Homo Consumens

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Homo Consumens by Nikos Vrantsis “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Oscar Wilde, the Picture of Dorian Gray A spoonful of sugar is an amount, a light weight, and not an object per se. The book, however, is a separate, integrated object reproduced on a massive scale. A spoonful of sugar is followed by another. Each book has its own self-sufficiency. Anderson Benedict, Imagined Communities

In traditional liberal thought commerce and consumption are two dimensions of a revolutionary practice and are considered to establish a peaceful and mutually beneficial relationship among individuals.i I quote Constant: “War and commerce are only two different means of achieving the same end that of getting what one wants. Commerce is simply a tribute paid to the strength of the possessor by the aspirant to possession. It is an attempt to conquer, by mutual agreement, what one can no longer hope to obtain through violence……..War is all impulse, commerce, calculation. Hence it follows that an age must come in which commerce replaces war. We have reached this age.” (Constant, 2000:40) Consumption is considered to be the part of a complicated relation of work, production, trade, exchange and acquisitions that shaped modernity and transformed the world. However this whole structure of relations has deepened and widened in monstrous scales, gradually transforming the very essence of these practices. Human participation in the production process was diminished and labor was transformed into small interventions in or designing of the moves of machines. The structure of relation was broken.ii The network broke up. iii Fabrication was gradually absorbed by mass consumption, whilst society was transformed into a mass society that needed to be fed, biologically and mentally. It seems like the ultimate purpose of this mass society was/is to consume unstoppably huge amounts of material and immaterial products. I quote Hannah Arendt: “Perhaps the chief difference between society and mass society is that society wanted culture, evaluated and devaluated cultural things into social commodities, used and abused them for its own selfish purposes, but did not "consume" them. (….) Mass society, on the contrary, wants no culture but entertainment, and the wares offered by the entertainment industry are indeed consumed by society just like any other consumer goods.” (Arendt, 1961:205) According to Arendt, in mass society, beauty, identity, origins are insignificant in front of this insatiable desire for consumption and entertainment. In the mind of the consumer, the product is disconnected with the process of its production. One does not care about the memory saved in a product, the energy spent for its designing and production of this product. Consumption, as an act of remembrance, participation and honor towards human constructive skills, is lost. Relation is established among owners of the same product, worshipers of the same “selfcontained subject” and not among participators in the genealogy of the product. Arendt has highlighted the difference between these two types of relation:

2 “The extent to which we use these standards (freshness and novelty) today to judge cultural and artistic objects as well, things which are supposed to remain in the world even after we have left them, clearly indicates the extent to which the need for entertainment has begun to threaten the cultural world.” (Arendt, 1961: 206) According to Arendt, the “democratization” of consumption and the gargantuan appetite for entertainment are shattering the very balance and character of the social capitaliv, affecting our history, our tradition, our relation. This huge demand for new products does not leave even those elements and objects that define our culture, our social links and even more our political “ethos” intact. Arendt, who was the observer of this very transformation, reflects upon this loss: “In this predicament those who produce for the mass media ransack the entire range of past and present culture in hope of finding suitable material. This material, moreover, cannot be offered as it is; it must be altered in order to become entertaining, it must be prepared to be easily consumed.” (Arendt, 1961:206) One’s connection with a society’s past weakens, the schism between past and present grows and the rituals of relation are transformed into acts of individual, existential confirmation. Memory is lost. The product has no history· only a present and an ephemeral future that instantly evaporates, leaving no trace· only the desire for the next ephemeral product· it is a spoonful of sugar that follows another and then another, in a perpetual succession that sustains the practice of consumerism. Indeed consumerism seems to be the –ism that won. But how can we explain this indisputable domination? I quote Stavrakakis, who has for long been involved in the dialogue upon consumerism: “Moving beyond the banal level of raw coercion, which –although not unimportantcannot form the basis of sustainable hegemony, everyone seeking to understand how certain power structures institute themselves as objects of long-term identification and how people get attached to them is sooner or later led to a variety of phenomena associated with what, since de la Boitie, is debated under the rubric of “voluntary servitude” (Stavrakakis, 2010: 64) According to Stavrakakis, one should look beyond raw coercion, into the manipulation of desire. In order to find the roots of this phenomenon, he highlights the transformation of the spirit of capitalism. According to him, initially, in order capitalism to be enforced, the dominant spirit of ascetic prohibition against thoughtless prodigality had to be cultivated among individuals: accumulation for the sake of accumulation, labor for the sake of labor· the secular version of Protestantism – to put it in Weberian terms. The mass production era, though, allowed and signified the transition in another dominant spirit. It was the transition from ascetic prohibition to the spirit of commanded enjoyment: “In societies of commanded enjoyment, enjoyment makes sense predominantly as a duty: duty is transformed into a duty to enjoy, which is precisely the commandment of the superego.” (Stavrakakis, 2012:12) But how has this domination of the spirit of commanded enjoyment established its hegemony? Stavrakakis and a group of researches, who draw their arguments from a psychoanalytical - Lacanian background, pose an elegant argument for explaining the forceful consumerism spirit, using the notions of desire and enjoyment (jouissance), the

