of society, of economy, the history of a certain time, this is where we connect to Marx.
Every fact is a product. It is not true to say : first there are facts and only then I come to know them but : first I learn a language, a map, first I learn to know, and then only I come to know ‘facts’. What we call facts are actually representations, lets say of reality. Once reality goes through language it is no longer a solid reality, it is not objective. Not only that it is not the source, the origin, the object, what we think we have in our mind, only language makes us believe that its something that its not. Only Enlightenment language make us believe that – there is one reality that I share with everyone. Wittgenstein would say that the last sentence is not valid because it does not really relate to anything – sinnlos, senseless.
We have learned language which has an array of symbols and signs, they create combinations and then we call them facts. Only when a representation seems coherent to us we will call it a fact.
Social media
If we get all of our ‘facts’ from a homogeus source, Facebook or Google we are getting only what we are being served. If we are okay with being served by this type of representations then it is really our doing that we will never be served with other things.
So, Google is now worth $632 billion, most of us use ‘free’ services that they provide, they pay salaries to 98,771 employees ? Its because we are the product. A human being is a product which is a clear step in the evolution of capitalism. Then who pays google ? The Politicians and advertisement industry, this is how the game rolls, ideology, consumerism. We only buy what they are telling google to sell us. Our social patterns are worth money to the people who can use them, which kind of people are those ? the next president, the next Zuckerberg, the next Musk. Did anyone ask what are they really doing ? or even more impotently what they can do ?
Change of values, a dying culture or both ?
As expressed in art as early as the second part of Don Quixote (1615) by Miguel de Cervantes and Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1656), the media or medium or representation, in this case a book and a painting, these have the power to create a dialectic paradoxical experience that shows us immediately the problem of representation. That problem is that the boundary between representation and reality is not really there.
Truth belong in a different time, the enlightenment period (Quid est veritas ?). The only valid argument for being rational is we should agree to use it otherwise we will go instinct. Spengler developed a model in his book The Decline of the West (1923) where he suggested that a loss of cultural belief in certain values would bring upon the dying of a culture, for example he used among the rest the Ancient Greeks and the Pythagorean rationality. He predicted we would loose our Faustian Enlightened culture, in his time thing were quite different and he was still pessimist about the changing of values that we experience today.
Like we mentioned before, high culture and also outdated media formats would disappear and only because of the darwinist nature of media in a capitalist society in the age of information. The new type of media doesn’t promote artistic values : it does not promote aesthetics in a developed way, and why ? because aesthetics means diving deep into art and not staying in the shallow water. Technology makes everything looks easy, but with a reason.
Mass consumption works with different parameters, mostly by numbers : number of consumers, the amount of profit, the amount of content. the leading factor determining the value (which is quantity) – is capitalism.
To bring an opposite and radical example: Sparta – there they believed in the values of honor, courage, bravery. The were educated differently because historically they were different people in a different time. The Greek Tragedy shows us according to Dorothea Krook (Elements of tragedy 1969) a possible Greek perspective that believed human suffering is the key for deeper understanding of the human condition, as a positive reaffirmation of life, something the Nietzsche believes in as well, in a much more elaborated way (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music 1872).
In Capitalism is all about pleasure, happiness, colorfulness, effortlessness. The threshold for stimuli is way higher, much of a drug addict. Why read while you can listen ? why listen while you can watch ? why take a month to read a book and not just five minute Youtube video about the subject ? long live TED.
Capitalism, unlike religious dogma or several other doctrines, is very open to change. Its democratic nature gives it its power, its fitness and resiliency for times of crisis, but it also makes it vulnerability for unwanted unregulated changes, for exploitation of power in a silent but dangerous way.
Baudrillard and simulacrum
According to Baudrillard The signifier, the image, the symbol, icon, and index, precedes the signified, or even without a signified.
in the original model (: Saussure , Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, early Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan) They thought everything could be mapped with a system a signs. The science of signs is called semiotics, its ambition would be to have a world of complete objectiveness. That was an ambition that existed since the days of Leibniz until it was abandoned around 100 years. It was abandoned because it philosophically thought to be false to say problematic, or historically absolute, not in fashion, doesn’t belong in our Zeitgeist. While the structuralist interpretations were about what does the signfier signifies, post-structual Baudrillard claimed that the signifiers does not signify, or that the content ‘behind’ the signifier is simply not there. Meaning no truth or reality just: representation, Wittgenstein would say that the only agreement we can achieve is because we are using language in the same way. Spengler would say that every culture and every period of times has it own unique way of using a language to build the world and therefore more importantly – a different world feeling, to say a different world in practice, because there is no world just a different view of which makes the world for us, and therefore you ask : whats the difference ? well, all World-feeling are equally valid, there is no way to evaluate internally one above the other one. Then why do we have or had cultures, instead of going each person an individual way in an individual world ? because it allows us to communicate and develop. There are people who can create their own world feeling : Artists, Scientists, philosophers, and if their work is useful enough for humanity it will embed and change a whole culture completely : Classical music, the infinitesimal calculus, The philosophy of language.
