More on Commodities

            Rhetorical and literary theory have become more debilitating for me than any physical malady I’ve experienced. And I thought knowledge was supposed to be power. I’ve never felt so discouraged, so artificial, so constructed and absent of free-will as I do at this moment. Postmodernism is a disease.

            All this talk about rhetoric/composition theory, and what purpose does it serve other than helping us come to terms with a loss of identity, creative license, and autonomy? The trajectory of IP laws makes me sick. If this—“You need to seek permission to quote even a single word from one of our texts”—is where writing is heading, then I might as well give up on this major right now. I better just sit back and wait for the policing of every word that leaves my mouth. And how will I ask for permission when the very words I wish to speak don’t belong to me in the first place? We’re trending towards silencing anything that doesn’t have a dollar sign attached to it. “Money talks” has never carried so much weight. The only discourse that matters is inscribed on hundred-dollar bills.

            Knowledge has become inextricable from economics, and art can scarcely be said to exist anymore. The arts are usurped by the capitalist system and channeled into commodities. What’s the point of knowledge other than the purposeless fragmentation and re-circulation in a system that continually promotes class disparity and conceals its mechanisms? I find myself questioning the purpose of my college education. The transaction doesn’t take place directly between student and professor, but essentially we give them money in exchange for knowledge. And it appears this knowledge imparted to us by professors is made up of fragments of knowledge that too had to be paid for. We buy the knowledge, and then we exchange our knowledge-laden services for money. Each act feeds and perpetuates the capitalist machine. I don’t know a better alternative than education at the moment, but I refuse to lead a life in which money is the chief goal.

            Reading and writing are some of the sole sources of pleasure for me in this life that seems so meaningless at times, but this will no longer be so if writing is reduced to a commodity. My love of books is starting to seem paradoxical now that I think about it. Books are indeed material commodities, but maybe it’s not the content I pay for, but the material artifact. The content can be read aloud and shared indefinitely—it’s not a finite resource—and no laws can do shit about it until they learn how to police my words. Karl Marx's notion that “the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” seems in some ways relevant to this discussion. Y'all better just strive to not create commodities in that case because, as Chuck Palahniuk so eloquently put it in Fight Club, “You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis."