Laya’s Reviews > Culture and Materialism > Status Update

Wish I understood more of the literary references, missing out on some interesting stuff

"It is often said that our society is too materialist and that advertising reflects this but it seems that in this respect our society is quite evidently NOT materialist enough, and that this is paradoxically, the result of failure in social meanings values and ideals. It is impossible to look at modern advertising without realising that the material object being sold is never enough"

- Advertising: the magic system

The Bloomsbury Fraction - when I saw the title I thought it would be a vindictive take-down essay of privilege and exclusion but this is an excellent analytical essay of upper class progressive intelligentsia 'conscience' and it's limits

"Darwin himself did not take a consistent position on any of these applications. In a letter he observed ironically that he had just received in quotes 'a squib' printed in a newspaper showing 'I have proved might is right and therefore that Napoleon is right and every cheating tradesman is right' - obviously a reaction to one of the first and crudest kinds of social darwinism."

Interesting stuff

"In a sense we can provide a very adequate analysis of social darwinism in terms of errors of emphasis it makes on extending the theory of natural selection to social and political theory I think it simplifies the matter a little too much in that biology itself has from the beginning a strong social component. We have to think of this dialectical moment between two areas of study."

- In Social Darwinism

Abstraction of a multiplicity into a singular and personified concept of nature was a leap in consciousness and underlies the double definition of nature as both physical object and also as immutable characteristics that are fundamental and explanatory. Gives rise to paradox on whether nature is a complex system of mutual cooperation or competitive brutality. Both ideas are present in pol theory -Ideas of nature

each term of the proposition has to be revalued..revalue 'determination' towards the setting of limits and the exertion of pressure, and away from prefigured and controlled content.. revalue 'superstructure' towards a range of cultural practices and away from reflected reproduction.. 'the base' away from a fixed economic abstraction and towards dynamic processes in real and economic relationships with contradictions