Prometheus 6

The Myth of the Rebel Consumer
by Rob Horning

…Williams finds it preferable to conceive of ourselves as "users", rather than "consumers"; individual users that acquire goods in order to put them to creative use to fulfill our social needs. Such a designation corresponds well to that trend amongst cultural studies theorists for celebrating the creative potential inherent in buying things (See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, 1984; John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, Unwin Hyman, 1989, or Paul Willis, Common Culture, Open University Press, 1990). Our purchases can express subversion, radical appropriation, or collective affiliation. That's right: I can use my thrift store purchase of a Herb Alpert record to express my dismay at the current state of the music industry, and you can use your coffee grinder at home to thumb your nose at Starbucks. We can make important demands for social change by restructuring our collective consumer demands. We can use our dollar to demand free-range chickens and hormone-free milk; and if that doesn't succeed in transforming America into a more humane society, we can even write a letter to Mother Jones to voice our frustration.

But by making pseudo-political statements through the manufactured artifacts of our culture, through the exercise of our free choice, are we truly users, or are we simply being useful? Expressing our politics through what we buy is no politics at all; at best it is but a vote of assent for the existing economic arrangements. Were we to value such a debased notion of freedom, we would be celebrating the way capitalism tries to cheat us out of more meaningful freedoms, foremost of which is the freedom to question the way modes of production are organized. If we forget that what we buy is insignificant as long as we continue to buy something, then we fall prey to one of our society's favorite myths: that corporations actually value their customers as individuals, that they really believe that the customer is right.

…In truth, this view aligns with the pluralism that modern corporations themselves have come to endorse. One needs only think of the proliferation of cable channels or the user-driven commercialized infotainment available on the Internet. Subversive uses and appropriations are already incorporated into the structure of these systems — corporations don't mind how you play as long as you play on their field.

For as long as we play on their field, we continue to be the sorts of people their industries require. And for my purposes, that is what consumerism is: a series of behaviors that identifies us to the existing order and fixes us in it while granting us a sense of identity that feels natural, that feels autonomously constructed. Never mind if these identities seem conformist or mass-produced — we won't know enough about anybody else besides ourselves to notice. Our access to goods allows us to build an identity without the hassles of dealing with actual other people. Again, we are all creative and sensitive people. The unique, imaginary playpens we each construct for ourselves in our narcissistic world of goods proves to ourselves just how creative and sensitive we are. Consumerism is the driving social force that seeks to ensure that each of our playpens remains isolated from the others; it is the wet nurse that comes when we cry, hungry for real experience, only to feed us more formula.