PATH / Capitalism / Technology / Death Denial

The PATH always feels a bit like the belly of the beast, like stepping down the stairs from the GO platform, I am stepping into the depths of Molach! And there is certainly something very gastric about the network of paths, or at least intestinal. An intestinal network below the hard concrete skin of the city, oozing with commerce, gushing with work, production, distribution, desire, envy, and consumption. These underground canals run with the shame and envy that drips from covetous brows. High heels click on terrazzo tile. Grown-up boys in black suits gaffaw, ridicule one another, and slink their greedy eyes at the short skirts that oscillate past them. This is not a place of dignity. Pride, yes, not dignity. But it’s that weak sort of pride entangled with narcissism, greed, and insecurity. This is a canal system built to channel the worst of what we are.

Across from me are two luggage stores. They are right next to one another, vying for our buying but selling two very different products – one high class stuff, the other very cheap and brightly coloured. A sign in one store declares “buy one get one 50% off”, the other, as if in desperate response, has a sign that says, “buy one get one ½ price!” This is pretty standard fare but the assumption is that if I know I’m getting a good deal, I will transcend my functional requirements in order to purchase a second piece of luggage. Oh come on! If I want one piece of luggage, I’ll buy one piece of luggage. But I’m sure it works, thus moving product, making room for more production, and lubricating the economy. Make more things! Sell more things! Keep the system going! The story is as old as it is revolting – in order for the division of labour that we have created to be effective, we need to keep producing luggage. We can’t just shut down the luggage factories once every person has a suitcase. We need people to keep buying things, an industrialized consumption to pair the industrialized production.

Fashion thus serves a very clear economic purpose. Desire and envy, covetousness and greed are manipulated and used in order to create the shifting mosaic of trends which keeps us buying more things. A belief in progress too drives this. If stuff is constantly getting ‘better’, then we are driven to keep buying the better stuff – if it doesn’t become untrendy, it soon be technically outdated, if it doesn’t fall apart first. One proposal to counteract this is to put the expired, “untrendy” back into the factory at the beginning of the cycle– thus the economic machine that we have created could in fact run perpetually and we would minimize the impact on the environment. There’s a good, if cynical, logic in that. But frankly I wonder to myself why we can’t just go in the opposite direction entirely and say, “when everyone has a good, strong suitcase, we will stop making more fucking suitcases!”?

What exactly is wrong with aiming for stasis damn it? But then again, maybe the perpetual production of new suitcases is kind of like aiming for stasis. Maybe the longing for a self-perpetuating economic system is in fact a denial of mortality. If everyone had a suitcase, for instance, it would open up the possibility of doing something entirely new. Perpetual suitcase manufacturing is a bit like navel-gazing – and very similar to pushing a rock up a hill only to find that the rock falls down every time! It’s running on a treadmill. Is the perpetuation of the suitcase making cycle because we can only think of slight variations on a theme? Or is it maybe a way of focusing on the present in order to forget our inevitable mortality? Are fashion, and, dare I say progress, distractions?

All this silliness with flash and technology, shifting trends that keep us racing around like greyhounds after a mechanical rabbit, is it only part of a big complicated device to ignore death? Technology indeed, very prone to quick changes in fashion, seems especially designed to break us free of death. Not only does it keep us focused on the small and the immediate, it also seeks to free us of our borders, to extend our will outwards into the world.

These people, rushing through, frantically typing into their Blackberrys, miles away from the people immediately around them, do they often think about death? Is this infinite world, with its crushing unanswerable questions and its immense depths of passion and misery, is it real to them?