pieto\the\media\ecologist

Is it possible, within capitalism, to have social sciences that are not at the same time social sciences of surveillance tied to strategies of control and desire? Is it possible to have forms of inquiry that recognize autonomous subjects of communication and not objects of manipulation?  This attention to the minutia of everyday consumption objectifies individuals by transforming consumption into an act of stylized repetition. Consumption is no longer a concrete act performed by an individual outside of the boundaries of pure and total exchange; rather it is the highly routinized act of a subject who has been interpellated in the ideologies of mass and niche consumption. We have been objectified by the society of consumption’s edicts to consume on the system’s terms; it is the objectification of our desires within the strange process by which the desires we have are the desires discovered by market research to enable the system to create the desires it needs us to have.  The mysterious conjuring by which the objects offered are at the same time the ones we want.