3 notion of libidinal attachment in the consumptive act: “The emerging hegemony of consumerism cannot be explained without taking the axes of desire and enjoyment seriously.” (Stavrakakis, 2007: 228) According to Stavrakakis, consumerism is linked with advertisement and public relations that manipulate – not create but manipulate the already existent– human desire, promising a jouissance, a completion, signified by the capture of a specific product. Advertisers promise the fulfillment of a psychic emptiness, the completion of a lack - which Lacanians claim that is constitutive both of the individual and the social levelv· advertisements persuade us that the feeling of lack is due to the lack of a specific product. However, despite the fact that every product we acquire signifies a failure to complete our lack and to satisfy our thirst, this failure does not destroy our attachment to consumerist practices. On the opposite, it reinforces it. I further quote Stavrakakis: “The aim of fantasy is not to satisfy desire, something that is ultimately impossible. It is enough to construct it and support it as such: through fantasy, we ‘learn’ how to desire. As far as the final satisfaction of our desire is concerned, this is postponed from discourse to discourse, from fantasy to fantasy, from product to product.” (Stavrakakis, 2007: 241) According to Stavrakakis, advertisement stimulates desire and manages our shortage. It is not doing anything fake. It manages our real need to desire and channels this desire into objects and products. It encapsulates our desire providing and spreading a certain way to desire, forcing us to hunt pleasure trapped in a vicious circle of lonely research. However, this obsessive consumerism may boost and preserve loneliness. As human action and desire seem to be gathered on the side of mass consumption of machine made productsvi, consumption may transform into a private self-referred practice that begins and ends to the individual, unable to establish nothing but a weak social bond. One’s free time and space seem to transform one’s power of fabrication into passive accumulation and consumption, which is a different, retardant channeling of human energy, that is not any more creating and transforming material, post material and institutional objects, but consuming and participating in self-referred practices of isolation. I quote: “While consumerism seems to broaden our opportunities, choices, and experiences as individuals, it also directs us towards predetermined channels of behavior and, thus, it “is ultimately as constraining as it is enabling.” (Steve Miles from Stavrakakis, 2011) In an amusing article written on the Guardian, by Stuart Jeffries, the journalist points out the decision of Tesco’s chief executive Dave Lewis to reduce the choices previously provided in Tesco’s clients. I quote Jeffries: “What Lewis is doing to Tesco is revolutionary. Not just because he recognizes that customers are time constrained, but because he realizes that increased choice can be bad for you and, worse, result in losses that upset his shareholders.vii(….) But the idea that choice is bad for us flies in the face of what we’ve been told for decades. The standard line is that choice is good for us, that it confers on us freedom, personal responsibility, self-determination, autonomy and lots of other things that don’t help when you’re standing before a towering aisle of water bottles, paralysed and increasingly dehydrated, unable to choose.” According to Jeffries consumers feel lost in a huge playground with the innumerous toys and they stand paralyzed, incapable to decide where to start from· realizing that nightmare Tesco’s

