It is another kind of submission that is required here on the facades of ruinous capitalism. It is the gesture of intimidation with which commodity worlds are spread out at the airport, not to buy, but to look. The crisis of consumption and its associated promises is evident in its omnipresence. This suggests the joylessness of the offer and architecture of the airport consumption - the thought laziness of the eternally same offer of things that nobody needs or wants, corresponds with the Toblerone vodka perfume padding for the average customer at the beginning and also at the end of the journey: You just do not want to let the customer go, the controllers of consumption, and if it were not so intrusive and distressing, you might almost think it desperate. The comprehensive simulation is thereby perfected just by a consumption that is not even based on status or distinction, but on the sole enforcement of a kind of capitalist duty to buy. And airports, in their contradiction of transport and waiting, of travel, lawn and standstill, of place and Ortlosigkeit are particularly suitable to demonstrate this new commodity character.Īccording to Marc Augé, airports are the exemplary "non-places" of our time, a certain aimlessness of travelers, who might as well fly to Berlin as to Dublin, to Bangkok as to Tel Aviv, corresponds to a larger-scale fabrication of Non-reality, ie the dissolution of space and time, and thus the coordinates of the real world. It is about the "slaughter of the past", as the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre analyze this change in their book "Enrichment: A Critique of the Goods". It's not so much about the production of new goods as industrialization has been, it's more about producing new desires for things that are old. It's about boundaries, it's about hierarchies, it's no longer about buying, otherwise the shops would not be empty, like temples without believers: it's about the demonstration of a rule, which is above all symbolic. It is no longer about participation, that is clear here. So social participation, the social ascent that was associated with buying in the American century, consumption as a sign of democratic representation or, depending on the ideological view, as a political narcotic, is finally turned into its opposite in the form of airport capitalism. This is detached from any necessity - and this purposelessness of airport consumption has nothing to do with luxury, which has an end in itself, nor with a democratic promise of freedom, which in theory was one of the capitalist promises of origin. The fascinating thing - and also the sobering one - is how openly, barrenly and unimaginatively the consumption in the airports of this world is transformed into a regiment of buying.
So the ecological consequences of one's own behavior, of one's own lifestyle, which significantly contributes to destroying the earth. This repression of yesterday and tomorrow, this pure presence created at airports, is in direct proportion to the suppression of the externalities of flying. The presumption and aggression of consumerism is nowhere to be seen more clearly than in the world's airports, where the conditions of supply and demand, desire and temptation, fetish and commodity are twisted in a way that mirrors the distortions of tired capitalism, who has no relation to the outside, to the world, and only aims at self-preservation, it costs what it wants. When flying, the pathologies of contemporary capitalism are particularly naked. The market here fails as an authority to do the right thing - the state must intervene to establish a reasonable order. If a flight from Berlin to Cologne with a low-cost airline costs about 15 euros and a train ride 120 euros, then something is basically wrong. It was also ignored that the cheap flights are an ecological disaster.
Ignored were those who drowned in the Mediterranean because they were not allowed to fly. There is, so the experience of recent years, a kind of human right to absurdly cheap travel, at least for the inhabitants of the Western world, who are in possession of a valid passport. They had paid 73 euros per ticket, from Berlin to Mallorca and back.
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