Daniel Fischer Professor Kathy Ludgate C Lit: 700 Literary Theory and Critical Practice 15 April 2010

Enslavement
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of livingthey embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its byproducts (sec. 60). --Guy Debord Society of the Spectacle

Sartres famous dictum existence precedence essence does not exist in America. America has become too distracted by material to worry about its existence and finds no reason to exercise its individual freedoms. The existence of man exists only as an extension of his materialistic surroundingsfreedom for the individual thus is manufactured. Moreover, commodity has conditioned mans nature and has enslaved him to the necessities of material where he must masochistically want and have each day. This need for survivalthis need for commoditydisplaces thoughts of existential revolt from the individuals mind and has him instead desire irrelevant cultural trends. The need for the newest gadget, the need for the next spectaclethese all distract from life where life now under the shadow of capitalism comes prepackaged with price-tags. It is the material of culture and capitalism that enslaves the individual from freedom Those who declare living as a mode of existence as never easy fall trap to capitalist ideology. Living, for the capitalist, will always be about material. But because society always produces more material and because commodities continually persist, and because Hollywood continually influencesthe individual is never satisfied. Thus material enslaves the individual materialistically just as Hollywood enslaves the mind ideologically. I want, I must have, this is the newest commodity, the newest celebrity trenddespite Americans being the unhealthiest and heaviest in the world, our appetites are never satisfied. Capitalism is derived on the basis of natural competition, and, in natural competition, there inadvertently always occurs a loser and a winner. Marx and Engels systematically understood this and abhorred the effects capitalism had on the industrial slave worker. The worker at the machine, concentrating upon immediate aims, has no time or inclination left for the contemplation of life as a whole (Japsers 51, quoted in Existentialism and Human Freedom). Commodity, in turn, does not attempt to hide the inequalities of capitalism, but instead hopes to romanticize it. In this romance, the weary individualor groups of individualsare offered freedom from their labors through moments of leisure. These moments of leisure are meant to reward the individual for her hard work while simultaneously disguising the fact that these very same properties of leisure in fact enslave her further:

The following is a master essay written by Daniel Fischer during his senior year at the University of Washington. Due to the size of the essay, only certain excerpts have been presented with ellipses designating section breaks. The contents of the essay are used later in his highly-acclaimed work and magnum opus, Existential Bondage written during his adult years.

As humanity is required to devote fewer and fewer resources to socially necessary labor, it has greater time away from the workplace. However, this separation of work and leisure is largely illusory, as the kinds of activities people practice in their free time secretly reproduce the conditions of workOn the other hand, bored by the endless repetition of the assembly line, people want novelty in their leisure time; on the other hand, the exhaustion of the labor process means that most are either unwilling or unable to devote the concentration that would be required to truly break from the patterns of thought and experience to which they have become accustomed at workWhile leisure masquerades as free time, it is an open secret that its true purpose is the replenishment of ones working energies. (Gunster 45) There indeed is nothing free in America regardless how luxurious the activity. In going to the theater, shopping at the mall, watching television, or simply reading a book, there is something, always, that must be paid to have this leisure time. And in paying for this moment, the individual becomes replenished, believes herself to be properly rewarded, and embraces the new work week with renewed vigor, unaware that her weariness will eventually remerge a second time just as it did in the beginning: As we become more and more dependent upon modern scientific inventions (do not luxuries always tend to become necessities?), we become more and more dependent upon the civilization that produces them (Killinger 308). Moreover, in order to prevent discontent in the individual and keep her from thinking, the culture industry produces more commodities to fulfill her needs. These commodities are nothing new, but are instead repeats to appease what is familiar to the weary-prone individual. As Adorno states when analyzing television: Every spectator of a television mystery knows with absolute certainty how it is going to end. Tension is but superficially maintained and is unlikely to have serious effect any more. On the contrary, the spectator feels on safe ground all the time. This longing for feeling on safe groundreflecting an infantile need for protection, rather than his desire for a thrillis catered to. (216)