4 “revolutionary” manager decided to relieve them of that burden. I suggest that Jeffries humorous reflections on Tesco’s decision should be taken into serious consideration. Indeed, it looks reasonable that, in this post-consumerism era one lacks the ability to choose to refuse in fear of being marginalized and turned into outcast. In a world where each second ten more different options arise, one stands paralyzed and incapable of choosing and when one chooses one instantly fills regret in sight of all those things he rejected. However, what is more important is the possible oblivion that this abundance may generate. One being totally attached to the habitus of extreme, perpetual consumption of images, products, information may turn him incapable to attach to anything else. Even culture could now be commoditized in this enormous and perpetual vicious circle of entertainment. I quote Arendt: “Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life. An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality, which is the quality that makes it disappear again from the phenomenal world by being used and used up. The great user and consumer of objects is life itself, the life of the individual and the life of society as a whole. Life is indifferent to the thingness of an object;” (Arendt, 1961: 208) The result of this mass consumption may be the destruction of durance and the violation of the dots of tradition that can be used as secure lighthouses for refinding society. Oblivion may gain space together with the rising gargantuan appetite of consumerism. This impact consumerism may have upon relation, social bonds and, thus, a society’s democratic ethos is what I think one should reflect upon. I am coming back to Foucault and his reflection upon modernity and “baudelairism”: “Being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting the perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult attitude consists of recapturing something eternal that is neither beyond the present instant nor behind it, but within it.” (Foucault, 1984) Lost in the neon-lightened corridors of the supermarket or in the secret paths of the web, one’s desires and lifetime seem to be absorbed in actions that deepen instability, loneliness and worthlessness, which one is trying to overcome through the only acts one is aware of: consumption. One may say that despite the fact that “New Babylon’s” preconditions are fulfilled the man of the “New Babylon” is not what Constant Nieuwenhuys expected. The utilitarian society is not transforming into a “ludic” society, and homo laborans is not turning into a homo ludensviii but into a homo consumens.ix Another Constant, Benjamen this time, foresaw the possible implications this could have: “The danger of modern liberty is that, absorbed as we are in the enjoyment of our private independence and the pursuit of our particular interests, we should surrender our right to share in political power too easily. The holders of authority are only too anxious to encourage us to do so.” (Constant, 2000: 60) Whilst Constant argued in order to find a balance between individual freedom and political praxis by protecting commerce and every other notion of freedom against political absolutism, one could claim that it is now the excesses of the free market that violate the expected equilibrium, isolate individuals through repetitive isolated motions. And it does so,

5 in a much nuanced way, through manipulating desire and calling us to fall into its sweet arms: “The command that we enjoy is nothing but an advanced, much more nuanced—and much more difficult to resist— form of power. It is more effective than the traditional model not because it is less constraining or less binding but because its violent, exclusionary aspect is masked by its fantasmatic vow to enhance enjoyment, and by its productive, enabling facade: it does not oppose and prohibit but openly attempts to embrace and appropriate the subject of enjoyment.” (Stavrakakis, 2012:13) But what could be the consequences of this consumerist utopia upon traditional democratic institutions? In the first chapter, I tried to relate the feeling of futility with the ineffectiveness of political voice. I described consensus between previously opposing parties that marginalize their ideological differences or maintain them symbolically and neutralize the traditional political arena that seems too weak to be radical and to offer alternatives. I, also, mentioned how the social link is suffering from the contemporary developments, as if a centrifugal force keeps the members of this society away from one another and how the rising force of the free market may be a cause of a cul-de-sac. This force though, cannot be examined as raw coercion. It is not just based on the pressure that MNCs can put upon a state – brandishing their option to exit any time in more profitable markets – but is also linked with the transformation of the way individuals, as owners and consumers, identify themselves and form their desires and bonds. One may claim that we are trapped in a paradox. We, as citizens, may be asking for a political alternative to enforce our voices and simultaneously we, as individuals, make it impossible for this alternative to take shape. But is it possible that the content of what our voice is asking for may be the reason of our voice’s ineffectiveness? As Stavrakakis puts it: “Consumer culture imposes its rules on politics and other social realms and shapes the dominant forms the social bond is assuming.” (Stavrakakis, 2007: 230) I have highlighted the importance of voice. But one should examine voice as a political capital that asks for something and thus is judged as effective or ineffective in relation with its power to achieve its demands. If the latter is true though, one should ask what is that one truly asks for. In the words of Kojève: “…..anthropogenetic Desire is different from animal Desire (…) in that it is directed, not toward a real, ‘positive’, given object, but toward another Desire. (…) Desire directed toward a natural object is human only to the extent that it is ‘mediated’ by the Desire of another directed toward the same object: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal or the enemy’s flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires; human history is the history of desired Desires.” (Kojève from Stavrakakis, 244: 6) If Kojeve’s idea is right one may assume that our demands are predominated by a conscious or subliminal demand to be able to obtain what the others want to obtain too and what guarantees our pleasure is that we desire ideas, images, objects that draw their value from other people’s desire. Furthermore one may exclude that as consumerism constructs and channels our desire, it transforms the root of our social bond and, furthermore, the very essence of what we ask for, not only as individuals but as citizens too. We can thus speak about a democratic paradox imposed by our conflicting desires. If we desire a true, radical, political alternative that can enforce our democratic confidence, we jeopardize the exodus of

