Philosophy Bites

Phi Sigma Tau, the Philosophy Honor Society, invites you to:
Mass Consumerism, Spectacle, and Holiday
headsinbags.jpg
Thursday, December 1st, Stabler Hall 307, 2:00pm

“The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression…As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized man’s lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

“In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long as his complete identification with the generality is unquestioned.”
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

“The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is not plain to see – commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity…alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses.”
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

Philosophy Bites meets at lunchtime once a month to discuss philosophical questions guided by a gobbet, or bite, of philosophical text.

Posted in: Uncategorized

Comments are closed.