Silvano owns textbooks plus a sole proprietorship

Table of Contents

Title Page Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE - The Consumer Society Critique

I - “THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION” (1944)

ENDNOTES Chapter 2 - “THE DEPENDENCE EFFECT” (1958)

II III IV ENDNOTES

Chapter 3 - “THE SEXUAL SELL” (1963) ENDNOTES

Chapter 4 - “. . . IMAGES WITHOUT BOTTOM . . .” (1988) ENDNOTES

PART TWO - The Social Organization of Symbols

Chapter 5 - THE IDEOLOGICAL GENESIS OF NEEDS” (1969)

1. CONSUMPTION AS A LOGIC OF SIGNIFICATIONS 2. CONSUMPTION AS A STRUCTURE OF EXCHANGE

AND DIFFERENTIATION 3. THE SYSTEM OF NEEDS AND OF CONSUMPTION AS

A SYSTEM OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES ENDNOTES

6

Chapter 6 - “ADVERTISING IN THE AGE OF ACCELERATED MEANING” (1996)

SIGN WARS: CONSTRUCTING SIGN VALUES THE LOGIC OF APPROPRIATION VALUE ADDED FLOATING SIGNIFIERS AND THE IMAGE BANK SPIRALS OF REFERENTIALITY, SPEED, AND

REFLEXIVITY CULTURAL CRISIS AND CONTRADICTION ENDNOTES

Chapter 7 - “HUNGER AS IDEOLOGY” (1993) THE WOMAN WHO DOESN’T EAT MUCH PSYCHING OUT THE FEMALE CONSUMER FOOD, SEXUALITY, AND DESIRE AUTHOR’S NOTE ENDNOTES

PART THREE - Consumption and Lived Experience

Chapter 8 - “OBJECT AS IMAGE: THE ITALIAN SCOOTER CYCLE” (1988)

THREE “MOMENTS” THE GENDER OF MACHINERY MEDIATION THE SCOOTER IN USE CONCLUSION ENDNOTES

Chapter 9 - “TOUCHING GREATNESS: THE CENTRAL MIDWEST BARRY MANILOW FAN CLUB” (1991)

MODERN CELEBRITY TOUCHING GREATNESS CENTRAL MIDWEST BARRY MANILOW FAN CLUB THEMATIC FINDINGS DISCUSSION ENDNOTES REFERENCES

7

Chapter 10 - “THE ACT OF READING THE ROMANCE: ESCAPE AND INSTRUCTION” (1984)

ENDNOTES PART FOUR - Consumption and Social Inequality

II - “CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION” (1899) Chapter 12 - “THE AESTHETIC SENSE AS THE SENSE OF DISTINCTION” (1979; ...

ENDNOTES Chapter 13 - “DOES CULTURAL CAPITAL STRUCTURE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION?” (1998)

DISTINGUISHING BOURDIEU METHODS MATERIALITY AND TASTE WORK AND TASTE DISCUSSION REFERENCES ENDNOTES

Chapter 14 - “FALSE CONNECTIONS” (1999) ENDNOTES

Chapter 15 - “Toy THEORY: BLACK BARBIE AND THE DEEP PLAY OF DIFFERENCE” (1996)

BASIC TRAINING TO MARKET, TO MARKET SHANI AND THE POLITICS OF PLASTIC FROM BELL JAR TO BELL CURVE ENDNOTES

PART FIVE - The Liberatory Dimensions of Consumer Society

Chapter 16 - “Two CHEERS FOR MATERIALISM” (1999) Chapter 17 - “FEMINISM AND FASHION” (1985)

8

ENDNOTES Chapter 18 - “SHOPPING FOR PLEASURE: MALLS, POWER, AND RESISTANCE” (1989)

CONSUMING WOMEN COMMODITIES AND WOMEN CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION PROGRESS AND THE NEW

PART SIX - The Tendency of Capitalism to Commodify

Chapter 19 - “THE FETISHISM OF THE COMMODITY AND ITS SECRET” (1867)

THE FETISHISM OF THE COMMODITY AND ITS SECRET

ENDNOTES Chapter 20 - “EATING THE OTHER: DESIRE AND RESISTANCE” (1992) Chapter 21 - “THE COOLHUNT” (1997) Chapter 22 - “ADVERTISING AS CULTURAL CRITICISM: BILL BERNBACH VERSUS THE MASS ...

