The Consumption of Inequality

Weapons of Mass Distraction

K. Halnon

• Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137352491
• Thema: Scienze sociali
• Thema: Sociologia

The fads, fashions, and media in popular consumer culture frequently make recreational and ideological "fun" of poverty and lower class living. In this book, Halnon delineates how incarceration, segregation, stigmatization, cultural and social consecration, and carnivalization work in the production and consumption of inequality.

1

Financial Crisis, Ideology, and Alienation

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, people in the United States faced the worst financial disaster since the 1929 stock market crash and the 1930s Great Depression that followed it. Those years were hard times, with great fortunes lost for some, mass unemployment, soup lines, and grave uncertainty about the future. Rather than public utility companies failing as they did at the end of the 1920s, the fall 2008 stock market crash saw the collapse of huge privately owned lending and brokering corporations, including Indy Mac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Citicorp, and American International Group (AIG). While blue chip giant CEOs were lobbying vigorously during the final months of the George W. Bush administration for massive government bailouts, myriad middle-class citizens who worked hard and planned for retirement lost their savings and security with repeated plunges in stock market values. Among the notoriously devastating days is September 29, 2008, on which approximately 1.2 trillion dollars vanished, with a dramatic Down Jones net loss, −777.68, the biggest negative net change in stock market history.

For many who were anxiously deciding whether to pull out then or brave the storm with their shrunken retirement funds, the stock market crashes were proof positive of the ultimate breakdown of a radically deregulated economy. Suddenly it became evident, for those critical of the capitalist system at least, that superrich financiers had literally swept away economic security for the nation, as well as for the global economy. Additional doses of economic-crisis reality were the plummeting of housing values and daily news stories concerning house foreclosures, more business failures, mass layoffs, rising grocery prices, food bank shortages, and record numbers of food stamp recipients. When auto fuel prices were finally declining, we learned about the impending demise of two US-based auto industry giants, Ford Motor Company and General Motors, which some anxiously predicted might be a final blow to the US manufacturing base. Initial government reluctance to bail out the auto industry was further understood by some as a serendipitous opportunity to finally finish the job energetically advanced during the Reagan-Thatcher years, or to let wither one of the only remaining employment sectors with significant unionization. President Obama’s February 2009 Stimulus and Economic Recovery Plan aimed at quieting the storm but amid announcements of massive layoffs. By March, headlines read that joblessness in the United States was at a 25-year high, at 8.1 percent, and that 12.5 million people were unemployed in February.1 By April, the rate rose to 8.5 percent. In 2012 the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated the enduring unemployment problem: 12.2 million unemployed persons, including 6.9 percent of adult whites, 14 percent of adult blacks, and 9.6 percent of adult Hispanics. The number of long-term unemployed, or those without jobs for 27 or more weeks, was 4.8 million, accounting for 39.1 percent of the unemployed. In December 2012, 2.6 million persons were marginally related to the labor force, “essentially unchanged from the year before.”2

Expressive of the emotional consequences of collapsing neoliberal capitalism, in March 2009 Gallup reported that the number of Americans claiming to be “suffering” increased by 3 million during the previous year, bringing the percentage of reported “suffering” Americans in February to 57 percent.3 Almost two years later, on November 6, 2011, National Public Radio (NPR) featured Erin Currier of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project who talked about pressures on the US middle class. She elucidated that 1 in 3 “Americans raised in the middle class fall out of it as adults.”4 Then, in May 2012, Investors.com reported, “For the first time in history, the number of jobless workers age 25 and up who have attended some college now exceeds the ranks of those who settled for a high school diploma or less.”5 The latter statistics lend credence to the NPR story’s conclusion. The “American Dream” is just that, merely a dream.

Indeed, much of today’s middle class is at best a tenuous one that over the past two decades lost its grip on prosperity. It is less secure than the working classes of the past. Its members make do paycheck to paycheck, overworked and overspent. They struggle with spiraling credit card and mortgage debt, job insecurity, and diminished levels of autonomy, meaning, and creativity at work, inside and outside of collapsible cubicles.

If members of the middle class are facing so much adversity, then we might imagine just how much more difficult it is for the working classes and poor classes to overcome obstacles in everyday living and leveraging escape from the ever-widening bottom of the class system. On February 18, 2013, AlterNet reported on the latest Census Bureau data: “One in two Americans currently falls into either the ‘low income’ category or is living in poverty. Low-income is defined as those earning between 100 and 199 percent of the poverty level. Adjusted for inflation, the earnings for the bottom 20 percent of families have dropped from $16,788 in 1979 to just under $15,000. Earnings for the next 20 percent have been stuck at $37,000.”6

This book is offered at a time when it is intriguing and also urgent to explore how and why, while financial catastrophe was percolating, so many indulged in and continue reveling in Poor Chic, or an array of fads, fashions, and media that make stylish, recreational, often expensive, socially stratifying, and ideological “fun” with popular consumer culture’s formulations of “black ghetto,” “white trash,” “super trash,” “blue collar,” and “redneck.”

