Social Inequality and Consumer Culture

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Social Inequality and Consumer Culture

• The promise held out by the work of art that it
  will create truth by lending new shape to the
  conventional social forms is as necessary as it
  is hypocritical. Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944

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Three Perspectives on Consumer Culture

• 1) Consumer culture is premised upon the
  expansion of capitalist commodity production. As
  a result material culture has expanded. This
  means increasing capacity for ideological
  manipulation.
• 2) Goods act primarily as markers of status and
  the satisfaction given by goods is related to
  this.
• 3) Consumption provides emotional, bodily, and
  aesthetic pleasure.

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Critiques of Consumer Culture

• The commodity logic and instrumental rationality
  manifest in the sphere of production is
  noticeable in the sphere of consumption.
• Leisure is filtered through the culture
  industry.

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Use Value?

• Once the dominance of exchange-value of goods,
  the commodity becomes free to take up a secondary
  or ersatz use-value. (Rose, 1978, p. 25)

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The Culture Industry Enlightenment as Mass
Deception

• Adorno and Horkheimer apply Marxs theory of
  alienation to consumers.
• Just as workers become passive, dominated
  subjects, so do consumers.
• Consumption becomes work.
• Alienation from process, from product purchased,
  from community of fellows, from self.

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Adorno and Horkheimers Critique

• The dumbing down of culture.
• The objectification of the consumer

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• The people at the top are no longer so
  interested in concealing monopoly as its
  violence becomes more open, so its power grows.
  Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be
  art. The truth that they are just business is
  make into an ideology in order to justify the
  rubbish they deliberately produce. (Adorno and
  Horkheimer, 1944 p. 3)

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All that is Solid Melts Into Air

• The culture industry appropriates (and thereby
  destroys) traditional and high culture.
• Wagners Ride of the Valkyrie is associated
  with a Bugs Bunny Cartoon (Kill the Rabbit, Kill
  the Rabbit)
• Tradition become Archie Bunker
• The Beatles Revolution is used to sell shoes.

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Governmental Control

• While enacted in the name of the people, it also
  silences the public.
• Official broadcasting- cost of access is
  prohibitive
• Supersize Me example- advertising of candy versus
  fruits and vegetables
• Censorship

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Market Control

• People with varied needs and interests become
  demographics.
• Results in propaganda.
• How salient are these groupings to identity?

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The Banality of Market Culture

• Art becomes artifice- it is produced to market to
  a demographic.
• Recycled culture
• Filters all
• Movie Syndrome (Real life is indistinguishable
  from the movies)

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• The culture industry perpetually cheats its
  consumers of what it perpetually promises.
  (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944)

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• The deception is not that the culture industry
  supplies amusement but that it ruins the fun by
  allowing business considerations to involve it in
  the ideological clichés of a culture in the
  process of self-liquidation. Ethics and taste
  cut short unrestrained amusement as naïve
  naïveté is thought to be as bad as
  intellectualism- and even restrict technical
  possibilities. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944)

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Galbraiths Dependence Effect

• Desires must be created to ensure demand.
• One cannot defend production as satisfying wants
  if that production creates the wants.
  (Galbraith, 1958)
• How is want made into need?

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Stuart Ewen

• The Seduction of Advertising.
• We are shown idealized images and promised that
  they lie just outside our grasp.

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Endless Options

• Style- is used as a means to seduce the consumer.
• Consumers are seduced to adopt preferences for
  products that are actually interchangeable.
  (Coke or Pepsi, Sprite or 7-Up, Panasonic or
  Sony)
• Promise of social mobility- you can be whoever
  you want to be.

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Marketing Social Justice

• Lifestyles become a marketable commodity.
• Social Justice becomes about your jeans.
• The Empty Promise of Transgression

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The Flaws with the Critiques

• There is some better, more authentic way of life,
  that is blocked by corporate power.
• The aesthetics of mass culture are problematic.
  (Its tacky).

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• Consumption and bodies became central to the
  development and social display of identity.

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Consumption and Social Inequality

• Consumption and Status
• Material advantages (health, nutrition)
• Conspicuous Consumption
• The Embodiment of Social Inequality

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Status and Consumption

• Thornstein Veblen (1899)- In modern society,
  wealth (rather than military prowess) had become
  the basis of social esteem.
• Because wealth is difficult to measure,
  conspicuous consumption becomes the means of
  determining social hierarchies.
• Consumption is a means of communication.

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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 countrys consumer
  spending.

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• Bourdieu (1984) notes that the body is not simply
  a surface to be read, but is a three dimensional
  expression of social relations that take the form
  of corporeal or mental schema, referred to as
  habitus (Bourdieu, 1984).
• Through the process of routine symbolic
  consumption, identity is constructed and
  embodied.

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• Bourdieu (1984) notes through daily practice
  taste is inscribed upon the body, and therefore,
  taste denotes class status. Ones taste serves
  as a marker of social status and creates a shared
  experience of class identity.

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Distinction

• Taste is one aspect of the reproducing of class
  differences.
• Consumer tastes vary in predictable ways, and
  depend on the cultural capital of the
  individual.
• Taste becomes a means of assuring ones social
  and economic place.

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• Those high in cultural capital apply a formal
  aesthetic sensibility to their consumption of
  food, décor, and mass media, in contrast to the
  functional aesthetic (emphasis on qualities such
  as durability) of low cultural capital consumers.
  (Schor and Holt).
• Visible symbols of status are still salient.

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• Other authors have applied similar principles to
  studying other facets of identity such as gender
  and/or race.
• The cultural capital conferred by ones taste
  reveals relations of power and privilege.
• How ones physical abilities, tastes and
  proclivities are read and valued by the larger
  society structures opportunities.
• Those in dominant groups are much more effective
  at having their own bodies defined as superior,
  legitimate, healthy, and/or normal.

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• Drawing on Marxist perspectives, the
  fetishization of bodies ultimately leads to the
  reproduction of socially unequal bodies.
• The bodies of the privileged are legitimated and
  idealized through participation in rituals of
  consumption.
• Non-dominant or othered bodies are rendered
  invisible, undesirable, and affixed with markers
  of stigma.
• The under-representation of and limited roles
  given to people of color in the mass media
  demonstrates invisibility, while the common
  conflation of gay and AIDS provides an example of
  stigma (Dworkin Wachs, 1998).

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The Body- A Critique

• Through goods, services, and rituals of display
  ones body is part of an endless tyranny of
  marketplace definition.
• The consumer begins to see his/her body as an
  alien object, that must be constantly managed to
  preserve ones position and identity.
• He or she is not tyrannized by an outsider, but
  becomes engaged in endless rituals of
  self-surveillance guided by idealized marketplace
  images conveyed through the mass media (Bordo,
  1993).
• Media forces, in particular advertising, conspire
  to simultaneously create a culture of lack and an
  endless array of products to assuage the lack, or
  at least the stigma of it (Kilbourne, 1999).

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• Particularly troubling is the normalization of a
  limited idealized range of images unattainable to
  most.
• The few who approach the ideal are subject to a
  litany of practices designed to stave off
  inevitable failure (Bartky, 1988).
• Recent research demonstrates that male consumers
  are also now subject to increasing
  objectification (Pope et. Al, 2000).