Rise of Consumer Culture - Essay Example

The Body as Consumer Product: Rise of Consumer Culture In his 1959 book, The Two Cultures, C.P. Snow wrote of a world culture of literary intellectuals on one hand and of scientists on the other. Snow characterised these two cultures, the intellectual and the scientific, as consisting of people whose thinking and writing would render visible the deeper meanings of our lives and redefine who and what we are (Snow, 1959/1993). Because of the opposite intellectual poles they occupy - literary intellectuals dabbling in armchair romantic constructs of reality vis--vis empirical scientists whose conception of reality is limited to the sensible, measurable, and commercialisable - Snow hoped for a third culture to bridge the gap. This linking culture Snow suggested in the second edition of his book in 1963, calling it a "third culture" where literary intellectuals lived in harmony with scientists, communicating ideas among each other and with the public. Brockman borrowed Snow's terminology of the third culture in his book (1995) of the same title as he daringly predicted that scientists and engineers at the cusp of what would soon become the dot.com boom will dominate this third culture. The boom came, but soon after followed the bust, and Brockman's third culture never materialised as he had hoped. What Snow and Brockman never realised was that a third culture had been moving quietly alongside these two cultures over the last half of the 20th century, one that combined the power of postmodernist intellectual thought and the energy of scientific innovation, helped along by the emergence of a capitalist society of excess wealth and prosperity. This third culture is the consumer culture, characterised by what we can describe as a body-centric attitude of consumption, where almost every conceivable commercial product is available to satisfy every craving or desire, fulfil any dream, and where reality can be reduced to one's identification with ideals created and circulated by the mass media. Essentially a perfect combination of Snow's two cultures - the romantic and the scientific - the consumer culture now defines who and what we are. The Marketable Self This is the scenario where Featherstone and other sociologists situate the body, the consuming subject, which is nothing more than the agent responsible for capturing and defining reality. Straddling the romantic-idealistic literary and the sensual-measurable scientific worlds, the consumer culture entices the human body to know and love it, to be a part of it, and to recognise that that is where its happiness and fulfilment lie. As the consuming subject (the body) attempts to capture - buying, eating, dressing up, or simply experiencing - reality in this consumer culture, it is the body that ends up becoming captive. It is in this context that we can analyse Featherstone's words (1991) that "the consumer culture constructs the marketable self." A main feature of this culture is a powerful popular media that helps in defining who and what we are. In his book (1999) Selling Dreams: How to Make Any Product Irresistible, Ferrari CEO Gian Luigi Longinotti-Buitoni (p. 193) describes the people of the consumer culture as bodies where product creators create a masterpiece the way a Picasso creates a painting on canvas, and where the media play the role of the artist's brush and oil. The body as a canvas Yes. In the consumer culture, "every instrument of the popular media - advertisements, television, and film to the press - provides a proliferation of stylised images of the body and emphasises the cosmetic benefits of body maintenance" (Featherstone, 1991). This strategy makes good business sense. After all, the physical perfection of the body or its idea of eternal youth has been one of our most cherished dreams. Beauty being a subjective judgment of a state of perfection, and the natural forces of aging, weight gain, and biological deterioration seemingly designed to halt our achieving that state, the possibilities for its definition are endless. The body becomes an artist's canvas in a consumer culture that the goods identify (who are you) and define (what are you). In a consumer culture, our bodies are what we are, where the ideals of beauty and good cease to reside in an inner self conjoined to the outer self that is identified and defined by appearance. Body size and shape, colours and fragrance, fashion and looks become the criteria by which we are judged. This is a culture where overweight bodies are judged as ugly, undisciplined, lazy, and sick, and where thin bodies are perceived as beautiful, ascetic, dynamic, and healthy. Devoid of any meaning beyond how the sensible self projects itself, the body becomes our sole contact with the world, the medium for the message (McLuhan, 1964) of who and what we are. This is what Featherstone means with the "marketable self." If you want to project a positive, good, and ideal image (smart, intelligent, humorous, decent, fit, healthy, sexy, or whatever), you need to know how to create that image in your body. Buy and do what you must to possess all these qualities and you will be how you look to others. In this activity, the media acts as the reference point for the ideal. Follow their signals and you will never go wrong in the consumer culture. You