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... s. Products are produced and marketed collectively, no matter how seriously industry tries to diversify product lines. What I would like to argue here is that consumers are incorporated into the capitalist system, not by the compulsive exercise of power by industry, but as a result of the interaction with industry. In other words, consumers can make their decisions through the interaction with industry by way of commodities, and in this interaction, categorization works as a determinant factor.
In many sense, categorization imposes some restricting power on the intended consumers because it defines the intended markets and consumers. The identity of a product, such as an executive car, is also constructed to penetrate the intended markets. On the other hand, consumers tend to refer to the 'given' categorization when they choose commodities. An executive may choose a car from the 'executive car' market. This is the effort by consumers to try to locate themselves in the intended market. In this respect, the action 'buying something' is the movement by consumers to refer themselves to the intended market, and therefore, this is the opposite direction of consumers' intentions to express themselves through commodities.
In most accounts of post modernity, consumer culture both exemplifies the blurring and flattening of modernist distinctions and indicates the medium through which it happens, it may even constitute an explanation. Things which inhabited different world and value systems, and were consumed by different audiences, now occupy a single cultural space. Moreover, that single cultural space may seem to be occupied by everyone. Earlier accounts of capitalism might attribute this to spreading commodification of all things, whether culturally high or low, public or private, can be made equivalent as things to be bought and sold.
In the notion of postmodern culture, commodities have been dematerialized and now exist purely as signs circulating within a political economy of signs. However seemingly infinite the number of different signs in circulation, they are all completely the same in being just signs. Within the circulation of sign there can be nothing but choice, - things have no intrinsic meaning or anchorage in the world they simply constitute a selection of signs from which to pick an mix. Foucault (1975) pointed out that we dont live in a world of facts that have a meaning independent people but, instead, in a world constantly subject to our every interpretation.
This implies that in postmodernism there can only be process and not progress, as it denies omniscience, the great narratives of modernism and the closure and end of wisdom. Frederic Jameson (1997) even goes so far to argue the death of the subject itself = the end of the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual. The once-existing centred subject, in the period of classical capitalism and the nuclear family, has today in the world of organizational bureaucracy been dissolved. In art for instance, the end of the individual brushstroke has come to an end due to the mechanical reproduction of our time.
The result is that the individual human body can no longer map its position in a mappable external world, and such forces incapacity is a symbolic of the wider incapacity of our minds to map the great global multinational communicational networks of the modern world (1997: 156) The media both reflects certain aspects of society and at the same time profoundly affects society. This relationship ultimately leads to a radically different kind of consciousness, one that rejects the notion of progress, one that cherishes irony, revels in superficiality, mixes genres and thus forms pastiches. The crucial de-differentiation for accounts of postmodern culture is the implosion of sign and reality, or, in semiotic terms, of sign and referent, connotations and notation. The place of signs and culture can no longer be plausibly anchored in, as Baudrillard (1996) puts it, final ities in the external world. Consumption is no longer anchored in the finality of need, not knowledge in truth, technocracy in progress, history in a meta narrative characterized by causation and teleology.
These external anchors for meaning are now revealed, and indeed experienced, as being internal to the arbitrary game of culture and signification. This schizophrenic subject becomes one of two exemplars of the postmodern consumer. On the one hand, the consumer, inhabiting a perpetual present, confronts all of social life as a field of simultaneous and depth less images, from which to choose, but to choose without reference to any externalities or anchors. In order to control the consumer, consumerism needs to have a form of authority over the consumer. Weber identifies three different types of authority, the traditional, charismatic and legal rational authority.
Weber regards today society as controlled by bureaucracy. The bureaucracy embodies Webers thinking on rationality, authority and the iron cage. First, bureaucracy is the epitome of formal rationality. Secondly it is the organizational structure that is associated with rational- legal authority and its triumph over other forms of authority and finally bureaucracy is itself an iron cage, in terms as to who functions it. More generally, as more and more sectors of society come to be characterized by bureaucracies, they tend to form one enormous iron cage. Weber conceived of capitalism as another form of a rational system, and he offers an extraordinarily clear image of its material cage-like character: Capitalism is today an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live.
