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Radical Consumption: Shopping For Change In Contemporary Culture: Shopping for change in contemporary culture
Ethical consumption, fair trade, consumer protests, brand backlashes, green goods, boycotts and these are all now familiar consumer activities - and in some cases, are almost mainstream. They are part of the expanding field of 'radical consumption' in a world where we are encouraged to shop for change. But just how radical are these forms of consumption? This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to examining contemporary radical consumption, analyzing its possibilities and problems, moralities, methods of mediation and its connections to wider cultural formations of production and politics. Jo Littler argues that we require a more expansive vocabulary and to open up new approaches of enquiry in order to understand the area's many contradictions, strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on a number of contemporary theories, terms and debates in media and cultural studies, she uses a range of specific case studies to bring theory to life. By analysing practices of radical consumption, the book explores a number of key
- GenresEconomics
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
40 people want to read
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April 21, 2018
I liked this – and that’s a couple of books in a row that I’ve enjoyed by Littler. This one starts by talking about how ‘ethical consumption’ is all too easily defined away as being ‘worthy’ and that what is ‘worthy’ is generally anything but ‘cool’. So that something that might otherwise be defined as doing what you can to save the world – and that you might think of as being unambiguously a good thing – is branded as being associated with people who would have us wearing hair-shirts and prone to occasional bouts of self-flagellation. And again, right at the start, she provides a really useful and interesting discussion on the relationship between ethics and morality – which she points out in a footnote both come from the same idea if from different languages (how one lives one’s life in a culture), it just one is Greek and the Latin. All the same, and as she also says, talking about ‘ethical consumption’ seems to make much more sense than talking about ‘moral consumption’ – and this is something she links back to Nietzsche’s concerns around morality.
The second chapter considers how various corporations have tried to structure our concerns about consuming in the world and how this is making the world a worse place. She focuses in particular on the American Express Red Card that Bono from U2 had a hand in creating. I’m not going to pretend that I’m particularly fond of Bono – all the same, what is particularly interesting here is that this is marketed as a way to both buy stuff and change the course of human history, a chance to have a huge impact while hardly changing your lifestyle at all, and yet, somehow also utterly change everything. And this is because you have become cosmopolitan – a citizen of the whole world – which this then places you in a philosophical tradition that stretches back to the Greek Stoics and arrives at us via Kant. This is seen as the ‘good’ side of globalisation, and again, the power is presented as being in each of our own hands to remake the world one purchase at a time.
Of course, the reality is a bit more complicated than this. In the case of the Red card, for instance, this does seem to be more a way for the middle classes to ease their consciences than it is a highly effective way of ending the problems facing humanity. She also raises the ‘cost/benefit’ question here – with the remarkable amount of free publicity available to American Express compared to the tiny outlay they provide from the use of the card. It doesn’t take a deep and penetrating vision to look into this to then see what type of people are likely to have a Red credit card or what they are likely to buy. The idea that it is perhaps better that they might be buying jeans made Africa or fair trade coffee is perhaps not to be sneezed at – but this is hardly a revolution, and it suffers from the problem so much of ethical consumption must similarly suffer from – that it is only available to those who have choices in their purchases in the first place, that is, the already better off.
The chapter moves on to discuss Mecca Cola – an Islamic alternative to Coke that sends 10% of its profits to humanitarian projects in Palestine. And while this is interesting in that it clearly is making a deeply political statement and one that addresses a company that is virtually synonymous with capitalism (and American capitalism at that) itself, this does seem to be a case of seeking to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. I’m not suggesting that one should therefore shop unethically, but rather that we also need to recognise that, as a strategy for changing the world, this can’t be the only game we play.
