Psychedelic Semiotics
Fabian Ginsberg
Info: In a well-known passage from Das Kapital, Karl Marx distinguishes between seeing things and perceiving commodities. When seeing things, light is really transmitted from one thing, the external object, to another thing, the eye. It is a physical relation between physical things. As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material [dinglich] relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In light of this, what Fabian Ginsberg is doing with his Psychedelic Semiotics could be described as follows: the fantastic becomes physical again, the social is integrated into the visual, and the value-relation governs the human-thing relationship.