Minding the gap: private and public vectors of consumerism

Aluminum casting by Anissa Mack,
from Canon Fodder, a show for the 2013
UND Arts & Culture Conference

As a college senior, I would spend time in the office of my advisor, Arthur Doederlein. Heady with a mix of middle-class, college-student poverty (which is to say, I was broke but my folks weren’t) and thinly understood critical theories, I once complained about the crass acquisition of stuff and the problems of conspicuous consumption. Dr. Doederlein casual dismissed my gripe, saying only “It’s nice to have stuff.”

And ever since, I’ve tended to agree. Stuff, especially nice stuff, or quality stuff, or valuable stuff, is nice to have. However, there’s still this pinging moral signal fighting through the noise of my own consumption. It’s fuzzy and faint and persistent. It originates in part from the democratic recognition that the consumer-marketplace is not egalitarian (but is increasingly stylistically so). It originates, in part, from a tension between what the marketplace categorizes as “nice,” “quality,” or “valuable” and my own taxonomy of worth.

All this is to say, I like to shop, and I want to live in a democracy, and I need to figure out how to resolve the tensions between the market and the polis while trafficking in a communication environment that increasingly blurs the difference between politics and consumerism (and not consumption, because that’s tuberculosis).

That’s the story I use to open my course on consumer communication. Our communication environment—public, private, social, civic, commercial—increasingly operates on a logic of what Michael Warner explains as “iconicity.” Messages need to differentiate themselves in a market where communication engagement is not necessarily measured in dialogue or engagement but in mere attention. This logic would seem to flatten our social and political communication, and even more troubling, eliminate the reciprocity that makes democracy possible.

And all of that might be true, but invariably some student will figure it out: how do we escape the totalizing force of this market logic? I’ll say this about the students at the University of North Dakota: they intuitively understand how commerce renders a place recognizable and how the messy ethics of the market aren’t so easily avoided. When you live in the middle of nowhere, your aspirational geographies are mapped by consumer landmarks (and so Grand Forks looks toward Fargo’s bigger mall, Fargo looks toward Minneapolis’s Mall of America, Minneapolis looks toward Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, and Chicago pretends it isn’t whiplashed glancing between the coasts). When you live in the middle of nowhere, that place seems less remote when an Olive Garden pops up in town and you can all of a sudden see your hometown (or, if we believe Olive Garden, your family) in the commercials on national network television. When you live in the middle of nowhere, you have fewer options for equipping yourself for modern life, and so fewer avenues for renegotiating the ethical and democratic practices of consumerism (which is to say, sometimes Wal-Mart is the only place affordable and otherwise accessible for procuring food and clothing during the long, cold winters of the northern prairie).

And so, the marketplace produces the kind of recognizability, commensurability, and iconicity that make community possible, but that community seems averse to the kinds of reciprocity, equality, and unity that we hope for in our democracies. In many ways, this conundrum sets up a Matrix-like challenge. Do we take the blue pill and decide that, whatever its faults, the commercial sphere is filled with nice stuff? Or, do we take the red pill and seek an ideal form of democracy while at the same time getting rid of the supposedly superficial stuff and its attendant quality of niceness?

Of course, Aristotle (and all sorts of other philosophers and philosophies) notes that any virtue can exist in excess or poverty, and so any virtue must be practiced appropriately and proportionately. A poverty of courage is cowardly and an excess of courage is reckless. A poverty of consumer communication is anti-modern, it denies the material conditions of democracy and everyday life that confront citizens—who, whether the ancient democratic traditions are equipped for it or not, spend at least some portion of their day as consumers. An excess of consumer communication, conversely, is anti-democratic, it explicitly traffics in private interests (the private interest of commercial profit and consumer self-interest) and draws its communicative force from a kind of paradox of belonging (“be like the cool kids”) and elitism (“because the cool kids aren’t like everybody else”).

The concerns over democracy, belonging, and market efficiency, coupled with the golden mean, allow us to position consumer communication as a pivot for articulating our relationship to political modernity (which is to say, a modern world where the mechanisms by which we identify ourselves and our communities are fraught with consequences for both ourselves and our communities). How do we balance public- and self-interest? How do we maintain our own identities in the face of the anonymity of group belonging? How do we keep our families fed and clothed and connected and secure while also ensuring our consumer choices don’t deny other families those privileges? And for my students, who come to a class like Advertising and Society much less interested in what Advertising does to them than what they can do for the industry of Advertising, how can we work within the consumer-communication marketplace in ways that make these meaningful distinctions useful for industry and individual alike?

To answer those questions, we need to first consider various descriptions and definitions of advertising. For instance, reading Roland Barthes on detergent and margarine (from Mythologies) produces a different kind of account than reading Marshall McLuhan on Ads from Understanding Media. Both of those accounts differ from the industry-standard account of advertising that can be found in Winston Fletcher’s Advertising: A Very Short Introduction. We’ll examine those differences in anothert post.