Unboxing Unboxing

            The issue of Cultural Studies that my group will be discussing in class focuses on the encounter between cultural studies and the broad range of practices that have come to be dubbed “anti-consumerism.” The journal’s fundamental assumption is that discourses of anti-consumerism have been largely ignored by the field of cultural studies. In the issue’s introduction, the editors suggest that consumption can be thought of “a rich semantic domain, and the consumer as a creative producer of novel articulations” (Binkley & Littler 521), yet the majority of the articles in the issue focus on highly legible, often self-described forms of anti-consumerism.  My paper’s goal is to suggest that consumption is almost always a process fraught with ambivalence and seeks to find that ambivalence even in those activities often characterized as the epitome of conspicuous consumption. I propose that to a greater degree than might be acknowledged all consumption holds aspects of what is described as “anti-consumer” behavior and question the degree to which cultural studies is acknowledging that inherent tension.

            In order to interrogate these issues, I will focus on the phenomenon and the reception of the unboxing video. Unboxing videos make a spectacle out of taking a new (usually high-tech) product out of its box and are conventionally understood as vapid displays of consumption. The rhetoric that surrounds the unboxing video generally vilifies the prosumers who create these videos and suggest that the videos largely work as a form of unpaid advertising. My intervention, which could be interpreted as a larger call for nuance, historical context, and empathy in the analysis of such behaviors, questions the degree to which this practice can be rethought of an extension of anti-consumerist ambivalence.

Consumption is not a passive event, in which people thoughtlessly accept the messaging of advertising. Instead, as Nestor García Canclini has claimed, the process of consumption can be productively thought as a space in which identities are constructed and questions of citizenship are interrogated. He writes that:

We recognize that when we consume we also think, select, and reelaborate social meaning; it becomes necessary to analyze how this mode of appropriation of goods and signs conditions more active forms of participation than those that are grouped under the label of consumption. In other words, we should ask ourselves if consumption does not entail doing something that sustains, nourishes, and to a certain extent constitutes a new mode of being citizens (26).

This quote helps to remind us that purchasing a product is often also an expression of personal identity that affiliates the purchaser with a group. García Canclini, by defining consumption as “an ensemble of sociocultural processes in which the appropriation and use of products takes place” (38), opens the door for product consumption to be more than a discrete relationship between producer and consumer. The purchasing of a product need not only be thought of the end of an ideological process, but rather can be considered its start. While consumption has traditionally been thought of as a practice that creates divisions, separating the haves from the have-nots, a notion of bottom-up, consumer-created brand cultures that appropriate products to consumer groups’ own ends creates new possibilities for capitalist collectivity.

            Many critiques of unboxing videos attach themselves to a half-formed logic of the fetish, merging the term’s Freudian and Marxist meanings. Such characterizations downplay the affective attachment that consumers to commodities and oversimplify the degree to which these videos, in their online publication, might actually work to reinsert social relations into the process of consumption. Beyond any subversive potential of the format (functioning, as they do, as opportunity for consumer voice, including the voice of parody), these videos crystalize a form Blochian of hope that helps to explain the promise of capitalism, yet at the same time reveal the limits of the promises of product manufacturers . These videos, products of a digital era, also memorialize a sense of physicality that seems threatened by the virtualization of commerce.  By complicating our understanding of the unboxing video in this way, my paper will serve as an intervention that asks for a more nuanced understanding of consumer’s relationship to consumption.

Works Cited

Binkley, Sam & Littler, Jo. Introduction: Cultural studies and anti-consumerism: a critical encounter. Cultural Studies. 22.5 (2008): 519-530.

García Canclini, Néstor. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. George Yúdice. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print.