CONSUMPTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

OBJECTIVE  Mahasiswa dapat menunjukkan hubungan antara antara teori konsumen dan shopping culture. (C4)

MATERIALS 1. What is a consumer? 2. Theories of consumption 3. Consumeristic culture

WHAT IS A CONSUMER?  Background Consumption emerges as a cultural concern in the late 1950s and early 1960s in debates about the development of ‘consumer society.’ It becomes fully visible in cultural studies in the 1970s in work on how subcultures appropriate commodities to produce alternative and oppositional meanings. More recently, it can be found in studies of fan culture and in studies of shopping as popular culture.  Definition of consumption: - The action or fact of consuming by use, waste, etc. - Decay, wasting away or wearing out; waste - Wasting of the body by disease; now applied specifically to pulmonary consumption - The destructive employment of industrial products, the amount of them consumed. (Oxford English Dictionary)  Consumer - Early users of the word consumer, from C16, had the same general sense of destruction or waste. It was from 18 Century that the idea of consumer began to emerge in a neutral sense in the description of bourgeois political economy … the acts of making and of using goods and services were newly defined in the increasingly abstract pairings of producer and consumer, production and consumption.

THEORIES OF CONSUMPTION  Theories of consumption - Marxism * Consumerism in Marxism is seen as the impact of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This transition is marked by the change of production, that is based on need into production that is based on profit, where workers make goods in return for wages, they don’t own the goods, and the goods are sold to the market for profit. To get the goods, the workers have to buy them with money. So the workers become consumers, thus the consumer society began. * People began to recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, computer, make-up, jewellery, clothes, shoes, bags, money, house, etc. - Poststructuralism-Psychoanalysis * The ideology of consumerism works in much the same way as the ideology of romance. If the ideology of romance is a narrative constructed around a quest: love is the solution to all problems. Like the search for love, consumption implies

Continued … an incompleteness; something missing. * The ideology of consumerism can be seen as one of a displacement strategies. The promise which it makes is that (like love) consumption is the answer to all our problems; consumption will make us whole again; consumption will make us full again; consumption will make us complete again; consumption will return us to the blissful state of the imaginary.  Theories of consumption can be focused on: 1. The economic and global impact of consumer activity, positioning consumers as the passive victims of capitalism; 2. The ways in which acts of consumption are a creative and active way in which individuals articulate their own identity; 3. The ways in which economic and global structures of production are inextricably linked with individual acts of consumer choice.

CONSUMERISTIC CULTURE  Subcultural consumption - Youth culture communicates through acts of consumption. - The process of subcultural consumption is discriminating, called bricolage, in which subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the commodities commercially provided. Products are combined or transformed in ways not intended by their producers; commodities are rearticulated to produce oppositional meanings. E.g. Teddy Boys wearing Saville Row Edwardian jackets and safety pins. In this way (and through patterns of behavior, ways of speaking, taste in music, etc), youth subcultures engage in symbolic forms of resistance to both dominant and parent cultures.

Continued …  Fan Culture - Fans are the most visible part of the audience. - Traditionally, fans have been treated in one of two ways – ridiculed or pathologized – the victim of mass media. - Fandom is a visible (pathological) symptom of the supposed cultural, moral, and social decline which has inevitably followed the transition from rural and agricultural to industrial and urban society. … Fandom represents a desperate attempt to compensate for the shortcomings of modern life. - A positive image of fandom is as a poacher because fans move between the strategy of cultural imposition (production) and the tactics of cultural use (consumption). They are always in the act of appropriating themselves. - The notion of poaching is a rejection of the traditional model of behavior, in which the purpose is passive reception of authorial/textual intent. - Fandom is not about consumption, it is also about the production of texts – songs, poems, novels, fanzines, videos, etc. – made in response to the professional media texts of fandom. E.g. People who are fans of a certain musicians, wrote songs for them, etc.

Continued … - Three key features of fandom is 1. the ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience; 2. the role played by rereading within fan culture; 3. the process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social interactions. - Ten ways in which fans rewrite their favorite television shows 1. Recontextualization; 2. Expanding the series timeline; 3. Refocalization; 4. Moral realignment; 5. Genre shifting; 6. Crossovers; 7. Character dislocation; 8. Personalization; 9. Emotional intensification; 10. Eroticization.

Continued …  Shopping culture - Shopping centres are used for … meeting places by young people, pensioners, the unemployed and the homeless. - Consumption is more than an economic activity. It is also about dreams and desires, identities and communication. - Shopping is not a passive ritual of subjugation to the power of consumerism. The truth of consumption is made and remade in the actual act of shopping. - Young people are not alone in engaging in similar forms of shopping. They are frequently joined by tourists, escapees from bad weather, window shoppers and others who avails themselves of the facilities without necessarily contributing to the profit made by the shopping center.