HOW TO DO IT DIFFERENT ALIENATED BY THE CONFORMITY AND HYPOCRISY

OF MASS SOCIETY? HAVE WE GOT A CAR ... FROM NAZI CAR TO LOVE BUG ENDNOTES

PART SEVEN - New Critiques of Consumer Society

Chapter 23 - “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY AND THE NEW GLOBAL CHALLENGE” (1993)

MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE SIMPLE LIFE COMMON EXPRESSIONS OF ECOLOGICAL WAYS OF

LIVING

9

MAINTAINING OURSELVES AND SURPASSING OURSELVES

THE PUSH OF NECESSITY AND THE PULL OF OPPORTUNITY

HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SIMPLICITY THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CHANGE ENDNOTES

Chapter 24 - “CULTURE JAMMING” (1999) THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE DEMARKETING LOOPS

Chapter 25 - “A NEW KIND OF RAG TRADE?” (1997) GARMENT MANUFACTURE AND PRODUCTION ENDNOTES

Chapter 26 - “TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION” (1999)

THE NEW CONSUMERISM CONSUMER KNOWS BEST A POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION

Chapter 27 - “WHY CONSUMPTION MATTERS” (2000) I. CONSUMER SOCIETY II. POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION III. CHASING THE DREAM IV: SPENDING THE CAPITAL V. HIDDEN CONSUMPTION VI. RENEWABLES VII. ENERGY USE CONCLUSION: OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT ENDNOTES

Chapter 28 - “ECOLOGY AND NEW WORK: EXCESS CONSUMPTION AND THE JOB SYSTEM” (2000) PERMISSIONS ABOUT THE EDITORS Copyright Page

10

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank a number of people who helped us along the way: Diane Wachtell, who originally suggested the idea of an anthology; Gerry McCauley, our wonderful agent; Matt Weiland, our editor, and Tim Roberts, our production editor, both at The New Press; Susan Bordo, Robert Goldman, and Tom O’Guinn, who provided photos for us; Elisheva Lambert and Jim McNeill, who provided dedicated research assistance; Eric Hall, who secured permissions; and Prosannun Parthas-arathi and Tuba Üstüner. We are especially grateful to those publishers and authors who allowed us to reprint their work free of charge or at reduced rates.

11

INTRODUCTION

DO AMERICANS CONSUME TOO MUCH?

Douglas B. Holt and Juliet B. Schor Global warming, the conspicuous spending of the newly wealthy, excessive advertising, and, most recently, the “Battle of Seattle” have all conspired to put the question of our consumer lives back into public view. Consumer society— the “air we breathe,” as George Orwell has described it— disappears during economic downturns and political crises. It becomes visible again when prosperity seems secure, cultural transformation is too rapid, or environmental disasters occur. Such is the time in which we now find ourselves. As the roads clog with gas-guzzling SUVs and McMansions proliferate in the suburbs, the nation is once again asking fundamental questions about lifestyle. Has “luxury fever,” to use Robert Frank’s phrase, gotten out of hand? Are we really comfortable with the “Brand Is Me” mentality? Have we gone too far in pursuit of the almighty dollar, to the detriment of our families, communities, and natural environment? Even politicians, ordinarily impermeable to questions about consumerism, are voicing doubts. A year ago, Hillary Clinton got the attention of the world by worrying that the export of American entertainment and consumer products was destroying indigenous cultures; and recently, Vice President Al Gore suggested that Americans should focus less on earning money and spend more time with their families. Polls suggest majorities of Americans feel the country has become too materialistic, too focused on getting and spending, and increasingly removed