Marx sought to understand how the commodity form objectifies the worker. In his analysis of commodity fetishism, it is not the value of the workers labor that is sold, but rather, the exchange -value of the product in the market environment. Whether or not the product holds any useful value for society is irrelevant under capitalism: what is important is its abstract value to potential consumers. Thus its use-value no longer exists. Moreover, the humanness of the product becomes eliminated by this abstract value system where the social nature of the goodthe fact that it was made by human beings for othersis ultimately lost (Gunster 49). Once again, it is not the hero in the suit we as an American culture should worship, but rather, the designer of the suit itself. Moreover, our praises are misguided when we solely worship Hollywood celebrities, for we often forget the amount of scriptwriting, set-designing, and graphic-engineering that comes with the glorifying of these masked characters. We have, unfortunately, succumbed to worshipping the face of a celebrity instead of the bodies that constitute him. Like our gluttonous appetite for commodity, rarely do we as a culture ever question the human labor behind the newest generation of, say, flat-screen cellphones. We come to believe that it is the autonomous movie, song, or book that so profoundly movies us, not the process by which these things were made (Gunster 50). The mass consumption of culture can only lead to mass assimilation. As a consequence, individual identity

becomes subordinated before the structures of conformity. Those who insist on individuality insist on becoming pathologies to society, for it is their very uniqueness that resists culture. Culture in its commoditized form produced for consumptioncomes prepackaged with stereotypes and clichs for the typical American to devour (Gunster 58). Those who wish to revolt against stereotypethose who bravely say that heroes can exist outside of America, or that women can be individuals, or that men can be strong without masksare often met with hateful backlash, for culture can have Nothing at all remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear (Horkheimer and Adorno 16, quoted in Mass Culture). Moreover, the Theythe false Hollywood heroes who wear masks asking to be worshipped by countless millionsexpect man to conform to established usages and opinions, of being assimilated to the general forms of human existence. By this means he becomes one among the many, he achieves anonymity, he becomes buried in the impersonal das Man (Coates 231-232). Indeed, if the masses as a whole continuously worship repeating archetypes in society as a spectacle, how is it then that individuality is preserved? The consumption of mass culture in commodity form is as detrimental to the consumer as it is to the rebelling individual. The consumer, ever so ready to partake in this system of wide-eyed anticipation for the newest fashion trendsthe newest television series, the newest gadgets, the newest Hollywood blockbusters, the newest celebrity gossip and scandalsawaits nothing innovative or grand, but rather, things typical and clich. In watching the Avengers perform their grand and mighty feats, we may cheer at the work of the special-effect artists, but, truly, when examining the movie and the rest of Hollywood itself, The accents on inwardness, inner conflicts, and psychological ambivalencehave given way to complete externalization and consequently to an entirely unproblematic, clich-like characterization (Adorno 217). The culture industry thus operates to not move audiences to new intellectual heights, but to restrict them and appease infantile desires. In fact, in order for the general mass in America to consume material, culture has to be dumbed down, where the more inarticulate and diffuse the audience of modern mass media seems to be, (emphasis added), the more successful mass media tend to achieve their integration (220). Those who produce culturethose who are capitalistsunderstand the flaws of a democratic society, and know very well the intellectual disparities that exist in America. And so, to profit from this knowledge, culture is packaged in such a way that it is effortlessly bought while bypassing intellectual scrutiny: Middle-class requirements bound up with internalization such as concentration, intellectual effort, and erudition have to be continuously lowered (218, emphasis mine). Remember: it is not the scholar or intellectual that Iron Man saves; it instead is the archetype, the middle person, the everyman and damsel-in-distress. Like high fashion, everything in culture is the same while parading beneath a false guise of new and innovative. This sameness is hardly unintentional, but is, again, made with effort to please the general public. What is familiar becomes comfortable; stereotypes are safe. Moreover, Banalization dominates modern society the world over (Debord, sec. 59). Like the existentialists who first discovered the true reasons for human anxiety, freedomthe freedom to think for ones self, the freedom to think against stereotype, against culturebecomes a burden too heavy, and so, the more stereotypes become reified and rigid in the present setup of cultural industry, the less people are likely to change their preconceived ideas with the progress of their experience (Adorno 229).

And so: The cognitive dimension of cultural experience is limited to the mere sorting of sensations into a crude schematic according to labelsand thus, the capacity to have new experiences, to critically reflect upon things that do not fit into a predetermined cognitive schematic, is fatally damagedIn other words, the products of the cultural industry do not allow people to reflexively secure the intellectual distance that is necessary to think critically aboutthe world around them. (Gunster 53, 55) Thus the greatest threat facing the individual is not death, but wearing the masks of Hollywood. Works Cited Adorno, T.W. "How to Look at Television." Quarterly of Film Radio and Television. 8.3 (1954): 213-235. Print. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black & Red, 1983. Print. Coates, J.B. Existentialism. Philosophy. 28.106 (1953): 229-238. Print. Gunster, Shane. "Revisiting the Culture Industry Thesis: Mass Culture and the Commodity Form." Cultural Critique. 45. (2000): 40-70. Print. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorono. Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1972. Print. Karl, Jaspers. Man in the Modern Age. Trans. Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: Doubleday, 1957. Print. Killinger, John. Existentialism and Human Freedom. The English Journal. 50.5 (1961): 303-313. Print.