How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole
Benjamin Barber’s Consumed: Consumerism has an aggressive, even totalizing face. It effectively colonizes the plural sectors that define culture’s diversity, replacing them with a homogenized environment of marketing, advertising, and shopping-faux feelings and simulated sentiments-as well as common pop-cultural commodities that constrict cultural pluralism. Nonetheless, anthropologists have argued for some time that colonized cultures often react to being colonized by shaping the forces that affect to shape them in ways that alter the cultural aggressor and modify its supposedly “dominant” cultural face. This countercolonizing logic may apply within a culture that is trying to brand and homogenize taste. The process has been called creolization, or sometimes hybridization, and is evident in America’s own cultural interaction with the postwar world beyond its shores.
While the consumer market may then be inclined to branding and homogenization, its interaction with the domains it brands and dominates can also produce new forms of diversity. Seemingly diminished local cultures may actually reappear inside the dominant culture in ways that pluralize it. The rebranded culture re-rebrands the original brand in turn. In investing itself in every sector, commerce finds itself at least partially decommercialized by the sectors it invades. Religion as televangelism is commodified, but commodification is compelled to serve quasi-spiritual ends and its radical commitment to materialist secularism is compromised. Hollywood had dumbed down the customers it entertains, but the customers have caused Hollywood to smarten up by supporting efforts at independent filmmaking that transgress the very conventions Hollywood helped contrive (see “Reel Change” in chapter 8).
2007.12.25 at 1:40 am
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