Consuming Passions:
The Culture of American
Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture of
American Consumption
Chapter 1
Consuming Passions: The Culture of American
Consumption
Laurence Shames, The More Factor
PAIRED READINGS: UNDERSTANDING SHOPPING
Malcolm Gladwell, The Science of Shopping
Anne Norton, The Signs of Shopping
Mark Dery, Dawn of the Dead Mall
Credit Card Barbie [PHOTOGRAPH]
Thomas Hine, What’s in a Package
Joan Kron, The Semiotics of Home Decor
Andrea Chang, Teen “Haulers” Become a Fashion Force
S. Craig Watkins, Fast Entertainment and Multitasking in an Always-On World
John Verdant, The Ables vs. The Binges
Tammy Oler, Making Geek Chic
Thomas Frank, Commodify Your Dissent
Survey of Popular Culture
For what underlay our clearing of the continent
were the ancient fears and divisions that we
brought to the New World along with the primitive
precursors of the technology that would assist in
transforming the continent. Haunted by these
fears, driven by our divisions, we slashed and
hacked at the wilderness we saw so that within
three centuries of Cortes's penetration of the
mainland a world millions of years in the making
vanished into the voracious, insatiable maw of an
alien civilization. Musing on this time scale, one
begins to sense the enormity of what we brought
to our entrance here. And one begins to sense also
that it was here in America that Western man
became loosed into a strange, ungovernable
freedom so that what we now live amidst is the
culminating artifact of the civilization of the West.
--Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
When we pick up our newspaper at breakfast, we expect-we even demand--that it bring us momentous events since
the night before. We turn on our car radio as we drive to
work and expect "news" to have occurred since the
morning paper went to press. Returning in the evening, we
expect our house not only to shelter us, to keep us warm in
the winter and cool in the summer, but to relax us, to
dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting
hobbies, to be a playground, a theater, and a bar. We
expect our two week vacation to be romantic, exotic,
cheap, and effortless. We expect a faraway atmosphere if
we go to a nearby place; and we expect everything to be
relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a faraway
place. We expect new heroes every month, a new literary
masterpiece every week, a rare sensation every night. . . .
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
We expect everything and anything. We expect the
contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars
which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. . .
. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the
move and ever more neighborly . . . to revere God and to be
God.
Never have people been more the masters of their
environment. Yet never has a people been more deceived
and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much
more than the world could possibly offer. (3-4; my
emphasis)
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
To furnish a barren room is one thing.
To continue to crowd in furniture until
the foundation buckles is quite
another. To have failed to solve the
problem of producing goods would
have been to continue man in his
oldest and most grievous misfortune.
But to fail to see that we have solved
it, and to fail to proceed to the next
task, would be fully as tragic.
--John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent
Society
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Americans continually find themselves in the
position of having killed someone to avoid
sharing a meal which turns out to be too large to
eat alone.
--Philip Slater, Earthwalk
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
America is striving to win power over the sum
total of things, complete and absolute
mastery of nature in all its aspects. . . . To
occupy God's place, to repeat his deeds, to
recreate and organize a man-made cosmos
according to man-made laws of reason,
foresight and efficiency: that is America's
ultimate objective. . . . It destroys whatever is
primitive, whatever grows in disordered
profusion or evolved through patient
mutation.
--Robert Jungk, Tomorrow is Already Here
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
The commonly accepted notion that
Americans are materialists is pure
bunk. A materialist is one who loves
material, a person devoted to the
enjoyment of the physical and
immediate present. By this
definition, most Americans are
abstractionists. They hate material,
and convert it as swiftly as possible
into mountains of junk and clouds
of poisonous gas. As a people, our
ideal is to have a future, and so long
as this is true we shall never have a
present.
--Alan Watts, Does It Matter?
