Some more juicy arguments from Heath and Potter's book.
1) You can't fight consumerism simply by consuming less (or indeed by changing your own consciousness).
As everything you earn gets spent one way or another, the only sure way to downshift your contribution to consumerism is to earn less. When you put your money in the bank instead of spending it on goods you have deciced you don't need, that simply frees up someone else to spend it on your behalf.
[This one is OK as far as it goes, but it's always been clear to me that although your average Guatemalan enjoys a trip to the market as much as anyone else, there is generally more to their individuality than how they define themselves as buyers. ]
2) Engaging in 'virtuous activities' is one of the major psychological devices that consumers use to grant themselves permission to overspend.
Most of the lifestyles that are commonly promoted as anti-consumerist play a significant role in promoting competitive consumption.
"In the last forty years anti-materialist values have been one of the biggest cash cows of American consumer capitalism." Organic food for instance, is labour intensive and is "one of the major forces driving the return to an almost aristocratic class structure in the United States, in which the wealthy no longer eat the same food as the poor."
3) Rebellion against aesthetic and sartorial norms is not actually subversive.
"Whether people have piercings and tattoos, what kind of clothes they wear, what music they listen to simply does not matter from the standpoint of the capitalist system. Corporations are fundamentally neutral when it comes to gray flannel suits and biker jackets."
and "How many more decades will it take before we realise that nuns who say 'fuck' are not radical, they are simply entertainment?"
4) Undergound/Cool taste inevitably drifts towards stuff that sucks (i.e stuff that is increasingly difficult for the mainstream to co-opt).
"In an effort to avoid the tyrrany of mass society the rebel increasingly finds himself in a half-empty bar listening to music that he himself acknowledges to be 'annoying', feeling superior to the poseurs."
[Yet surely not all refined taste can be dismissed as higher-order posing? There are real issues of quality at stake here. There really is a lot of dross in the mainstream so one's motives for admiring things outside of it are not always insincerely 'elitist'. When I first started listening to classical music I liked the Bruch violin concerto. I still do, it's a high-quality mainstream piece, but over the years I have also come to enjoy less accessible compositions.
The accessibility of some types of art is something you have to work on, but these are personal tastes: I don't force myself to listen to ugly music in order to feel superior to the vulgar masses.
And whilst I will grant that there is a persistent taint of status-seeking dishonesty in the production and consumption of all experimental art, it also remains the driving force of innovation in our culture. Beethoven's late quartets must have sounded very 'underground' in their own day.]
and lastly, 5) The point at which rebellion becomes genuinely disruptive generally coincides with the point at which it becomes genuinely anti-social. And then you're not so much being a rebel as being a nuisance.
1 comment:
I agree in principle with much of this, esp. #3, but #4 is pushing it and smacks of trying to be clever...in fact it seems childish and cliched...musicians committed to avant-garde music, for example, are not thinking about being subversive or rebellious as much as they are trying to create beautiful music that exists within its own sound aesthetic. But I suppose the thesis is about consumers, not producers.
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