What complicates elucidating Poor Chic’s multifaceted ideological character is living in a consumer society where nearly everything has become a commodity, or a product or a service that can be bought and sold—from political elections, war, death, and revolution to air, water, dating, care for the elderly, incarceration, and even execution. Thus what might be an otherwise obvious distinction between what is real and what is not becomes much less certain. To be sure, one of the effects of living in what French critical theorist Guy Debord calls a “society of the spectacle,” or a consumer society, is that virtually everything is transformed into product things and information. The consequence: unreality has become “the chief product of present-day society.”7 Debord proclaims emphatically, “THE WORLD THE SPECTACLE holds up to view . . . is the world of commodity ruling over all lived experience.”8 Elaborating even further on how consumption produces alienation in modern capitalist consumer society, he says, “The commodity’s mechanical accumulation unleashes a limitless artificiality in the face of which all living desire is disarmed. The cumulative power of this autonomous realm of artifice necessarily everywhere entails a falsification of life.”9 Philosopher Douglas Kellner summarizes the Debordian view: “For Debord, the spectacle is a tool of pacification and depoliticization; it is a ‘permanent opium war’ which stupefies social subjects and distracts them from the most urgent tasks of real life—recovering the full range of their human powers through creative practice. The concept of the spectacle is integrally connected to the concept of separation and passivity, for in submissively consuming spectacles one is estranged from actively producing one’s life.”10

Toward Lifting Large Veils of Obfuscation

As the 2008 stock market was crashing, with a speed and intensity that made Republican presidential hopeful John McCain’s remark that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” at least very doubtful to a majority, Senator Barack Obama emerged as victor of a long and heated struggle. With an indisputable popular vote, on November 4, 2008, he was elected as the first biracial president of the United States of America. If the strategies employed during the election are any indication—with images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton used in one July and August 2008 advertisement to suggestively discredit Obama as merely a (trashy) “celebrity” politician11 and “Joe the Plumber” utilized in the final stretch of McCain’s campaign to rally the “white guy” blue collar vote—perhaps the public is finally tiring of the deceptions around class, race, and gender imagery that deflect attention from more important issues and truths, such as the actual fundamentals of the economy and, for that matter, the present actualities of being a working-class white guy.

Furthermore, given that the mass public is facing dire economic uncertainty, struggling to pay bills and grappling to keep homes, while the jet-setting superwealthy are bailed out of their financial troubles with trillions of US treasury dollars, this may usher in a momentous occasion: a historical peak in class consciousness. The 2012 99 percent versus 1 percent Wall Street protesters at first seemed indicative of emerging class struggle. But media depictions of mass protest as ambiguity and attempts to transform rebellion into “reality shows” gives one pause. Notwithstanding these setbacks, this book’s timing may be ideal toward raising race- and gender-specified class consciousness and breaking through weapons of mass distraction that divert attention from the poor, poverty realities, and the increasing economic impoverishment of the middle class, working class, black underclass, and white underclass.

Beyond One-Dimensional Thinking and the Commoditization of Dissent

We are living in a historical time when the predominant producer-cultivated consumer zeitgeist is a postmodernist one that neither requires nor encourages us to critically examine the many actualities obscured by commodity images and artifacts. However, this book challenges this pervasive spirit of the times by paying close and necessary attention to numerous actualities referenced by skulking Poor Chic commodities and by also emphasizing how some journalists, academicians, students, and social critics have struggled against commodity culture’s furtive character.

Toward lifting large veils of obfuscation, The Consumption of Inequality: Weapons of Mass Distraction explains how Poor Chic works dynamically to distort material realities, blame victims, stigmatize white poverty, and douse failing urban economies, failing school systems and for-profit incarceration with “ghetto fab” and “outlaw cool.” Further masked by Poor Chic’s weapons of mass distraction is the economically diminished blue collar white guy who in and through popular consumer culture is consecrated with social and cultural capital. Finally, this book explains how representations of the blue collar white man, via a “redneck scapegoat” in Redneck and Blue Collar Comedy, explicitly vents his vehement “politically correct” anger on feminists, gays and lesbians, poor whites, physically and mentally challenged persons, obese individuals, immigrants, and political liberals (the ostensible odious promoters of so-called political correctness), while in reality blue collar workers have been transformed into the unemployed, service workers, and the near poor. Hence we must ask the following questions now and throughout: How does Poor Chic ideologically mask and sidetrack attention from increasingly harsh material realities of class struggle? Are there more constructive and humanizing ways to express and redress grievances? How can reaction and resentment that is expressed in and through the consumption of inequality be redirected onto its proper targets? These are fundamental Marcusian questions.