The next chapter looks squarely at Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and I think this is perhaps the highlight of the book. She stresses that Milton Friedman was decidedly against such ideas – in that he believed corporate organisations had only one goal, and that was to maximise shareholder profit. Talk of ‘triple-bottom lines’, for instance, had to be understood within the notion that the ultimate bottom line is the financial and each of the others would be cast aside if that one looked like it was suffering. It is perhaps slightly too cynical to say that CSR is merely about branding otherwise evil organisations as good, and I say this because some corporate organisations simply can’t live the Friedman hyper-capitalist path because their customers expect some form of responsibility from them and therefore acting in ways that are not responsible has costs to their shareholders/financial base too. Nevertheless, she makes the point that what corporations generally use corporate social responsibility to achieve is their ability to avoid corporate social accountability – that is, being moved from self-regulation to social-regulation by governments – that is, their ability to essentially ‘green wash’ their activities or what I read elsewhere recently ‘to put a green sheen on what they do’ is an imperative since not being able to put such a sheen on their actions might force much more stringent (and costly) regulations upon them. As she says at one point, organisations can advertise different products as being green for opposite reasons – she talks at one point of a plastic handled paint brush being described as ‘green’ since its production doesn’t cut down trees and a wooden handled paint brush being ‘green’ since it uses renewable materials.
The next chapter discusses the reflexivity of anti-consumer activism. She discusses No Logo at length and its relationship with identity politics. I hadn’t realised that the book itself – No Logo, that is – had been published by HarperCollins which is owned by Murdoch (what do they say about the last capitalist selling the rope to hang the second last capitalist?) Her point is that Klein is seeking to restructure identity politics – particularly as it is associated with brands – so that different identities can be formed that are less harmful to the environment or to the working conditions of the poor.
She then shifts to look at Anita Roddich’s book Take it Personally. This is particularly interesting, not least since Roddich doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to any of the nuances or complexities of living in a world where consumption itself is classed and deeply contradictory, but rather spends lots of time praising herself as some sort of hero of the age while really only presenting alternatives available to the middle class and as such not particularly likely to solve any of the problems seemingly being addressed.
This is perhaps less true of say, Adbusters (an organisation I really quite like since it seeks to subvert the power of advertising and often does so by using humour – a few of my favourite things going on right there), but the problem is that such voices are inevitably whispers against the screams of corporate ‘unbusted’ ads. It is too easy to see this as an ultimately futile exercise, but the point being, I guess, and as she ends the chapter saying, anti-consumerism requires reflexivity and so anything that encourages that is helpful.
The last chapter looks at Guattari’s ideas of the three ecologies: the psychological, the social and the environmental; and looks at how these interplay in how we might go about creating a notion of green consumption. My reading of this is that there is very little point in trying to understand (and change) how our consumption impacts the environment, if we don’t also understand the psychological imperatives that drive us to consume in the first place – and then how those imperatives are encouraged by the way our societies are structured. So, the point is to understand the deep complexity of all of these interrelated (and even contradictory) drivers of our consumption, rather than just saying something like ‘we really do need to have less impact on the planet…’
She then runs through some of the crises facing us – neoliberal and post-Fordist profit and market drivers, climate change, peak oil, polution – and then the paradoxes that these bring to us while we are seeking to reduce our impact on the world through our consumption. There is a nice bit in this that talks about a fashion designer producing a shopping bag with the words ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ written on it (which became iconic and sold for hundreds of pounds – ironies piled on ironies) – which was then almost immediately parodied with other bags saying ‘I’m a smug twat’, which nicely relates back to the beginning of the book where she discussed the problem of ‘worthiness’ and how uncool ‘being ethical’ can be.
The complexities of consumption are such that it isn’t in the least bit clear to me how we can solve any of these problems individually – which is, of course, the mode of solution that changing our consumption patterns proposes. This relates to the limits available via caveat emptor – that is, let the buyer beware – as the means of solving complex social problems. Economic theory might propose that we have perfect information on all products available to us and how they can help to increase our utility and therefore that our choices are always based on maximising such … and so on – but we all know this is total nonsense, even as an approximate model (read any of the books available on behavioural economics if you doubt this). In fact, far too often the information available to us on products is so limited (and intentionally so) that our choices are virtually meaningless – since, surely, freedom can only be based on ‘informed’ choice, if choice and freedom can related at all.
This all comes back to the need for strong forms of regulation – but since our governments have been bought and paid for by corporations, such regulation is unlikely anytime soon. And even if it were likely, our entire social structure is based on the need for increasing rates of consumption (rates of consumption that must grow exponentially, no less), and our identities are constructed and reconstructed on the basis of what we buy and what that then says about the types of people we are, or want to be, given what we buy.
