Ways of Not Seeing

I must quote parts of this article of Mark Kingwell:

"John Kenneth Galbraith noted that “no one has really read very much social science if he hasn’t read The Theory of the Leisure Class at least once,” adding, “The book yields its meaning, and therewith its full enjoyment, only to those who also have leisure.” Veblen himself, in the last sections of the book, indicts the tenured ease of academic life as one of the clearest examples of conspicuous waste, and Pierre Bourdieu’s great work on social distinction concludes its survey of taste as a class-based exercise with a keen sense of how intellectual and cultural capital underwrite each other."

"We are fetched by a beautiful thing, as we are by beauty in general, because of the “promise of happiness” it holds out. Sudjic’s desirable things go on repeating that promise, day after day; although the promise may be bogus, the seeking itself is not, and that’s why it is never just about position—Veblen’s reductionism is too extreme. But that’s also why we go on believing the promises even though we know they’re empty, even when we realize that consumer goods reliably generate the unhappiness of restless aspiration. It’s the language of the soul we should be parsing, not the language of things, our shared entrapment in the caverns of human desire. This project of psychic spelunking is as old as Plato and as fresh as last week’s clearance sale."

"There is of course no guarantee that introspection, any more than strolling the mall, will prompt political change. For that we would need luxury taxes, limits to cheap borrowing, and other structural curbs on competitive consumption. Nor will consideration of our own place in the consumer economy necessarily lead to changes in what we value: this is theory, not therapy. Meanwhile, various inventive cultural escape hatches—hi-lo cultural slumming, the dandyism
of camp—seem jejune if not flatly contradictory. There is nothing outside the system, and attempts at escape are always just higher-order versions of distinction. You can’t win, and you can’t stop playing."

"Here’s some advice: stop worrying about it. The point of analyzing desire is neither victory nor freedom; it is, instead, to indicate an alternative scale of value, according to which idleness and play—the everyday gift of cultural détournement—are cherished as the most divine, because least encumbered, dimensions of human life. If we could see that, maybe the closed promises of consumption would give way to the open invitation of thought itself."