German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1964), like Theodor Adorno (1991)12 and the Frankfurt School more generally, voiced pressing concern over how the “culture industry” is responsible for distracting humans from recognizing true human needs and desires, for themselves and for others. As Marcuse biographer Douglas Kellner explained, Marcuse predicted that entertainment and leisure philosophy in Western capitalist societies would produce “false needs while dramatically reducing people’s capacity for critical thought and resistance.”13 With practical and tempered optimism, Marcuse urged toward finding a way out of “one-dimensional” thinking, or moving from “false to true consciousness.”14 Thus our task is to reject the trap set by what German philosopher Wolfgang Haug more recently has termed “commodity aesthetics,” or commodities that elicit, distort, and divert desires, while simultaneously satisfying exchange value.15

Central to overcoming “one-dimensional thinking” is subverting the strategic eradication of class consciousness. In Captains of Consciousness, Professor of Media Studies Stewart Ewen delineates the historical creation of consumer desire, which entailed advertisers deliberately cultivating a “self-conscious change in the psychic economy,” or a set of intentional strategies among advertisers making consumers self-conscious of social scrutiny and fearful of social rejection and then offering consumption as solution.16 A central element of the cultivation of consumer culture was, with the aid of “mass psychology,” to control public opinion. Ewen summarizes the techniques employed by public opinion expert George Phelps: “The advertising of the future, declared George Phelps, will be effective in so far as it is able to ‘leap to the eye . . . leap to the mind.’ All activity was envisioned as taking place within the corporate walls; the prospects for the consumer were no more than a passive (if ‘gratified’) spectatorship. The human eye become merely a target for visual stimulation, the ear was but an ‘avenue of entry’ for the blandishments of advertising.”17 Even more intricate strategies are delineated in works of Edward Bernays, so-called father of public relations and modern political spin, and famous political columnist Walter Lippmann, who unabashedly embraced propaganda as the ideal means for manipulating “public opinion” through advertising.18 Bernays was especially interested in cultivating “public acquiescence.”19 He cautioned that in the absence of a leader at hand, when “the herd must think for itself, it does so by means of clichés, pat words or images which stand for a whole group of ideas or experiences . . . [P]laying upon an old cliché, or manipulation of a new one, the propagandist can sometimes swing a whole mass of group emotions.”20

Ewen went on to explain that the linchpin in the cultivation of mass consciousness was transforming “class” into “mass.” As he put it, “business hoped to create an ‘individual’ who could locate his needs and frustrations in terms of the consumption of goods rather than the quality and content of life . . . In order to sell the commodity culture, it was necessary to confront people with a vision of that culture from which the class bases of dissatisfaction had been removed.”21

Indeed, we may have arrived at this ideal. According to a 2007 Pew Research study, young adults ages 18 to 24 (“Generation Next”) were reportedly “happy” with present conditions, comprised an “optimistic,” “look at me” spending generation, and shared the number one life aspiration, to get rich, and the number two life aspiration, to be famous.22

Expressing further unease about how consumer culture strategically impedes raised consciousness and social change, the anti–culture industry book Commodify Your Dissent contains a parody business prospectus with a Buy Recommendation for a fictitious business called Consolidated Deviance, Inc, abbreviated as ConDev. The company’s products are “youth culture fabrication,” “youth culture cooptation,” and the “merchandising of deviant subcultural practice.” What aids in the sale, the prospectus explains further, is Mounting Inchoate Generational Anomie (IGA)—something like the unnamed cancer in the film Fight Club, to be discussed later—and an academic cooptation strategy called poststructuralism. Concerning the latter, the prospectus says that in the 1990s “subcultural studies” proliferated in some of the country’s most influential academic presses, with convoluted works appreciative of, for example, the “libidinal heteroglossia of Grunge.” ConDev’s goal, according to the “Buy Recommendation,” is to maximize what was started among such academics by trademarking “SubCult” and “PostRock,” the latte...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Weapons of Mass Distraction
• 1: Financial Crisis, Ideology, and Alienation
• 2: Critiquing Postmodernist Zeitgeist
• 3: Prison Chic
• 4: Black Ghetto Cool
• 5: White Trash Stigma
• 6: Super Trash Spectacles
• 7: Blue Collar Vogue
• 8: Redneck and Blue Collar Comedy
• Conclusion: Tourists, Victims, and Deadening Others
• Notes