12

from long-standing nonmaterialist values. Why are doubts about consumer society reemerging at the

end of the twentieth century? Three factors have combined to create the current disquiet. Perhaps most obvious is the new inequality—the top 1 percent of households now own about 40 percent of all wealth, and the top 20 percent are responsible for half the country’s consumer spending. The long boom of the 1990s has resulted in a dazzling display among the nation’s newly rich to outdo one another in ostentatious spending. Each twist and turn of this Veblen- esque competition is duly reported on by the national media, whether it’s thousand-dollar bedsheets, ten-thousand-square- foot homes, or hundred thousand dollar vehicles. The entire nation becomes privy to the ins and outs of hiring butlers and erecting stone walls. The onlookers are alternately attracted and repelled, disliking the values driving the conspicuous consumption but at the same time fearful of falling too far behind in this accelerated race. Households of ordinary means console themselves with affordable luxuries, but all is not well in the kingdom of plastics.

On the one hand, the sheer disparities of wealth, income, and situation grow harder to justify, particularly as prosperity feels more assured. Homelessness, hunger, and child poverty continue to nag at Americans’ consciences. Furthermore, the upscaling of the wealthy puts pressure on others to follow suit. Many households find themselves stretched thin, as incomes for the majority have not kept pace with rising consumer standards. Savings rates have fallen, while credit card debt and bankruptcies have skyrocketed. Not only money but also time is in short supply. As lifestyle norms require two earners, and jobs become increasingly demanding, time for family and community is squeezed. The acceleration of daily life, often for purposes of consuming, contributes to a feeling that things are out of control. People look back to an earlier era when there was time enough, even if living standards were less opulent. Many long for a simpler, more authentic, less materialist past. “Balance” has become a defining mantra.

The second trend is the relentless commodification of all

13

areas of social life, and the rise of market values. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this trend is the marketization of a wide variety of goods and services that had hitherto been outside the profit nexus. Most prominent among these are the services produced in the household economy, where self- provision had been the norm. Today, as married women are more devoted to paid employment, they begin “outsourcing”—hiring baby-sitters, accountants, gardeners, grocery delivery, and personal shoppers. Households that can afford it substitute time for money. Less and less of daily life is produced at home; more and more of what we consume is commodified, i.e., produced for sale on the market.

This commodification of daily life is also occurring in other areas. Health care and education, which were previously provided as public goods to citizens, are given over to private corporations who produce them for profit, as if they were ordinary consumer goods. Public services such as welfare and prisons are run by corporations for the purpose of making money.

The production of news, culture, sports, and entertainment is also increasingly commodified. Twenty-five years ago, the public good aspect of book and newspaper publishing coexisted with the need to make money. Now, a handful of megaconglomerates have taken over all the major media. Profitability and reproducing the political legitimacy of the system have become the dominant criteria for cultural production. The mouse is truly eating the world.

Indeed, virtually no aspect of social life appears to be immune from these trends. “Personal style” is now a hot market commodity. Trend spotters scour the nation’s inner cities, searching for the successors to the hip-hop innovators of the 1980s. They scrutinize the walk, the talk, the way one’s pants are worn. At lightning speed, style moves from inner city to suburb and back again, a marketed commodity. But it’s not just youth culture that is being replicated and sold. Business gurus urge everyone to perfect their personal style. Brand and market yourself, whomever you are.

The relentless drive to commodify is also evident in the commercialization of public space and culture. Advertising

14

and marketing appear almost everywhere—in museums, on public television and radio, in doctor’s offices, on subway platforms, and on restaurant menus. Sports arenas, previously named for communities, now sport corporate logos. Movies are replete with product placements. Public schools, once relatively isolated from corporate advertisers, became their new frontier during the 1990s, as marketers strived for “share of mind” among six-year-olds. Many of the nation’s children now watch commercials in their classrooms (via Channel One), learn from corporate-written curricula, look at advertising on the Internet, or drink the official school soft drink (Coke or Pepsi).

