W9/WQ—Consumption
Capitalist Realism — Mark Fisher (2009)
Ask students to read for more than a couple of sentences and many — and these are A-level students mind you — will protest that they can't do it. The most frequent complaint teachers hear is that it's boring. It is not so much the content of the written material that is at issue here; it is the act of reading itself that is deemed to be 'boring'.
What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate' and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment, the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand.
Some students want Nietzsche in the same way that they want a hamburger; they fail to grasp - and the logic of the consumer system encourages this misapprehension — that the indigestibility, the difficulty is Nietzsche.
Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny — Sarah Benet-Weiser (2018)
Yet economies define themselves as neutral. Crucially, economies are about individuals—consumers, buyers, sellers. In this definition, economies are seen in a way that validates capitalism, where production is invisible, and commodities, markets, and consumption are prioritized. Economies privilege and give value to the individual who can participate in that economy, and because they focus on individual bodies, they are by definition gendered, raced, and classed economies. Within the politics of visibility, bodies that are disenfranchised and marginalized are moved into the spotlight so as to highlight that disenfranchisement and marginalization. Within an economy of visibility, the spotlight on their bodies, their visibility, the number of views, is in fact its politics. This spotlight is literally designed for social media such as Instagram, Tumblr, and Snapchat.
The Consumer Society — Jean Baudrillard (1970)
The consumer society needs its objects in order to be. More precisely, it needs to destroy them. The use of objects leads only to their dwindling disappearance. The value created is much more intense in violent loss. This is why destruction remains the fundamental alternative to production: consumption is merely an intermediate term between the two. There is a profound tendency within consumption for it to surpass itself, to transfigure itself in destruction. It is in destruction that it acquires its meaning. Most of the time in daily life today, it remains subordinate - as a managed consumptivity - to the order of productivity. This is why, most of the time, objects are present by their absence, and why their very abundance paradoxically signifies penury. Stock is the excessive expression of lack and a mark of anxiety. Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth. At any rate, it is clear that destruction, either in its violent and symbolic form (the happening, potlatch, destructive acting-out, both individual and collective) or in its form of systematic and institutional destructiveness, is fated to become one of the preponderant functions of postindustrial society.
Capitalist Realism — Mark Fisher (2009)
The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that 'caring individuals' could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono's Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. 'Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands', Bono proclaimed. 'Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce'. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism — on the contrary, Product Red's 'punk rock' or 'hip hop' character consisted in its 'realistic' acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes.
The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.
On Machines — Marx
Real economy-saving consists of the saving of labour time (minimum [and minimization] of production costs): but this saving is identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from consumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption, hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an individual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy.
The Consumer Society — Jean Baudrillard (1970)
Consumption, like the education system, is a class institution: not only is there inequality before objects in the economic sense (the purchase, choice and use of objects are governed by purchasing power and by educational level, which is itself dependent upon class background, etc.) - in short, not everyone has the same objects, just as not everyone has the same educational chances - but, more deeply, there is radical discrimination in the sense that only some people achieve mastery of an autonomous, rational logic of the elements of the environment (functional use, aesthetic organization, cultural accomplishment). Such people do not really deal with objects and do not, strictly speaking, 'consume', whilst the others are condemned to a magical economy, to the valorization of objects as such, and of all other things as objects (ideas, leisure, knowledge, culture): this fetishistic logic is, strictly, the ideology of consumption.
Automated Media — Mark Andrejevic (2019)
There is a tendency in the examples of both politics and sociality toward a form of self-obliteration that recalls the Freudian formula of the “drive,” which, as he puts it in his discussion of the pleasure principle, operates to “free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation” (Freud 2015). The insight here is that the goal of the drive is not so much to unearth new per- mutations of excitation but rather to achieve the stasis resulting from the satisfaction of an “instinctual impulse” (Freud 2015).
Amazon’s fantasy of anticipatory consumption, for example, frames the goal of shopping as the umbilicular stasis of the womb: the satisfaction of the consumer impulse before it emerges, and thus the perfection of the attempt to “keep the amount of excitation ... as low as possible” (Freud 2015). Something simi- lar is at work in the antipathy toward politics evinced by the version of automated politics in which deliberation, research, and reflection are no longer necessary components of citizenship. If humans are fundamentally “political animals,” the impulse toward automation might be understood, in this regard, as inhuman: the eradication of the characteristic practices of human social life. Social media that automate sociality are in keeping with the prospect of endless quiescence as the endpoint of desire: the ability to dispense with the noisome toil of human social and political life. This ten- dency toward self-subtraction recurs in the repetition compulsion of social media: the gestures that, in the name of communication, amount to a bar- rier against engagement, a constant form of self-soothing that displaces the vagaries of human encounter. The frantic attempt to kill time associated with the acceleration of the consumption of information and sociality can only be fully achieved by automation.
Amusing Ourselves to Death — Neil Postman (1986)
A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama—a mythology, if you will—of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.
Indeed, we may go this far: The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country— these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.
Updating to Remain the Same — Wendy Chun (2016)
Not accidentally, the correlations exposed and exploited by many of the consumer uses of Big Data focus on the amplification of consumer behavior: if you have bought this, you probably also want to buy that. The goal is to program customers to act in certain ways (or to predict present conditions or future habits), based on habits already contracted. Corporate uses of Big Data are not interested in changing behavior radically (or in prevention), but rather in amplifying certain already existing behaviors and pre-empting others. It is not interested in causes, but rather proxies (such as unscented lotions and vitamin B for pregnancy).
Also, the fact that it takes data analytics to realize that human female procreators suffer from morning sickness is dumbfounding and raises questions about corporate hiring. How much less expensively could Target have figured this out, had it had more women in leadership positions? Further, as the medical insurance examples reveal, Big Data can lead to rational yet unjust conclusions: the tie between car insurance and regular adherence to a regular medication regimen can further exacerbate inequalities by making the urban poor pay more for their health insurance. In other words, by finding seemingly unrelated correlations, Big Data can aggravate existing inequalities and lead to racist and discriminatory practices, justified through the use of seemingly innocuous proxies. Through these proxies, the allegedly "coarse" and "out dated" categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender are accounted for in unaccounted ways.
Cyberpositive — Sadie Plant & Nick Land (1994)
The Indians of South America have other travelling drugs-including coca-which evaporate the signals of sustenance deficiency. The North American soft-drinks industry was not slow to notice that Coke Is It, the pause that refreshes, the cheerful lift.
Cocaine hooked the world on Coca-Cola, and so re-educated twentieth century capitalism about markets. Addiction is the paradigm case of positive reinforcement, and consumerism is the viral propagation of the abstract addiction mechanism. The more you do the more you want: runaway feedback. It's often treated as if it were a disease. When the Coca-Cola company moved on from trafficking cocaine, the South American drug cartels took over.