become a "marketable self" that others in the consumer culture will "buy." Buying is the first step to be a marketable self, but this is not enough. Dressing in the latest fashions, buying cosmetics and fragrances, and having all the good intentions in the world are not sufficient to make you marketable. One has "to do", and the consumer culture is characterised by tremendous manifestations of asceticism never seen in the world (perhaps, I'm obviously exaggerating here) since the dark ages: fasting, working out, cosmetic surgery and nips and tucks of all sizes and shapes, ingestion of dietary supplements, the proliferation of diets to name a few. All these outline the relationship between body maintenance and appearance that defines the inner and outer self. Whilst Dark Ages asceticism was practised for a transcendental good, self-discipline in a consumer culture has as its overarching objective the maintenance of the body. The definition of perfection has shifted from inner virtue to external appearances, and anything becomes worth doing if it is to enhance the body's ability to receive, provide, and project comfort, convenience, beauty, and pleasure. Plasticity of bodily qualities The consumer culture is not without its intellectuals, many of whom are sociologists like Featherstone, Michael Foucault, and Susan Bordo, whose ideas have shaped the culture much like the way they see culture shaping the body. However, a common view of the body as the medium for all human expression and for interpreting all cultural and material experiences does not mean their views are in total agreement. By way of example, Foucault delineates the body's textuality from its experience by suggesting two registers of embodiment: "a useful body and an intelligible body" (1977, p. 136), each distinct from the other, with one (the body) submitting and using and the other (the self) functioning and explaining. Bordo does not seem to agree, for whilst she uses Foucault's terminologies in her analysis (1992, p. 96-97) of the rising incidence of anorexia and other feminine disorders, she disregards the intelligible body when explaining how these disorders are caused within the consumer culture by the particular construct of the body produced in the postmodern condition. Her insights lead to a specific understanding of the plasticity of bodily qualities. Having acknowledged the existence of two "distinct" bodies (an external body and an internal self), and viewing the body as nothing but a site for cultural inscription in a consumer culture, Bordo defines the body only in terms of its materiality. This gives justification for the effacement of the body to take advantage of its plasticity or its innate ability to be constructed and manipulated through surgery, diet, and exercise to change its size and appearance. As long as these can make one feel and look beautiful, why not do it Changes in body image follow from changes in outside dimensions. This follows Malinowski (2002, p. 171) who said that culture might be conceived as an instrumental enhancement of human anatomy, referring directly or indirectly to the satisfaction of a bodily need, a venue where biological functions provided both its instrumental purpose and its metaphorical base. This supports Douglas's (1970, p. 70) declaration that the human body becomes an image of society and there can be no natural way to consider the body without involving at the same time a social dimension. Purveyors of goods in a consumer culture play upon this perception of the body and the anxieties surrounding it that Turner (1992, p. 221) attributes to the socio-economic, cultural, and political context of a late twentieth-century consumer culture where a body that in being hyper-thin is also hyper-cool. Because of its ability to induce desire in a culture where desire and desirability equal pleasure, the female body is inextricably linked to consumption (Clammer, 1995). Images of the female body appear in women's magazines to promote consumption - of fashion, appliances, food, travel, or cosmetics. Similarly, female bodies appear in men's magazines as images and objects to be consumed by the male gaze. Used either to be consumed or to induce consumption, the female form is presented within the realm of commodity aesthetics (Clammer, 1995, p. 199), depersonalised and presented only to signify consumption or as a consumable commodity. Essentially, he concludes (p. 216), the social construction of the body in popular media is as a commodity that is presented as to create desire, stripped of subjectivity, reduced to an object and symbol of consumption. This is why advertisements and the portraits of the female form they contain are replete with bodies of sculpted perfection exuding sexuality and desire, playing to the innate fantasies shared by men and women alike of being wanted, desired, sought after, maybe even loved. Popular media, with its ability to control the circulation of ideas about gender roles and identities, is blamed for this phenomenon, but Dale (2004) asks a basic question: who influences these ideas, is it the media or does it come from the consumers themselves This is one source of the anxieties related to the body's plasticity for which the popular media's role is controversial. Caused in part by the wave of anorexia nervosa among young