In class last week, we pondered the question of whether mass consumption culture might offer agency to those who consume it. Davis argued that there is nothing redeeming about it, that mass consumption removes all politics from the consumer and that which is consumed. Mercer argued that self-consciousness in the practice of consumption (in this case of the Afro or other politicized styles) might leave room for some political agency in its consumption. The search for women’s agencies through practices of consumption was a particularly popular strategy in academic circles in the 90s, if I remember correctly, where making space for agency within contexts, practices, or systems thought to be occlusive of these agencies was seen as a way of prescribing empowerment to marginalized groups within this system. Though I recognize its merits (both as a means of legitimizing women’s pleasures/agency, as well as a systematic and recognizable mode of scholarly writing), I am somewhat ambivalent as to the productiveness and the ethics of such an approach particularly when applied indiscriminately to all practices of consumption. The writers we read this week seem to take us away from that direction, choosing to look at the systems which create taste and mass consumption patterns, rather than seeking ways and means to find agency within those systems. Although the question of agency may seem tangential to this week’s readings, they all seem to implicitly respond to that mode of writing by choosing not engage with it at all, or to do so in liminal ways.
Perhaps I should start with Rabinowitz who is most critical of these attempts to elicit “agency” out of just any possible context. She claims that doing so becomes detrimental to a critical study of the material patriarchal and capitalist frameworks which determine these contexts and shape the feminine pleasures which some writers insist on seeing as empowering.
Rabinowitz
Rabinowitz looks at how female desire and pleasure have been produced through consumption and use particularly in the period from the 1980’s to the 1990’s. She performs a study of how the television soap opera produces lavish wedding scenes to keep viewers invested in watching and is also in constant intertextual conversation with other consumer media forms such as the women’s magazine to retain their visibility and relevance. Toward the end of the article, Rabinowitz makes some gesture toward acknowledging how subversive readings or the deconstructivism of commercialism and commodity culture might offer a way of reading ruptures or slippages which may provide agency to women in spite of the totalizing effects of consumer capitalism. However, she restrains this tendency toward a euphoric reading of discourses of empowerment in the most feeble of circumstances, quickly writing that “these examples that argue against the totalizing effects of commodity culture are only partial or incomplete strategies for addressing social and economic inequalities in capitalism.”
I agree with Rabinowitz. To read agency into contexts such as these, where questions of pleasure and empowerment are so deeply implicated within questions of how those pleasures are created by various corporations are not only impossibly optimistic but also counter-productive. The fervour to validate and legitimize women’s pleasures in whatever form or through whatever text neglects a critique of the material production of these pleasures which one may find to be deeply rooted in patriarchal or corporatist systems. I am not saying women’s pleasures and agencies through these pleasures ought not to be theorized or acknowledged as a space for empowerment. But I am suggesting that certain contexts require careful consideration when adopting such methodologies when writing. I think my sentiments are best expressed in the words of Rabinowitz herself – “In our recent historical haste to rationalize our scholarly investment in the fictional soap opera text, and in our desire to mediate the soap opera genre for feminist purposes, we too often neglect how pleasure is subjected to and regulated through the interests of commodity consumerism” (283).
White
White, in her study of shop-at-home-TV, has a rather ambivalent attitude toward the female TV shopper. She does not excessively try to save the TV-shopper from derogatory readings of her as victims of mass consumer culture, repeatedly duped by the television. However, she does try to reason for an understanding of the shopper and how the mechanics of the program create a space for therapy, conversation and community between hosts and shoppers, and furnishes middle-class dreams of upward mobility. She doesn’t quite go so far as to argue for the female TV-shopper’s agency, only stating at the end of the paper that the shop-at-home TV validates women’s positions at the centre of communal and familial relations. I appreciate her well-reasoned and temperate approach to the subject although her ambivalence left me wondering about her politics with regard to the mass media systems of taste cultivation and consumption practices she was describing.
Perhaps part of this ambivalence can be traced to how she sees shop-at-home-TV as a cinema of attractions, rather than an insidious taste-making entity which configures its consumers as female, home-bound, and undiscerning. Indeed, the products displayed on shop-at-home-TV channels might be likened to a cinema of attractions only in the most cursory manner in that they function more as spectacles rather than narratives. Beyond this perfunctory reading of the cinema of attractions however, the early attractions cinema and shop-at-home-TV are not quite alike. Part of the spectacle of a cinema of attractions was in seeing how the medium displayed itself and what the technology of cinema could do. This is not at all a factor in the shop-at-home-TV program. Rather, I thought that the pleasure of watching products one could buy on TV was immersed in a participatory mode of spectatorship – beyond a superficial admiration of the image or a product, one wondered what one should and could buy. Indeed, the spectacle which White refers to which is the beauty or functionality of a product (as revealed in the close-ups) is a different sort of spectacle than that which Gunning articulates. The former is about a product, the latter is about a visual image. My point is that we need to dissociate the product we see on shop-at-home-TV from pure spectacle – it is “live”, attainable and therefore speaks to different viewing pleasures and politics. In all, I thought that White could have gone further in nuancing her study of the shop-at-home-TV medium in light of this fact. I wonder if it is also worthwhile trying to read any “agency” or space at all into the female TV shopper.
Berry (Be Our Brand)
In class last week we wondered if the internet created a more democratic space where shoppers might review beauty products purchased for the benefit of other shoppers and therefore create a consumer-led system of knowledge production. Though I myself scour google for reviews on almost anything from yoga mats to travel recommendations, I am nagged by the feeling of how this rhetoric of consumer led “agency” has itself been manipulated by the corporations selling the products. What is presented is the illusion of a consumer-led knowledge system, of a democratic marketplace. For instance, I gave a pair of jeans I bought off smartbargains.com a lousy review for being an untrue fit. Out of curiosity, I monitored the site to see if my review showed up but it never did. Which is why, whenever it comes to questions of agency or diversity with regard to internet shopping I am highly skeptical.
I share this skepticism with Berry who began by critiquing how corporations profited by marketing difference – by both selling the exotic as well as segmenting the market into personality “types” and also by profiting from say, creating different make-up foundations or shades of stockings for different ethnic groups. Tempted as one may be to read empowering narratives of choice, diversity, and self-expression into the plethora of choices made available through internet shopping, Berry avoids such a reading, choosing instead to center her critique on the calculated production of this “diversity” though capitalism.
I suppose its refreshing for me to see almost a return of sort to critiquing the systems of pleasure production which we started with in the readings for our first few weeks. Although seemingly less invested in rallying readers to subvert them, they are still invested in questions of the mechanics of “macro” systems and how this creates seemingly benign modes of pleasure which ought to be critiqued rather than invested with “agency”.
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