Novel consumption: narratives of contemporary
ideology and practice
Kaela Jubas
The University of British Columbia, Canada
Introduction
From relative obscurity in the social sciences, consumption has become a topic
of widespread interest. An ideology of consumerism has accompanied both
capitalism and democracy, and has been reinterpreted as capitalist structures
and democratic systems have developed. Today, consumerism and
neoliberalism work together to bolster the ‘common sense’ (Gramsci, 1971) of
many contemporary capitalist democracies: the value of choice, offered to
consumers in the ‘free market’ and to citizens at the ballot box; the preference for
privatization and deregulation, portrayed as more efficient and less bureaucratic
than publicly delivered or regulated goods and services; and the ability of
individuals to free themselves from the constraints of social categories by
(re)constructing their identities through consumption.
This paper juxtaposes a contemporary mainstream discourse of consumerism
with two counter-discourses. It picks up on conference themes of formal and
informal learning in communities and cultures in their global contexts, as well as
methodological possibilities in researching lifelong learning. I focus here on
narratives found in three contemporary English-language novels. Their storylines
and characters illustrate that individuals encounter and construct multiple
discourses of consumerism and practices of shopping and consumption. I further
relate this analysis to the contention of some adult educators that informal,
unanticipated learning occurs in the course of everyday life, and that fiction is
one possible entrée to critical explorations of social issues.
Theoretical perspective and analytical concepts
Informed by a critical cultural studies perspective which acknowledges the
politics of culture, this inquiry draws on Antonio Gramsci’s (1971) ideas of
‘hegemony’, ‘ideology’, ‘common sense’ and the role of educational role of
intellectuals in everyday civil society. I use consumerism as an example of
hegemonic ideology, and the claim that the ‘free market’ amplifies the democratic
aims of choice and freedom as an example of associated common sense.
Popular novelists, in a Gramscian sense, are intellectuals whose works either
reinforce or challenge hegemonic ideology and can encourage informal learning.
Building on Gramsci’s ideas, Raymond Williams (2005) agrees that hegemony
always accommodates a certain degree of disagreement. What he adds is a
characterization of two types of non-hegemonic responses:
There is a simple theoretical distinction between alternative and
oppositional, that is to say between someone who simply finds a different
way to live and wishes to be left alone with it, and someone who finds a
different way to live and wants to change the society in its light. (41-42)
Ideological discourses and practices can shift from alternative to oppositional,
depending on the threat that they pose to the hegemonic order. No hegemony
can accommodate all interests and positions, and oppositional positions emerge
and push back against hegemony. As Ben Agger (1992) explains:
Cultural studies emphasizes that culture is conflict over
meaning….Hegemonic culture attempts to define culture from the top down,
in terms of the system’s own needs for legitimation, productivism and
consumerism. Counter-hegemonic culture resists these definitions and
instead proposes alternative formulations of the good life....Cultural studies
proponents…add that these conflicts are powerful initiators as well as
symptoms of social change, not to be dispelled or suppressed. (10)
These thoughts are complemented by the critical adult education work of Griff
Foley (2001). Foley’s concept of ‘incidental learning’ which ‘has to be
uncovered…(because it is) informal, incidental and embedded in other activities’
(77) acknowledges that unplanned, unrecognized, often political learning can
occur in the course of daily processes and activities. Foley focuses his research
on the learning that emerges in the course of collective action; I stretch his
thoughts further, asking how unorganized and sometimes solitary activities –
such as reading fiction – can also spur radical learning.
Some other adult educators have turned their attention to the importance of
narrative for the story-teller. They discuss contemporary, personal story-telling as
a form of experiential learning, which Linden West refers to as 'a cultural
psychology of learning:
This at a moment when experiential learning has, I believe, become a
psychological and existential imperative as inherited meanings and
traditional lifestyles have either fractured or are open to perpetual
challenge. Learning, in such contexts, involves the constant reworking of
experience to create some meaning, intelligibility, authenticity, continuity,
cohesion and agency across a life. (West, 1998: 236)
In this paper, I ask a related, but different, question which guides my
methodology: How can engaged reading (or hearing) others' stories encourage
critical learning?
