We are the palimpsestuous.
We leave recognizable traces when we erase or conceal, allowing intentions and the spectacle to slip through.
We overwrite the overwritten, undermine our best interests, efface every symbol, and negotiate with the spectacle, but to no avail.
“The consumer is actually trapped between freedom and immobility, because although we are given the privilege of movement, freedom of movement is a fiction; we move according to the logic of consumer society, and through our movement we are transformed into an object of the gaze, subtly woven into the capitalist system.”1
Our freedom has become our boredom and it becomes filled with fetishism, fanaticism, fear, etc.
“Commodity has completed its colonization of social life – commodities are now all there is to see.” 2
“Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life.” 3
We resist, but our supports from above are severed and our foundations below are extracted. We are left suspended, and asphyxiated by, the residuum that coagulates within the transparent bounds of our consumer incarceration - tethered to the spectacle by codification. The Universal Product Code “is the mechanism by which the virtual establishes its logic in the real.” 4
So, the “Century of the Self” has exceeded the expectations of its designers “for the present age, which prefers the sign to thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence ... the illusion only is sacred, truth profane.” 5
The topos persists and we are overwritten while we overwrite.
1. Walking into and out of the spectacle: China's earliest film scene. -- Laikwan Pang
2. The society of the Spectacle – Guy Debord
3. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping – Rem Koolhaas, et al.
4. Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places
5. Preface to the second edition of the Essence of Christianity – Feuerbach