The world of appearance is imbued with ostensible solidity that curtails both the abysmal and the eternal, and not one of us would continue to exist as an individual being if the familiar barriers to sight had suddenly vanished. We raise barriers to protect ourselves from non-relativity of the absolute because there is no here or now without their limiting, relativising function. In that sense, selective blindness is not merely an individual deficiency but a condition of seeing, of relational identity that transcends evental and contextual uniqueness and thereby allows for localised recognition and repetition. By closing our eyes we project the world of objective finitude, of differential identity and qualified meaning onto the canvas of the absolute which, by all measures, is not even there. Those who would dare to gaze beyond the ‘surface’ that shields our inner eye from the undivided, from the timeless and the unknowable, would inevitably face annihilation of identity, which subsists precisely as the transcendental limit of manifest existence.
The locus of perspective, the innermost here, is located in space by a surface that folds into forms and creates the perception of content, but is itself devoid of content. The surface is a self-imposing target of attention and can be accepted without any preparatory effort, without upsetting the already assembled structures of meaning, because it is their most rudimentary manifestation that appears only insofar as it conceals, encloses or resists. Functionality of the surface as a barrier to sight culminates in packaging (in both metaphorical and literal sense), which inflates the spatial extension of contents and thus accentuates the sense of voluminous, substantial interiority: it declares fullness by boldly concealing it, by defining a distinct envelope of the positive interior.
From the perspective of industrial production everything must be packaged, because packaging ascribes identity and therefore wholeness to an otherwise discontinuous assembly of functions or parts, and thus emulates its functional or processual unity. Packaging protects, decorates, informs and offcourse conceals, but its primary function is that of meta-realisation of the packaged content as a commodity, the instances of which come to constitute an extension of the narrative of its packaging. Stacked on the shelves of a shop, which may also be a form of packaging and an extension of the same narrative, it projects the manufacturer’s insignia, performance specifications and seductive images of the hidden product, which already engage into a mediated discourse with the outside: it is encoded with the referents of consumption and gratification.
Once the product is purchased it is immediately concealed inside a shopping bag, whose surface is an extension of the surface of the shop and is thus encoded with the voice of the seller. When the bag is eventually removed and the outer packaging penetrated one may encounter a fine protective wrapping, a translucent hymen, which reinforces the sense of untainted virginity and thus implied libidinal valency of the goods. The product emerges from this soft cocoon exposing its aesthetic and ergonomic form, adorned by a distinguishing emblem: the mark of the maker. The outer shell exposes only as much of the actual mechanism as is deemed necessary to the functionality of the product, unless the first layer of the interior is also presented as a decorative aspect via a transparent shell. Removal of the exterior shell is permitted only where it is essential to general maintenance; otherwise, penetration is strictly prohibited and punishable with termination of warranty. If the exterior layer is removed, the actual working mechanism may be exposed, which is normally protected from the user as much as the user is protected from accidental harm. The mechanism itself is made up of various sub-components that are also individually packaged by their unitising shells, bearing logos and specifications. The packaging can be progressively stripped away until elemental constituents are exposed, packaged by one another and plugged into one another. The product is a package, inside a package, inside a package… and ultimately there is nothing inside, nothing beyond the functionality and imagery of respective layers of packaging conversing with one another.
Consumption of industrial products is never semantically neutral but, due to the unique functional valency present in every design, is implicitly instructive: it coordinates and defines the very functions it purports to serve. The user, who engages with the product’s functional potency in a subordinate, dependent fashion, inadvertently activates the symbolic relationality of its delivery and realisation within oneself. The products we use do not merely affect the way we interact with others but fundamentally reconstitute identity of the subject/user as well as the natural object-field, that is, the entire realm of the non-produced. The user who is engaged in consumption inevitably internalises characteristics of the technologies being consumed, not because such characteristics have an ontological dimension that parallels that of the subject, but precisely because that is what they are lacking. The product, once semantically assimilated, subsists in the consumer, buyer or user whose tacit acquiescence to such a bivalent designation presupposes a relationship of constitutive entanglement. The functions that products perform are designatory, that is, they consist of symbolic and relational content determined by designers and communicated to users via functional focalisation and contextualisation, via ergonomic modality, aesthetic and archetypal association, but also by an explicit set of textual and pictorial operating instructions: the user’s manual. The same product can often be used for a variety of purposes that it was not designed to serve, without affecting its ontological constitution, but any new application would demand a new meaning and a new context – a creative extension beyond the ready-made narrative. Strictly speaking, it is only the meaning of the product that is produced, its function, and not its ontological substance, which does not come into being in the process of production, yet we erroneously ascribe distinct ontological presence to the function itself, and with it, to the form that embodies that function.
