Cultural Studies is Good For Thinking

Canclini’s chapter “Consumption is Good For Thinking” serves as a case study for one of the questions we’ve been discussing all semester: “What is cultural studies good for?”  The basis for his chapter largely stems from the compartmentalization endemic in studies of consumption and the ensuing limitations of these studies when they are taken alone, as in the case of strictly economic, anthropological, psychoanalytic, or aesthetic frameworks.  His call for a sociocultural study of consumption is not intended to dismiss the relevance and necessity of specialized analyses, but instead to demonstrate the benefits in finding their points of intersection and examining the results with a wider lens.   Canclini’s characterization of consumption – as an ensemble of sociocultural processes – suggests that the multi-faceted, multi-discipline nature of consumption evoked by the word “ensemble” calls for an interdisciplinary methodology by nature, and therein seems to lie the place where cultural studies is most needed and most effective.  In the case of consumption, Canclini’s approach yields a more fully developed, complex, challenging conclusion: that “commercial value is not something contained ‘naturally’ in objects but is rather the result of sociocultural interaction among the people who use them,” and that “humans exchange objects to satisfy culturally defined needs, to integrate with and distinguish ourselves from others, to fulfill our desires and to map out our situation in the world, to control the erratic flux of desires and to give them stability or security through institutions and rituals.”  When a cultural studies approach is multidiscipline, it is “good for” looking at social and cultural phenomena that likewise have effects that register in a wide number of colliding sectors.   Not just a process, but ensembles of processes. 

A discussion of Idiocracy in light of Canclini’s book chapter reveals perhaps the most horrifying aspect of Mike Judge’s dystopic future (and surely there are many).  In the year 2505, consumption seems to no longer play any role in group distinction, class division, identity creation, or meaning making.  It is no longer a place of competition and rational decision, but a scenario in which the act of consumption has become arbitrary; the ritual has become habitual.  It is only after the symbolic intermediaries of the family, neighborhood, labor practices, religion, and politics have broken down that the act of consumption becomes meaningless, and society becomes the postmodern stereotype called out by Canclini in Consumers and Citizens – “the omnipotence of mass media, which presumably incite the masses to gorge themselves unthinkingly with commodities.”  Citizens who buy Brawndo are pitiful figures not because they have been duped into buying something they don’t need, or that they are alienated from the most natural of processes (drinking water), or that they aren’t smart enough to know that plants don’t crave electrolytes.  Mike Judge’s doomsday scenario is one in which acts of consumption are no longer a source of meaning, order, or security.  A common critique of Judge’s film – partially in jest – is that the film’s 2505 date is too far off.  That is, his dystopia looks too shockingly contemporary to be 500 years in the future, and I would agree that his satire is aimed squarely at the present.  Still, in light of Canclini’s findings and with some optimism I would argue that such a vast amount of time would need to elapse in order to create the zombified populace in which consumption means nothing.