Las Indias in English

A single word defines neoliberalism’s most traditional method: Reification. By way of extreme and fundamentalist reification, neoliberalism makes everything, absolutely everything, even human relations, into salable commodities.

Even beyond that, in the other direction — at the fringe end of paraphilia— it turns physical objects into something capable of being loved. The most dehumanized case possible is when that love/admiration is dedicated to abstract constructs like a capitalist 1.0 corporation. (“I love Apple!”) This is the expression of its pathos, ethos and logos distilled into a reductionist aesthetic through consumer objects.

Upon returning to Apple after he was famously expelled from the company he founded, Steve Jobs explained to his employees what the main problem Apple had to solve was.

Jobs said:

It’s the products. The products suck! There is no SEX in them anymore.

It should be noted that Jobs never said that the functionality of the products was inappropriate; his central concern was form. This reductionist aesthetic is no accident and is not a simple aesthetic minimalism. Somehow, it manages to cross the “uncanny valley” to achieve its ends, and by doing so, almost inadvertently subverts a whole set of human values.

This subversion of Objectum Sexualis goes together like two sides of a coin with the other dehumanizing half of neoliberalism’s reification.

For Apple (like for Margaret Thatcher), human groups don’t exist; there are only individuals, ideally in a private monologue and transaction with their god.

Ideally: objects, gears in the grand machine of corporatism. The Apple-Objectum subverts just like reification, but in the opposite direction.

Isn’t it true that this is related to the ancient sin of idolatry? The cult of the object and the impossibility of consummating one’s love for it.

Thingified humans, humanized things: two halves of the neoliberal method

A second term for Obama, a public vandalized by his administration, and all the same promises unkept… and the other half: a new Macintosh model, iPhone, etc.

If neoliberalism could consummate its neurotic love, it would amount to encompassing any and all needs met… it would be the end of unrequited love transactions: the end of rent-seeking… and that cannot be permitted in hegemonic orthodoxy, because the marriage of neoliberalism and capitalism 1.0 does not allow for it.

This is useful to understand that it’s not just the more typically reifying half of traditional neoliberalism that we’re going to come up against on the long road towards Capitalism 2.0.

Many others who follow the teachings of the book of Jobs to the letter will also show up in due time.

References

• Georg Lukacs, The Phenomenon of Reification
• John Zerzan, Esas Cosas Que Hacemos
• John Holloway, Change The World Without Taking Power. The Meaning of Revolution Today (+ Wikipedia)
• Objectum Sexuality (+ Wikipedia)
• When relationships with inanimate objects become intimate
• Leander Kahney, Inside Steve’s Brain