The point, I guess, is that we need to learn to consume less – although, saying that alone says nothing in a world where far too many don’t have the option to consume less. These are systemic problems that can hardly be addressed by the feeble resources available to the individual in society – but sooner rather than later the world will stop forgiving us for the devastation we are causing, and then the fun and games really will begin. We are witnessing this today in the Middle East – much of what I’ve been reading lately has said that many of the crises and uprisings there are due to impacts from climate change. And the effects of climate change are set to become much more intense and much more wide spread – like a Calvino scene from Invisible Cities, we have built a mountain of waste and it is about to collapse upon us. We can only hope that we will learn to act before it is all too late, although, looking at the governments we elect, that doesn’t seem the most likely outcome to expect, does it?
The second chapter considers how various corporations have tried to structure our concerns about consuming in the world and how this is making the world a worse place. She focuses in particular on the American Express Red Card that Bono from U2 had a hand in creating. I’m not going to pretend that I’m particularly fond of Bono – all the same, what is particularly interesting here is that this is marketed as a way to both buy stuff and change the course of human history, a chance to have a huge impact while hardly changing your lifestyle at all, and yet, somehow also utterly change everything. And this is because you have become cosmopolitan – a citizen of the whole world – which this then places you in a philosophical tradition that stretches back to the Greek Stoics and arrives at us via Kant. This is seen as the ‘good’ side of globalisation, and again, the power is presented as being in each of our own hands to remake the world one purchase at a time.
Of course, the reality is a bit more complicated than this. In the case of the Red card, for instance, this does seem to be more a way for the middle classes to ease their consciences than it is a highly effective way of ending the problems facing humanity. She also raises the ‘cost/benefit’ question here – with the remarkable amount of free publicity available to American Express compared to the tiny outlay they provide from the use of the card. It doesn’t take a deep and penetrating vision to look into this to then see what type of people are likely to have a Red credit card or what they are likely to buy. The idea that it is perhaps better that they might be buying jeans made Africa or fair trade coffee is perhaps not to be sneezed at – but this is hardly a revolution, and it suffers from the problem so much of ethical consumption must similarly suffer from – that it is only available to those who have choices in their purchases in the first place, that is, the already better off.
The chapter moves on to discuss Mecca Cola – an Islamic alternative to Coke that sends 10% of its profits to humanitarian projects in Palestine. And while this is interesting in that it clearly is making a deeply political statement and one that addresses a company that is virtually synonymous with capitalism (and American capitalism at that) itself, this does seem to be a case of seeking to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. I’m not suggesting that one should therefore shop unethically, but rather that we also need to recognise that, as a strategy for changing the world, this can’t be the only game we play.
The next chapter looks squarely at Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and I think this is perhaps the highlight of the book. She stresses that Milton Friedman was decidedly against such ideas – in that he believed corporate organisations had only one goal, and that was to maximise shareholder profit. Talk of ‘triple-bottom lines’, for instance, had to be understood within the notion that the ultimate bottom line is the financial and each of the others would be cast aside if that one looked like it was suffering. It is perhaps slightly too cynical to say that CSR is merely about branding otherwise evil organisations as good, and I say this because some corporate organisations simply can’t live the Friedman hyper-capitalist path because their customers expect some form of responsibility from them and therefore acting in ways that are not responsible has costs to their shareholders/financial base too. Nevertheless, she makes the point that what corporations generally use corporate social responsibility to achieve is their ability to avoid corporate social accountability – that is, being moved from self-regulation to social-regulation by governments – that is, their ability to essentially ‘green wash’ their activities or what I read elsewhere recently ‘to put a green sheen on what they do’ is an imperative since not being able to put such a sheen on their actions might force much more stringent (and costly) regulations upon them. As she says at one point, organisations can advertise different products as being green for opposite reasons – she talks at one point of a plastic handled paint brush being described as ‘green’ since its production doesn’t cut down trees and a wooden handled paint brush being ‘green’ since it uses renewable materials.