Indeed, our deepest personal connections are increasingly dominated by market transactions, whether it’s through surrogate motherhood, the sale of one’s DNA, the booming trade in sex for hire, or the commercialization of religion and spirituality. Little remains sacred, and separate from the world of the commodity. As a result people become ever more desperate to sacralize the profane consumer world around them, worshiping celebrities, collections, and brand logos.

The third major development that is reigniting criticism of consumer society is the rapid globalization of the world economy. Beginning with the French general strike of December 1995, grassroots opposition to globalization has begun to intensify. The most dramatic example has been the Battle of Seattle, a mesmerizing confrontation between the agents of corporate globalization (represented by the World Trade Organization) and a coalition of labor, environmental, church, student, and anticonsumerist activists.

Protesters in Seattle attacked not only, or even mainly, the export of American jobs, but rather the corporate vision of global consumerism. They questioned the very desirability of the WTO’s stated purpose of increasing incomes through global trade. Rejecting the current system of cheap commodities based on exploiting labor and natural resources, they offered alternative visions of local economies built on sustainable agriculture, locally controlled manufacturing and retailing, and limited material desires. It is significant that

15

the protesters went after Nike, Starbucks, and other mega- brands. They stood against corporate consumerism, in favor of locally owned small businesses; they rejected the idea that one’s personhood is defined by the logo on the shoe; and they argued against the impoverishment of small farmers and producers that globalization has wrought.

Perhaps most important has been the link between the spread of consumerism and the ongoing devastation of the natural environment—the connections between air travel and carbon accumulation; the demand for exotic hardwoods and species extinction; meat consumption and soil erosion; toxics and human health hazards. Recent years have been the warmest of the century. Weather patterns have turned extreme, and crocuses are appearing in December. As the planet warms up, so too must the debate about our consumption, the ultimate cause of climate change.

Within the academy, a parallel discussion is taking place. Scholars are becoming more attentive to questions about the nature and desirability of consumer society, engaging in an ongoing academic conversation. As they have always been, the public and academic debates are dialectically connected. Sometimes scholars anticipate broader cultural changes; in other moments, such as the current one, political movements have set the agenda for the academic dialogue. In the pages that follow, we’ve selected essays that provide an entry point into these discussions.

THE ECONOMIC CRITIQUES: CAPITALISM NEEDS CONSUMERS

What drives consumer society? Is it corporations, who by their marketing and advertising campaigns ultimately determine what consumers want? Or is it consumers, whom producers must satisfy in order to stay in business? This deceptively simple question has been at the heart of much of the scholarly literature, and continues to preoccupy both supporters and detractors of consumer society.

16

Throughout the middle decades of the century, from the 1940s until the 1980s, the theme of corporate influence was dominant in the scholarly literature. One of the most influential contributions was the 1944 classic essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, prominent members of the Frankfurt School. Drawing on Marx’s theory of alienation in the workplace, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that employers’ needs for objectified and submissive workers created a parallel need for dominated, passive consumers. Creativity and subjectivity, the hallmarks of the artisanal economy, are simply incompatible with the de-skilling and repetitiveness of mass-production industry. Culture, once brilliant, demanding, and intellectually challenging, becomes soothing, banal, familiar, and entertaining. With astonishing prescience, Adorno and Horkheimer predicted the “dumbing down” of art and culture, the concentration of cultural producers, and the spread of an entertainment society.

For Adorno and Horkheimer, the objectification of labor requires the objectification of the consumer. This “paramount position of production” was to assume a central role in other influential critiques of consumer society, such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Galbraith was also posing the question of compatability between production and consumption, but in ways more Keynesian than Marxian. In particular, the phenomenal increases in productivity that fueled mass production had to be accompanied by similarly phenomenal increases in consumer demand. But how to ensure that the endless stream of cars, appliances, and other products would actually be sold?

