Curing Consumption?

In the midst of a financial crisis, we are now angry at the hangover. The mob-like political lynching of A.I.G. (so far) has been the apex of the ire applied to our monetary intoxication. Deep down, many of us acknowledge this is a collective crisis and few are innocent. Blame has been showered like laser blasts in a science-fiction film, everywhere and hitting everything. However, we scrupulously avoid letting the accusations hit us, despite a quiet voice inside saying ‘You shouldn’t have purchased that new outfit’ or ‘Why did I put my funds into a risk aggressive managed fund?’ We over consumed. And we know it.

Consumption has defined our society since the end of the Second World War. The wise and eminent economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that part of the West’s transition to an affluent society revolved around creating artificial need. New media and technologies were essential to this construct, but what ensued was a media vortex of simulacra that constructed the ‘shoulds’. This is what a romantic dinner looks like; this is how the pious life is led; this is what a liberal lives like; this is the dress to be worn; this is the drink of success; these are the books one should read. Like stereo instructions, needs were given outlets, destinations for fulfilment. Behind much of this was a financial imperative. Yet so many sources of power were at work here, monetary power only being the dominant framework. Mind you, in our pluralist age, there were a variety of needs constructed by myriad media sources, yet they all served the dominant power discourse of capital. The transition from Modernism to postmodernism rendered physical force too costly to remain the dominant means of power, thus allowing capital to ascend to the throne of a tight network of power structures. But it seems as if this order has been reversed, with consumption itself assuming the dominant discourse of power.

Viewing a brilliantly subversive film entitled Enjoy Poverty by Dutch artist Renzo Martens this past weekend, it is clear that we consume so much more than objects. Martens raised the issue of viewership consumption with the audience – are we in the developed world consuming poverty in Africa for our own need to contribute to organisations in order to fill a need to ‘do good’? The film suggests that with consumption comes a form of power, the power to fulfil needs. The destitute in the Congo were shown they could not transform this perverse power structure to their own advantage – they could not make money from their own poverty as countless others in the international aid ‘industry’ do. Because they could not consume according to the media network that drives desires in the developed – and even developing in the case of China and India – world, they were powerless.

Our voracious appetite for consumption cannot be satiated, because it has no locus. There is not a single source that dictates what is to be consumed. Rather, the entirety of the material world and its associated epistemes and values are on this smorgasbord. Objects are to be consumed because of ideas, ideas are to be consumed because of values, values are to be consumed for image, images are to be consumed for pleasure, pleasure is to be consumed by objects, and so the infinite loop goes on. There is no source, no original anymore. This is what Baudrillard meant when describing simulacra as the end of meaning. We have reached a sphere where meaning is no longer attainable, much the way we cannot grab fruit from a tall tree. Just as the fruit exists, meaning is floating about, but we have created a system from which we cannot escape.

Tuberculosis was once called consumption. It is ironic that our culture of consumption developed just as TB was being eradicated from most of the developed world. Consumption itself changed meanings. Perhaps the thirty years of excessive neo-liberal consumption will once again give consumption a dirty word and its dominant usage will resort to a kind of profane slang. For while the uncomfortable effects of consumption are scaring us into a scaling back, the contemporary system of consumption gave birth to something far more insidious. With consumption arose the fetish. As we consumed more and more, we fetishised some of what we consumed. Obsessions and addictions grew out of needs that couldn’t be satiated. In this way, we gave power to the objects, images, ideas, etc that we somehow worshipped. The non-material became objectified through the process of consumption, and in turn became fetishised. Unfortunately, fetishes are something far more difficult to break away from than consumption habits. By applying power to objects, we serve them by consuming. I fear that commodity fetishism – and not in the Marxist sense – will simply be replaced by idea or value fetishism. It is a prison with walls of good intentions, of bars built by intellect. Worse of all, it is a prison with no escape route in sight.