CONSUMPTION OF
EVERYDAY LIFE
OBJECTIVE

Mahasiswa dapat menunjukkan hubungan
antara antara teori konsumen dan shopping
culture. (C4)
MATERIALS
1.
What is a consumer?
2.
Theories of consumption
3.
Consumeristic culture
WHAT IS A CONSUMER?

Background
Consumption emerges as a cultural concern in the late 1950s and early 1960s in
debates about the development of ‘consumer society.’ It becomes fully visible in
cultural studies in the 1970s in work on how subcultures appropriate commodities to
produce alternative and oppositional meanings. More recently, it can be found in
studies of fan culture and in studies of shopping as popular culture.

Definition of consumption:
- The action or fact of consuming by use, waste, etc.
- Decay, wasting away or wearing out; waste
- Wasting of the body by disease; now applied specifically to pulmonary
consumption
- The destructive employment of industrial products, the amount of them consumed.
(Oxford English Dictionary)

Consumer
- Early users of the word consumer, from C16 , had the same general sense of
destruction or waste. It was from 18 Century that the idea of consumer began to
emerge in a neutral sense in the description of bourgeois political economy … the
acts of making and of using goods and services were newly defined in the
increasingly abstract pairings of producer and consumer, production and
consumption.
THEORIES OF CONSUMPTION

Theories of consumption
- Marxism
* Consumerism in Marxism is seen as the impact of the transition from feudalism
to capitalism. This transition is marked by the change of production, that is based
on need into production that is based on profit, where workers make goods in
return for wages, they don’t own the goods, and the goods are sold to the market
for profit. To get the goods, the workers have to buy them with money. So the
workers become consumers, thus the consumer society began.
* People began to recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul
in their automobile, hi-fi set, computer, make-up, jewellery, clothes, shoes, bags,
money, house, etc.
- Poststructuralism-Psychoanalysis
* The ideology of consumerism works in much the same way as the ideology of
romance. If the ideology of romance is a narrative constructed around a quest:
love is the solution to all problems. Like the search for love, consumption implies
Continued …
an incompleteness; something missing.
* The ideology of consumerism can be seen as one of a displacement strategies.
The promise which it makes is that (like love) consumption is the answer to all
our problems; consumption will make us whole again; consumption will make
us full again; consumption will make us complete again; consumption will
return us to the blissful state of the imaginary.

Theories of consumption can be focused on:
1.
2.
3.
The economic and global impact of consumer activity, positioning
consumers as the passive victims of capitalism;
The ways in which acts of consumption are a creative and active way in
which individuals articulate their own identity;
The ways in which economic and global structures of production are
inextricably linked with individual acts of consumer choice.
CONSUMERISTIC CULTURE

Subcultural consumption
- Youth culture communicates through acts of consumption.
- The process of subcultural consumption is discriminating, called bricolage, in
which subcultures appropriate for their own purposes and meanings the
commodities commercially provided. Products are combined or transformed in
ways not intended by their producers; commodities are rearticulated to produce
oppositional meanings.
E.g. Teddy Boys wearing Saville Row Edwardian jackets and safety pins. In this
way (and through patterns of behavior, ways of speaking, taste in music, etc),
youth subcultures engage in symbolic forms of resistance to both dominant and
parent cultures.
Continued …

Fan Culture
- Fans are the most visible part of the audience.
- Traditionally, fans have been treated in one of two ways – ridiculed or
pathologized – the victim of mass media.
- Fandom is a visible (pathological) symptom of the supposed cultural, moral, and
social decline which has inevitably followed the transition from rural and
agricultural to industrial and urban society. … Fandom represents a desperate
attempt to compensate for the shortcomings of modern life.
- A positive image of fandom is as a poacher because fans move between the
strategy of cultural imposition (production) and the tactics of cultural use
(consumption). They are always in the act of appropriating themselves.
- The notion of poaching is a rejection of the traditional model of behavior, in
which the purpose is passive reception of authorial/textual intent.
- Fandom is not about consumption, it is also about the production of texts –
songs, poems, novels, fanzines, videos, etc. – made in response to the professional
media texts of fandom.
E.g. People who are fans of a certain musicians, wrote songs for them, etc.
Continued …
- Three key features of fandom is
1. the ways fans draw texts close to the realm of their lived experience;
2. the role played by rereading within fan culture;
3. the process by which program information gets inserted into ongoing social
interactions.
- Ten ways in which fans rewrite their favorite television shows
1. Recontextualization;
2. Expanding the series timeline;
3. Refocalization;
4. Moral realignment;
5. Genre shifting;
6. Crossovers;
7. Character dislocation;
8. Personalization;
9. Emotional intensification;
10. Eroticization.
Continued …

Shopping culture
- Shopping centres are used for … meeting places by young people, pensioners, the
unemployed and the homeless .
- Consumption is more than an economic activity. It is also about dreams and
desires, identities and communication.
- Shopping is not a passive ritual of subjugation to the power of consumerism. The
truth of consumption is made and remade in the actual act of shopping.
- Young people are not alone in engaging in similar forms of shopping. They are
frequently joined by tourists, escapees from bad weather, window shoppers and
others who avails themselves of the facilities without necessarily contributing to
the profit made by the shopping center.