"And isn’t modernity – by which I mean the ramified social and cultural forms taken on by capitalism as it became, through the centuries, profoundly a ‘form of life’ – isn’t modernity the life-form of permanent crisis? Doesn’t capitalism depend on – thrive on – moments of social overreach and massive destruction of its productive powers? And isn’t one main function of ‘modernity’ – again, meaning the whole battery of social and representational apparatuses whose job is to endlessly reinvent a subject-relation to risk and anomie and breakdown (a subjection to society in free flow) – isn’t the task of ‘modernity’ to make crisis livable? Make it a natural habitat? Make crisis the individual’s life-world? [. . .]"
"The term that still seems to me to sum up this tourniquet of image and ghost-existence is ‘the society of the spectacle’. And it is, I think, this model of sociality that the crisis will eventually test to the limits. So secondly, this. We are familiar with the notion that the dependence of capitalism on continual growth may already be hitting against the limits of what the actual planet can take. Some say the economic question is solvable, and they may be right; but behind it again is the question of life-world, of the sociality capitalism has made. The idea of a low-growth or no-growth economy, that is, may be sustainable; but the idea of a no-growth spectacle – an image-world starved of resources, frozen and deteriorating, in a state of perpetual un-fashion – seems to me profoundly a non-starter. It is a contradiction in terms."
-- T.J. Clark, "Things as They Are"
3 comments:
That's a strange poster. Usually these were about one of "us" offering a fag to one of "them," be "they" the upper 1% or aliens. But a black kid offering one to a spook, that seems oddly (US) self-referential (when you remember that the West was German brand named in attempt to be mistaken for the cigarettes the Marlboro cowboy would smoke).
It is an odd ad campaign. I was unfamiliar with it, previously. Apparently there was one that featured an extraterrestrial...
http://www.s-f.com/hamburg/de/creation/classics/west/
But the political double entendre of the slogan is just too ironic.
"...And now, here's Patty 'Tania' Hearst for Virginia Slims. Because you've come a long way, baby!"
I wondered what had happened to Benetton's marketing team....
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