IMC India - Commodity Aesthetics on India's IMC

Commodity Aesthetics on India's IMC
By Shokat 03/12/2005 At 22:35

Having lost its ties to organic movements and practices Anglo-Indian/Pakistan activist thought also became more and more drawn to post-structuralism and its hatred odds...

Such examplesof 'selling out,'thought the exception rather than the rule, indicate the degree to wich a form of knowledge once grounded in critique has systematically been corrupted by power. However, isomorphic adaption by the critical intelligentsia to new pressures toward forced obsolescence have typically taken more subtle form - commodity aesthetics and the 'follow-om'system in theory (trend innovation).
In an effort to shore up the appearance of use value in a saturated market, the producer engages in a series of ingenious improvisations at the level of aesthetic form. To sell, the commodity must now archieve innovation, the subordination of use value to brand name. It is for this reason that baroque theorist are concerned less with persuasiveness of argument or coherence of thought than with successful presentation of an original style. The last publishing examples on India IMC, for instance, has successfully positioned a work as a superior 'good'within the niche market of theory, where its erudition signals a distinctive'brand name' of theoretical competence in good old 'Fascist Germany': NO ONE CAN RIFF ON POST-COLONIAL SEMIOTICS THE WAY WE CAN.

Virtuosity of aesthetic expression first became indispensable in the accumulation of academic capital in postwar areas. The reasons were, again, structural. In the postwar period, the relative autonomy of academics, their frankly anachronistic status as independent commodity producers, was progressively eroded by the state and the market.
The modern technocratic state no longer requires the traditional services of intellectuals in legitimating social norms because capitalism essentially legislates values for them. In India/Pakistan, for example, the intellectuals underwent a transformation from 'state-centered' to 'market-centered' intellectuals, as the rise of the mass media effectively undermined the traditional intellectual field. For previous generations of such establishment, academic prestige had been acquired only through long years of largely anonymous scholary research.
It shows how the break-down of the blood-brain barrier between academia and popular culture made possible the rapid ascension of certain groups to high academic and literary positions. The avant-garde, with the advent of the star system in a good theory, even a 'true'theory, came to be conflated with a theory produced by a charismaticintellectual; revelation of truth, meanwhile, became indistinguishable from revelation of the person or body of the intellectual himself. Human sensuality itself emerges in commodity aesthetics as a crucial site in capital's struggle to uphold the commoditity's appearance of use value - as a continuous process od sensual organisation.
By shaping human sensory and psychic desires, especiallly sexuality, advertisers have been able to carry commodity aesthetics and aesthetic innovation deep into the self.
This pattern has extended itself into the realm of critical theory. As commodity aesthetics has extended into though and speech, it has also been extended into bodily gesture and comportment.
"There is not only the distictive voice but also the striking face, the sari, and the characteristic tics or patterns of delivery!" What makes the star sexy is her or his proximity to power: to the money mashine of film industries, or an affiliation with one or another ideological apparatus of the state. The celebrity at the podium of a major literary studies conference functions as the embodiment of desire and sexual promise, speaking directly to the viewing subject's own narcistic ego. For consumer demand to be endlessly generated and regenerated, the commodity must be able to find some footing 'within' the subject himself.

At last : FIGHT FASCISM - RACISM - HINDU GENDER ORDINANCE

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Shokat 04/12/2005 19:03

As early as the 21st century, before the rationalization of the university but well into the breakdown of the barrier between the academy and the mass media, we begin to witness a shortening of the half-life of commodity concepts in theory - intellectual history moved very fast, an unfinished manuscript quickly became anachronistic and I even hesitated to publish it. The Qu'ran on an interpretation of the latest stage in commodity fetishism, "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods...at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to art will innovation and experimentation.

The task of the left in India/Pakistan is not just political or economical. It must be first and foremost psychological and social, it must start offering alternatives in practice and theory sound of poems, to what is clearly the most insidious impediment to collective action - the fragmentation and atomization of society. While the left in India/Pakistan at least recognizes the need to be more democratic in social patterns, and inclusive...it needs to re-create the basis for social cohesion.