“People recognise themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobiles, hi-fi sets, split level homes………social control is anchored in the new needs which the consumer society has produced. ” Marcuse,1968:24 To what extent are we controlled by the consumer society we live in? The rise of the consumer culture is a phenomenon characteristic for the twentieth century. The impact of this cultural movement is disputable.
The quote above was taken from Marcuse’s book “One dimensional man. 1964 Marcuse believed that the products of consumer capitalism indoctrinate and manipulate society to promote a false consciousness of needs which become a way of life. He saw this as another form of totalitarianism which binds consumers to producers and uses the pleasures of consumer lifestyle as instruments of control and domination. Therefore the question arises whether the culture of consumerism poses a profound threat to the freedom and individuality of the consumer.
In response to this claim, the essay will argue that Marcuse has been right in arguing the advertising and consumerisms aims to manipulate the consumer’s consciousness.Furthermore by taking an existentialist approach it will argue that society ultimately chooses their own path and consents to their own destiny. It also takes into consideration that in the contemporary society consumerism is omnipresent; therefore the option of choice is diffused. The essay, will be structured in the following way.
It will first outline the concept of consumer culture and its development in the last century. Moreover it will outline the change from the age of modernism to the post-modernist era. According to Slater 1997, Consumer Culture is the culture of market societies and is defined though market relations.It predominantly is the product of capitalism.
He believes that this new culture is a pecuniary culture based on money. The central claim is that the values from the realm of consumption will spill over into other domains of social action. He further argues that Consumer Culture is in principle, universal and impersonal. He simultaneously agues, that there is an ultior claim towards this definition, as although it seems universal and is depicted as a land of freedom, in which everyone can be a consumer, it is also felt to be universal because everybody must be a consumer.
Another characteristic is that Consumer Culture is identified with private choice and private life. The next characteristic feature is that the consumer’s needs are unlimited and insatiable. He argues that in the age of consumption the identities are negotiated though consumption, with which he means that we define ourselves more and more by what we consume. His last characteristic to the definition of consumer culture is that Consumer Culture represents the increasing importance of Culture in the exercise of power.
Ritzer 1999 refers to the places in which consumption takes place “cathedrals of consumption. ” He argues that there are obvious cathedrals of consumption such as the supermarket, internet shopping or the shopping malls, but also ordinary everyday locations, which we would not associate with consumption, such as the railway station, the library or even our living room at home. Everywhere we go we are surrounded by cathedrals of consumption which aim to entice us to consume. Once can detect three different theories, to the power of these cathedrals of consumption.
Weberian theory leads to the view that the cathedrals of consumption, when taken together, create a rationalized iron cage from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to escape. This is totally commodified world in which it would be futile, or nearly so, to hope to find a space in which one is free from commercial pressure. Supportive of this view is the proliferation of the new means of consumption, especially their spread into the home, so that even one is unable to avoid opportunities and pressures to consume.A second view, more traceable to theories of Michael Foucault 1976, is that instead of an overarching iron cage, what we have is a great number of minicages.
Each cathedral of consumption is a minicage and when consumers are in one of them, they are constrained. Following Foucault’s notion of the “caceral archipelago”, we can think of each of the new means of consumption as an islands fortress that is part of a larger archipelago. Using this metaphor, the consumer is free to hop from island to island but on each of the island the consumer is constrained.There is a third view associated with rational choice theory.
It argues that consumers are free to move in and out of the cathedrals of consumption as they wish, and when they find themselves in one of the cathedrals, they can decide for themselves whether or not to consume. More generally, they can decide to avoid any and all of the cathedrals, they are free to avoid consumption if they wish. This notion is put forward by Featherstone 1991 and Campell 1989. The rise of consumerism really accelerated after the Second Wold War.
People became more prosperous and therefore had more money to spend on commodities. Ewen 1976 traces the development of modern advertising back to the 1920s, where realization took place on part of the owners and managers that they no longer control the workers. Consumers became important an feature of capitalism and advertising arose to help make those decisions. After the economic boom of the 1990s prosperity increased even more and large incomes and early retirements characterized that decade.