6 the free market forces and our right to desire other people’s mainstream desire in a transparent and well-connected world of never-endingly displayed desires. Here I quote Thomas Friedman: “Governments that want to avoid globalization should not only prove that their alternatives can secure high quality of life, but – and this is crucial- must succeed in an environment where everyone is informed about the way that other people live.” x (Friedman, 1999: 117) Thus, I suggest that the weakness of traditional political institutions should be examined not only as the outcome of the lost equilibrium between exit and voice. It is not only the possibility of the impoverishment as the outcome of the isolation of a state· it is the loss of the dominant identity and promise of pleasure of a state’s citizens that this impoverishment entails. These two prerequisites together enforce the “TINA” dogma. xi Thus, it may not be enough anymore, to ask for a more effective voice.xii One should hear the demands of this voice. But how can this equation be solved? According Lane and his research on the relation between consumption and loneliness, isolation of the western phenotype, the identity expressed as an obsession to consume and the weakness of the nation-states institutions, are connected with a debilitation of the values of the social link. I quote: “If the market has a destructive influence on friendship (and I now think it does), it must be through elevating instrumentalist and materialist values over social values, by eroding communities and neighborhoods (…..)The tentative hypothesis in this section is that there has been a shift from collective to individual consumption, with a consequent loss of social interaction.” (Lane, 1994:540) According to Lane, human loneliness lies at the bottom of these phenomena. Consumerism could be seen both as a cause and a symptom of loneliness· it may be a research for balance that deepens imbalance· a practice of oblivion in which one is lost. Thus, advertisements may not just manipulating desire-in-general, but the desire one has to be back in social life, to be important and baptized in the waters of self- significance: “We buy advertising messages, which promise happiness, fun, popularity, and love”. (Andersen from Stavrakakis, 2007: 239) However I would like to reflect upon suggestions made mainly by mainly leftist groups that try to solve the consumerism equation, with their “rational” arguments, ignoring the factor of desire - signified by Stavrakakis.xiii Despite their astute analysis on the extreme form of practices that establish isolation they tend to denounce the practice itself. xivAmitai Etzioni, for example, an important scholar of the Communitarian movement, influenced by ideas drawn from the traditional German community spirit, defends that the tension between personal privacy and the common good should be diminished through a limitation on the importance of individualism. One cannot but agree that we live in years of radical individualism and that consumption cannot impose its absolute domain in society without destroying other social links. Indeed today we may be dealing with a mass society so big and so greedy that absorbs the past, the social and the Political. However, this form of communitarianism, in view of the existent loneliness and extreme individuality, suggests the sacrifice of the individual. On the opposite, I would suggest that consumption, as a practice of an already shaped and balanced social life, be balance itself and what one may ask for is a social reinvention, a reinvention of relation, a balanced social bond capable of detaching one’s obsession to consumption, instead of

7 demonizing the practice per se. xv Considering phenomena such as “selfies”, consumption mania, social media obsession one may claim that loneliness is transforming the functionalities of relation into acts of existential confirmation. I consume, thus I exist. I am connected, thus I am related. One may also assume that this break of relation raises the fear of loneliness and is getting us more and more lonely.xvi In Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury describes a Dystopia that is moving so fast that forgets to think why it is moving for. The advertising signs are constantly growing in order to remain visible from drivers of the fast moving cars. It is a world that words are unimportant. Images and spectacles are the only things that matter. In that lunatic world the fireman Montag, whose work is to burn books and spread oblivion, meets Clarisse, an odd duck that memorizes book in order to save them. Clarisse is interested in odd things· she is making questions that no one knows how to answer, because no one knows who he is. I quote: “-Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning." He suddenly couldn't remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable. -"And if you look"—she nodded at the sky—"there's a man in the moon." He hadn't looked for a long time.” Clarisse is an outcast, but simultaneously a symbol of defiance. xviiShe chooses to refuse participating in the practices and velocities of her society. She chooses objects, reflections, dreams, relation, questions and violations instead of greed, abstractions and isolation.

