The desire for freedom and the consumption of politics

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 28, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 395-417

  Orlie, Melissa A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

capitalism; commodity consumption; conduct; democracy; ethics; freedom; Michel Foucault; politics; sexuality

Indexed keywords

EID: 84997967443     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453702028004524     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990).
2. I am not claiming that political movement and legislation about sexuality - for instance, anti-pervert political movement and legislation in the form of anti-gay rights initiatives — are not or will not remain politically significant. But there do appear to be countervailing tendencies especially suited to the current regime of political capitalism — such as niche marketing to gays and lesbians — that in retrospect may assume the appearance of a ‘missing link’ in which we will discover ‘how we have been free’; on the latter theme, see Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), p. 222.
3. See Melissa A. Orlie, Living Ethically, Acting Politically (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
4. In the following reading of our current situation, I in no way want to deny or minimize the systemic dimensions of our political condition. Given my aim of highlighting our social agency through practices of individual conduct, however, I endeavor to use language that might facilitate our imagination of this agency rather than more systemic tropes which tend to obscure the active and passive role we play in the disposition of our bodies, skills and resources. For an early analysis of the new political culture of consumption which gives greater attention to these systemic aspects see, for example, Paul Smith, ‘Visiting Banana Republic’, in Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism, ed. Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 128–48.
5. My own sense of the intrinsic relationship between radical democracy and a substantive critique of capitalist civilization is deeply influenced by the teaching and writings of Sheldon S. Wolin. I also take the phrase ‘political capitalism’ from his writings. I explore the relationship between these themes and his writings in ‘Political Capitalism and the Consumption of Democracy’, in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 138–160.
6. See S. S. Wolin, Editorial, democracy (Fall, 1983): 6.
7. See S. S. Wolin, Editorial, democracy (Summer, 1983): 4 and
8. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 201–2.
9. See Wolin, Presence of the Past, p. 22.
10. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, Vol. One, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 5. There is much talk these days, in the most popular media and beyond, about commodity consumption and its politics. One hoped-for effect of my analysis is that it might aid efforts to distinguish between forms of consumption that accord with capitalist realism against radical democratic principles and those forms that pursue radical democratic principles even as they are forced to accommodate capitalist orders of power.
11. For example, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 9–18; and
12. Wolin, Presence of the Past, pp. 192–207.
13. For example, advocates of ideology critique castigate cultural studies and poststructuralism for ignoring capital while they neglect ordinary people's exercise of power and the variations in their conduct that can make a political difference; for example, see Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Investigations (New York: Guilford, 1991).
14. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Vol. I, Introduction, trans. John Moore (London and New York: Verso, 1992), pp. 58, 42.
15. As I drafted this essay in 1999, the voracious appetitive powers of the American consumer were being granted responsibility and praise for preventing a world-wide recession that otherwise would likely have followed the collapse of ‘Asian markets’. (Theoretical recognition of the importance of expenditure to general economy receives an important articulation in the writings of George Bataille.) For a powerful statement of the moral stakes of each individual act of consumption, see Peter Singer, ‘The Singer Solution to World Poverty’, New York Times Magazine (5 September, 1999), Section 6: 60–3. As I revise this essay in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001, Americans are explicitly being admonished by their leaders to express their patriotism by consuming more so as to bolster a flagging economy. Consumer and citizen increasingly seem to be taken as synonymous.
16. See Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
17. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987; and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 36–57.
18. For a helpful and historically informed overview of perspectives on consumption, see Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity(Cambridge and Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 1997); for a now classic example of the cultural optimist's perspective, see
19. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989) and for the cultural pessimist, see
20. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and a useful critical review of cultural studies work on commodity consumption, by
21. Marianne Conroy, ‘Discount Dreams: Factory Outlet Malls, Consumption, and the Performance of Middle Class Identity’, Social Text 54, 16(1) (Spring, 1998) pp. 63–83.
22. Mike Davis, ‘The Political Economy of Late Imperial America’, New Left Review 143 (January-February 1984): 27–8, 37.
23. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 23, 4, 23–4.
24. See Chris Rojek, Capitalism and Leisure Theory(London: Methuen, 1985);
25. Anne Norton, Republic of Signs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 48.
26. Norton, Republic of Signs, pp. 49–51.
27. For a fair-minded critique of Foucault along these lines, see Brown, States of Injury, pp. 12–14, 24, 62–4.
28. See Orlie, Living Ethically, pp. 35–87, 126–98.
29. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, pp. 26–8, 26, 40.
30. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 44–5. According to my reading of Marx, it becomes increasingly difficult to speak of use-value per se once the commodity form has become dominant. One implication of this interpretation is that in social orders where the commodity form is dominant even the most instrumental and thrift-driven practices of consumption have importantly symbolic and imaginative aspects. Consequently, although I am in agreement with many aspects of Marianne Conroy's recent critique of predominant assumptions about consumption and consumers in cultural studies, I think it is misleading to suggest that commodity consumption that is oriented by price is preoccupied with use-value rather than exchange-value. Likewise, recognizing thrifty consumption as a form of labor does not require us to reduce it to a solely pragmatic activity driven by the instrumentally conceived needs of social position alone (for example, see Conroy, ‘Discount Dreams’). Even when price is the ultimate determinant of where and exactly what many of us buy, price does not determine how we imagine ourselves through commodities. Moreover, it would be a mistake to follow economists and to regard thrift as a merely calculative value without aesthetic, ethical and political valences.
31. For instance, both the grass-roots movement and the growing industry around simplified living in the USA have obvious economic class and monetary components, but it is hardly illuminating to reduce the various articulations of this phenomenon to a simple reflection of diminished or increased economic capacities alone; for examples of the simplified living phenomenon, see a recent issue of Hope magazine No. 17 (December, 1998), pp. 19–35, ‘Enough is Enough!’, on resisting and reinventing consumer culture.
32. The advertising campaigns of Nike in the 1980s and 1990s are among those that broke new ground in this regard and others have followed suit. For analyses of Nike that inform my discussion here, see Cheryl L. Cole and Amy Hribar, ‘Celebrity Feminism: Nike Style: Post-Fordism, Transcendence, and Consumer Power’, Sociology of Sport Journal 12 (1995): 347–69;
33. Cheryl L. Cole, ‘American Jordan: P.L.A.Y., Consensus, and Punishment’, Sociology of Sport Journal 13 (1996): 366–97.
34. On this theme, see Robert Meister, ‘Beyond Satisfaction: Desire, Consumption, and the Future of Socialism’, Topoi 15 (1996): 189–210.
35. For a classic instance, see Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), which is nonetheless still highly valuable. Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of distinction is highly useful for understanding significant aspects of commodity consumption but in my view missteps when it reduces our practice of distinction-making to a simple reflection of our habitus; see
36. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
37. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 7.
38. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 11.
39. The following discussion draws upon Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 20, 11.
40. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, p. 27, 56.
41. See Cole, ‘Jordan’;
42. Wolin, Presence of the Past, pp. 156–63.
43. See Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990).
44. See Cole and Hribar, ‘Celebrity Feminism’.
45. See McCracken, Culture and Consumption, p. 117;
46. Campbell, Romantic Ethic and Spirit of Modern Consumerism, p. 90.
47. See McCracken, Culture and Consumption;
48. Campbell, Romantic Ethic and Spirit of Modern Consumerism, p. 90.
49. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, pp. 27–8, 78–93.
50. See Bourdieu, Distinction.
51. See Wolin, Editorial, democracy (Summer, 1983): 6;
52. Wolin, Presence of the Past, p. 154.
53. I pursue this theme elsewhere, including in ‘The Art of Despising Oneself: the Slavish Roots of Nietzsche's Asceticism’, International Studies in Philosophy XXXII(3) (2000): 71–82.