Quotes About Commodification

Suppose I told you about the income from body parts? Organs, bones, DNA, whatever's in demand. That's one of the big earners for this place.

What really is wild about rock 'n' roll? Nothing. It's so banal and so part of corporate culture. It threatens to lose all its life.

Reality TV has managed to commodify everything we used to think of as the elements of normal life.

The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.

I am commodifying my grief, to put it really bluntly. I accept it. And I try not to think about it.

Musicians are often asked to answer for an entire culture, or for an entire movement. It's a process of commodification. It becomes packaged and summarized in a word like 'emo' or 'grunge'... or 'folk music.' I think that's just language itself, trying to understand the mysteries of the world.

My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of — junk, I'm just junk.

At every point along the passage from African to New World markets, we find a stark contest between slave traders and slaves, between the traders' will to commodify people and the captives' will to remain fully recognizable as human subjects.

Turning captives into commodities was a thoroughly scientific enterprise. It turned on perfecting the practices required to commodify people and determining where those practices reached their outer limits (that is, the point at which they extinguished the lives they were meant to sustain in commodified form). Traders reduced people to the sum of their biological parts, thereby scaling life down to an arithmetical equation and finding the lowest common denominator.

The slave ship at sea reduced African captives to an existence so physically atomized as to silence all but the most elemental bodily articulation, so socially impoverished as to threaten annihilation of the self, the complete disintegration of personhood. Here their commodification built toward a crescendo that threatened never to arrive, but to leave the African captives suspended in an agony whose language no one knew.

Unless individuals have the power to defy commoditization and define their own lives, their potential is vulnerable to the crushing forces of objectification.

In fact, in an overwhelmingly commodified existence, consumption becomes the number one form of entertainment.

La cultura actual se ha convertido en una civilización de las cosas y no de las personas. El resultado es que las personas se usan como si fueran cosas, degradándose así su trato. Es,

Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?

The construction of masculinity and femininity was driven by the need to sell products.

The TV goes to a commercial for air freshener. A woman is spraying air freshener so her family will be happy. Then to a commercial for very thin panty liners so a woman can wear a dress and dance and meet the man she will later spray air freshener for. Clean and bleed. Bleed and clean.

Water is not free anymore. Our resources were free at one time, but now they are not. Everything is getting controlled by big corporations. I'm most worried about this.

You'd never look at a Rembrandt and say, 'That's just wood and canvas and paint - how much?!' It's all about how many people want it. It works on a pair of jeans as well - they're just material and stitching, and as soon as you walk out of the shop, they're worth nothing.

So in the tradition of Poland Spring, Evian, and other hydro-geniuses, we've decided to bottle something that was freely available and charge you money for it.

Commodities have now penetrated the romantic bond so deeply that they have become the invisible and unacknowledged spirit reigning over romantic encounters.

Far from being a 'haven' from the marketplace, modern romantic love is a practice intimately complicit with the political economy of late capitalism.

European medicinal cannibalism depersonalized and objectified the human being whose body parts were eaten. Along with this went the desocialization and individualization of the meaning of eating human substance. This kind of cannibalism served no larger communal or religious purposes; its sole objective was to enhance the well-being of the individual eater. Human body parts were commercial commodities, bought and sold for profit.

Once demonized, the immigrant can be dehumanized. Dehumanization commodifies the immigrants. The immigrant-as-commodity is not precious. Rather, the immigrants-as-commodities are likened to "hazardous waste dumps.

The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws.