Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism

Sam Binkley, Jo Littler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317984986
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

Anti-consumerism has become a conspicuous part of contemporary activism and popular culture, from 'culture jams' and actions against Esso and Starbucks, through the downshifting and voluntary simplicity movements, the rise of ethical consumption and organic and the high profile of films and books like Supersize Me! and No Logo. A rising awareness of labor conditions in overseas plants, the environmental impact of intensified consumer lifestyles and the effects of neo-liberal privatization have all stimulated such popular cultural opposition. However, the subject of anti-consumerism has received relatively little theoretical attention – particularly from cultural studies, which is surprising given the discipline's historical investments in extending radical politics and exploring the complexities of consumer desire.

This book considers how the expanding resources of contemporary cultural theory might be drawn upon to understand anti-consumerist identifications and practices; how railing against the social and cultural effects of consumerism has a complex past as well as present; and it pays attention to the interplays between the different movements of anti-consumerism and the particular modes of consumer culture in which they exist. In addition, as well as 'using' cultural studies to analyse anti-consumerism, it also asks how such anti-consumerist practices and discourse challenges some of the presumptions and positions currently held in cultural studies.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Sam Binkley & Jo Littler

INTRODUCTION

Cultural studies and anti-consumerism: a critical encounter

A recent mock-article in the satirical US-based newspaper The Onion announced that ‘consumer product diversity’ – the sheer number and volume of different commodities out there in the world – has now replaced biodiversity. ‘In the light of the crumbling global ecology’ the parodic news story argued, ‘it is vital that we furnish the diversity of the global marketplace by buying the widest range of consumer products possible’. If we do so, ‘lush, highly developed supermarkets’ will replace the deteriorating ecosystems symbolized by fallen rainforests and melting glaciers.¹ The tone – like so much in The Onion – is at once ironic, rueful and critical. Beginning from the precept that we have our head in the sand about the implications of current levels of consumption, it pastiches the right-wing, pro-corporate positions that fuel it, and, at the same time endorses the pleasurable comforts of a robustly distanced perspective that is only too acutely aware of its own lack of power. Its humour is a kind of survival strategy; it touches a sensitive cultural nerve; and it occupies a position that can lend itself to a number of political purposes.

The Onion's article is one example of a widening popular discourse on the problems of contemporary consumerism. It has a specific character, gesturing as it does toward the environmental consequences of the rise of ‘turbo-consumerism’ – a significant increase in the sheer volume of goods and services (Honore 2004, Lawson 2009). This phenomenon has been created from new trends like the expansion of electro-digital scrap, more ‘units’ of clothes being bought annually, a ballooning global economy in ‘cheap’ or ‘bargain’ products and services, from toys to airplane flights, and the expansion of new markets – in China, for example, a new Wal-Mart is currently opening every day (Parks 2007, Ross 2004, Schor 2006, Watts 2006). If a key anxiety around consumerism of the last decade has been trained on the sweatshopped labour behind large commercial brands, as documented by Naomi Klein's bestselling book No Logo, one of the key anti-consumer anxieties emerging in the present is the environmental consequences of the ballooning economy in ‘bargain’ and ‘cheap’ goods. (Klein 2000, Bosshart 2006).²

The Onion's article also indicates something of the pronounced lack of approval of contemporary consumerism which is currently manifest in our cultural landscape in all kinds of ways, on all kinds of themes, with different forms of intensity ranging from polite disquiet to virulent unrest (Littler 2008). A rising awareness of labour conditions in overseas plants, the environmental impact of intensified consumer lifestyles and the global effects of neo-liberal privatization have all stimulated a variety of forms of popular cultural opposition. Buy Nothing Day enacts a yearly protest of excessive consumption. Television programmes such as No Waste Like Home and Affluenza tell us how to consume less. There is an anti-IKEA scene in the film Fight Club (1999), a pastiche of the ‘caring’ corporation in I Heart Huckabees (2004), a mixed critique of overconsumption by the affluent in The Edukators (2004), even a gestural critique of consumerism in the DreamWorks animation Over the Hedge (2006). Islamic brands such as Mecca Cola position themselves as opposed to ‘fierce materialistic capitalism’ . Sales of fair trade brands have risen by a third worldwide in the past year (FLO 2006). And with direct actions against Esso and Starbucks, the defaced adverts and ‘culture jams’ of organizations like Adbusters, and films and books like Supersize Me (2004) and McLibel (2005), increasingly belligerent strands of anti-consumerism have elbowed their way into popular culture. Such attitudes, attitudes that are critical of consumerism, are shaped in a variety of popular spheres rather than simply through activism or policy. They are registered in the home as well as the protest, the television programme as well as the supermarket purchase, the book as well as the boycott. And they are increasingly mainstream.