The next chapter discusses the reflexivity of anti-consumer activism. She discusses No Logo at length and its relationship with identity politics. I hadn’t realised that the book itself – No Logo, that is – had been published by HarperCollins which is owned by Murdoch (what do they say about the last capitalist selling the rope to hang the second last capitalist?) Her point is that Klein is seeking to restructure identity politics – particularly as it is associated with brands – so that different identities can be formed that are less harmful to the environment or to the working conditions of the poor.
She then shifts to look at Anita Roddich’s book Take it Personally. This is particularly interesting, not least since Roddich doesn’t seem to pay too much attention to any of the nuances or complexities of living in a world where consumption itself is classed and deeply contradictory, but rather spends lots of time praising herself as some sort of hero of the age while really only presenting alternatives available to the middle class and as such not particularly likely to solve any of the problems seemingly being addressed.
This is perhaps less true of say, Adbusters (an organisation I really quite like since it seeks to subvert the power of advertising and often does so by using humour – a few of my favourite things going on right there), but the problem is that such voices are inevitably whispers against the screams of corporate ‘unbusted’ ads. It is too easy to see this as an ultimately futile exercise, but the point being, I guess, and as she ends the chapter saying, anti-consumerism requires reflexivity and so anything that encourages that is helpful.
The last chapter looks at Guattari’s ideas of the three ecologies: the psychological, the social and the environmental; and looks at how these interplay in how we might go about creating a notion of green consumption. My reading of this is that there is very little point in trying to understand (and change) how our consumption impacts the environment, if we don’t also understand the psychological imperatives that drive us to consume in the first place – and then how those imperatives are encouraged by the way our societies are structured. So, the point is to understand the deep complexity of all of these interrelated (and even contradictory) drivers of our consumption, rather than just saying something like ‘we really do need to have less impact on the planet…’
She then runs through some of the crises facing us – neoliberal and post-Fordist profit and market drivers, climate change, peak oil, polution – and then the paradoxes that these bring to us while we are seeking to reduce our impact on the world through our consumption. There is a nice bit in this that talks about a fashion designer producing a shopping bag with the words ‘I’m not a plastic bag’ written on it (which became iconic and sold for hundreds of pounds – ironies piled on ironies) – which was then almost immediately parodied with other bags saying ‘I’m a smug twat’, which nicely relates back to the beginning of the book where she discussed the problem of ‘worthiness’ and how uncool ‘being ethical’ can be.
The complexities of consumption are such that it isn’t in the least bit clear to me how we can solve any of these problems individually – which is, of course, the mode of solution that changing our consumption patterns proposes. This relates to the limits available via caveat emptor – that is, let the buyer beware – as the means of solving complex social problems. Economic theory might propose that we have perfect information on all products available to us and how they can help to increase our utility and therefore that our choices are always based on maximising such … and so on – but we all know this is total nonsense, even as an approximate model (read any of the books available on behavioural economics if you doubt this). In fact, far too often the information available to us on products is so limited (and intentionally so) that our choices are virtually meaningless – since, surely, freedom can only be based on ‘informed’ choice, if choice and freedom can related at all.
This all comes back to the need for strong forms of regulation – but since our governments have been bought and paid for by corporations, such regulation is unlikely anytime soon. And even if it were likely, our entire social structure is based on the need for increasing rates of consumption (rates of consumption that must grow exponentially, no less), and our identities are constructed and reconstructed on the basis of what we buy and what that then says about the types of people we are, or want to be, given what we buy.
The point, I guess, is that we need to learn to consume less – although, saying that alone says nothing in a world where far too many don’t have the option to consume less. These are systemic problems that can hardly be addressed by the feeble resources available to the individual in society – but sooner rather than later the world will stop forgiving us for the devastation we are causing, and then the fun and games really will begin. We are witnessing this today in the Middle East – much of what I’ve been reading lately has said that many of the crises and uprisings there are due to impacts from climate change. And the effects of climate change are set to become much more intense and much more wide spread – like a Calvino scene from Invisible Cities, we have built a mountain of waste and it is about to collapse upon us. We can only hope that we will learn to act before it is all too late, although, looking at the governments we elect, that doesn’t seem the most likely outcome to expect, does it?
Displaying 1 of 1 review