By utilising the function that a particular product communicates we acquiesce to the reality of its meaning and thus become drawn into its symbolic dimension, signifying the value system from which the design had emerged. We extend that ontic fallacy to ourselves when we identify with the functions we perform, that is, of being a worker, a doctor or a policeman, but these functions have no more bearing on our ontological substance than they have on the lifelong continuity of selfhood. The multilayered language of constitutive limits, encoded throughout the tiered assembly of functional relations, is assimilated by those who consume its designated meaning and thus become semantically anchored in the code of its production, defining a common culture which does not unify but, rather, imposes uniform parameters of individual differentiation and segregation. It is only within this vertical architecture of processual encapsulation that the abstract entity called the person (both in the colloquial and the legal sense of the term) is posited as that which mediates between multiple levels of semantic assembly and the Self, whereby it intervenes as an individualising locator within the hierarchy of processual control. Our positioning within this hierarchy is not a consequence of individual capabilities but, rather, it is the hierarchy itself that cultivates capabilities and endows processual authority to individuals within its power by initiating them to the required level of processual encapsulation and its esoteric meta-language, that is, not merely to performative aspects of the assigned function but to the normative structure in which the function is grounded.
The language of functional limits defines and controls our perspective by setting the background of relational valencies in terms of which we constitute ourselves and, implicitly, determines the referents of value and identity. Its signs carry secondary, symbolic content while its symbols are signatory – it is a language which consists of signs of the ruling production, which at the same time are the ultimate goal of this production (Debord 1983). The sign is understood directly, by semantic initiation to a particular code of equivalences, while the symbol is understood indirectly, via contextual association. The sign speaks only of what is, but the symbol adds to that which it symbolises: it says more than the experience of the symbolised could impart alone because the symbol is already an implicit value judgement. The interplay of signs and symbols, where one is subordinated to the other but neither is presented alone, simultaneously extrapolates the parameters of meaning and delivers instructions for its use, in the sense of a product that does not satisfy a pre-existent need but, instead, formulates it. This is particularly apparent where a new product, once accepted by some, creates such a significant deficiency in those who would reject it that, irrespective of the fact that it has not been necessary before, soon becomes an existential dependency: it shifts the entire social plane to a new interactive protocol. The need formulated thereby is not a pre-existing condition of prospective users but is inherent to the interactive protocol itself, assimilated by users in the form of altered relational syntax. Road transport, for example, configures a set of unique economic expectations: to transport something from A to B with reasonable speed and energetic efficiency. These normative criteria (the signatory content) are in turn associatively re-invoked at the symbolic level, as the basis of positive valuation and associated demand for the roads themselves. Quality roads ‘save time’ symbolically, irrespective of the real cost to the users, and are thus culturally rendered an absolute good.
If a product offers some measurable advantage (saves time, for example) that advantage is de-proportioned within the updated syntax and becomes the new norm. Anything less than the norm is then deemed deficient and thus the purported saving is a purely inflationary adjustment: the ‘gift’ of increasing the amount of savings by the same percentage for everyone increases the nominal holdings of currency but does not make anyone richer except him who would tax every such transaction as if it were an addition of value. The nominal count of assets, work-hours or production volumes is meaningless as the quantifier of wealth; only the ratios matter, because only inequality which is re-presented and measured in the meta-structure of value, signified as a need, as hunger, has the energetic potential to induce directed motion against individual will, which is to say, can be commodified.
