The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy (can a consumer culture consume a culture?)
This is a different question than ‘can a consumer culture consume itself’? We have seen quite evidently, especially in popular media, that this is in fact not merely an outcome thereof but a way of maintaining its dominance upon consumption in general. One views a situation comedy, especially an animated one, and if one has not viewed many years of similar programming as well as following the popular culture news, one is immediately lost. Such media constitute one long in-joke, and their satire is disingenuous at best, since it serves also as an ongoing advertisement for everyone else in the same game. Humor is itself tied to the consumption of a specific kind of media, and this also has the convenience of saving the hack writer’s time imagining innovative scripts and characters. Similarly, retreads of film and television, upshifts to streaming etc. from video games and comic books, exhibit the same symptomatology, and one might even wish to cast the older but continuing sourcing from the novel as the beginning of this self-absorbed and auto-absorbing manner of production.
But for all this, has our contemporary consumer industry been able to reach its wider goal; that of the consumption of the entirety of the culture in which it is ensconced? This is a more difficult query and the response appears at once more nuanced. In order to take it up, we must begin with the most perceptive analyses of consumption, those of Marx and Durkheim. For the former, the well-known understanding of commodity as fetish may serve, for a moment, as a starting point. We have seen elsewhere how the religious overtones of the original fetish item, a vehicle for, and representation of, Mana, which is otherwise quite an abstract power, turns what is mere force into a usable forcefulness. It is a more focused legerdemain that can also be associated with the difference between magic and sorcery. In the most value-neutral sense, sorcery is simply magic in use. The fetish quality of a commodity turns it from a mere use object into a representation of power redefined by capital, but the much older aura of status retains its hold over the consumer, even if the source of such status has shifted from heaven to earth, as it were. Marx’s own example is pedestrian, likely purposely; a table. Unlike Heidegger, who later uses the same item to illustrate the phenomenological intimacy of dialogue amongst other such aspects of ‘closeness’ and ‘alongsideness’, Marx offers us not a whiff of old-world paternalism. Instead, he is didactic in the extreme. And a piece of furniture is not a terrible example given that such a genre of commodity had been coopted by industrial production in a manner that accosted the senses used to cottage-style craftsmanship. Furniture could well have been called ‘fine’ or even ‘beautiful’, and we pay a homage both archival and ironically fetishistic, genuflecting perhaps somewhat ludicrously, to handcrafted antique furniture in art galleries and museums. I have seen such objects placed adjacent to paintings and sculptures, as if we were to place ourselves, in our mind’s eye at least, in some Mannerist domestic scene, replete with paternalism aplenty and this time with no Heideggerean insight in sight.
So for Marx, the table was a good mark. Now mass-produced, what could the buyer expect regarding possession and status, which prior to industry could be borrowed from the artisan, just as one would borrow status from having a Gainsborough paint one’s wife’s portrait: ‘Hmm, she’s hotter than ever I thought. Now that’s artistic genius!’ For more plebeian items, Marx desired to show that the same fetishistic display of status markers remained available. In our age, however, it was not to be associated with the ability to command ethereal forces, but rather quite material ones, and those through wealth. In pre-modern modes of production, from horticulture through the late-stages of agrarian organizations, one’s own status was linked to the procurement of status items or services. For capital, the accumulation of wealth shifted from an ‘in-itself’, or a ‘for its own sake’, as if it were either a kind of aesthetic endeavor, or indeed an esthetic one, associated with some lineage hagiography. From this the Protestants developed the idea of assignation through worldly success; wealth was a sign of soteriological favor. Especially well-evidenced in the Netherlands, this idea spread forth through Puritanist longings and Anabaptist communitarianism. A Spartan lifestyle belied a very productive lifeway, and it was not long in generational span before considerable accumulations of wealth were built up. To this day, such ethnic enclaves that remain, including those Mennonite and Hutterian, display such in-typical advantages.
But all of this has been analyzed in detail by Weber, who is our usual third wheel in thinking aloud about modernity and capital. For Marx, wealth was to be displayed by and through the purchase of commodities, which for him, meant any object that could contain a value surplus to its own autochthonous use-value. This constitutes an extension of ipssissimosity, and such a sleight of hand can only be maintained, he felt, through consumption itself. In this, Marx’s sense of things proved incomplete, for we now understand modern advertising to be the chief vehicle of the production, not of the object or commodity, but rather of the fetish surrounding it. Its advent in 1925, the year of John Watson’s Theory of Modern Advertising, occurred almost simultaneously with the first overproduction, wherein the means of production outstripped the actual material needs of consumers. For almost a century then have we lived in this odd situation; we make more than we use, so we must make mere needs into desires. This, in a word, is the meaning of marketing.
