consumerism

and consumer culture

Images are a central aspect of commodity culture

and a society dependent on the constant production
and consumption of goods in order to function.
- Ours is a consumer culture.
culture.

- Consumerism pervades almost everything we do, every act of ‘identity construction’

construction’ we
participate in, and every interpersonal relationship we conduct.

- We don’t think about how historically strange consumerism is because we live and breathe it
‘24/7’

It is all about a world of things to be desired, envied and imagined…. Life as it “should be”.

It speaks the language of the imagined future - a world that works by abstraction.
What is consumerism?
Consumerism as a moral doctrine - consumerism could be
considered as our ‘moral responsibility’ to shop. This
shopping, the doctrine goes, confers choice, freedom,
autonomy and ultimately happiness on the individual.

What is a consumer society?

A society in which the individual is surrounded by an enormous

assortment of goods, goods whose characteristics are changing
constantly.
Marxist theory explained that the production of surplus (goods)
gave rise to the need for workers to be consumers and to
spend large sums of money on mass produced goods.

This all gives rise to modernity and the expected lifestyle in our
society.

With the recent introduction of e-commerce and telemarketing,

the physical basis of selling may be going through a major
change, as virtual shopping may make stores obsolete.

Customized ordering of goods and services have impacted the

manufacturing and distribution model that has been in place.
In the 20th century the workplace, home and
commerce were increasingly separated.
Women were relegated to the home (private
sphere) while men were delegated to the
public sphere.

Within the context of the city, people came

to feel the concept of self and identity were
influenced by the greater group - and the
fact that commodities gave ‘meaning’ to their
lives in the absence of the once close knit
community and its traditions..
What is consumerism?

Consumerism as the ‘ideology of conspicuous

consumption’ - this ideology suggests that
consumerism is less about ‘stuff’ for ourselves,
and more about how what we buy confers identity
and social status compared to other social groups.
Consumption is about signalling social status and
group membership.
What is consumerism?

Consumerism as economic ideology - an

incredibly powerful ‘logic’ post WW2.
This argument has it that consumerism
is necessary to stimulate economic
production. If people ever felt content
with what they had this would lower
production and ‘economic growth’.

Consumer culture must continually

stimulate new desires in populations
whose basic needs are already met.
Window shopping is one manifestation of this new activity, where the flaneur/flaneuse is one example of the mobile
practice of looking in the consumer culture.
Associated with this is a belief that everyone was potentially inadequate and in
need of improvement through consumption of goods.

Consumption was seen as a form of leisure and pleasure as well as therapy.

Even though a global market has come into existence, advertising remains
something that is organized to demographics, age, culture, gender and class.
What is consumerism?

Consumerism as political ideology - has largely replaced the idea

that politics should be about the state providing for its people.

Now all the main political parties tell us that a successful political state
is one where people’s needs are satisfied by ‘individual choice’ in
the marketplace.
George Bush said this after 9/11 - that it was every American’s patriotic
duty to shop more than ever.
Commodity culture and commodity fetishism

Commodity self (Stuart Ewen’s) idea that we as subjectivities, are, at least partially,
mediated and constructed through our consumption of commodities.

A commodity becomes part of one’s self identity and helps project one’s self into the
world. (e.g., choice of drink, of automobile, of clothing, of body tattooing, etc)
Theorist Michael Schudson
argues that advertising itself may
not really be so powerful; that
ads function indirectly and there
is a host of other commercial
efforts that make the commercial
environment work.

Since the 60’s advertisers

have stopped the hard sell
and favored being hip/cool
as they appeal to the
counterculture.
Marxist theory:

exchange value —what a particular

product costs in given system of exchange

Use value —refers to a product’s use in

society (what they are valued for in
abstract monetary terms).

Marxist theory critiques the emphasis on

exchange value - that is, not what the
products are really worth, but what they are
worth in abstract monetary terms.
Commodity fetishism — when
products are imbued with cultural
meanings quite apart from specific
production conditions and context.