The youth became increasingly involved in consumption.The technological change is probably the most important factor in creating consumerism. Automobiles and motorways made transport faster and the improvement of the mailing service ensured fast delivery. The most important invention was the computer in 1946.
New facilitating means came into existence, for instance the credit card, which made it possible for people to obtain what they want and need from the cathedrals of consumption. For small payments we know are able to use the Cyber Cash System on the Internet.Hence consummation has never been this easy. There has also been a sociological change in how today’s society consume.
According to Samuel Strauss consumptions involved a commitment to produce more things from one year to the next. Previously business has sought to give consumers what they want. Now business interest shifted to an emphasis on compelling consumers to want and “need” the things that business are producing and selling. Ritzer 1999 argues that today we are in fact in a time of “hyper consumption”.
One cannot deny the fact that nearly everybody is involved, or at least touched by the culture of consumption. In the last twenty years personal savings have gone down and personal debt has risen. Although these sociological changes seem to be for the better, Schor’s 1998 findings prove that although there is an increase in consumption and material possessions, Americans seem no happier than in earlier generations. We consume differently today.
We seem never to stop shopping as we are surrounded by commodities. Every destination seems to be a Cathedral of Consumption.For instance, a do-it yourself attitude and self service facilities in Fast Food Restaurants or even an ATM, encourage us to believe it is our own choice to consume. Even though the exportation of American Consumer Culture is noticeably very aggressive it enjoys worldwide acceptance.
The key to this attitude is the absence, since the fall of communism, of any viable worldwide alternative to the American models. American models of Cathedrals of Consumption have an increasing international presence, influencing European consumer culture.As for example Mc Donald’s had only a quarter of its branches outside the US by 1991 but by 1996 it was over 40%. The rise of consumerism is also very closely linked to the shift from modernism to postmodernism.
The term ‘postmodernism’ is difficult to define. The term is a contradiction in itself. Its meaning appears to be self-conscious, self-contradictory and self-undermining statement. The ‘post-‘ suggests a new direction from the previous philosophy of modernism. Modernism was the cultural movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20th century. It derived from a conscious opposition to classicism.It emphasized experimentation and aimed at discovering an inner truth behind the surface of appearance. Modernism was progressive.
It was exploring the paradoxical, was ambiguous and uncertain and stressed an open-end nature of reality. Postmodernism figuratively rejects modernism. It emphasizes eclecticism in art styles, ironic stances towards life, superficiality instead of depths and the role of reproduction as against originality in art. Modernity was marked by progress, the striving and ‘development towards a better, more complete and more modern condition’.
In order to begin out criticism of consumerism, one has to take Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism into consideration. Paul Ricoeur 1986 has described the concept of commodity fetishism as ‘crucial for a theory of ideology’ in capitalist society p. 130. Marx’s comments on fetishism in Capital are confined to one comparatively short section in the first chapter.
He criticizes the taken-for-granted assumptions of common sense and he argues that these assumptions conceal the real nature of social relations in capitalism.According to Marx, the value of a commodity derives from the labour which has produced the commodity. Instead of understanding the value of the commodity in terms of the social relations which have produced it, the commodity’s value is understood in relation to other commodities, such as money or the goods that money can purchase. In this way, the labour expended in the production is forgotten in the everyday understanding of the value of the commodity.
Marxian theory of the exploitation of workers is clear-cut because all value comes form the workers.If they get anything less than everything, they are being exploited. Jean Baudrillard 1996 criticizes industry”s generous attitudes towards consumers by giving them the freedom of choices as a trick of capitalism: Our freedom to choose causes us to participate in a cultural system. It follows that the choice in question is a specious one: to experience it as freedom is simply to be less sensible of the fact that it is imposed upon us as such, and that through it society as a whole is likewise imposed upon us.
