"Consumers are nearly powerless; their sole act of power is in choosing which items they will consume, although their choices are strictly limited to what has already been produced."
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In the past few decades, intellectual analyses have emphasized the cultural backgrounds of commodity, consumers’ demanding social lives, and commodity’s aesthetic influences (Durham & Kellner, 1986). However, this new awareness of commodities seems to have no connection to traditional political economic analyses of the structure of a particular commodity’s production. Instead, this new analysis focuses on the consumption of commodities. Therefore, these analyses of commodities are one-sided, and analysts see the method of producing commodities as fundamentally irrelevant to the studies of commodities (Hilton, 1985). This article utilizes Marx’s ideas about value—the ideological illustration of a specific mode of production, but not a collective fantasy inserted into the actual mass of the commodity (Tormey, 2001). Using this model as its foundation, this essay discusses the facts that underpin the redefinition of a commodity as an item for consumption, which means there is a hidden basic change in the view of economic structure — the shift from an industrial society to one based on consumer capitalism. This essay contends that an item made for consumption points to a unique principle, a structure of shared images and ideas that illustrate the bias and inequality inherent in social relations under consumer capitalism, by converting the unproductive nature of consumption into its resultant forms. Although consumers suffuse existing products with meaning, they do not create anything material at all. Consumers who select and desire certain items are weak; the items that support materialism are separate from consumers, and the consumers’ daily encounters with these items are a chain of remote and external events that have no goal (Mattila, 2001).
Under a capitalist system, consumers have a limited arena in which to act because they construct meaning without physically changing the items they are consuming, although consuming it may eventually destroy the item (Dowling, 2006). Instead of changing or creating an item, they create their own psychological meaning and attach it to an item. It is vital to understand that these psychological constructions are completely biased and personal, separate from the item’s physical mass. Meanings are personal since they are not included in the item. An item means something different to every user of that item (De Vries, 2008). All that is included in the item is a collection of physical characteristics that make it significant, attractive, and possibly precious to the consumer. These characteristics originate from the actual labor that produces the item, and have no connection to the consumer’s actions.
Indeed, consumption damages the physical characteristics of the item, so nothing significant is created outside the consumer. The consumer’s actions, then, as far as the object is concerned, are actually irrelevant (Dowling, 2006). These actions cannot be included in the item’s body; they can only touch its exterior. Thus, the weakness of the consumer is revealed, as the consumers’ actions exist only as realizations that have no relevance to the item’s physical form.
Consumers are nearly powerless; their sole act of power is in choosing which items they will consume, although their choices are strictly limited to what has already been produced. The production process limits their choices. The present age is, in fact, an era of nonstop choosing (Tauber, 1996), which can be discussed through two conflicting perspectives. From a progressive perspective, a larger quantity and diversity of products is being manufactured, so there are more options. However, from a regressive perspective, any control that a consumer has on a product is completely a posteriori. This conflict between the progressive and the regressive explains why consumers have been addressed by Sassatelli (2007) as both heroes and hated fools. With a larger number of options, consumers have more space to demonstrate self-expression (Dennis, 2005). Nevertheless, since they are barred from production, consumers do not have the power to change the foundation of their material existence; consequently, they exist, in spite of their individual aims, to be exploited by the producers. Therefore, although they are under the impression that they have free will and are no longer controlled by the old restraints, the pleasures they extract from each playful chance to consume is spoiled by shame, panic, and anxiety, the emotions that to a great extent invigorate the present state of consumer politics.
The progressive idea that consumers have more options comes straight from the expansion of productive power, but this quality is actually the reason for the powerlessness of consumers. The type of production used in a system of consumer capitalism builds a complete barrier to social advancement and undermines the power of consumers because the vast majority of them have no control over production, even though society is open to a larger amount and greater diversity of products than ever before, which symbolizes a historical accomplishment (Berger, 1972). This problem is clearly the situation for the millions of people who labor in manufacturing plants and agricultural fields to generate most of the world’s products; they rarely experience the joy of consuming the products they produce, nor do they have any power to decide what they produce (De Vries, 2008). For consumers, a few of them wealthy, but most of them not, the present type of production allows them a pre-set living experience in which their options are after-the-event, between choices — items and practices of purchase — which have previously been decided and formed by someone else. Consumer capitalism, then, is a system in which regulations are ready-made and in which people are captives of the dilemma created by the system. As a result, the propagation of options and diversity coexists with indifference and fate. Unless the belief in choice brings with it the opportunity to cause a change in terms of altering the direction of events or a location in the movement of a series of events that may be unalterable, it undoes the freedom it supposedly supports (Berger, 1972).
