We've Made a Fetish out of our 'Stuff'

So I read this book....and I want to talk about it. It's called The Code of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society, by Sut Jhally. It covers the basics of Marxism, and its relations to products, and the labor force.

Jhally makes it apparent we don't know about our products. Questions concerning the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of any goods today are frivolous in our climate of advanced capitalism. Who's hands touched this? What were the working conditions like? How much did he/she get paid for it? Was it a child? We are alienated from these worthy questions.

Indifference to the inherent foundation of our goods has led to a mind-blowing phenomenon called commodity fetishism. “Commodity fetishism is seen when an excessive proportion of individual activities are channeled through the market so that the commercialized sector of our lives is unduly large.”

I’ve never had to think twice about the concept of “surplus-value” or profit. Jhally explains there is an exchange of equals in the workforce, worker’s labor for worker’s wage. Although, with this basis, how is profit possible? The shocking, yet not so shocking, fact that workers are producing more value with their labor than their own labor is worth, has bled into the political economics of broadcast media.

Cable networks sell audience-viewing time to advertisers for more money than I can sit comfortably with. The cliffhanger rests in how much are we, as an audience, worth? Networks fill the empty time they own by buying the watching power of the audience, or the capacity to watch. Advertisers buy our watching power (consciousness) from networks for more than what was originally paid, thus valorizing (establish and maintain the price of a commodity by governmental action) our consciousness. We're actually working when we watch TV.

We are paying the networks through our own consciousness. That's irritating. Think you get out of it with new technology like TiVo and Fios? Nope. The cyclical motion of us working in a non-media environment to pay for those commodities validates us right back where we started. Our money, our time, and our mind is handed over to broadcasting networks whether we like it or not.

So why? Why do we even watch TV? Studies show it's addictive, that we don't even really like it, that we feel guilty when we admit just how much we actually watch. Interesting...

Now, I’ve never been convinced of anything extremely negative about the realm of advertising. Although, it only took the first few points of The Code of Advertising to significantly make me question my sense of security.

Jhally’s impressively unbiased view of his observations initially made me assume he was a critique of advertisement. His illustration of Marxism unveiled worker suffrage that seemingly has no signs of improvement. We’re under the mercy of advertisement. His comeback to the defense of advertisement was that it doesn’t offer a reality that isn’t there; rather it reflects aspects of our social life that can be taken interpretively. This isn’t an outlandish concept, although it’s not exactly....soothing. Perhaps it is not advertising I should scapegoat, instead, the industry is merely trying to survive in the world of capitalism. Ultimately, my scope has been broadly widened.