Everything one wants or does not want is likely to be desired or rejected by the other. This is one of the contexts in which exchanges and relationships occur. The commercialization of goods and merchandise is always an exchange, usually made possible by money. The currency and the acquisition patterns allow the circulation of products and ideas in societies.
Commercialization was enlarged, reaching also human relationships. It is more and more frequent to exchange affections and sexual experiences, to turn them into an object of consumption, in which the price varies according to abilities and admitted deceptions. It is an everyday practice of societies, evident among male and female prostitutes, less explicit or unlabeled in other relationships. Many marriages, stable unions, unshakable friendships, and secular commitments are set out in unstated bargains.
The modern world, in the twenty-first century, facilitates what was once problematic, it breaks taboos, but allows distortions: pleasure and desire can be fulfilled by rapid dialing or typing, one gets what one wants at any time. Such facilitation often impedes authentic, legitimate living. Everything is produced, even desire. The individual only has to manage and create resources: from money to motivations to have desires and to realize them.
These are the desiring machines, as Gilles Guattari and Félix Deleuze said, no longer resulting from previous traumas and experiences, but rather guided by warranty seals, slogans of happiness, of freedom without prejudice. These announced paradises create demands and motivate. The protagonists are not only the perverted ones, but mainly the curious ones motivated to have experiences without continuity, without commitment, almost anonymous, only marked by pleasure, in which the other is transformed into an object, a product to be consumed, even if this entails their destruction after disposal.
The human being managed to shorten the distance between the source of production and the consumption of the product by becoming the product, produced to produce. By living for the pleasure that satisfies, consequently only for realizing what gives pleasure, it is self-consumed by the auto referenced positioning, created by the loss of dynamics, by the inexistence of the other, reduced to a single dimension: source of pleasure. It is the equivalent of the autoimmune syndrome, in which the body devours itself. Merchandising affections, negotiating relationships while desiring satisfaction is paradoxical, it depletes the bargain itself, creates automata dependent on each other, as well on the random quotation of goods: anything serves and becomes necessary. Unions that happen as a result of agreements are, by definition, contingent, consequently, fluctuating, and so, in order to maintain them, there is a need for contracts, commitments and illusions. It is a perversion that also creates points of resistance, such as waiting for consideration, expecting to have pleasure in what is given, what is made available, even if everything is accomplished by deception. Entering this process requires constant verification, guarantees are needed to ensure new bargains; there is no freedom, there is no love, there is only anxiety and commitment.
You cannot give what you do not have; there cannot be a connection when there are no links; continuity is not possible in dispersion; humanity is not possible when it has been lost in the soothing exchanges, in the alienating sedations of desires and possibilities. It is the empire of automation, which directs the alienation, the reification in relation to the other. Licit and illicit drugs, affective dependencies, sexual dissatisfaction, fear and despair are the resulting symptoms that denounce this whole process of dehumanization.