It is snowing and I am in Oxford Street, yes, I am a purchaser. I am here to buy a computer for the kids, deigning it to be a necessary tool to speed up their education - having long ago given up on teachers.
God I have never see so many people of so many hues and sizes. There is not enough room on the pavements. I feel I am entangled in some delirium of consumption.
There is something invisible driving us all. What is this thing? It is omnipresent, yet unreal, yet it would seem we have all surrendered to its ideology. All these people! our submission to this omnipresent thing seems alarmingly universal. What are we talking about here is the ‘Market’ - in some totalising views a means to understanding all human behaviour. Ok I have an image of this thing (the Market) but it is destined to remain as such. You can’t touch it, breathe it, so what is real about it? What is real about it, is its very unreality. What is real about this invisible thing that drapes over us and worms its way into us all, is its ‘realisability’.
I continue up Oxford Street,
“Excuse me”,
“No need to push”.
Well at least these people are exercising their freedom to do their Christmas shopping. But you just know that the market rarely has anything to do with choices or freedoms. And you just know all those choices are determined for us in advance, whether it be cars, toys or TV programmes. Of course we select among these ‘things’ but we can scarcely be said to have a choice in choosing any of them.
“Please don’t push.”
“Will you move yourself? I want to get in there.”
“Where?"
“That shop.”
“No need to be rude.”
“Oh go take a running f***ing leap.”
“Rude bastard. I hope all the bargains have gone.”
We are like commodity junkies, it is purchase lust at full pelt; like stupefied rats on a hedonistic treadmill. Get me out of here.
But I push and struggle on, look at us all, we are on all fours to the bloody ‘thing’. Human freedom, indeed. We are all guided by the invisible hand of the Market It is our white stick. But why are so many of us seduced? Because the market is ‘sexy’, members of its family, entrepreneurship, mergers, bonuses, merchant banking, house prices and shopping are deemed alluring. And who made that so? The Market and how it 'advertised' itself. Can any of us take action, do something, anything, about this cloying commercial ‘thing’ that we are swathed in?
I think of those demonstrators at the G8 (the world's eight largest industrial market economies who meet annually to discuss political and economic issues of mutual concern). But you just intuitivly know that opposition to the market merely ending up re-constituting the system because the market has already constituted the opposition. Talk about the serpent eating its own tail, it is that circular. We just can't go back in some infinite regress and undo the market. For it I would seem that our independence and integrity do not exist in opposition to the marketplace but are produced by and contained within it.
It is as if by some prescient miracle the Market 'sussed' out the opposition and came up with some goods to accommodate it.
“Don’t want anything to do with the status quo? I fully understand, Sir. How about this uniform? (expensive) distressed jeans; and could I interest you in this, Sir, leather jackets (which cost a pretty penny) and here we have some pork pie hats which have been marked down, and just down the street Madam, bottled water, and then there is a shop there that sells flares and there is a fast food outlet just along there in case you tire during the demo’which if I might say so, Sir, I have every sympathy with it.”
The extraordinary unifying and systemising power of late capitalism, which is so omnipresent as to be invisible inveigles us all and is as deadly as radiation
But let’s leave all that aside for I am determined to buy this bloody computer for my children. So, what’s wrong with that? But I am still struggling through this throng, a pedestrian nightmare where everyone has the same idea. God damn it, the market has cannibalised us all
“Excuse me, do you mind?”
“Bloody shoving into me.”
At last, made it to the shop, now I am going up the escalator. I look at the other shoppers they seem very pleased with themselves now that they are in the Cathedral. Still, I suppose you have to accept it, even though we are on all fours to it, the ‘Market’ will see to us and keep us in line. All we need to do is keep it clean and well oiled. Anyway one good thing, in our secular society it has become a consoling replacement for divinity.
.
“How much? Really!”
“Would you just like to put your card in there, Sir.”
Article by Bosco Redmond.
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