Market Society

See my essay on the Rise and Fall of the Market Economy -- also my blog post on WEA Pedagogy, reposted on RWER blog, on A Summary of Polanyi. The basis idea is that A Market Economy requires a certain kind of society in order to function -- therefore emergence of a market society requires reshaping human norms in certain unfavorable directions. One of these directions is replacement of generosity by greed.

Susan Sontag, On Photography, 1977.

She wrote this in 1977, before the flood that came with the Internet or cell phones with cameras. One wonders what she would be saying now.

Understanding

“Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.”

Mental Pollution

"Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution."

Capitalism and images

"A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats_ The camera's twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images."