AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING

Abstract

Cultural studies is in a difficult position if it wants to find itself on the side of democracy against neo-liberalism in this age of ecological crisis. A great deal of the deconstructive, anti-essentialist, post-humanist, post-modernist thinking of recent decades has undermined the grounds upon which earlier generations understood the commodification of the world to be distasteful. In the absence of any normative conception of humanity, community, or nature, why not succumb to the deterritorializing thrill which the marketization of everything promises? The liberal defence of consumer culture which characterized a whole genre of work in cultural studies is clearly unable to answer this question, predicated as it is on a now wholly anachronistic critique of mid-century discourses of austerity, restraint, and patriarchal normativity.

This might seem to leave us with a choice of either reverting to the prescriptive Marxism of pre-1960s cultural theory or accepting the job offered to us by the neo-liberal university: of training smart, reflexive, ironic hedonists to work and consume efficiently in the knowledge economy. However, there is another way. An attentive and nuanced reading of post-structuralist and post-Marxist philosophy, as well as older resources for cultural theory, can provide the basis for a democratic and anti-essentialist critique of consumerism as a normative paradigm which erases difference and silences political discussion by the violent imposition of particular modes of relationality (in particular that of the customer/seller relationship) on every social scene. It is from the perspective of a politics which tries to keep open the possibility of other, multiple modes of relationality, rather than one which wishes to impose a singular utopian blueprint on the future, that cultural studies can play a useful role in critiquing the hegemony of consumerism and competitive individualism without succumbing to the temptations of too much socialist nostalgia.

Keywords:

• anti-consumerism
• commodification
• cultural studies
• ecology
• privatization
• democracy

Notes

1. This was the phrase used in the explanatory paragraph included in all books in the Phronesis series edited by Laclau and Mouffe (and published by Verso) in the first few years of its publication in the early 1990s.