Labor and working conditions must

remain invisible to the consumer.

Nike, which originally was promoted as

a signifier of female self empowerment.
Then, when it was learned that
Indonesian women worked as exploited
producers, the company had to institute
some reforms.

Yet the argument goes today that the

paltry pay is a huge amount of money in
a country where poverty is the rule, not
the exception. Thus, Nike can still argue
they are doing a service by having
offshore production plants!
Commodity fetishism operates through
reification which asserts that abstract ideas are
real or concrete.
Driving a fancy sports car assigns a symbol of
wealth, carefree-ness, “coolness” to the owner, or
at least the owner thinks they become so.

Condemnations of consumer society and

commodity culture have proliferated throughout
the 20th century.
The Frankfurt School argued that commodities
were a death knell for meaningful social
interaction - a corruption of the really valuable
aspects of existence.
Pop Art (1960s-70s) attacked
distinctions between high and low art,
declaring that TV, comic books, etc
were as socially significant as high art.
Fine arts, classical music were
considered elitist and upper class.

Andy Warhol embraced popular,

commodity culture when he queried
the boundaries between art and
product design, while celebrating the
repetition and conformity of mass
culture - as a statement of the
repetition characteristic of commodity
culture.
Roy Lichtenstein, another Pop Art artist,
made comic strip paintings, celebrating
and commenting both on the flat surface
of the comics - on the “kitschy” stories
they told as well as the aesthetic.
Addressing the consumer

Advertising uses interpellation, the process by which

the consumer recognizes themselves in the subject
position offered in a product or its advertisement.

Judith Williamson calls this appellation, where “you,”

the individual, are constantly being addressed in the
message.

The Frankfurt School referred to this practice as

pseudoindividuality, an ad’s (false) promise to produce
individuality.

The whole process is one in which we consume

products through commodity signs.
Ads create a relationship of
equivalence between a
product and its signifier.
Sometimes they use well
known figures to endorse
their product; sometimes
they try to show their product
is unique when there are in
fact, many products like it.

Companies also use

differentiation to show their
product is unique.
So ads construct relationships
of equivalence, differentiation
and signification to create
commodity signs.

They operate with a presumption

of relevance that allows them to
make inflated statements about the
necessity of their products.

If photos establish the “truth” of a

claim about a product, they also
are a primary source of fantasy.

Text is used to force the viewer to

re-read the image with a new
meaning—this helps to create the
ad’s impact.
Images are powerful connections to concepts, but words have great potential as well.
Allied to the sounds of the words in your head are the new words, or new word combinations (neologisms),
neologisms), that advertisers
create deliberately to implant novel elements in the audience’s heads.

Often they can even be nonsense words – but these nonsense words i.e “Beanzmeanzheinz”, can become part of the cultural
vernacular.

Watch out for taglines or jingles that deliberately don’t make grammatical sense, but which stick in the head.

Also look out for wordplay that uses:

polysemy - a play on a word that might have more than one meaning

homonyms - words with different meanings that are spelt the same

Descriptive adverbs - drives SMOOTHLY, cleans BRIGHTLY, and adjectives NEW, FRESH, SPECIAL

simile - when the qualities of one thing are compared to those of something else ‘runs like a cheetah’

metaphor - an expression that doesn’t say something is LIKE something else, it suggests it IS something else ‘Nescafe
your cup of inspiration’

euphemisms - often used if the ad deals with potentially sensitive or distasteful subjects. Tampon commercials and
funeral home commercials commonly use them ‘feminine protection’
All this leads to hyperbole - that is to say the deliberate exaggeration
of promotional claims way beyond reason, just to get our attention.

We can discuss the legality or ethics of claims like:

“No-Age: Say No to Aging” - Christian Dior

“Who says you can’t restore what time takes away” – Nutrimentics

Often this hyperbole is situated in a justifying bed of technical jargon.