Methodology
Juxtaposing characters and storylines of three novels, I use intertextual analysis
in this inquiry. As Christine Jarvis (1998) explains, ‘Theories of intertextuality
insist that texts are not self-contained systems. They incorporate other texts –
those the writer has read and those the reader has read’. Following Jarvis
further, I suggest that a critical, emotional reading of fiction – getting to know and
empathize with different characters, their stories and their points of view – can
build awareness of social issues and encourage reflexivity and critical thought in
readers’ daily lives. Unlike Jarvis, who sets her study in her adult education
class, I limit my exploration here to my response to fiction read on my own, and
focus primarily on thematic analysis rather than a broader structural, linguistic
and textual analysis common in literary studies.
Analysis
It is easy to see messages about consumption in advertising, but there are other
cultural forms of messages – hegemonic and non-hegemonic – circulating. From
documentary films to media stories to literary and visual art, critical analyses of
consumerist culture are responding to a hegemonic consumerist discourse. This
paper presents narratives which suggest three discursive possibilities. In addition
to a mainstream consumerist ideology, exemplified by Sophie Kinsella’s novel
Confessions of a Shopaholic, I explore what Williams (1980) might consider an
alternative ideology and an oppositional ideology. The former is articulated in a
narrative of cynicism, found in Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X, and the
latter in a narrative of resistance, exemplified by Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation.
Narrative 1: Embrace of a Hegemonic Ideology
As I’m about to leave, a pile of letters comes through the letterbox for me.
Several of them look like bills, and one is yet another letter from Endwich
Bank. But I have a clever solution to all these nasty letters: I just put them in
my dressing table drawer and close it. It’s the only way to stop getting
stressed out about it. And it really does work. As I thrust the drawer shut
and head out of the front door, I’ve already forgotten all about them.
(Sophie Kinsella, 2001, Confessions of a Shopaholic, p. 193)
Confessions of a Shopaholic (Kinsella, 2001) introduces Becky Bloomwood, a
young, college-educated, white woman working in London for a financial
publication. The novel traces her attempts to cope with a job that bores her, her
daily shopping expeditions and her continual evasion of creditors. The story turns
when Becky is drawn into the financial problems of her parents’ neighbours who,
along with other investors, have been misled by an investment company and lost
a substantial amount of their savings. To earn extra money, she writes a
newspaper article about their predicament and, enjoying the resulting publicity,
appears on a television show. She brings the neighbours’ case to the public eye
and becomes, in the eye of her beloved Luke Brandon, the handsome,
successful public relations consultant, a person of intelligence and integrity – as
well as feminine beauty and style.
Becky is successful in spite of and, in part, because of her consumption.
Shopping enables her to invent a mainstream, ideal persona and, ultimately,
realize an ideal life. Becky might be intellectually vacuous and willing to take
advantage of people, but she has style and can laugh at what are, after all, only
typical feminine foibles. She plays into the Western hegemonic stereotype of
‘woman’ as an uncontrollable shopper who, in the end, means no harm and
brings cheer, grace and sympathy to balance ‘man’s’ obsession with work. Her
story reveals several aspects of hegemony: It presents consumerism as a path to
social identity and status; it reflects idealized notions of gender, race, class and
nationality; and its connection of consumption, gender, race, nationality and class
reiterates hegemonic cultural values.
Narrative 2: The Birth of Cynicism
We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there’s a
great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and
we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our
colons so tied in knots that we never thought we’d have a bowel
movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the
odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the
endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had
compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take
downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was
enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much
better.
(Douglas Coupland, 1991, Generation X, p. 11)
In this novel, readers meet narrator Andy, the other main characters, Dag and
Claire, and an array of their friends, work acquaintances and family members.
