Tuesday 145: Thought while running

I'll be brief:

In more than one of David Foster Wallace's works, he features a consumer product used for some reason other than its intended use. I wouldn't call it a preoccupation, but it's approaching motif status: In the long short story "Westward The Course of Empire Makes Its Way," it's a sidebar about baking soda: how advertisers convinced people that it could freshen their drains, so consumers will literally throw the product away. In Infinite Jest, the tennis players all use Lemon Pledge instead of sunscreen, because it works better than any sunscreen (I never looked into it, but this cannot possibly be true).

There have got to be other examples. It recalls the thought experiment early in The Broom of the System, which goes that since a broom is for sweeping, its essence is the bristles. When we say "broom," we think bristles. But if a broom was for breaking windows, its essence is the handle. Use changes meaning, essence, and reality such as it pertains to communication or expression. How does the broom express itself?

This is subsequently mediated through the consumer (or Marxist) lens: How is exchange value affected if use value changes? The superficial point is about alienation—it's another barrier, an increased distance between labor and production and consumption. Or maybe not. Maybe he's past that and it's about consumer capital's alienation, social or psychological alienation, from the products we buy and why we buy them.

Zizek has a point that consumer capitalism is ultimately about becoming a consumer of your own life. Perhaps this is a way of forming a proof toward that.

God am I going to have to understand Kurt Gödel to figure this out?