The jargon itself may be pseudo-scientific, and most of the time we are
not meant to understand the meanings of the jargon.

However for some products (techno devices, cars, medicines, some cosmetic products) the use
of these terms carries the cultural prestige of science and rationality that can help persuade
us even if the claims are actually outrageous:

“Surgery can Wait!

Wrinkle-Decrease with BOSWELOX, a unique phyto-complex
that helps to counteract skin micro-creasing” - Loreal
Advertising designers combine iconic signs—drawings or graphs, indexical signs
- which might appear in photographs, and symbolic signs—in the form of text or
other imagery.
Most ads depend on symbolic and indexical combinations.
The photo is perhaps the strongest sign because it depicts what we accept or
believe to be the ‘real’, and so relays a sense of ‘authenticity’.
Glamour is the state of being
envied (John Berger).
Envy and nostalgia are also
combined to engage the
consumer.

The irony is that ads sell an

unattainable highly constructed
world that promises to be an
attainable ideal.
And as John Berger states - it is
a world always situated in the
future.
Advertising uses the idea
of our desire to return to a
nostalgic state (perhaps of
innocence?) and our
knowledge that we suffer
from a “lack” which
remains unfulfilled…

Some ad campaigns
intentionally try to create a
connection between a
product and a symbol of
the past.
Other ads sell concepts of the nation and the family as norms.
There is also a tendency to promise “membership” like an exclusive club to interpellate all
consumers as potential members of a class regardless of their actual class status.

http://www.abouttheimage.com/2878/visual_case_study_american_express_are_you_a_cardmember
_campaign/author24
The use of races other than white
promise exotic-ness/multiculturalism
to a product.
Consuming otherness is central to
commodity culture in the global era.
Bricolage and counter-bricolage

Redeployment of commodities
for new purposes/meanings
involves bricolage.

Fashion designers and

advertisers use counter-
bricolage to appropriate styles,
which have reconfigured
commodities. (e.g.: wearing
boxer shorts visibly above one’s
pants to show off the designer
label)
Or advertisers might co-opt
contemporary values of
feminism (self-control,
empowerment, and self
realization) to appeal to
female consumers who
identify with those values.
Thus important political
principles become part of
the act of selling.
The brand

Similarly a brand can become a

generic item that sometimes leads to a
product’s loss of uniqueness, e.g.,
Kleenex, Xerox, Doc Martens.

Consumers ‘appropriate’ logos as a

means of constructing their identity.
Anti-ad practices

Anti-ads are often pointed at

commodity culture, using billboards or
graffiti against ‘straight’ billboards to
convey their message. (See
Adbusters.com for more examples)

This is known as culture jamming.

 One thing that remains unchanged in our
era is the sense that coolness and hipness
are central to the exchange of
commodities, even when using marginal
cultures to sell to the mainstream.
The boundary between the mainstream and
the margins is always being renegotiated.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/themes/symbiotic.html
MERCHANTS of cool
Part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YuO8Zw9vJo&feature=related

Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPUkubmyK24&feature=related

Part 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTu_IiV8_4w&feature=related

Part 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkmOePBTg_Q&feature=related

Part 5
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ipM4Bi59a8&feature=related

Part 6
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh00Zw1G1YY&feature=related
Broadly, a consumer society will have these features:

The ‘balance’ or ‘guiding force’ of society has moved from

production to consumption.
We hear less about blue collar factories these days (which are
employing less and less workers as production is automated and
exported overseas) and more about the ‘palaces’ of
consumption - the shopping malls (which employ more and
more people).

Consumer societies are post-industrial societies in this respect

 The family moves from a unit of production to a
unit of consumption, and beyond that, the family
breaks down and more appeals to consume
become centred on the individual.