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
In a Cathy comic strip—Cathy Guisewite's ruthlessly perceptive daily
chronicle of modern spaciness—Cathy and her boyfriend Irving introduce us,
in a Sunday comic show-and-tell, to all the new material possessions in their
repertoire, all of which are "state of the art“ and none of which is ever used:
an "anodized aluminum multi-lens three-beam mini excavation spotlight that
live its life in the junk drawer with dead batteries"; a "high-tech, epoxyfinished, heavy-gauge
steel grid hanging unit for home repair tools that required two
carpenters to install and is now used as a scarf rack“
“safari clothes that will never be near a jungle";
"aerobic footgear that will never set foot in an aerobics class";
a "deep-sea dive watch that will never get damp";
"architectural magazines we don't read filled with pictures of furniture we
don't like";
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
"financial strategy software keyed to a checkbook that's lost somewhere
under a computer no one knows how to work";
an "art poster from an exhibit we never went to of an artist we never heard
of.“
Guisewite brilliantly labels this post Me Decade conspicuous consumption,
"abstract materialism": materialism about as "realistic" or representational as
a Jackson Pollock canvas. "We've moved past the things we want and need
and are buying those things that have nothing to do with our lives," Cathy
herself tells us in the cartoon's final frame. In the 1980s, the age of the
yuppie, we perfected the art of what Time magazine has called
"transcendental acquisition."
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Laurence Shames, The More
Factor
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
UNDERSTANDING
SHOPPING
Malcolm Gladwell, The
Science of Shopping
Anne Norton, The Signs
of Shopping
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Mark Dery, Dawn of the Dead
Mall
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
For here is the mall. . . . Every facet
of its operation, including the air
that everyone breathes, is
controlled, as if outside its walls
there were only a fatal eternity. It
could be anywhere, or nowhere; it
could even be moving about. If you
stand in the right place . . . the
vibrations of people walking and the
low hum of the mall's comfort
control machinery can offer the
illusion of movement, through the
air, or through . . . space.
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
The fantasy is explicit in the video
arcade, but out here it is still
curiously valid: a limited
cybernetic excitement, in a safe,
enclosed structure with room to
walk around in. . . . Give it a warp
drive and a five-year mission and
you've got this . . . starship.—
William Kowinski, The Malling of
America
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Thomas Hine, What’s in a
Package
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Joan Kron, The Semiotics of
Home Decor
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Andrea Chang, Teen “Haulers”
Become a Fashion Force
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
S. Craig Watkins, Fast
Entertainment and Multitasking
in an Always-On World
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
John Verdant, The Ables vs.
The Binges
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Tammy Oler, Making Geek Chic
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Thomas Frank, Commodify
Your Dissent
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Graceland
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Baby Boomer
Yuppie
Slacker
Goth
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
The whole modern age has been,
as Norbert Wiener observes in The
Human Use of Human Beings (6465), one prolonged Mad Tea Party
on a planetary scale. Since the
discovery of the New World and
the concomitant obliteration of the
limited, preRenaissance closed
universe, humankind has behaved
as if we could always "move down"
to the next available open space at
the world's table after exhausting
all the natural resources at its
previous location. "When Alice
inquired what would happen when
they came around to their original
positions again," Wiener notes,
"the March hare changed the
subject."
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
At different times in our history, different cities have been the focal
point of a radiating American spirit. In the late eighteenth century, for
example, Boston was the center of a political radicalism that ignited a
shot heard round the world a shot that could not have been fired any
other place but the suburbs of Boston. . . . In the mid-nineteenth
century, New York became the symbol of the idea of a melting-pot
America or at least a non-English one as the wretched refuse from all
over the world disembarked at Ellis Island and spread over the land
their strange languages and even stranger ways. In the early twentieth
century, Chicago, the city of big shoulders and heavy winds, came to
symbolize the industrial energy and dynamism of America. . . .
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor
of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high
cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is
a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such
proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse
increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion,
news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into
congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even
much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of
amusing ourselves to death.—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to
Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption
Survey of Popular Culture
Consuming Passions: The Culture
of American Consumption