Choosing one car over another may perhaps personalize your choice, but the most important thing about the fact of choosing is that it assigns you a place in the overall economic order. Baudrillard 1996, 141 In Baudrillard”s account, the capitalist system allows consumers a certain degree of freedom, and this generous attitude toward a free individual consumer makes the capitalist system more attractive and effective. In the real business world, industry treats consumers as groups, such as status groups, age groups, value groups, sex groups, etc. based on industry”s categorizations, namely the intended markets.
Products are produced and marketed collectively, no matter how seriously industry tries to diversify product lines. What I would like to argue here is that consumers are incorporated into the capitalist system, not by the compulsive exercise of power by industry, but as a result of the interaction with industry. In other words, consumers can make their decisions through the interaction with industry by way of commodities, and in this interaction, categorization works as a determinant factor.In many sense, categorization imposes some restricting power on the intended consumers because it defines the intended markets and consumers.
The identity of a product, such as an executive car, is also constructed to penetrate the intended markets. On the other hand, consumers tend to refer to the “given” categorization when they choose commodities. An executive may choose a car from the “executive car” market. This is the effort by consumers to try to locate themselves in the intended market.
In this respect, the action “buying something” is the movement by consumers to refer themselves to the intended market, and therefore, this is the opposite direction of consumers” intentions to express themselves through commodities. In most accounts of post modernity, consumer culture both exemplifies the blurring and flattening of modernist distinctions and indicates the medium through which it happens, it may even constitute an explanation. Things which inhabited different world and value systems, and were consumed by different audiences, now occupy a single cultural space.Moreover, that single cultural space may seem to be occupied by everyone.
Earlier accounts of capitalism might attribute this to spreading commoditization of all things, whether culturally high or low, public or private, can be made equivalent as things to be bought and sold. In the notion of postmodern culture, commodities have been dematerialized and now exist purely as signs circulating within a ‘political economy of signs. However seemingly infinite the number of different signs in circulation, they are all completely the same in being ‘just signs.Within the circulation of sign there can be nothing but choice,- things have no intrinsic meaning or anchorage in the world they simply constitute a selection of signs from which to pick an mix.
Foucault 1975 pointed out that we don’t live in a world of facts that have a meaning independent people but, instead, in a world constantly subject to our every interpretation. This implies that in postmodernism there can only be process and not progress, as it denies omniscience, the great narratives of modernism and the closure and end of wisdom.Frederic Jameson 1997 even goes so far to argue the ”death’ of the subject itself= the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual. ‘ The once-existing centred subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy been dissolved.
‘ In art for instance, the end of the individual brushstroke has come to an end due to the mechanical reproduction of our time.The result is that the ‘individual human body’ can no longer map its position in a ‘mappable external world, and such forces incapacity is a symbolic of the wider ‘incapacity of our minds’ to map the great global multinational communicational networks of the modern world’ 1997:156 The media both reflects certain aspects of society and at the same time profoundly affects society. This relationship ultimately leads to a radically different kind of consciousness, one that rejects the notion of progress, one that cherishes irony, revels in superficiality, mixes genres and thus forms pastiches.The crucial ‘de-differentiation’ for accounts of postmodern culture is the implosion of sign and reality, or, in semiotic terms, of sign and referent, connotations and notation.
The place of signs and culture can no longer be plausibly anchored in, as Baudrillard 1996 puts it, “finalities” in the external world. Consumption is no longer anchored in the finality of need, not knowledge in truth, technocracy in progress, history in a metanarrative characterized by causation and teleology.These external anchors for meaning are now revealed, and indeed experienced, as being internal to the arbitrary game of culture and signification. This schizophrenic subject becomes one of two exemplars of the postmodern consumer.
