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Fictions Commodity Culture

Christopher Lindner’s Fictions of Commodity Culture

Intro

• Gaskell’s industrial novels, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Trollope’s Eustace Diamonds, Conrad’s Secret Agent, and De Lillo?’s White Noise
• “how the commodity, as capitalism’s representational agent, created and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth century, and how that culture, still with us today, has persisted and evolved since then.”
  • “Commodity’s colonization of the social imagination”
  • how terribly unspecific
  • Method: “pairing off key moments in the development of commodity culture with representational texts” (stupid superstructure model)
    • this is so so wrong: history is not a stable base from which a text begins its “representation,” but instead a crazy mixture of residual, dominant, and emergent material structures, cultures, practices, and discourses that the book is itself a part of. The way the book artificially constructs its own reality, and then therefore has something to comment on, isn’t a representation of reality but instead again part of the social process that constitutes historical movement.
    • and he’s silly b/c he thinks just White Noise will help him talk about everything past his last example, 1907’s The Secret Agent! and even crosses the ocean. (and then he pairs off each 19th c work with a 20th c: Gaskell with Trainspotting, Secret Agent with punk…this is an erasure of history)
• Thesis: it actually gets no further than the Culture Industry…geez: “commodity figures throughout the fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a living object of consumer fetish that excites desires yet strangely denies satisfaction”
  • Wow, you clearly haven’t read anything. Zizek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology: the object always exceeds you, it’s why you desire
  • This doesn’t deserve my attention except insofar as to show why anyone wanting to talk about consumer culture should have an understanding of Marxism. God. Insipid.