Webs of Words

I was reading around on consumerism and came across an article that the neo-marxist were wrong about consumerism and the newer hip guys like Baudrillard were right because desire is mediated.  So individuals seek the sacred now in consumer objects and are able to achieve individuation without rigid hierarchies and maximize personal freedom.

Sure desire is mediated; Hegel said that, and maybe the guy does prove the neo-marxists wrong (or at least his version of it ).  But the whole argument is not just wrong but completely absurd:

 First, one can only be free in his system if one has money to buy sacred consumer objects.

Second, since this is true, consumerism of the kind he describes cannot and will not do away with rigid hierarchies until the class structure is modified.

Three, this consumerism that he promotes threatens to eat up the world’s resources; maybe we will have to impose some rigid hierarchies to restrain over consumption.

A patently absurd argument of this kind is possible only if one steps completely into the so-called world of intertexuality.  It is an argument contextualized by the argument it makes against a position it does not understand and so is nothing but a creation of words with absolutely no reference to any known reality.

It’s this kind of stuff that leads the masses to think, if they think at all, that academics live in the “ivory tower” and are generally out of touch with common sense.  The masses for their part do not see that common sense is not reality, but a socially mediated construction.  The consequence of this is that anybody can easily be caught up in a self-satisfying and narcissistically fulfilling web of words.

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