AMST 3253W

Midterm Exam #2
Consumer-citizens and capitalist contradictions

1973 was an eventful year in the United States as well as world history. For

example, the Vietnam War ended, the victory for women’s reproductive choice

was won in Roe v. Wade, Watergate scandal resulted in Nixon’s resignation, and

OPEC boycott resulted in unprecedented energy crisis. Significantly, it was also

“the first great experiment with neo-liberal state formation [in] Chile after

Pinochet’s coup on the ‘little September 11th of 1973.’”1 In the U.S. the neoliberal

turn was achieved through much wider range of tactics, often by utilizing various

cultural forms and ideals of citizenship filtered through consumer market to serve

ideological goals. The steady neoliberal direction that US took throughout the

1970’s was solidified and accelerated by Reagan’s presidency in 1981. By looking

at two different images from 1973, I will argue that market and political move to

create an ideal consumer-citizen resulted in extraordinary pleasures as well as

horrors and has always remained exclusive despite its universalistic promise.

The neoliberal turn in the U.S. was not merely an ideological experiment but

a concrete reaction and strategy of the capitalist ruling class to face declining

rates of profit and regain the power lost in the post-WWII Keneysian compromise.2

Citizenship in the US was always contested and changing political category. For

example, in the 1950’s – 1960’s, the Civil Rights movement posed challenges to

hegemonic notion of citizen as white male (or female). However, the 1970’s

economic downturn and challenges posed by new citizens in their claims to power

rendered new configurations of citizenship necessary. Consumer-citizen became

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the dominant model. As long as citizens, even those that were perceived as

“troubling” (not heteromasculine whites) were consuming, the social cohesion and

capitalist logic was to be sustained. The focus on consumption is not accidental,

but also marks the shift from industrial production and thrift to excessive personal

consumption as a vehicle for economic growth. Baudrillard articulates this shift in

the larger historical framework, where utility/need is replaced by the endless

desire to consume.3 The desire, however, is not independent from economic

processes but is engineered through “’technostructural’ conditioning of needs and

consumption.”4 Any meaningful ideals of democratic citizenship are erased and

manipulated through electoral systems that become indistinguishable from the

marketplace itself and “’real’ freedom” is found only in consumption.5

Baudrillard’s views are convincing only to a certain extent. While escapist

consumption might be a cultural ideal, it is neither ever fully achieved nor

possible, since access to consumption remains structurally enforced through

gender, race, class, and variety of other identity markers as well as capitalist

regional uneven development. Shifts towards consumer citizenship and mass

affluence produced not only pleasures and seductions, but also fears and horrors.

Hanson’s Young Shopper and Chambers’ Ivory Snow images can serve as an

illustration how society responded differently to consumption. Chambers, once a

model for Ivory Snow, turned into a porn star, is portrayed in the picture as a

carefree, happy, young, naked, white woman who is liberated through

consumption and participation in the consumer market. The facial expression is

one of pleasure and desire. On the contrary, Hanson’s sculpture portrays a

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consumer who appears to be burdened and tired of consumption. She is supposed

to be young, but looks older, her hair is messy; she is “overweight” (compared to

Chambers who obviously embodies cultural feminine ideal). These two images

could be read in variety of ways, for example by comparing their femininities. But

they more importantly serve to show how uncertain and contingent consumer

capitalism is, even if it appears to be a utopia (or dystopia) as described by

Baudrillard.

The pleasures of the 1970’s were multiple and could be seen as a direct

continuation from the 1960’s radical break with 1950’s domesticated

consumerism and conformity.6 The 1960’s and especially 1970’s saw enormous

proliferation of private pleasures and desire. Thrift, as a cultural ideal, “became

un-American.”7 Contrary to earlier social ideals were pleasure is somewhere in the

future as a reward, in the new age there is “pleasure to begin with, pleasure in the

middle, pleasure at the end, nothing but pleasure.”8 Chambers’ body in the

picture represents this pleasure regime though association of pornography and

consumption. The proliferation of pornography in the 1970’s could be seen as

important part in the endless consumer pursuits of new pleasures and

experiences. Transgression, which pornography at least to a certain extent tries to

achieve, becomes commodity in itself. As long as what is transgressed does not

fundamentally challenge the system of production and consumption, not only it is

not repressed but encouraged. The late capitalism of the 1970’s had to learn how

to accommodate and “work through difference”9, within the US as well as globally.