The weakness brought about by consumers’ choices is due to the significant difference between the modern idea of choice and free will, which is a historical trend. Modern choices are unique in that they are often surrounded by specific available choices. In contrast, free will is a conceptual and unrestricted capability, independently free from willpower (Kane, 1996). In addition, modern choice has to be performed immediately in order to exist, while free will comes before any temporal act. Compared to free will, modern choice seems closer to real life, but it also means a drastic decline in a person’s area of action. Modern choice is defined under the narrowest of conditions, as a preference of one choice over other choices, all of which already exist. Under consumer capitalism, a buyer’s choice of products discloses his or her material helplessness. Because consumers do not have a constructive connection to the materials used in production, modern choice becomes immaterial (Ekström & Brembeck, 2004).
Consumers are also weak because the production process shapes their desire for certain items. The distinction between unchanging natural need and changeable cultural desire is that the desire to consume involves real material items produced by workers in precise ways, but the need to consume does not (De Vries, 2008). An artistic product generates a public that favors a particular style and is able to take pleasure in beauty, and this is applicable and transferrable to other products. Production, therefore, creates not only a product for the consumer, but also a consumer for the product (Brennan, 1997). Products must contain a feature of desire, in the modern sense of the word, rather than meeting other human needs. The natural need may be unmet, but cultural desire is self-fulfilling since products are constantly emerging, seducing the consumer, who is powerless to resist the primal urge that consumption satisfies. Thus, desire is totally realistic, but its practicality is limited to the present time and space, to the instantly accessible.
Under consumer capitalism, the materiality of products is self-supporting and independent from consumers because consumers surrender to the material obligation of a ready-made world. Although the modern world has been formed by human labor via global developments, consumers perceive that labor not as an active social force of which they are a part, but as a compilation of lifeless and completed products. Thus, the modern world seems external to consumers, and vice versa. Our material helplessness gives power to this material world. Therefore, the complement of meaning, selection and desire, which is based on a limited and biased subjectivism, is a limited and biased materialism that puts our focus on the products themselves (Williams, 1980). The products’ physical occurrence is independent from that agency, and that leads to disenchantment with the products (Antle & Summer, 1975). Such constrained materialism has spread across a diversity of academic systems. For example, in visual art, such restricted materialism encourages a minimalist concentration on the smallest materiality of the objective world. In psychology and philosophy, restricted materialism produces a focus on physicality and an aversion to classical, dualistic approaches (Nicastro, 1999). In the social sciences, it causes a focus on material culture, the study of products or on items-in-use (Sheumaker & Wajda, 1996; Staniforth, 2003), and, concurrently, to a sociology of objects (Downs & Hagemeijer, 2004), the study of items in action. Therefore, the helplessness and isolation of the consumer in relation to production practices is experienced as the strong domination of the finished products in the modern world.
Daily experiences become a series of isolated and individual occasions because the modern world of consumer capitalism is formed from numerous individual and isolated products and consumers. Essentially, it is a disordered and manifold world, a mixed collection of bodies, languages, decisions, methods, messages, and customs (Burke & Porter, 1991). A world in which theorists emphasize the diversity and intricacy of the living experience (Parasnis, 1998), and political systems encourage cultural diversity or, on the contrary, warn against its risks and artistic practices; montages, for example, repeat the effect of separation, replication, and discontinuity. Consumers are afflicted as they become afflicted by “multiphrenia” – “the splitting of the individual into a multiplicity of self-investments” (Kristja´nsson, 2008). Humans live in a world of things with diverse natures, and that behave in a variety of ways (Jones, 1979). However, appearances, even when valid, cannot explain all of reality. Underneath the erosion of the public field (Ehrenberg, 1999) is the propagation of uniqueness and standards of living and the materialization of a lonely individualism (Greisman, 1976); underneath the emotional combination of deadness and nervousness, aggravated by the never-ending series of informal encounters, lies the isolation and disintegration of society into specific acts of consumption, which represents a particular set of material relationships among consumers.
To conclude, consumer capitalism employs a specific type of production that causes ideological effects. This type of production results in powerless consumers, and their sense of involvement and change is restricted to their individual awareness of dependent desire, meaning, and decision making because consumers do not create or transform the actual products. While the materiality of the products asserts itself independently from consumers, consumers face the material world as a collection of alien objects and isolated experiences. Although consumption has not actually taken over all aspects of life, one cannot deny that consumer capitalism seems to be self-directed and demanding that it bend our society to its will (Dear & Flusty, 2002).
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