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Notes

This brings Friedman’s McDonalds theory to mind. As he put it, there had never been a war among countries where McDonalds had invested, meaning that where a free market deepens, the possibilities of war with another free market society are diminished if not absolutely eliminated. i

ii

Upon the transformation of these practices I would suggest the insightful work of Lewis Mumford: “The myth of the machine”.

iii

We could say that complication was simplified. While the previous process was a ritual of planning, designing, producing, exchanging and consuming, now we have three main stages: oligarchic designing by established mythical “brands”, machine production with human interventions, machine based transportation and mass democratized consumption. In the mass production era, producers care about variety more. Let’s take a food supplier for example. A food supplier imagines his product standing on the self of a super market and not on the table of a family. He doesn’t care about the quality, just the looks and variety of his product. Consumers, on the other side, think that food is growing on the self of the supermarket. They do not care about the process of its making. They care about the product itself. iv

v

I would like to add here that despite the fact that I accept lack as the basis of this elegant analysis, I examine it not as an ontology but as a product of modernity. I examine it not as lack in general, but as lack of a definitive social relation. vi

We should be careful here. Machinery and industrial production, in this dissertation are not considered to be bad per se. On the opposite, they have freed time and space. Time and space, freed by industrial production, should have provided an exit out of rarity and “ανάγκη”. It should have freed a human being from the state of “homo laborans”, a creature condemned to work to survive. What I suggest is that the expansion of this mass production into every part of our self is destroying relation by destroying human constrictive skills. And construction is the act of memory and society. vii

The article can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/21/choice-stressing-us-out-dating-

partners-monopolies viii

Term used for the first time by Johann Huizinga in the book: 'A Study of the Element of Play in Culture.' In his foreword, Huizinga speaks of the man who plays in still-measured terms: 'In the course of time we have come to realize that, after all, we are not as reasonable as the eighteenth century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism, assumed; hence, modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Farber: Man the Maker. Even though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens, it is, as a name specific to the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals, too, are makers. There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making -- namely, playing. It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature.') ix

But this is justified through the perplexity of modern man, who is incapable of reinventing oneself through creative construction, through personal intervention in the social realm. A Dutch architect, Constant Nieuwenhuys described it in his “New Babylon” project, his utopian planetary architectural camp for nomads. New Babylon, as any Utopia, was a future society of abundance, “a society that knows neither famine nor exploitation nor work…. a society in which, without exception, anyone could give free rein to his creativity” ( Nieuwenhuys, 1954: 1) Nieuwenhuys, was a situationist that reflected on society and established his Utopia based upon an ontology of nomadism. He aimed to surpass the mental, emotional and rational obstacles of what he called “utilitarian society” and invented a 'ludic' society where the activities, relieved of all utility as well as all function, would be pure products of the creative imagination. According to Nieuwenhuys, it is not “Homo Faber ” that lies after “Homo Laborans” but “Homo Ludens”, a nomad who is perpetually changing his social and architectural environment and is attached to nothing but intervention and play. Despite the problematic assumptions that we meet in his utopian vision, Constant reflects upon the violence of even rich and “free” men, members of the upper social layers. He justifies this violence as the product of lack of imagination, capable to direct human energy towards totally new forms of creativity: “The objective impossibility of realizing a creative life within utilitarian society, based on the suppression of creativity but, nevertheless, containing all the conditions favorable to its development permits us to understand why aggression finds itself apart from the struggle for existence. In a contemporary society, the propertied class itself cannot act creatively, and it is easy to understand that they feel more frustrated than the masses who own nothing, yet they struggle for their future freedom.” x

