Sunday, May 23, 2004
(6:26 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Meta-Depression
Being first-order depressed is bad, sometimes overwhelmingly so: self-loathing, radical insecurity, a vague (or perhaps detailed) desire for the world to disappear.
Yet, in today's fast-paced society, there is a way for it to become noticably, qualitatively worse: to realize that one is unconsciously, as if by instinct, planning on using shopping as an anti-depressant -- that one believes, in the very depths of one's being, that parting with money is a genuine solution to this problem. That is meta-depression, because consciousness of one's thorough integration into consumerism robs one of the anti-depressant that would otherwise have been easily available.
Although I have not done extensive testing on this, I theorize that it is possible to reach a Ricouerian "second naivete" and enjoy shopping anyway, perhaps by purchasing a book of heavy theory and thus "sticking it to the Man" by belonging to a particularly rebellious and enlightened marketting demographic -- perhaps, even better, by stealing said book of heavy theory.
This is the kind of stuff you're not going to get from reading Kristeva.
UPDATE:
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2002.
Frank, Thomas. One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Anchor, 2001.