One aspect of globalization means commodifying, exoticizing, and appropriating

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difference: “to be at the leading edge of modern capitalism is to eat fifteen

different cuisines in one day.”10 Which in and of itself is not a new capitalist

feature but rather inherent in the capitalist logic of perpetual revolutionizing of

itself.11 What was new about this period is that technology, particularly

communications, made the transfer of images, ideas, and commodities

enormously fast and widely accessible. Technology also revolutionized mediums

such as pornography which was now possible to produce without significant

capital investment and establishment film industry support. For some, this time

marked a new era of consumer democracy and consumer citizenship. It was

claimed, that the class and various identity differences as well as time of

ideologies came to their end.12

However, the consensus was never truly achieved and the new

consumerism did not evoke merely pleasure and peace, but horror and panic. The

sculpture of Young Shopper exemplifies some of the horrors of consumerism. The

shopper looks tired, alienated, and depressed. For Baudrillard consumer society

indicates that people “are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they

have been in the past, but by objects.”13 Consumerism, even if it celebrates

difference and otherness, in the end is homogenizing force, since to consume is to

“accept the life-style of a particular society.”14

Baudrillard’s ideas illustrate the social and philosophical horrors about the

loss of humanity, citizenship, and politics. Yet, there were variety of other

concerns about the horrors of consumerism that could be seen as more material.

Environmental movement has been on the rise exposing hidden effects of

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consumerism and the rate of environmental destruction. The calls to face the

horrors caused by uncontrolled consumerism varied from warnings about fast

approaching apocalypse to more modest regulationist approach to increase

environmental standards. Majority of environmental politics, however, did not

challenge capitalist production and consumption and reinforced the consumer-

citizen logic by framing their politics as consumer rights – the right of individual

consumer for safe products. The environmental politics often overlooked how

communities raced and classed as marginal were disproportionally affected by

environmental pollution, for example by living in the urban areas polluted by toxic

dumps.15

Other fears could be also not be simply pacified by consumerism but were

to various degrees incorporated into its logic such as fear of nuclear war via

persistence of Cold War and communism as competing ideology. Although

Americans were mostly fascinated with technology it also generated horrors and

anxieties of the possible loss of human control. In various scenarios of science

fiction and film, control could be taken over by aliens, robots, and cyborgs. But

more importantly, not everyone was happy with erasure of old identity hierarchies

and the promise of consumer-citizenship. For capitalism to successfully operate it

needs to have populations which can be employed to extract surplus value. While

a lot of production was being relocated to various parts of the globe, the class and

racial divisions have not disappeared, but often deepened. Various emerging and

politicized identities did challenge capitalism, while simultaneously providing

capital with opportunities to capitalize on them.

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 Consumerism and various cultural practices did not work parallel to or

outside capitalism (even if they appeared to be oppositional) but were intimately

part of the processes that define late capitalism. Economy and culture are by no

means distinct - “the institution of the economic as a separate sphere is the

consequence of an operation of abstraction initiated by capital.”16 However, the

illusion that it is possible to escape capitalism (or reality) through consumption

proved to be not as nearly universal as the promise of consumer-citizen has

suggested. The duty to consume could not be fulfilled by all, since the exclusions,

in part based on old social divisions and in part on economic logic, remained

strong. Hall’s assertion that “for capital, in the end, the differences do not

matter”17 might be true but capital does not operate in isolation from politics. For

example, Reagan’s attempt to reassert white heteromasculinity and reinstate

conservative “social values” in the 1980s on the large scale also illustrates

conflicts within the capital-state nexus and the shortcomings of consumer-citizen

ideal. Furthermore, mass culture “is enormously absorptive […] but the

homogenization is never absolutely complete, and it does not work for

completion.”18

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1
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development, (New York, Verso: 2006) : 12
2

Ibid 42.
3

Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, (Stanford, Stanford University Press: 2002):
39.
4

Ibid 43.
5

Ibid 43.
6

Garry Cross. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commericalims Won In Modern America. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002): 169.
7

William H. Whyte quoted in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, (Stanford,
Stanford University Press: 2002): 54.
8

Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” from Dangerous Liaisons:
Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. McClintock et al (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press: 1997): 181.
9

Ibid 181.
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10

Ibid 181.
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11

Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, (New York:
Routledge, 2000): 29.
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12

Garry Cross. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commericalims Won In Modern America. (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002): 146.
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13

Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster, (Stanford, Stanford University Press: 2002):
32.
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14

Ibid 40.
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15

Finis Dunaway, “Gas Masks, Pogo, and the Ecological Indian: Earth Day and the Visual Politics of
American Environmentalism,” American Quarterly 60.1 (2008): 69.
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16

Judith Butler paraphrasing Marx, in “Merely Cultural,” New Left Review I/227, Jan-Feb 1998: 42.
17
Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” from Dangerous Liaisons:
Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. McClintock et al (Minneapolis, University of
Minnesota Press: 1997): 182.
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18

Ibid 179.