Featherstone’s
three components of consumer culture:
-First is
the view that consumer culture is premised upon the expansion of capitalist
commodity production, which has given rise to a vast accumulation of material
culture in the form of consumer goods and sites for purchase and consumption.
Has increased the capacity for ideological manipulation and ‘seductive’
containment of the population from some alternative set of ‘better’ social
relations.
-Secondly
there is the more strictly sociological view that the satisfaction derived from
the goods relates to their socially structured access in a zero sum game in
which satisfaction and status depend upon displaying and sustaining differences
within conditions of inflation. Focuses upon the different ways people use
goods to create social bonds or distractions.
- Thirdly
there is the question of the emotional pleasures of consumption, the dreams and
desires which become celebrated in consumer cultural imagery and particular
sites of consumption, which variously generate direct bodily excitement and
aesthetic pleasure.
- Those who
own the means of production in consumer cultures have to change people’s
attitudes from ideas that focus on thrift and saving to ideas that focus on
consumption.
-Bernay’s
argument builds upon this. ‘If we understand the mechanism and motives of the
group mind, it is not possible to control and regiment the masses according to
our will without their knowing it. Mass psychology is yet far from being an
exact science and the mysteries of human motivations are by no means all
revealed. But at least theory and practice have combined with sufficient
success to permit us to know that in certain cases we can effect some change in
public opinion… by operating a certain mechanism’- Does PR have the ability to
shape a society’s collective consciousness without anyone in that society
realising what has happened? Seems to be evidence that at least in certain
areas, involving purchases of products and goods, something similar to what Bernays
is writing about has taken place.
-Protestant
ethic has lead to the development of consumer culture long before advertisers
began to manipulate people, Protestant theology began to dissuade people from
the value of asceticism and poverty and convince them that God wanted people to
enjoy life and that consumption was divinely inspired. Calvin glorified hard
work and using time profitably, so people could earn money and thus be able to
consume, as God wanted them too. This theology led to providing a hardworking
and diligent workforce, who believed that their place in society and in the
scheme of things was determined by God and was a matter of divine providence.
-Psychoanalytic
perspective on consumer culture is that the fundamental aim in life is to live
and to live pleasurably. In order to achieve this, each of us tries to deal
with and dispose of destructive forces in himself, venting, diverting and using
them in such a way as to obtain the maximum security he can in life- and
pleasures to boot- an aim which we achieve by infinitely various, subtle and
complicated adaptations. Each of us has an unconscious need for material things
and the financial and psychological benefits that lead to our getting and
having things can never be satisfied. Having things is an instinctive need to
feel alive and good.
-Marxist
perspective on advertising takes a different approach. Its not consciousness
that determines society but society that determines consciousness. Consumer
Cultures are the way the ruling classes divert the proletariat (the masses) and
prevent them from developing a class consciousness and from thinking about
political change and revolution. There is a connection between ‘alienation’ and
consumer culture. Through ‘forced labour’ by the workers, leads on to
alienation and self conscious and self acting commodities. Marx says everyone
in capitalist socities is alienated, for those who are the members of the
ruling classes are also alienated and always worried about political changes
that might impinge on their domination. It is alienation that Marx argues leads
people into consumer culture, for it is only when they purchase things that
they find momentary gratification and escape from the alienation that plagues
them. Advertising may sell products but at the same time it sells the
capitalist social order that makes it possible for workers to participate in
consumer cultures. Advertising works by generating dissatisfactions and
anxieties in people and feeds on the alienation that pervades capitalist societies.
It assuages these feelings by focusing attention on private consumption thus
people are lead away rom paying attention and thinking about the way the ruling
classes dominate capitalist societies and the grossly unequal distribution of
wealth found in them. Advertising also promotes narcissism, leads people to
focus on their own personal wants or desires and to neglect social and
political matters and the needs of others. In consumer societies it is private
consumption that dominates, not expenditures for the good of the community.
-Products
can be hyper real in that signs now take on a life of their own and tend to be
the primary determinants of social experience. Signs and codes replace reality
and the world is experienced through images to the point where the real as
something different from the image disappears. A world of ‘hyper-reality’ is
created in which everything in the world is simulated in the sense that models
created by images replace the real.