They have come from different places in the United States and Canada, ‘but
where you’re from feels sort of irrelevant these days (“Since everyone has the
same stores in their mini-malls,” according to my younger brother, Tyler)’,
explains Andy (Coupland, 1991: 4). Having left behind middle class families and
jobs, each of them now has a ‘McJob (“Low pay, low prestige, low benefits, low
future”)’ (Coupland, 1991: 5), and lives in the same housing development in Palm
Springs, California.
As the title of this novel suggests, Andy, Dag and Claire are stand-ins for middleAmericans (and, by extension, Canadians) of their generation (and, by
implication, their white race). Recognizing the false promise of post-War
consumerism and the environmental and social problems that it has created, they
have chosen life on the cultural periphery. Still, they do little more than belittle
those remaining in or aspiring to the cultural centre, poking fun at the people
around them and the lives they used to lead. Their observations are witty and
clever, and often insightful; however, as Andy’s sarcasm suggests, things are not
much, much better for them now. Ultimately, they are left with little more than
postmodern cynicism about social and political structures and cultural institutions,
and are unable to generate alternatives to the status quo.
Narrative 3: Committing to Resistance
Lloyd roused himself. ‘Momoko, they want to give away all our seeds!’
She stood then. Scooting herself to the edge of the chair, she got to her feet
and shuffled over to Lloyd’s bed. She held on to the metal safety bars and
looked down at his unhappy face.
‘It is good way.’
‘But they’re ours. We have to keep them safe!’
She shook her head. ‘No. Keeping is not safe. Keeping is danger. Only safe
way is letting go. Giving everything away. Freely. Freely.’
(Ruth Ozeki, 2003, All Over Creation, p. 358)
This novel differs from the other two novels in two important ways. First, its lead
characters are more difficult to identify singly. They include Yumi, a biracial
Japanese-American woman living in Hawaii with her three children; her aged
parents, Lloyd and Momoko, who live on the Idaho potato farm where she was
raised; their neighbours Will and Cass; Elliot who, as a teacher, seduced Yumi
and, as a public relations consultant, now represents a corporation producing
bio-engineered potato seeds; and a cast of anti-consumerist neo-hippies called
'Seeds of Resistance' who focus their protest on corporate agriculture. Shortly
after Yumi and her children come to Idaho to care for her parents, the Seeds of
Resistance arrive. Together, these characters point to the realization that life is
complicated and lives are interwoven in surprising ways.
Secondly, the novel features a group of characters who resist globalization. Nonviolent resistance of all sorts is portrayed as a rational and just response to an
ideology and practices which are threatening human health and wider ecology.
Towards the end of the novel, as Lloyd lies dying in hospital, the characters
discuss what to do with the catalogue sales business built from seeds that
Momoko has saved for decades. In the excerpt from that conversation cited
above, Momoko speaks with great clarity. Her understanding of the importance of
her seed collection and her willingness to share them openly provides a 'real-life'
illustration of the more abstract political-economic analysis of the Seeds of
Resistance. It is Momoko and her interpretation of personal experience which
persuade her conservative husband that there is no future in continued
privatization and hoarding, and can help readers see the impacts of and potential
responses to the corporate globalization project.
Eventually, even the novel’s central mainstream characters abandon an
unquestioning embrace of consumerism and corporate globalization. Some of
them are uncertain, but most retain some sense hope. All of them have learned
something about the complications of shopping and consumption, and about how
those practices are linked to relations between community members and
between social groups. Lines are drawn to connect producer and consumer, the
West and the East, and hegemonic discourse and alternative responses to it.
Readers follow the characters’ experiences and learning, and can themselves
deepen their learning about the variety of ideological narratives and responses
present in society, the ties between ideology and social structures such as
capitalism, and the complexities of production and consumption.
Discussion
Marginalized by critical scholars from Marx onwards, consumption is a recent
interest in adult education research. It is central in marketing and home
economics, but critical analysis is rarely found in those fields (Pollay, 1986).
