Happiness

What could be more important to contemporary consumer culture than the search for happiness? It seems obvious that attempting to accumulate consumer items that carry with them significant symbolic power is driven forward by the desire to “find happiness,” to discover success, contentment, satisfaction. However, the critical literature on consumer culture that has grown rapidly in recent years appears to indicate that happiness is not the necessary by-product of consumerism and that dissatisfaction and waste are often the end point of the consumer cycle.

While consumerism is often seen as highly exploitative, alienating, environmentally destructive, and culturally corrosive, the myth of consumer happiness remains a popular notion. Some of the liberal accounts of consumerism that developed during the 1960s and 1970s highlighted innovative subcultural creativity and ironic symbol inversion, and often pitched unusual fashion and leisure pursuits as proto-political activities that sought to destabilize capitalism and its oppressive state. For these commentators, the subject could never be fully incorporated into [Page 700]the discourse of capitalism. Human subjectivity was fleet-of-foot, creative, and rebellious, and could rearticulate the meaning of consumer symbolism so that bland, mass-produced items would come to reflect something defined by the community itself. During the 1980s, this kind of speculation of the nature of the subject became one of the dominant modes of accounting for the formation of subcultures within the broader framework of consumer culture. It is probably not a coincidence that this approach found favor at exactly the same time as global capitalism was radically reconfiguring its business plan and leftist politics was forced to capitulate to neoliberalism's apparent ability to improve living conditions for the majority of the people.

Such liberal accounts, in which progressive politics is boiled down to the ability of the subject to resist the prescribed meanings of global capitalism, continue to linger, but as the twenty-first century begins to take shape, it has become almost impossible to ignore the very real problems of global consumerism. We might assume that the myth of consumer happiness is an ideological strategy that is used to propel consumers back to the market, to forget their previous consumer dissatisfactions, and to hand themselves over to a spectacular world of potential indulgence, blocking out any reservations they might have about the geopolitical downsides to the global consumer market. Consumers are told that they work hard, that they deserve it. What is life without a little bit of indulgence now and then?

That enduring sense of contentment, that ephemeral “thing” that can make us genuinely happy, has been something that people throughout history have strived for. Philosophers have argued persuasively that the essence of life is struggle and hardship and that we are condemned to always want what is beyond our reach. But this debate takes on a decidedly different hue when this logic is applied to contemporary consumer culture. Twentieth-century politics was profoundly utopian and promised to actually deliver human happiness and contentment to its populations. We have now progressed beyond this point. Utopian political projects are now almost universally seen as unworldly, hopelessly optimistic, and deeply misguided. In the early years of the twenty-first century, many believed that we had hit on the perfect political and economic formula, a pragmatic but progressive formula that had transcended ideology and promised to enable people to embrace freedom and actually experience a sizable portion of enduring happiness. That formula was an open liberal democracy accompanied by global free market capitalism. Almost all political parties in the West treated this model as a fait accompli.

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