The Pre-Packaged, Bite-Size, Consumer Ready Life

If only commodities matter anymore, then our existence is not so much lived and experienced as purchased and consumed.

It was Karl Marx who made the initial observation that commodities were really the encapsulated life-stuff of the worker and of the earth. Commodities are life-stuff. Commodities are what the Cosmos in concert with the human worker-bee have poured life into. The purchaser of the commodity--or the possessor/owner--becomes, in a sense, a purchaser of life, of the mediated essence of existence, of what might be called jouissance. Marx made the point that in an increasingly commodified world life itself would be threatened with becoming a commodity that didn't exist any longer in unpackaged, unmediated, non-commodified form. In other words, life would be increasingly a product that could only be purchased.

My disgust is that we are on the verge of just this scenario. Think for a moment about the commodification of experiences that are purchased in commodity-form. Humans are literally buying their life. Life, then, is reduced to being the 'ultimate consumer good.'

Life: the final commodity. After all, what can any longer be commodified when the experience of life itself--our actual living!--has become just another product that one can purchase? What becomes of living when it is just another charge on our credit card? What becomes of living when our life is but a series of items we pluck off the shelf, that we place in our on-line shopping cart? What becomes of living when our life is but the accumulation of pre-packaged bits and bites, each specifically designed and fit for human consumption?

Are we any longer human in such a world? For that, too, was a question Marx was given to comtemplate: what would life be like in a totally commodified world? Perhaps we can whisper back into the past and tell him.