We
borrow from each other and slum around a bit, but the distinctions
remain. It's related to the issue
where time and again censorship effectively prevents one class
from having access to what another has on the grounds that they
can't handle it. The nineteenth-century suppression by government
of written pornography intensifies as the working class becomes
more literate. In our own times, Jane Juffer has shown how attempts
to stop the transmission of pornography on daytime cable don't
affect male viewers but only stop housewives from watching it.
It's only when their husbands are at work can they become private
consumers.
I did a whole class on art and pornography,
which is why I'm bringing these issues up. The difficult
question to address here, with art and pornography,
is what entitles some people to think they should be legislating
other people's pleasure, that most mutable and elusive of
experiences?
But then for a number of reasons I'm
not convinced that the critique of commodities is honest except
where it concerns issues raised in the debate around globalization—like unfair
wages, working conditions, environmental damage, excessive subsidies.
The critique tends to focus on our intoxication with commodities
as if we had no way to articulate or modify this relationship.
As if every second of our close engagement with all the stuff around
us wasn't an ongoing reappraisal of that relationship, whether
through sensations of pleasure or impulses of self-expression.
This is not to say that commodities are in themselves good, but
just that we manage to deal with them effectively. We use commodities
for self-definition but this use is invariably so finely tuned,
so intimately felt, that the influence exerted by commodity and
consumer is mutual.
The Marxist aesthetician W. F. Haug claims
that these attunements are turned back on the commodifiers, particularly
through the use of clothing to express sexuality, which compels
a response from manufacturers.
Who is in control then? The commodity
or the consumer?
I think you will agree that this range of delicate
responses gets made within the marketplace; that there is no "outside,"
outside the market. The idea that selecting alternatives to mainstream
commodities avoids capitulation to the market is only a reprise
of what we've
seen happening to the avant-garde, the delusions of the avant-garde.
Your rejection becomes incorporated. In any case these alternatives
are themselves
commodities
of equal
intricacy and expressiveness.
Consider, for example, the subtle
coding around tatoos. The fine adjustments, moment by moment,
that constitute a resistance to conformity simply continue on another
level. And this is one reason why the narratives of overwhelming
economic forces don't entirely convince. Heidegger's concept
of enframing and Lefebvre's concept of everydayness as pernicious
deterministic influences on our lives are, I think, resisted
at
every turn by people as
they determine their own inventive responses. |
