Jordy: Obsolescence and Desire

Obsolescence and Desire: Fashion and Commodity Form
Gail Faurschou

I had a difficult time comprehending this article. The topic of the introduction was easy enough to comprehend. It concerned the late capitalist economy and cultural repercussions. The late capitalist economy is based on commodity, which requires the consumption of objects. Fashion was proposed as the exceeding example for the consumption of a commodity because it continuously reinvents itself by recycling styles from the past. After the introduction the text became extremely difficult to read because it used abstract terminology without explanations or elaborations. For instance in the statement, “the death of the symbol is the precondition for its birth as a sign commodity”, what is a sign commodity? How does a symbol die? Why must a symbol die in order for sign commodity to be born? Why can’t they co-exist?


“The spectacle, grasped in its totality, is both the result and the prospect of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration.”

I do not understand this quote. The spectacle as a result from modes of production is easy to understand, but what does the additional decoration have to do with the spectacle?
Are they saying that the spectacle is part of the real world? Or are they saying that spectacles are added decoration? And in either case what is the relevance if it is decoration or not?

Postmodernity: is understood as a new phase of intensification and re-organization of late capitalism such that production, having surpassed its earlier rationale of satisfying the needs of a modernizing society, is now compelled to drive consumption to new extremes of insatiability”

Postmodernity is in its purest stage: fashion is the dominant expression

Fashion does this by transforming the “object” of consumption and intensifies the outmoded of the object’s value.

“Postmodernism is the dead world of objects become fashion-conscious”

Symbols and Signs: What does it mean to say that fashion parades objects as a reification of what they once were, or a simulation of what they imagines themselves to be?

Fashion: birth, death, spectacular resurrection

Objects:
- More than utility
- Give meaning
- Destroy

“Marx: all value is social and objects acquire it on the basis of the relations through which we exchange them”

“Exchange them”: symbolic or commodity

Commodity:
- Mediated through the market
- Exchange value: equivalent units of socially necessary labor time
- Does not allow for a symbolic investment or the generation of meaning

Late capitalism: renders obsolete any explanation of consumption

I am unclear on the differences between symbolism and commodity.

The Paradox of Value in the circuit of consumption: “Symbolic” consumption: How does it take place? Continuously generate? Intensify?

“The death of the symbol is the precondition for its birth as a sign commodity”

Why can’t the sign commodity exist before a symbol? Why can’t they coexist?

“… Objects are (not) mechanically substituted for an absent relation, to fill a void, no: they describe the void, the locus of the relation, in a development which is actually a way of not experiencing it, while always referring to the possibilities of experience”

I am not sure what the discussion of is about here? How does an object describe a void? What is the void? What is they importance of the experience? Is it the experience of creating an object or the consumption or the destruction of it?

Consumption: “a collective and active behaviour, a constraint, a morality, and an institution. It is a complete system of values.”