The interest in the signified belongs to a different period and for a specific type of people. It’s only what intellectuals do : It is the essence behind the action of interpretation and the ability to build complex constructs of ideas. Producing interpretations is very time consuming, especially when there is the claim that the signified are not there, it makes this action futile in a way. In the realm of capitalist consumer entertainment there is no time nor motivation to be busy with the signified and therefore we are left only with the signifiers – A FORM WITHOUT CONTENT – no value, no place for interpretation, no form of objectivity and the possible catastrophe of the future which we are all afraid of : how do we find a shared language in this way ? the possibility of real communication and value creation.
The medium is not the message, but just the medium
McLuhan said “the medium is the message” (1964), but then there is only the medium. There is no more parameters no identify a message, but only parameters to identify the medium or more precise to quantify it, by ratings, the willingness of the consumers to consume.
What are the parameters – psychological, social, cognitive, intellectual, ideological etc’ that makes a consumer consume ? those are the questions that belong to the advertisement industry, they have the answers. If there is no message (=reality), but just the medium then the value of the product do not relate to the message but only to the medium itself. The form is only getting better but no message, it would be literately judging a book by its cover. The western cannon has no meaning anymore, and why ? If reality is rich and complex then the message becomes rich and complex, if reality becomes shallow and poor then there is no message but just a medium, and there is the ultra-nihilistic idea of no need for a message, because consumer capitalism sees complexity as something completely unnecessary. For a complex message and a rich view of life, semantically and therefore also practically speaking, there is need for a complex medium, for example poetry. Without any message we can do well with sensual stimuli – after all, all animals go by this only.
Did anyone ever consider the fact the we are a generation of animals lovers only because we see them as becoming more similar to us ? How did that work ? Did we first discover things about animals or things about ourselves ? We only give value to human things, that is the essence of Anthropomorphism and at the same time of value assignment. There is an idea that one should let the world be and not try to make it human, not try to force humanity upon it. While sustainability and ‘world-caring’ aim to repair the world, it could be that it’s not broken, because it cannot break, cannot be fixed, it is only we that break, so why not start there ?
Let us not forget that in this period it is the medium that builds our reality, it structures our language and it is in the active process of limiting it, more visual, less lingual. If we see the news as reflecting reality, as facts, and wrongfully not as part of consumer-capitalism. If social media (facebook, google, whatever) would bring you only reality and not a fake version of it nobody would use it – because then just live your life.
Instagram is a good example – it never reflects reality but maybe our ideal view of reality, and what is that ? mostly : a celebrity popularity contest. Something that you do in high school, Rousseau’s idea of reversing history and going back to nature, to complete madness, a reset.
Zero-sum game
Fake news and ‘real news’ are the same. We are not living in a world of ‘facts’. We are living in a world with too many voices and too much opinions that don’t allow for facts to exist, at least beyond our own simple daily life experience. If we talk about God, History, Art, Aesthetics, The western cannon they all don’t belong in our time. Those were the sacred values of the past and they are now replaced only by consumerism. Consumerism determined by consumers with capitalistic dynamics of the lowest shared common factor. Nietzsche was so far ahead of his time as to predict it as early as 1870.
Google is the new empire – an empire of signs & signifiers. It is tagging, branding, rating, every person and every company out there. Google will not ask its consumers to provide with content they cannot generate, they would not ask for intellectualism because it does not comply with consumer entertainment. The counter consumerism intellectualism is considered elitist, condescending, colonialist.
There is no reality and facts, just simulacrum that is the only thing left. Think about the destruction of individuality and its replacement by a statistic client which is only valued by Consumer segmentation. Think about the shameless metamorphosis of artists becoming service providers. No more subjects but the recipients of the medium, an empty shell, a form without content. No culture means no shared language, no possibility of generating value, maybe the loss of an option to create a true sustainable future.
Further reading : Herbert Marcuse, György Lukács, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer , Frankfurt school, Rolan Barthes (he was the seam between post and structuralism)
George Orwell – 1984, Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man