Because consumption must always increase,

consumer societies commodify more and more
aspects of life (spaces and rituals, including the
imagination itself), and make them a matter of
exchange value (money).
More things become valued chiefly for what they are
‘worth’ money-wise - this ‘logic’ applies even to
families and religions

In consumer societies debt is not a sin, but is

encouraged
When most consumption goes beyond ‘basic needs’, ‘persuasive
rhetoric’ - marketing and advertising - becomes an ever larger
component of consumer economies.
This rhetoric must appeal less to use, or utility values and more to sign
values such as brand values:
‘Use or utility value’ - what a product was made to ‘do’, its basic
functionality (a chair is for sitting on)
‘Exchange value’ - in an industrial society the worker is ‘alienated’
from the product of their labour - they no longer make the chair and so
some artificial standard must be introduced to determine the relative
value of things - this is abstract/money. People work for money to buy
the chair…

‘Sign value’ - what a product or service comes to ‘represent’ in society

as a social meaning maker. Any value that is separate and ‘added to’ its
use value.
In the case of the chair, we might buy it because we can sit on it, but
there will be other factors too - we might like its style [aesthetic value],
or the logo [brand value], or we might like the images and dreams
evoked by the advertising campaign.
To maintain the façade of ‘more
consumption=more happiness’ consumer
society must make us feel like ‘gods’ -
‘sovereign consumers’
So - how do advertisers indulge the ‘all powerful’ consumer?
They assign them various ‘consumer
identities’ where the shopper is ‘hailed’
or appealed to as:

Explorers
Identity seekers
Seducers / hedonists
Thrill seekers
Artists
Experts
Victims
Citizens
Leaders
Activists

‘Authentic rebels’ (the ‘rebel’ mode

of address becomes increasingly
common – you’re not like all the
rest, you’re special)
So - how do advertisers indulge the ‘all powerful’ consumer?
They can also imagine different ‘ways
of shopping’, where the consumer
is considered to shop:

As a ‘rational’ household manager

As a bargain hunter
As a fashion victim
For ethical / political reasons (green
/ organic shopping)
As an expert / aficionado
Compulsively
Carelessly
Adventurously – ‘extreme’
consumption
Rebelliously

Entire ‘themed’ shopping environments

can be constructed with these
‘shopping personae’ in mind
Consumerism supplies not just ‘stuff’, but meanings and values - rules for living.

A certain amount of consumption is necessary to fulfil basic needs,

but our economies would change drastically if they weren’t supported by
‘non essential’ consumption.

Lots of people also like consuming, not just the physical products but the act of shopping
itself and the reading of the creative, complex non-product texts that go with them (the
ads!)

The economic risks to consumerism for ad-makers include:

consumers getting jaded, cynical and bored by the claims of consumer culture
Economic recession and a credit squeeze (no money to borrow)
The actions of anti consumer activists
But there are also more ‘systemic’ downsides to consumption societies:

Increased rate of unhappiness and depression in spite of increased wealth

Ecological unsustainability (we cant keep making and buying more forever)

Greater division between haves and have nots – and in a media society the have nots can
see what the haves have, which breeds resentment
In conclusion:
• It could be argued that consumerism is well on the way to becoming a complete belief system
with shopping centres as the new ‘cathedrals’ and advertising as the new religious texts

• The logic of consumerism seeks to commodify - place an exchange or money value - on all
aspects of human creativity and sociality, and especially on self-realisation and happiness
itself.

• So pervasive is this ‘logic’ that even anti-consumer groups now ‘market’ themselves using
promotional rhetoric.

• Keeping consumers interested is however hard work. Much recent creative advertising rises
to the challenge by appropriating dissent to make ‘stuff cool’ for the ‘rebel consumer’ – the
‘true individual’

• A much bigger challenge to mass advertising is network society – mobile phone culture, Ebay,
Facebook, Myspace and YouTube.
For Thursday:

Find one example of hyperbole or neologism for

this weeks Thursday class. Bring in a copy and
briefly explain how this is used in the message.