Commodity and Self

Despite Plato’s admonitions, we’re not a people keen on self-examination. We’re much more interested in the self-as-commodity: selling our high-concept idealizations of who we think we are to others and becoming frustrated when those we deal with don’t live up to the high-concept idealizations of who they think they are we’ve bought. So we should no feel too bad about being objectified, as commodification is the apotheosis of objectification. We can be physically admired, after all, and still be loved, but we can’t be commodified without being objectified. This comes not just in the form of selling Doritos or Mercury Mariners or Michelob Light with sex but by selling whole lifestyles by association with these products, or, on the other side of the transaction (and with a more Marxian bent), selling selves as sets of skills.

Human interaction in the global economy, then, is primarily a monetary affair, governed not by actual relationships but by how we can afford to live, to whom we can sell our objectified selves, and what sort or lifestyle we’ve bought ourselves into.

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