Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Things, people, and ideas

Swim in the sea of commodities because this is where you will find the people.

If you can talk to others about things, at the very least you aren't gossiping with them about people. And if your Marxism map is drawn well, for example, it's not hard to connect what is popular about things to a more constructive discussion about what is important to people. In any case, it's always important to move conversation away from what we like or don't like about people or things, toward the relevant relationship between the two. It's at this point that we begin to talk about ideas.

Talking about ideas isn't something that we get a lot of practice at in advanced consumer societies, however. Ideas in themselves become "things" which we regard in our role as consumers. What is normally a process becomes a commodity, or finished product. This idea is "awesome," that one is "stupid." The consumer is always casting an up or down vote, rather than seeing possibilities where perhaps no one else does; or the limitations of something that only works in one context.

If you've ever seen a group of people assembled together to "discuss anarchism," more often than not what you've encountered is a narrow subset of consumers who might as well be "fans" of any other kind of commodity. As long as it is conceived as a "thing," not a process, anarchism is just something else to adorn oneself with and fret about, rather than a map by which to know the world. You will know the former by the pointless acrimony that ensues; the latter by the impulse to always want to learn more, in whatever context.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is really good.

Where's the "Like" button?

Abonilox said...

"You will know the former by the pointless acrimony that ensues; the latter by the impulse to always want to learn more, in whatever context."

Well said. I hope I fall in the latter category.

almostinfamous said...

a well-written zinger :)

i like this part:
"Ideas in themselves become "things" which we regard in our role as consumers. What is normally a process becomes a commodity, or finished product. This idea is "awesome," that one is "stupid." The consumer is always casting an up or down vote, rather than seeing possibilities where perhaps no one else does; or the limitations of something that only works in one context."

it only recently occurred to me how often i have taken to negating ideas simply on a pragmatic basis (no time/grumpy/stupid) rather than explore them and see if i can indeed learn more from them.

Anonymous said...

I rarely comment here.

But I think what you've written is a very insightful way of approaching politics in life.

captain mandrake said...

You had me up until the third paragraph.

There are just different temperaments and varying degrees of conflict tolerance. I think someone can be inquisitive, genuine and acrimonious all together, though not perhaps at the same time.

Overall, I think attempts to equate anger with some intellectual or moral deficiency are authoritarian at heart. It makes more sense simply to say that acrimony tends to get in the way of a fruitful interrogation of ideas.

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