On the one hand, the consumer, inhabiting a perpetual present, confronts all of social life as a field of simultaneous and depthless images, from which to choose, but to choose without reference to any externalities or anchors. In order to control the consumer, consumerism needs to have a form of authority over the consumer.Weber identifies three different types of authority, the traditional, charismatic and legal rational authority. Weber regards today society as controlled by bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy embodies Weber’s thinking on rationality, authority and the iron cage. First, bureaucracy is the epitome of formal rationality. Secondly it is the organizational structure that is associated with rational- legal authority and its triumph over other forms of authority and finally bureaucracy is itself an iron cage, in terms as to who functions it.More generally, as more and more sectors of society come to be characterized by bureaucracies, they tend to form one enormous iron cage.
Weber conceived of capitalism as another form of a rational system, and he offers an extraordinarily clear image of its material cage-like character: “Capitalism is today an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalist rule of action.This constrain is important in itself for its relationship to exploitation, and also because it makes possible the systematic extraction of enchantment from these structures. Ritzer: 1999 To sum up Weber 1921 saw the spirit of modern capitalism leading to rationalized, disenchanted capitalism, for Campbell 1989 , on the other hand, the spirit of modern consumerism leads to romantic, enchanted capitalism.
Although production is of central importance in rational capitalism, it is of secondary importance for romantic capitalism. What is of central importance for romantic capitalism is consumption.And, within the realm of consumption, Campbell accorded great importance to fantasies, especially the fantasizing of consumers. This is very true, as people have independent desires to pursue pleasures; this is not a desire that has to be manipulated into being.
Postmodern theory offers useful corrective on the idea that the means of consumption control and exploit consumers. Although there is control and exploitation in the sense that people are led to buy and to spend too much, the fact is, that people are not, in the main, being coerced, into doing so, but are quite eager to behave in these ways.Most consumers do not see themselves as being controlled and exploited and would vehemently reject the idea that this is what is taking place. Whatever the objective realities of price paid and quantities purchased, most consumers seem willing to pay the prices and would, if anything, consume more if they could.
Leis 1976 argued that modern Euro-American societies are characterized by what he calls a high-intensity market in which individuals are trained to act as consumers. This change is seen to have two key features.The number and complexity of available good in the market-place grows enormously and individuals tend to interpret feeling of we-being more and more exclusively in terms of their relative success in gaining access to high level of consumption. However, he suggests that the intensification of commodity circulation has a number of negative effects in relation to the ethnics of the good life or well-being as a result of the fact that the “direct interaction between impulses and sources of satisfaction is broken, impulses are controlled and consciously directed towards an enlarged field of satisfaction.
1976, 81 It is an undeniable fact that consumption has moved to being a very important part in today’s society. It has crept unnoticed into our consciousness, and now is associated more or less with any action we take. The rise of consumption has led its way to advertising, increasingly influencing us. But the counter argument is that nobody is “forced” to consume and the demand for consumption is rising.
Featherstone argues that this is all part of what he describes as “aesthetization of everyday life” Featherstone 1991: 67-8 the sense of a world saturated by the flow of signs and images, a word encountered through images. We consume more because we have more money to spend. Although personal debt is going up, we now found new means of how to express ourselves. Rather than seeing consumption exploiting the consumer, I would argue that consumption really enables us to new freedom.
Formally it is true that the world consumption offers us, is not a world of reality.It allows us to live in a world, which we would like to live in and allows us to nurture this dream, presupposing we have enough means to consume the commodities necessary for this. Weber argues due to bureaucracy we find ourselves placed in one big iron cage. I would argue against it, as one can still find locations not affected by bureaucracy, for instance an excluded island.
I would rather go along the lines of Foucault 1975 and Ritzer 1999 who argue that the cathedrals of consumption provide a multitude of mini-cages.The problem is that the increasing demand for cathedral of consumption has now produced so many that we are unaware of their existence. What I am trying to argue is that although we are being controlled by consumerism, we are controlled by our consent. As Lytoard 1979 argues, we take comfort in uniformity.
Although now, the line between our free will and the consequence of advertisement is very thin. Reality is as Baudrillard 1998 and Lytoard argue blurred, and only with rational reasoning one can detect out freedom.
