"Thanatotic corporatismî
In these times the death trap of commodity culture finds release in an awakened religious impulse. Phil Rockstroh explores the political and spiritual economy of ìThanatotic corporatismî in ìLove, Work, And Death In An Age Of Carelessness.î
With reference to The Great Gatsby, Rockstroh points out how corporate interests manage to cage human instincts and longing. HereÃÂs a taste:
ìCommodification is a cage: it distorts the human animal's instinctual longing for love, communal acceptance, and freedom by proffering commercial facsimiles of such things -- but instead delivers the human animal to economic imprisonment. The bars of the cage might be invisible -- yet the sense of confinement is palpable across our corporatized culture, where, like convicts in the cell, longing for release, Christian fundies long for the eternal theme park of JesusLand, while neocons long for "Greater Israel," while consumers, confined in their work stations and cubicles, long for vacations, real estate, porn, and appliances, while George W. Bush longs for his own idealized reflection -- all are like Gatsby, longing for rapprochement with Daisy -- an event he believed would engender the reemergence of the person he had been while in her presence before the exigencies of capitalism left him corrupt and love-lack -- but beneath it all, like deluded Gatsby, the imprisoned populace of the consumer state, their souls shriveled by self-enclosure and doomed by the corrupt choices they have made to literalize their longings, lies the hidden desire for the release that comes with death.î
While Rockstroh claims the American empire is dying, he points sensibly to our instinctual relationship with the life force of natureÃÂs elements, along with the human tragedy that ensues from estrangement.
Thus Rockstroh:
ìIn a similar vein, we are dependant on air, water, and soil. Tragically, far too many of us have been tricked into believing they are dependant on Wal*Mart, McDonnell Douglas, Time-Warner, Big Pharma, and the like -- but these corporate monstrosities, these mindless aberrations sprung from our instinctual drives for acceptance, community, and security, now grown grotesque and toxic by unrestrained capitalism -- simply use us, and objectify us, and degrade us, by always taking more (increasingly more, obscenely more...) than they give back...They care nothing for us -- and we owe them nothing.î
Rockstroh marks several themes about consumption and sustainability that are relevant to the lives and times of those participating in the Lakewood Observer.
Our choices and our efforts to break open a civic, natural space of community that is free from 24/7 corporate impositions, which paradoxically compel an apocalyptic embrace of religious dogma can be said, nonetheless, to occur in the moral terrain of the soul.
ìThis is the choice our times have given us: our soul's suffocation within the self-constructed prison cells of the commodified self or the passion-agitated air created by the ceaseless need to struggle against exploitation.î
For more see:
http://www.swans.com/library/art11/procks47.html
Kenneth Warren
