Week 10 – Notes

This week we started with a Canadian NFB documentary, El Contrato (2003) about the journey of several Mexican migrant workers in Leamington working in an array of greenhouse tomato farms. We talked about how important it is to our understanding of consumer culture and the system of consumption, and our understanding of the rhetoric “eat local” in Canada. We also discussed the intricacy of the global capitalist system and its ontology as an unbreakable chain in the way it makes us complicit in its treatment of people, no matter what our subject position is.

We then talked about consumer culture, and how for Celia Lury, contemporary Euro-American consumer culture is material culture. Specifically, as Strusser pointed out, the identity of the consumer and the citizen consumer is new to contemporary culture, despite people consuming products and commodities for centuries.

Lury  wants to nuance systems of exchange that rely on a hierarchical and dichotomous frame of production and consumption. Consumer culture recognizes that we do not just consume, but that we consume and produce in tandem. Lury views our everyday practices more like an appropriation. One of the most vital ways in which people relate to each other socially is through the mediation of things (p.1).  She names the study of these person-thing relationships material culture —the study of things- or objects- in use.

Lury points out: the use or appropriation of an object is more often than not both a moment of consumption AND production, of undoing AND doing, destruction AND construction. This is to move away from simply consumption or consumption based culture. In one instance, a person consumes/uses up a product that was produced and circulated in that system of exchange, and through that consumption they then can create/produce an new arrangement in a system of exchange, such as a meal for other members of the family, or to buy fabric to make clothes or consume a videogame to produce research.

The reductive 2-way consumption model also privileges production and especially technological production and figures consumption as secondary and responsive. Lury points out that this model of market production also maintains its frame on unfounded assumptions, such as there being a radical break between “pre-modern” and “modern” societies. As Strusser pointed out, change happens piecemeal and historical periodization in relation to consumer culture is reductive.  So the shift in contemporary times, has been from a production-drive to a consumption-driven culture in Euro-America.

Alongside Harold and Portwood-Stacer, Lury is not focused on the effects of consumer culture, but rather on the significance and character of the values, norms and meaning produced in such practices. An important question is: what does consumer culture do? What does material culture do that is unique to this euro-american post-wwII context? How does it form our identities? And how we arrange ourselves in relation to other objects, people, and to values, and how we live? There are different types of consumption and it’s not all consumption of commodities. Baudrillard in System of Objects (1968) says: “It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system”.

Consumer culture constitutes an appropriation of objects rather than simply consumption. Objects become paramount in discussing consumer culture (and not simply as over-consumed goods!) Social lives have things (cultural significance) // Things have social lives (they have narratives) We possess these things. Possessions come to serve as symbols for interests/identities. Self-identity is understood as a relation to possessions, and self-identity also becomes a possession, which we will look at in our “Branding of Self” module. Possessions in this frame are read as an activity not a state – this establishes a social identity. We perform to create associations between the goods we have and what they possibly mean to others.

Baudrillard argues that there have been historical changes in the ways in which material goods acquire meaning and convey it. This meaning constitutes signs and referents, and as such is stylized. Despite Baudrillard’s work being of import in rethinking consumer culture, it has been critiqued as ignoring activities/agency of consumers, and I know this point has been something brought up by Andrew Macpherson and Maddie last class.

The stylization of consumer culture refers to the production design, make-up and use of goods as if they were works of art (illustrated in Pintrest and nesting blogs). The design emphasis is on the goods themselves (their surface appearance), but also the related packaging, advertising and context of display  in sites of purchase (stores, malls, etsy, evident in boutique-y stores that create narratives, but also in big box stores with prices and sale signs — for instance you are more likely to buy something if it’s on sale, even though the regular price has been inflated to make you feel like you are getting something cheaper when it does go on sale). The aestheticized mode of the use of goods, and their use as if they were works of art is to be in a perpetual process of fantasy and social bonding.

With that in mind, Lury attempts to identify what is unique about now, and what best describes and defines consumer culture:

A process of stylization

There are 4 factors:

1. importance of the abundance of circulation of commodities (Portwood-Stacer also defined this as integral to the contemporary historical period of capitalism and anarchism)
2. Changes in the interrelationships of different systems of production and consumption or regimes of value – as such that the industrial/informational division of labour is growing / and economic exchange is more and more controlled by big corporations and this also create indie sites of of consumption/production
3. Relative independence of practices of consumption from production- as we have seen — alienation, commodity fetishism
4. Special importance given to consumption or use of certain objects or goods, usually be specific social groups and/or hegemonic ideologies and by cultural intermediaries (groups that have the ability to influence developments in fashion, style, art and not necessarily those with economic wealth, such as our example of sneaker consumption).

Number 4 is the factor that ties all together and provides basis to name this stylization.

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