women and girls in the last three decades because of their propensity to use supermodels with pre-pubescent or waif-like figures, popular media's reaction was to declare that, rather than influencing the desires of consumers or the way they act out their roles, advertisers capitalise on our personal desires by using our craving for the ideal to significant effect (Dale, 2004, p. 4). What sellers of goods do is take existing social themes to promote interest in their product. As Gauntlett (2002, p. 54) declared, "capitalists have turned feminism into something narcissistic which you have to spend lots of money on, and - in line with L'Oreal's 'Because I'm worth it!' Tagline - even feel pleasure and liberation in doing so." This fact Orbach (1986, p. 35) had observed as early as the mid-80s, when she wrote that "commodities are displayed with young women close by, signalling availability and sexualitytheir bodies split off and reattached to a whole host of commodities reflective of a consumer culture. Cars, Cokes, and centrifuges become a form of sexuality, a means of access to one's own and/or another's body." In a consumer culture, the body is like a slab of clay, an external shell to be shaped and manipulated to desire and create desire. Advertisements that offer quick weight loss with diet or exercise, acquiring the universally desired body shape through surgery or creative applications of body sculpting, and Botox injections to remove wrinkles are examples of the way dreams are marketed. These selling strategies are not exclusively addressed to women. The recent rise of metrosexual consciousness is shifting the marketing magnetism these same dreams possess to males of all orientations. The Body as Machine I read recently a web article (Kensington, L. 2005) on the possibility of having a lifespan of five thousand years with the help of dietary supplements, exercise, stem cell injections, and a bit of genetic engineering. I still am not decided if it's worth living that long, even though another feature of the consumer culture is the desire to live longer, equating it with the long-term enjoyment of bodily fantasies, desires, and pleasures. This is but a logical procession into the postmodern age of the Cartesian conception of the body as a machine to be treated and dealt with rationally and systematically (Dear, 1998). Scientists have known for centuries that the human body has machine-like characteristics: contains complex parts interacting continuously, needs fuel to be converted to energy, requires maintenance and care and at times repairs, minor and major ones, and, from time to time, it breaks down. The body, however, unlike a machine has a conscious self that keeps it running, much like an operator watching over the functioning of a piece of machinery. The self, following Foucault's dichotomy, is what drives the body to perfection and, at the same time, driven by the body to experience pleasure. If the self desires to enjoy fulfillment in a consumer culture, it has to take very good care of the body (Shilling, 1993, p. 181). I have not counted it, but my guess is that a car has tens of thousands of parts; most of it are not moving and can endure the rough and tumble of daily use. Our bodies, if you don't count the cells and genes within that can number in the millions, has fewer parts but most of them are moving. Our body parts age because the cells that compose them age and die. Some body parts are sensitive and get easily damaged, while others are sturdy and last a long time without giving problems. All these concerns are the objects of a consumer culture. The battle cry may have been sounded long before White (1995) who stated that the "body can be fixed, and that we have a duty to fix it." Keeping the body in a fit and healthy condition defines the moral worth in a consumer culture where fat is sick and bad (Worley, n.d.). It may seem ironic that this fat-as-bad ideation was fuelled by the same consumer culture that gave rise to McDonald's, junk food, and super-sized sugared drinks, but then this is a culture full of contradictions and fads, driven to and fro by how it defines beauty and who does the defining. The consumer culture has given rise to several industries centered on keeping the health and beauty of the body machine. Aside from health food, cosmetics, and fashion, new business opportunities have been created in the last decade or two that focus solely on exercise (gym and gym equipment, professional training), stress management (yoga, spa, travel and tourism), anti-aging (dietary supplements, spa memberships, engineered senescence), and obesity treatment, among others. A ready market of baby-boomers exists - more educated, affluent, and willing to try new things - that act as the consumer culture's main fuel source, that we may not be far off the mark to think that the generation born after the second world war may have experienced more cuts, wounds, bruises, and medical operations than their parents did. We can say the same of vitamin and health food consumption, which may account for the increase in life spans from 45 in 1900 to 72 in 2000 (Kensington, 2005, p. 2). Thus is the consumer culture fed by, and that feeds on, a huge market willing to sustain it. Pierre Bourdieu and physical capital We can begin this discussion of Bourdieu's concept