Much of the early critical writing on consumption in sociology, history and cultural
studies is theoretical or abstract (see Baudrillard, 1998; Bocock, 1993). Although
current work in these fields presents case studies, from water consumption in
nineteenth-century London (Trentmann & Taylor, 2006) to the development of a
mass consumer society in the United States (Cohen, 2003) to consumer-related
strategies in the post-War Germanys (Pence, 2006), new empirical research
often focuses on children and youth rather than adults. In a rare critical study of
adults’ shopping, sociologist Sharon Zukin (2005) explores how social
characteristics enter into shopping options and decisions, but stops short of
exploring how shopping and consumption can contribute to politically charged
learning.
Reflecting technological and cultural trends, many recent critical discussions of
learning and consumption focus on media. In mainstream media, notably the
burgeoning ‘reality’ shows which ‘promote changing lifestyles, becoming different
is represented as a common experience. This is the paradox of style and fashion:
seeking to be different through consumption means buying into a (sub)cultural
identity shared with others’ (Miller et al, 2005). On occasion, mainstream media
can have unexpected impacts, as they tap into social movements and
disaffection among their audience members (Wright, 2006). Embodying the
cynicism of Coupland’s (1991) vision of generation X, satire has worked its way
into the mainstream and offers critiques of hegemonic ideologies and their
common sense.
The role of literary texts as well as shopping and consumption in promoting
ideologies remains largely overlooked in adult education. In the field of literary
studies, Rachel Bowlby’s (2001) exploration of nineteenth- and twentieth-century
trends in, concerns over and fiction about shopping indicates one way that social
issues can be linked to literary fiction. An important contribution of my inquiry is
that it strengthens ties between adult education and other fields in which fiction is
being explored as a source of both formal and informal learning about shopping,
consumption and social relations.
Many adult educators refute the idea that education is always purposeful and
always occurs in formal settings. A heightened interest in experiential learning is
consistent with the postmodern understanding that:
the recognition of the significance of language, discourse, signs and sociocultural locatedness in any knowledge claim leads to a questioning of the
universality of knowledge, its transcendental foundations and its canonical
forms. (Edwards & Usher, 1998: 90)
At the same time, informal learning is often discussed in terms of work, whether
paid or volunteer. The emerging hegemonic discourse of lifelong learning, with its
tendency to focus on learning as skill-building and practical, is consistent with the
cultural pervasiveness of a neoliberal ideology which turns adult education into a
consumable product, a response to ‘market/technologically driven changes’
(Baptiste, 1999: 96).
Jennifer Sandlin (2005) explores formal consumer education as well as ‘culture
jamming’ and other examples of informal anti-consumerist education, and
reviews multiple responses to consumerism and conceptualizations of adult
learning. In outlining ‘three different reactions to consumer culture crafted by
different forms of consumer education’ (Sandlin, 2005: 174), she notes that some
embrace a hegemonic ideology of consumerism, as does Kinsella's (2001) novel.
Others question consumerism on an individual basis and encourage
conscientious shopping. This response resembles the individualism of
Coupland's (1991) novel, but avoids its cynical conclusion. Still others politicize
consumption and organize collective anti-consumerist responses, like some of
the characters in Ozeki's (2003) novel. This response most likely affords a
possibility for incidental learning (Foley, 2001) about complex local and global
issues and politics.
I continue to broaden conceptualizations of adult and consumer education,
seeking examples of how incidental learning (Foley, 2001) might occur in daily
activities. Shopping, consumption and consumerism are present in fiction just as
they are in ‘real life’. As shoppers shop and readers read (about shopping),
critical learning can occur. Still, shopping is seen as mundane and reading is
seen as solitary, in contrast to the view of critical learning as serious and
collective. As Stephen Brookfield (1998) notes, experience does not always lead
to reflection and reflection is not always critical; however, the more broadly
individuals read and engage with others, the more likely they are to move
'beyond affirmation to alternative critical reinterpretations of experience'
(Brookfield, 1998: 130), texts and discourses, whether in the formal setting of the
classroom or the informal setting of the living room or the grocery store.
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This paper has been approved for inclusion in the proceedings through an
anonymous peer refereeing process.