The power of a sign that commands obedience is realised only when its audience is also homogeneously re-presented in the meta-structure of value, standardised and thus rendered uniformly responsive to its symbolic content. The narrative of the product is thus commonly endowed with totemic features, with distinctly anthropomorphic characteristics intended to envelop all forms of subjectivity. But a product is not a passive statement of genuine totemic meaning developed via cumulative sensory affinity with its substance or medium; rather, it is an extension of the relational syntax that seeks to colonise subjectivity of users irrespective of the medium via which it is disseminated. A work of art, for example, is characterized by both syntactic and empathic affinity, and is distinguished thereby from industrial production which is solely syntactic in focus: art unifies on the empathic level but ambiguates the syntax, while industrial production homogenizes the syntax via empathic ambiguity associated with unitary repetition and substitution. Industrial production, which is always and only a production and promulgation of meaning, is inherently alienating, because it is fundamentally anti-ontological, having no affinity with being and thus acting as an iconoclastic impostor. In the realm of consumption: it is not the goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they are wrapped. (Vaneigem 2006, 85)
Once the equivalence of name and being is acquiesced to and intersubjectively integrated, fused as one, it is not the reality of a being that is enunciated by the name; the meaning of the name becomes an object in its own right that colonises the associative domain of sensory experience as the thing-in-itself. The name is the ‘end’ of discourse, writes Foucault (2005, 130). The problem at the heart of industrial production is not the scarcity of meaning but its saturation through the codified narrative of packaging, which homogenizes the entire relational syntax as its core monolithic capital and thus precludes individual authority to define it. The codified meaning leaves no question unanswered and nothing unnamed: its answers are authoritative and ostensibly definitive but, on closer examination, either contradictory or arbitrary. Since this deficiency is integral to the status of the product as a thing-in-itself, any structural corrections are not only impossible but existentially terminal to the capital and, consequently, cosmetic developments and the excesses of trivia that continuously override and neutralize one another are celebrated and rewarded, while the fundamental assumptions of the interactive protocol are placed beyond rational debate or even acknowledgment. These are tacitly accepted and incessantly extrapolated, it is therefore not necessary for designers of products to be subjected to any ideological supervision or special restrictions but simply exposed to the same truth-protocol as the consumer/user of the final product. Creativity of designers is not explicitly limited, but already culturally enframed as a range of semantic and cultural expressibility, which imposes the limits of sense, of what it means to think for oneself without crossing the threshold of the absurd into the abortive state of self-censorship and conceptual sterility. The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself. (Marcuse 1991, 172)
No territory is left unclaimed, preventing any genuinely new meaning from colonizing the occupied domain, but what the owners of the capital fail to recognise is that the territory could not belong anywhere else, because it arose only as a unique relationality of its inherent contradictions. The semantic jurisdiction of the capital persists not despite its deficiencies but because of them, and the imbalance thus sustained both energises its totalitarian potential and interpolates its existential domain. Commodities, products, services, workers or money do not constitute the capital; these are only differential referents among which the capital spreads like a force field. For Žižek therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, which is no longer attributable to concrete individuals with their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective”, systemic, anonymous—quite literally a conceptual violence, the violence of a Concept whose self-deployment rules and regulates social reality. (Žižek 2014, 31)
To the extent that we acquiesce to the narrative of limits as that which unifies and homogenises our sense of proportion, the triggers of affectation, and the entire interactive syntax, our individual authority to endow or augment meaning is neutralised or forfeited, and thus subordinated to the voice of the sovereign Other, whose monopoly on meaning is synonymous with absolute power.
The symbiosis of workplace safety regulations, road-safety rules and foreign-aid with the systemic violence of capitalism is only ostensibly contradictory: all these elements serve the singular objective of maintaining exclusive control over the meta-structure of meaning. The protocols of safety become a mode of coercion and exploitation; gestures of aid become a mode of colonisation and genocide. The politics of safety as the paramount consideration in all human endeavours reduces being to the lowest common denominator of mortal flesh, whereby the conscious Self is implicitly situated in a position of subordination to the flesh. In that sense the paradigm of safety is a strategy for capturing the otherwise incommensurable singularity of selfhood within the materialist framework of domination. One can imagine the safety protocol of a concentration camp, enforced in order to minimize any interference with smooth functioning of the death-machine, where corpses dropping in wrong places would no longer carry themselves of their own hopeful will to their final destination. Prisoners in this scenario are not a mere substance, not just human material, but parts of a machine: living parts that work for their own efficient exploitation and subsequent disposal. Their bodies move along the process line and enforce the ruling protocol onto one another, continuously pulling each other back into line, into the machinic process which could not continue without their energetic assistance. The continuous flow of consumable machine parts that are at once the fuel and the conveyor for their own delivery resembles the mythical Uroboros that endures only because it perpetually devours itself. A subtle parallax arises here, between living & dying and being & non-being, where living & dying are logically conditional on being a something, which, as the simplest of determinations, is always at the meta-level to life and death. In order to assume the position of un-conditional being and thus consolidate authority over life and death, the systemic administration first deprives the controlled material of exactly that essential quality: the system separates life from being by endowing individual administrators with the autonomy of abstract being without life, in the form of title, rank or office, while simultaneously reducing its human and animal material to a life without individual being, as a homogenous organic mass. It is no coincidence that the flow of cheap electronic goods, dysfunctional DIY tools, toxic toys and plastic garden furniture coincides with the most comprehensive devaluation of life and consciousness, as it purges the individual authority to engender new meaning for the sake of energetic consumption in itself. The machinic cycle of continuous consumption and degenerative reconstitution of meaning has a ritualistic quality, akin to keeping the slaughtered animal alive until it bleeds itself empty; only then it is allowed to die.
Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2005.
Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London: Routledge, 1991.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press, 2006.
Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil. London & New York: Verso, 2014.
Cultural Analysis & Philosophy 