of physical capital with a brief review of social capital as recently covered by Putnam in his book Making Democracy Work (1993) to explain how society works. He views social capital and its components (moral obligations and norms, social values like trust, and social networks) as a prerequisite for a well-functioning economic system. Bourdieu, writing in French in the 1970s and early 1980s, proposed (1980) an older concept of social capital, identifying three dimensions of class-related capital: economic, cultural and social capital. His concept of social capital emphasises the role of conflict and power through social relations that increase the ability of an actor to advance her/his interests. Social capital is therefore a resource in the struggles carried out in society (Light, 2004). Social capital thus has two components: first, it is a resource connected with group membership and social networks (Bourdieu 1980b, p. 249) and is the by-product of the relationships between actors rather than merely a common quality. Second, social capital is based on mutual cognition and recognition (Bourdieu 1980a; 1980b), thus acquiring a symbolic character that is transformed into symbolic capital used in the social struggle. The greater and better the qualities of one's social capital, the better is one's chances to succeed, and be happy, in this world. It is in this context of Bourdieu's social capital that physical capital finds meaning, as a form of symbolic capital that exists only in the "eyes of the others." Its effectiveness depends on communication, able to exist and grow in inter-subjective reflection and recognised only there. In Bourdieu's world, physical capital is not utilised mainly to accumulate economic and cultural capital, but rather to advance one's own quest for recognition and dignity (Wacquant, 1998, p. 218). Bourdieu recognises (with Wacquant, 1992) embodiment as critical to sociology and views society as shaped by a theory of culture and social order centred on the body. Culture for him is the product of collective human actions shaping and constraining social existence, and in pursuing individual goals, these social actors engage in social practices that contribute to the maintenance of the existing culture and reproduce it as a collective pattern of preferences and tastes. The body is "the point where culture and social structures are manifested and produced" (1992, p. 48-49). Bourdieu uses the term physical capital to refer to that aspect of cultural capital that is embodied through social practice and any form of physical attribute such as skill, beauty, physical strength, and poise that can be converted into other forms of capital. The shape, size, use, and adornment of the body carry particular meanings just as ways of walking, sitting, gesturing, and taking part in social life are saturated with social and cultural meaning. In particular social settings, these constitute a valuable form of capital that can be converted into more powerful forms such as the economic capital of wage. As an example, beautiful supermodels and actors or a sports star with a sculpted body (like Anna Kournikova who never won a single professional tennis tournament) can command generous compensation packages because their positive images meet a genuine need in the consumer culture. This is in line with Shilling's (1991) broader concept of physical capital. He also suggested that physical capital is easily grasped by thinking of the ways in which sportsmen and women, actors and actresses, and even prostitutes, use their bodies for material gain (Shilling, 1993). While these are indeed explicit examples of physical capital, less explicit cultural capital is embodied in and through the daily use of the body. Everyday actions communicate important social and cultural meaning to both enable and restrain social action and gain access to resources, and likewise to attain and maintain a decent level of recognition and dignity. Bourdieu therefore argues that not only is culture imprinted on the body, but also that the body is the central means through which culture is produced and reproduced. The shape, size and deportment of bodies, the ways they are positioned in relation to each other and their occupation of space all communicate powerful meaning. Bourdieu (1977, 1984) contends that such bodily discourse operates implicitly at subconscious levels to mark the bearer with cultural and social meaning that is constantly and unconsciously communicated. As he notes, "The principles embodied in this way are placed beyond the grasp of consciousness and, hence, cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation, cannot even be made explicit." (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 94). In other words, physical capital becomes a defining and identifying factor in the consumer culture. If you are beautiful, you will go places. References and Bibliography Barnard, M. (1996) Fashion as communication. London: Routledge. Bordo, S. (1992) "Anorexia nervosa: psychopathology as the crystallization of culture" in H. Crowley and S. Himmelweit (eds), Knowing women: feminism and knowledge, Polity Press in association with Open University Press, Cambridge and Oxford. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press. 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