We are at a point where everything and nothing seems to be true. We live today a concept of truth that stands in blatant contradiction to any supra-societal and supra-historical approach of truth and knowledge...
Every
criticism ultimately exposes itself as
an aesthetic attraction. And these
morsels are greedily absorbed by modern,
liberal society, and so any criticism
that was able to hide until then
immediately dissolves into supple
popularities.
Time to think about
the fetish.
Essentially,
fetishism is the attribution of inherent
value, or powers, to an object.
Initially, the Portuguese developed the
concept of the fetish to refer to the
objects used in religious practices by
West African natives.
The theory
of fetishism was articulated at the end
of the eighteenth century by G. W. F.
Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of
History. According to Hegel, Africans
were incapable of abstract thought,
their ideas and actions were governed by
impulse, and therefore a fetish object
could be anything that then was
arbitrarily imbued with imaginary
powers..
Oh yes, having power!
Karl Marx already wrote in Capital about
the fetish character of the commodity
and its mystery: "At first glance, a
commodity seems to be a trivial thing.
But if you look more closely, you can
recognise its metaphysical subtleties
and theological quirks in the commodity.
We too have become commodity.
Later Guy Debord has found in the
concept of the spectacle the point at
which one can leverage contemporary
society.
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The fetishism of commodities is a deterministic myth, designed to conserve the existing order by convincing the people in it that they can do no other. By picturing themselves as unfree, men make themselves unfree: their prophecy of powerlessness is self-fulfilling. How can this paralysing picture be shattered, this confusion dispelled?