Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics by Roberta Sassatelli

Author:Roberta Sassatelli [Roberta Sassatelli]
Language: rus
Format: epub
Tags: AvE4EvA
Publisher: Sage Publications
Published: 2007-04-28T20:00:00+00:00

Control Investment Obligation

Liberty Active

Passive Oppression

Abandonment

Private

Female

Pleasure

Irrationality

to various degrees all of the discourses on consumption, even those providing a considered scientific view, run the risk of falling into celebration or censorship, yielding to a series of binary oppositions which trap us in dichotomous thought (see Figure 6.1). Primary binary oppositions such as public/private, rational/ irrational, male/female, and of course freedom/oppression are all laminated with further dualities and form chains of meanings which solidify into a compelling order.

These chains of oppositions have also been supported by a number of metaphors that have been used across time to express anxieties about consumption, or more simply to describe it.2 For example, the concerns generated by the growth of the female presence on the public scene at the turn of the 19th century have led to likening women with the ‘mob’, with women portrayed as an irrational, sexually aggressive and voracious mass taking the public sphere of the department store by storm (Hilton 2002; Huyssen 1986; Kutcha 1996; Nava 1997). The eating metaphor is still crucial today in the representation of women as ‘irrational’ consumers needing tutelage of some kind lest their desires be overwhelming (Bordo 1993). The main metaphorical systems which currently help people visualize, figure and judge their consumer practices as well as the place of consumption in contemporary culture have recently been discussed by Richard Wilk (2004). The ‘life-cycle’ metaphor which is widely used in economics invites us to think that consumption is ‘like senility, loss of energy, decline of value’; the ‘consumptionas-burning’ metaphor suggests that consumption is like ‘fire’ and that ‘the rich consume more than the poor because they have more fuel’; the ‘consumption-aseating metaphor’ considers the human being as ‘driven by desires’ and puts it at the centre of the world ‘with the impersonal forces of the economy and nature providing the fuel and carting away the waste’ (ibid, 14–17). Insisting that the eating metaphor works as a ‘prototype’ so that ‘the more an act is like eating the more it seems like real consumption’, Wilk shows that the often implicit association between consumption and eating is misleading. It may be detrimental to both an understanding of consumer practices (especially those involving durables,

Representations and Consumerism

collective and cultural goods) and the pursuit of innovative ideals of consumption (of the environmental variety, for example).

All in all, contemporary scholars of consumption should be aware of the binary oppositions implicit in their language and metaphors, to avoid that evaluative pendulum which makes consumer culture into a ‘fetish concept’, a ready-made jargon rather than an object of study. In his Apocalypse Postponed, Umberto Eco (1994, 17 and 20, orig. 1964), defines a ‘fetish concept’ as a ‘generic concept’, utilized either as ‘targets for fruitless polemic’ or ‘for commercial operations which we ourselves consume on a daily basis’; an instrument which has ‘a particular ability to obstruct argument, strait-jacketing discussion in emotional reaction’, being either a total rejection or an unconditional apology. Eco reproaches both apocalyptic and celebratory attitudes for ‘never really attempting a concrete study of products and how they are actually consumed’ (ibid, 25).

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