Consumer Culture

Conceptual Overview

Two main approaches to the study of consumer culture may be discerned. First, there are the critiques of consumer culture, which have largely drawn from Marxist discussions of capitalist society and the Frankfurt School–inspired critiques of mass culture. Among the important scholars who have generated and inspired this criticism are Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer. For many of the critics, the consumer culture is essentially synonymous with “capitalist culture” or “mass culture,” and it represents alienation and the destruction of a stable traditional social order by industrial and capitalist relations that debase “real culture” and destroy community. In these accounts, consumer culture is sometimes viewed as being produced and sustained particularly by mass media, which lulls people into the pleasures of consumption and consumer ideology. Consumer culture, in these critiques, is often associated with inauthenticity, materialism, planetary exploitation, and sometimes also with “Americanization” (or “Disneyification”). Consumers are seen as having a fairly passive role; they are sometimes even viewed as powerless, manipulated victims of the capitalist culture. As such, they are depicted as satisfying “false needs,” buying things they do not need and in the process destroying the planet.

Second, from the late 1980s and early 1990s onward, there has been a growing interest in cultural studies of consumer culture. In this stream of research, the focus of interest has been on the cultural dynamics and complexity of consumption and marketplace behavior, and it has taken significantly less “moralistic” forms. From this perspective, consumption is viewed as productive and profoundly cultural in the sense that it invokes, mediates, and reproduces the meanings and systems of representation through which people make sense of their everyday life and achieve social order. While acknowledging and focusing on the effects of different mechanisms and relations of power in consumer society, cultural studies of consumption tend to accord consumers a more active and creative role. The focus of interest may be, for example, on the ways in which consumers resist, re-accent, and rearticulate the meanings that marketers have encoded to brands and products, as well as on the practices through which consumers transform, customize, and reconfigure the products that they buy.

The work of Michel de Certeau on consumption and the practice of everyday life in 1984, for example, radically questions the basic arguments and assumptions of the Frankfurt School about the victimization of consumers by the culture industry or the capitalist order. Through the tactics of everyday life, consumers continuously disrupt the logic of late capitalism even while confirming it.

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