The Phantasmagoria of Capital
A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents
David Black, The Phantasmagoria of Capital: A Short History of the Commodity, the Spectacle and its Discontents. 150 pages, illustrated. BPC Publications (London: 2025). Paperback: £9.99. Kindle: £4.99.
This book consists of 20 chapters lifted from the last two years of posts on my weekly Substack, written 2023 to 2025. Taken together, these essays, as presented, comprise a 'short history:' of the concept of human freedom as conditioned by society's relationship to nature - including 'human nature - as a 'metabolism'.
The book is in three parts.
Part One, ‘Origins’, takes off from Richard Seaford's insight that the reason we see the poetry and philosophy of Greek Antiquity as much less alien to us than, say, the culture of Ancient Egypt, is because of the presence of monetization that we share with the Greeks.
1 - Tragedy, Philosophy and Money
2 - Cults, Myths and Money
Part Two, ‘New Passions - Post- Feudalism’, examines how, once the power of money, slavery and trade had undermined the feudal world, the spread of commodification gave rise to a new bourgeois 'subject'. Within the cultures of both Protestantism and the Catholic Counter-Reformation the art of the ‘new’ world reflected and promoted a secular subjectivity which itself fell into crisis and abjectivity as it became objectified and reified in commodity production.
3 - Anarchism and Aristotle
4 - ‘Another Language’ - Walt Whitman, Karl Marx and the British, 1850-56
5 - Marx and the Narodniks
In Part Three, ‘Commodity Culture’, the roots of today’s 'culture wars' are traced to how artists of the avant-garde, philosophers and revolutionaries of the Far Left envisaged and sought to bring about a new society freed from the domination of commodities and value-production.
6 - Lukács on Journalism as Prostitution
7 - Culture Wars in the Spiritual Animal Kingdom
8 - Culture (Before the World) Wars
9 - History, Capital and Phantasmagoria
10 - Melancholy, Allegory and Tyranny
11 - Surrealism's 100 Years
12 - Strolls in Dialectical Fairyland
13 - 'Go home Mr. Chaplin'. The Letterist Assault on Cinema
14 - 'Extremist Innovations' for Beginners
15 - Spectacular Integration
16 - The Spectacle of Ressentiment
17 - Cities of the Dreadful Future
18 - Spectacle Paradiso
19 - Gillian Rose
20 - Alternatives to Vanguardism