It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalist rule of action. This constrain is important in itself for its relationship to exploitation, and also because it makes possible the systematic extraction of enchantment from these structures. (Ritzer: 1999) To sum up Weber (1921) saw the spirit of modern capitalism leading to rationalized, disenchanted capitalism, for Campbell (1989), on the other hand, the spirit of modern consumerism leads to romantic, enchanted capitalism. Although production is of central importance in rational capitalism, it is of secondary importance for romantic capitalism. What is of central importance for romantic capitalism is consumption. And, within the realm of consumption, Campbell accorded great importance to fantasies, especially the fantasizing of consumers. This is very true, as people have independent desires to pursue pleasures; this is not a desire that has to be manipulated into being.
Postmodern theory offers useful corrective on the idea that the means of consumption control and exploit consumers. Although there is control and exploitation in the sense that people are led to buy and to spend too much, the fact is, that people are not, in the main, being coerced, into doing so, but are quite eager to behave in these ways. Most consumers do not see themselves as being controlled and exploited and would vehemently reject the idea that this is what is taking place. Whatever the objective realities of price paid and quantities purchased, most consumers seem willing to pay the prices and would, if anything, consume more if they could. Leis (1976) argued that modern Euro-American societies are characterized by what he calls a high-intensity market in which individuals are trained to act as consumers.
This change is seen to have two key features. The number and complexity of available good in the market-place grows enormously and individuals tend to interpret feeling of we-being more and more exclusively in terms of their relative success in gaining access to high level of consumption. However, he suggests that the intensification of commodity circulation has a number of negative effects in relation to the ethnics of the good life or well-being as a result of the fact that the direct interaction between impulses and sources of satisfaction is broken, impulses are controlled and consciously directed towards an enlarged field of satisfaction. (1976, 81) It is an undeniable fact that consumption has moved to being a very important part in todays society. It has crept unnoticed into our consciousness, and now is associated more or less with any action we take. The rise of consumption has led its way to advertising, increasingly influencing us. But the counter argument is that nobody is forced to consume and the demand for consumption is rising.
Featherstone argues that this is all part of what he describes as anesthetization of everyday life (Featherstone 1991: 67 - 8) the sense of a world saturated by the flow of signs and images, a word encountered through images. We consume more because we have more money to spend. Although personal debt is going up, we now found new means of how to express ourselves. Rather than seeing consumption exploiting the consumer, I would argue that consumption really enables us to new freedom. Formally it is true that the world consumption offers us, is not a world of reality. It allows us to live in a world, which we would like to live in and allows us to nurture this dream, presupposing we have enough means to consume the commodities necessary for this.
Weber argues due to bureaucracy we find ourselves placed in one big iron cage. I would argue against it, as one can still find locations not affected by bureaucracy, for instance an excluded island. I would rather go along the lines of Foucault (1975) and Ritzer (1999) who argue that the cathedrals of consumption provide a multitude of mini-cages. The problem is that the increasing demand for cathedral of consumption has now produced so many that we are unaware of their existence. What I am trying to argue is that although we are being controlled by consumerism, we are controlled by our consent. As Lytoard (1979) argues, we take comfort in uniformity.
Although now, the line between our free will and the consequence of advertisement is very thin. Reality is as Baudrillard (1998) and Lytoard argue blurred, and only with rational reasoning one can detect out freedom. Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean (1998), The Consumer Society, London: Sage, Campbell, Colin (1989). The Romantic Ethnic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford: Blackwell Foucault, Michael (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Jameson, Frederic (1993): Postmodernism. in: Docherty, Thomas. (ed. ) Postmodernism a Reader.
Cambridge: Harvester Wheatsheaf. pp. 70 - 71 Leis, W. (1976) The Limits of Satisfaction. Toronto: Toronto University Press Lytoard, Jean- Francois (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press Ricoeur.
Paul (1986) "An Interpretation of Religion and Society in the Thought of Karl Marx and Gibson Winter, " in Encounter 47 Ritzer, George (1999) Enchanting a disenchanted world: revolutionizing the means of consumption, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. School, Juliet B. , The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer. New York: Basic Books Slater, DR (1997) Consumer Culture and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press Weber, Max, (1921), Economy and Society 3 cols Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press
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Research essay sample on Live In A World Iron Cage
