Consumer culture’s desire-production reproduces itself autonomously without needing any external cause

Evidence

It seems to me very important to persuade ourselves, as Michaels tirelessly insists here, that we are inside the culture of the market and that the inner dynamic of the culture of consumption is an infernal machine from which one does not escape by the taking of thought (or moralizing positions), an infinite propagation and replication of “desire” that feeds on itself and has no outside and no fulfillment. It is a process whose dangerous power can be more tangibly observed in the socialist countries today, which are attempting to solve the basic problem of the production and distribution of urgently needed and desirable consumers’ goods without any great awareness of the autonomous dynamic of that “culture of consumption” thereby unleashed and in which we ourselves are plunged to the point of being unable to imagine anything else. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 468

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to what we mark as ‘waning of affect’ and affective production — the market’s autonomous desire-engine echoes how Jameson elsewhere describes postmodern affect as depth-less. Also connects to Sontag’s image lust mentioned later in this same passage. — connects to: Mass culture’s technical rationality masks class domination as consumer demand. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94; The culture industry rules by manufacturing the needs it satisfies — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 107; Predetermined needs reduce the consumer to the eternal object of the industry — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 110 (+6 more)