In the decades just prior to this seismic shift in the definition of value in capital, it was Durkheim who detailed and augmented Marx’s analytic to include the sensual and sensitive aspects of fetish in general. For Durkheim, the aura of the commodity had less to do with a borrowed status hung up upon material outlay and rather more about the character of awe. Just as the collective conscience could be offended by a perceived injustice, so too could it recognize itself in a culture’s higher self-expressions. Beauty, in this view, still made sense as a representation of its traditional siblings; truth, the good, and the spirit. Marketing would soon learn how to exploit this sensitivity by engineering quite artificial outbursts of the ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase. In one of his most famous epigrams, if ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, then one immediately can understand the wider scope of what is at stake in modern mass media. The commodity fetish in our day must transcend the object in order to take into itself the whole of culture.
What then would it mean to worship ourselves in this more material manner? Certainly there are collateral clues – signage, rather than truer signs, perhaps – in the cult of celebrity, the esteem of marque and logo, the esthetic purity of fashion and modeling, or yet the mystique surrounding the founder or CEO of this or that ‘revolutionary’ enterprise. All these and others no doubt foster a sense that not only is our culture a visionary one, holding in its own breast the heated breath of distant stars and with its eyes reflecting their eternal light – all the while whilst bathing in a bathos of self-stultification, mind you – but that it is also of the value that we may indeed sincerely worship it and not feel anything of either the larger narcissism which must be involved, or, more damning, of the anxiety which must drive such collective preening. Here, we must allow Durkheim to take us back to Marx in order to read again, with a fresh set of frames, the critique of capital itself. Now the rhetorical term ‘bathos’ traditionally suggests a lack of intent, and while it may not be central to the goals of advertising and marketing to create this slide from what we take to be the historically sublime to what can be taken as trivial – almost everything within the ambit of popular media is at least this, if not actually ridiculous or yet absurd – in any calculated manner, the mere fact that it has the power to manifest the nothing much as something and even something great suggests to its latter-day sorcerers that magic, at least of a sort, is yet extant in our otherwise disenchanted world.
Yet this cannot be a conclusion, for it begs the implication that our culture is, as a whole, trivial. I would like to think that this is not the case, even if we are often turned in the direction of the valueless by the fetish of status-value and that of the marque. One might go so far, without being overly vain, and suggest that for some of the legendary marques, whose brand-value has distinguished itself consistently over many decades, that the actual quality of the products in question do merit some respect, if perhaps not outright adoration or yet worship. Ferrari, the brand with the most current admiration of this sort, could serve as an example of a product which actually is what it claims to be, at least in its actual use. Whether or not its aura is transcendental is not really at issue; all it needs to do is transcend its general genre of commodity. In this, a keenly-crafted and daringly-designed machine can carry a near-primordial torch; the shaman accomplished his tricks ad hoc. Sorcery, unlike magic, is always directed to some specific purpose.
Yes, but in capital we also have magic itself as a commodity of sorts, for a Ferrari accomplishes its specific engineering purpose in it remaining an automobile, and nothing else. But if it were perceived in capital as only a car it would lose most of its value all along the line. So, marketing has, in addition to point-of-sale, the deeper and more sophisticated task of maintaining aura ‘after-market’, so to speak. The fact that a new auto loses about a quarter of its ticket value when driven off the lot – it is now a ‘used car’ or, in a marketing lingo perishingly close to that Orwellian, ‘pre-owned’ – must not impinge upon its value as a status item, a commodity in the Marxian sense. And indeed, the exotic car’s new owner cares not a jot that they have been stiffed however much cash on the barrel upon getting behind the wheel of such a vehicle. Even my relatively quite staid and stoic Lexus sports sedan was able to overcome any such hint of regret on my part when I purchased it new many years ago. But less mystically, its truer value has manifest itself in the fact that though now 16 years old, it still drives like a new car. Surely such testimonials from the ‘consumer’s themselves’ would be of the greatest value to any marketer. But even here, the suasion of worship is present; a testimonial is suggestive of a testament; but then again we are today not recording the irruptive Mana of a messiah, but rather the manufactured mimesis of the forces of nature and cosmos, ever aloof to the Babel of humanity’s vainer desires.
G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.