In the context of this activity, it is notable that the subject of anti-consumerism has received relatively little theoretical or empirical attention from practitioners of cultural studies. On the one hand, this relative lack of engagement is surprising given the discipline's historical investments in extending radical politics and exploring the complexities of consumer desire. On the other hand, we can observe how certain of cultural studies' central tenets (most notably its opposition to determinist accounts of consumer culture and its rejection of chest-thumping denunciations of the ‘culture industry’), have at times blinded it to rising popular sentiments among contemporary consumers: that they are in fact manipulated, and that intentional, organized opposition to this manipulation is possible. Long championing mundane consumption as always-already radical, some strands of cultural studies have seemed reluctant to embrace anti-consumerism as a popular source of opposition, as this would seem to imply a return to the stereotyped totalizations of its age-old nemesis: the mass culture critics and the Frankfurt School Marxists. It is to this dilemma that contributors to this special issue of Cultural Studies aim to respond. What productive understandings, in other words, might result from a critical encounter between the theoretical and methodological legacies of cultural studies and the scattered contemporary phenomenon which we might term ‘anti-consumerism’? By way of an introduction, and in an effort to provide a framework within which such a question can be posed, we offer a brief reflection on cultural studies' troubled relationship with one of the left's favourite intellectual parlour games – the critique of the commodity form.

Cultural studies and the critique of commodities

[In the commodity] a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

(Lukács 1967, p. 83)

With these words Georg Lukács summarized Marx's well known explanation of the commodity form as an expression of alienated sociability, of a world turned upside down in which, as Marx put it: ‘the definite social relations between men themselves assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Lukács 1967, p. 165). It is perhaps not an overstatement to argue that, for many years, cultural studies has taken on as its own project the overturning of the determinism implicit within this view, long maintained within continental cultural Marxist traditions, of the commodity as the embodiment of suspended, obfuscated or arrested sociability. Indeed, this project has borne many valuable rewards: a powerful and convincing thread of analysis has uncovered a multitude of such relations ‘between men’ (and perhaps even more between women) not concealed behind but taking place all around and through the commodity, in the everyday spatial and temporal coordinates of its consumption and use, and in the rich diversity of interpretive practices by which commodities come to signify as emblems of identity and articulations of difference. By considering the commodity a pliable, polysemic source of meaning in the semiotics of everyday life, and by reading the consumer as a nuanced bricoleur of commodities understood as symbolic instruments in the struggle for identity, cultural studies has undercut any claim concerning the properties of the commodity per se as a monolithic mediator of social experience in general. What has mattered is less commodification as a general process, but specific commodities applied to specific uses, contexts and situated interpretations.

The strengths of this approach are beyond dispute. Inquiries into consumption as a cultural process have emerged from a range of fields from anthropology, sociology, historical studies, political science and economics, many bearing the influential stamp of cultural studies' early inquiries into consumption as a rich semantic domain, and the consumer as creative producer of novel articulations (for a useful discussion, see Miller 1995). The relevance and timeliness of such studies is becoming more apparent as new trends and currents reshape the consumer cultures of advanced capitalist societies. However, a popular suspicion of the commodity as a general form that obscures or inverts ‘real’ relations between men, and by extension obfuscates a potentially more ‘authentic’ relation we might otherwise develop with ourselves, has also increasingly come to take a new and impressive presence in the everyday desires and habits of consumers themselves (Binkley 2007). This tendency is apparent in the glut of products resonating with the discourses of recent anti-globalization and environmental movements, boisterously proclaiming their biodegradability and environmental friendliness, or flaunting the sweat-free conditions of the ‘relations between men’ in the manufacturing process. More than just marketing ploys, such a new seriousness resonates with consumers who often and increasingly bring powerful desires for personal authenticity and transcendence to the de-fetishization of the commodity form, even in the case of commodities that come in forms that are already partly defetishized. Indeed, what we would call ‘a fetish for de-fetishization’ now constitutes a powerful and pervasive disposition among consumers, an animating new consumerist rhetoric whose mark is increasingly apparent in advertising, social movement discourse and in everyday discussion. Evidence of this sensibility is widespread: from a rising interest in fair trade, through the expansion of slow foods, to neighbourhood anti-Wal-Mart mobilizations; through American Apparel's penchant for conspicuous disclosure of its manufacturing conditions, the Body Shop's insistence on the use of indigenously grown ingredients, and Citibank's exhortations to transcend materialism; and by an expanding interest in downshifting, in ‘simple living’ networks and Voluntary Simplicity circles, which variously prescribe methods for streamlining the soul and cleansing ourselves of the detritus of post-modern life.