The paradox is getting even more interesting, if one takes into consideration the structure of, what is called, impersonal free markets that are being accused of the inhuman tactics they follow against whole states and populations. But who are these people forming this electronic impersonal and inhuman herd? It would be very simple if they were just George Soros or Fitch Corporation that bet on market failures, state bankruptcies or seek steady and protected environments to put their shares. Isn’t it possible that this impersonal, easily manipulated herd includes also citizens and low income individuals that panic seeing a political crisis taking place in a country or a corruption scandal that includes the corporation they trusted their stakes on? One may claim that we are leaving in a world separated between limited spheres rather than in a ludic and liquid world that includes as all, as hunters and victims of the same dominant Logic. In the insightful words of Gille Deleuze: “Control substitutes the old mechanisms of discipline, does not work anymore from distance (vision for example), and neither desires to turn this distance into contact (when vision turns into touch). Control works on a different level; it is not control on the bodies any more but

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desires, not on space but time, not on knowledge and skills but life itself, not on populations but individuals.” (Deleuze, 2001: 43) xi

Radicalization does not only mean economic isolation but also identity loss. The need for an identical substitute will be necessary, whilst there will be no capacity to please the demands for more consumerist rights. That substitution could be probably established upon a former collective identity and provoke the rise of a neo-nationalistic narrative provided by the state power that chooses isolation. xii

I would suggest that it would not be unexpected that a big number of revolutionaries are deprived of the right to exercise the mainstream practices that could make one part of the society. As long as one cannot be the idol of one’s desire, one justifies this incapability with a pity or even violence. As Stavrakakis puts it: One would end up with a ‘false consciousness’ argument and a critique of advertising which has been proved to be both short-sighted and counterproductive (Stavrakakis, 2007: 238) xiii

xiv

It is the radical desire to denounce desire, to denounce participation in the false perverted world, and to enter the source of catharsis that may give one the right to become a preacher of a “true world”. In this process, it is not the aim that justifies sacrifices, but sacrifices that justify the aim. It looks like the member is saying: “after all this sacrifices, I have to be right. It is too painful to be futile”. The reason that may lead one towards consumerism is the reason why one may be knocking on the door of a anti-consuming elitism. It is the fear of loneliness and the search of relation. Structuring one’s life in sacrifice though, one is not only making one loses one’s self in the mass conscience of the sect, but one is creating bitterness that sometimes leads to severe dangers for society. One may think of the theatrical work “The Unknown Harmony of the Next Century” by Dimitris Dimitriadis depicting this research for a “pure man”. This Rousseauian belief of a pure man, whose purity is lost inside the filth of society, offers an alibi to his protagonist to commit crimes on humanity in search of this new man. The relevance with the dystopian works of Zamyatin and Orwell and his irony towards the Utopian texts that start from the same belief are obvious. xv

A research of the outburst of local creators show a trend to reclaim and recapture manufacture space. The rise in numbers of local producers is a conscious decision which could alter the very relation established between individuals in the post-industrial era. These movements started being mainly focused on shaping a different relation between the food producer and consumer, focused on food and environmental initiatives. This small but significant move demonstrates the will for an alternation of the relation between producers and consumers, the will not to destroy but stabilize the machine-depended relation. Starting from Enzo Mari, the craftsmanship, the local food movements, the local handmade design, the participatory actions are spurring, shaping not only different relations but, also, creating traditions and memories, beauty and place identities. We could refer to initiatives that started in the USA in the 1990s which focus on building a different food chain, between local families and local producers who are creating products with care, without intermediaries. In his 2008 book The Craftsman, the sociologist Richard Sennett makes a case for homo faber (or "man as maker"). Harking back to the workshops of the medieval guilds and to the studio of violin-maker Antonio Stradivari, Sennett set out to prove Immanuel Kant's dictum that "the hand is the window on to the mind". It is only through making things, he says – by trying and failing and repeating – that we gain true understanding. He is not, like some latter-day John Ruskin, arguing that handmade things are better than machine-made ones. He is simply saying that skilled manual labour – or indeed any craft – is one path to a fulfilling life. xvi

This could also be relevant to the notion of death. A broken relation may be raising the fear of death, creating angst. The only way to achieve memory is through relations. Memory, as a way to fight against death, is evaporating as relation is coming apart. One may try to balance this fear with an obsessive consumption trying to substitute quality to quantity. Without relationships one may lose himself, losing the web of people that confirm one’s existence. xvii

The resemblance with Mellville’s Bartleby the Scrivener is obvious.

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