Galbraith’s answer—the dependence effect—is that “the institutions of advertising and salesmanship. . . create desires.” The corporation both creates the want, and satisfies it. Compatibility is ensured because the same institution controls both sides of the market.

This was to prove a potent theme in the fifties and early sixties, as the ascendance of Madison Avenue and its turn to ever more sophisticated psychological approaches alarmed many. Books such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden

17

Persuaders and Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man stressed the seamlessness of the system. In 1963 Betty Friedan produced a brilliant gynocentric companion piece to Adorno and Horkheimer’s androcentric analysis. For the latter, production means factories and male workers; for Friedan, the relevant labor process is the household economy and occupation: housewife. But in both, work is boring, repetitive, unskilled, mundane. Friedan argues that the feminine mystique, and its attendant confinement of women to the home, was driven mainly by the need to sell products. Combing through the motivation research of Ernest Dichter, Friedan reconstructs the marketers’ view of women. They were the backbone of the consumer economy, but career women did not care to spend their lives doing something as trivial and unsatisfying as shopping. Capitalism needed housewives, stunted in their careers, driven to purchase discerningly, manipulated into channeling their considerable creative potential into cake mixes, washing powders, and the choice of breakfast cereal rather than more significant accomplishments in the world of work.

Of course marketers promise more than the mundane world of the kitchen. As Stuart Ewen argues in his piece on style, Madison Avenue also offers commodities as the route to pleasure and sexuality, through their ability to create identity, freedom, “fascination and enchantment,” beauty, and style. Consumers are seduced by sophisticated advertising to adopt a host of superfluous preferences for products, which are at heart advertisers’ fictions: Buy style in the marketplace and you can be whoever you want to be.

While they differed in many ways, these critical accounts shared certain themes—they described false and true needs, a superficial, surface world of commodities versus an underlying realm of authentic life. Furthermore, in these accounts, the standard defense of the system became illegitimate, for if corporations created needs, particularly in insidious ways, they could hardly be credited for meeting them. There was a better, more authentic, and less consumerist way to live. But it was blocked by corporate power.

18

A second critique was aesthetic. Mass production was derided as lacking quality, taste, and creativity. Thus, consumer society produced neither the good, the true, nor the beautiful. It was a great con game.

THE CULTURAL CRITIQUES: MANUFACTURING MEANINGS

The economic critiques explain how the profit motive leads to the organization of consumption. They are less compelling in their descriptions of why consumers go along with corporate designs. One answer is that advertisers have been successful because they have been able to embed valued meanings in products. If correct, this argument leads to the important conclusion that meaning does not necessarily emanate from the material or functional aspects of products.

As anthropology has been particularly good at showing, human understandings and experiences of what are seemingly objective properties are actually cultural constructions. Goods have symbolic meanings in all societies. However, capitalism poses a new problem—imbuing functionally and materially similar products with different symbolic meanings. The marketer needs to induce the consumer to pay a premium for products that are mere commodities (i.e., mass-produced, identical goods).

Despite their emphasis on manipulation, Adorno and Horkheimer understood the importance of symbolic meanings with their recognition that consumers could use consumer goods and marketed imagery to create categories of social difference. It is with Jean Baudrillard, however, that we begin to find a fully articulated theory of the production of social meaning through commodities. The primary target of his damning essays is the argument of most defenders of consumer society—the idea that commodities are produced to respond to individual needs and wants. Such tautological formulations beg the question: How are these needs and wants produced?

19

Baudrillard’s answer is that individual desires are disguised expressions of social differences in a system of cultural meanings that is produced through commodities. This “fashion system” is a code—an infinitely variable set of social differences—that people access through consumption. It is not meaningful to talk about authentic versus false needs in Baudrillard’s model, only the extent to which people have been absorbed into the fashion logic. One of the most important implications of this view is that if consumer society is premised upon the production of difference through commodities, then the system is extremely resilient. How can a social movement challenge consumer society without falling prey to the further expansion of fashionable difference through its opposition?