The phenomenon of contemporary anti-consumerism presents not only a complex development in a terrain the contours of which cultural studies has long held a rich familiarity, but also an opportunity for the field to build upon its strengths and apply them to emerging new objects, discourses and practices. Such an inquiry does not demand cultural studies practitioners to jettison those assets that have traditionally proven useful in the study of consumption, such as the deep distrust of manipulationist theories or a longstanding devotion to the intrinsic politics of everyday practice. Nor does an inquiry into anti-consumerist politics (which can sometimes be defined by ideologies of personal authenticity and essentialist notions of community) mean that cultural studies has to forfeit its traditional commitment to a politics of anti-foundationalism and a deep reluctance to include essentialist categories in any of its critical frameworks. Cultural studies' anti-essentialism does not consign it to relativism – a point often lost on its most vociferous critics – nor does it prohibit it from uncovering the liberatory potential of movements and cultural articulations bearing the mark of essentialist beliefs. While it is certainly true that many anti-consumerist groups counter the dislocations and wild vertigo of contemporary neo-liberalism with appeals to the authenticity of consumer subjectivity, or to the ontologically innocent sociality of consumers themselves, it is the work of cultural studies to locate these essentialist assertions conjuncturally, as contextual negations, not as flat-out doctrinal beliefs to which we must subscribe. Neither does an anti-essentialist commitment somehow align cultural studies with the same machinations of capitalism (now expressed in the rebellious, anything-goes triumphalism of the new economy) against which it has traditionally mobilized (Frank 2002). Whilst it is important to recognize that relativism, in and of itself, does not necessarily mark a critical position for cultural studies in the face of neo-liberal marketization, clearly critiques of anti-essentialism do not necessarily stand between the critical aims of cultural studies and the activities and strategic essentialisms of contemporary anti-consumerist movements.

One of the key objectives of this issue is to confront the thorny question of the politics of cultural studies as it relates to the broader effects of consumerism head-on. In interrogating anti-consumerism, it is not the aim of our contributors to effect either an easy drift to the right nor a lurch back into some zone of pre-theoretical certainty. Rather, the aim is to use the critical resources of the present to arrive at better understandings of the dynamics between consumerism and power: understandings which can deal with both the complexities of pleasure, status and power that consumer culture brings on the one hand, and its involvement in social disparity, ecological devastation and cultural harm on the other.

Cultural studies clearly has unique resources to offer the subject, given its deft sensibility for the manner in which broad structures of power are negotiated or articulated with everyday (and not-so-everyday) cultural practices. Such treatments can offer us the ability to make powerful interrogations of the processes by which forms of consumption produce meaning in people's lives. As Juliet Schor puts it, the key is not to disparage or ignore symbolic value, but rather to think about what this symbolism means, where it is coming from, and to explore how different types of symbolic meaning might be created through more egalitarian processes. Cultural studies can allow us to consider how commercialism has proved a crucial tool in the dissemination of meaning; and how disparagement of the commercial has often been made because of its articulation to the feminine and the lower-class (Bolwby 1985, Husseyn 1987, Nava 1992, 1996).

The constructive encounter between cultural studies and recent anti-consumerist movements we envisage here draws on existing strains of activity that includes in particular the work of Andrew Ross [in books like No Sweat (1994) and Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor (2004)] alongside earlier inquiries into the possibilities of political consumerism as indicated by texts such as Mica Nava's Changing Cultures (1992). Moreover, as the contributions that follow make clear, other disciplinary cross-pollinations (or border raids) with areas including philosophy, social geography, political science and media studies can serve to expand the resources available for the analysis of anti-consumerist outlooks and mobilizations. However, before we elaborate on such specific examples, we need to delineate and clarify what we mean by ‘anti-consumerism’ itself.

Anti-consumerism: toward a definition

What exactly is anti-consumerism? Is it indeed necessary, the reader may well ask, that we suffer yet another neologism crafted in the Ivory Tower's left-leaning workshops? On the most general level, we might perhaps say that anti-consumerism is an ethical standpoint which results from a highly contextual and variable hybridization of any number of thoughts and sentiments, rhetorics, postures, discourses, modes of expertise and institutional mobilizations, which combine at various historical junctures to posit some larger meaning or value outside of or beyond the world of mass produced goods and services. It is a grafting together o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: Cultural studies and anti-consumerism: A critical encounter
• 2. Young women and consumer culture: An intervention
• 3. Against the commodification of everything: Anti-consumerist cultural studies in the age of ecological crisis
• 4. Alternative hedonism, cultural theory and the role of aesthetic revisioning
• 5. Tackling turbo consumption
• 6. Liquid consumption: Anti-consumerism and the fetishized de-fetishization of commodities
• 7. The elusive subjects of neo-liberalism: Beyond the analytics of governmentality
• 8. Consuming the campesino: Fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification
• 9. Alternative realities: Downshifting narratives in contemporary lifestyle television
• 10. Fourth worlds and neo-fordism: american apparel and the cultural economy of consumer anxiety
• 11. Consuming authenticity: From outposts of difference to means of exclusion
• 12. Fashioning social justice through political consumerism, capitalism, and the Internet
• 13. The quandaries of consumer-based labor activism: A low-wage case study
• Index