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i was considering avoiding this thread, but no.
1. um...planned obsolesence was more or less a structural requirement under the fordist mode of production because it was predicated on long production runs of standardized items. within that context, it is a device for creating turnover. this is not rocket science.
there is no general correlation between it and "technological progress"--not if you have a look at the actually existing history of capitalism--the universe of neoliberal vagueness would posit such a correlation--but neoliberalism posits all kinds of ridiculous relationships on this order--and if you want a measure of how well they play out in real time, just have a look at the litany of disaster that is the history of the imf/world bank/structural adjustment programs since the collapse of the bretton woods arrangement.
2. i liked lurkette's post above in general, but it does a strange thing: it conflates human propensities to create and use symbols with commodity fetishism and in doing that conflates modes of interaction particular to capitalism with some basic features of this fiction they call "human nature" with the result that capitalism becomes identical with human sociability in general. the notion of commodity fetishism comes from marx, who was clear--CLEAR--that it is an expression of the social and economic conditions particular to capitalism. it presupposes alienation. alienation is a device for talking about the consequences of the capitalist re-organization of production: the fragmentation of tasks, the dekilling of work, the reduction of workers to on the one hand "bearers of abstract quanta of labor power" and on the other to appendages of the machines. the logic behind commodity fetishism presupposes the effects of alienation as marx outlined it--subjected to the fragmentation that capitalism imposes, workers (well folk in general) recognize something of themselves in commodities because, for marx, they recognize something of the "condensed labor power" that constitues the core of the commodity's value as he understood it--that is they recognize a trace of being-human in the commodity, in its being-worked and this functions as a kind of solace or compensation for what capitalism does to workers in particular: it tends to reduce them to things. to objects.
so all of this presupposes the capitalist mode of production. it is a historical creation of capitalism, not an expression in some endless series of anything fundamental about human nature, whatever that is.
one result of this blurring is the disable any sense of the historical nature of capitalism as a social form. another is to erase any sense of alternatives. a third is a fundamental, basic error: it conflates the uses of commodities within the capitalist mode of production with human capacities to generate symbols in general. which makes capitalism an expression of "human nature" which makes capitalism appear far more rational than it is--and worse, makes it appear inevitable.
3. if you want to play this game, we can: the court of louis 14 at versailles was built around a culture of display. superficially, it resembles the conspicuous consumption that veblen critiqued at the end of the 19th century: but the system of production within which this culture of display operated was fundamentally other than that of capitalism. so one could say that the display is about the performance of identity through the assemblage of symbol collages--but you cannot say that commodity fetishism was the driver for it.
any attempt to naturalize patterns of socialization turns on basic errors.
while you can argue that human beings are defined around the need to make meaning, it is wrong to go from there to arguing that therefore all patterns of meaning generation are somehow equivalent. that you can make comparisons does not mean that the comparisons are accurate.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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