Konsumideologie

The ecological crisis is omnipresent, and airlines and car manufacturers have apparently been fighting against it (in a media-effective manner) for some time now. The narrative: we can save our planet without fundamentally changing our way of life. These attempts - now called "green capitalism" or "sustainable growth" - are demonstrably doomed to failure. They are less about seriously addressing the ecological crisis and more about opening up capitalist fields of accumulation and the ideological reproduction of existing power and domination relations. Following on from Herbert Marcuse, Johannes Greß attempts to develop a new perspective on the ideological function of consumption in the context of a radicalising ecological crisis. The guiding principle here is Marcuse's thesis that consumption functions as the ideology for integrating the (oppositional) masses into the capitalist system. Supplemented by the ideological-theoretical considerations of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, an understanding of consumer ideology as the result of a "politics of jouissance" is to be developed - which is to be countered by the emancipatory design of a "democratic politics of jouissance".