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The Politics of Consumption

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The Politics of Consumption ephemera: theory & politics in organization THE POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION What is ephemera: theory & politics in organization? ephemera is an independent journal, founded in 2001 and currently supported by the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. ephemera provides its content free of charge, and charges its readers only with free thought. theory ephemera encourages contributions that explicitly engage with theoretical and conceptual understandings of organizational issues, organizational processes and organizational life. This does not preclude empirical studies or commentaries on contemporary issues, but such contributions consider how theory and practice intersect in these cases. We especially publish articles that apply or develop theoretical insights that are not part of the established canon of organization studies. ephemera counters the current hegemonization of social theory and operates at the borders of organization studies in that it continuously seeks to question what organization studies is and what it can become. politics ephemera encourages the amplification of the political problematics of organization within academic debate, which today is being actively de-politized by the current organization of thought within and without universities and business schools. We welcome papers that engage the political in a variety of ways as required by the organizational forms being interrogated in a given instance. organization Articles published in ephemera are concerned with theoretical and political aspects of organizations, organization and organizing. We refrain from imposing a narrow definition of organization, which would unnecessarily halt debate. Eager to avoid the charge of ‘anything goes’ however, we do invite our authors to state how their contributions connect to questions of organization and organizing, both theoretical and practical. ephemera 13(2), May 2013 The politics of consumption Alan Bradshaw, Norah Campbell and Stephen Dunne in association with: Published by the ephemera editorial collective: Anna-Maria Murtola, Armin Beverungen, Bent M. Sørensen, Bernadette Loacker, Birke Otto, Casper Hoedemaekers, Emma Jeanes, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, Joanna Figiel, Kate Kenny, Lena Olaison, Martyna Sliwa, Matthew Allen, Michael Pedersen, Nick Butler, Sara Louise Muhr, Stephen Dunne, Stevphen Shukaitis, Sverre Spoelstra. First published for free online at www.ephemeraweb.org and in print in association with MayFlyBooks (www.mayflybooks.org) in 2013. Cover image: Luibov Popova Untitled Textile Design on William Morris wallpaper for Historical Materialism 2010 by David Mabb. ISSN (Online) 1473-2866 ISSN (Print) 2052-1499 ISBN (Print) 9781906948177 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. Table of Contents Editorial The politics of consumption 203-216 Alan Bradshaw, Norah Campbell and Stephen Dunne Articles Consumption matters 217-248 Ben Fine The dialectics of progress: Irish ‘belatedness’ and the politics of prosperity 249-267 Kate Soper Alienated consumption, the commodification of taste and disabling professionalism 269-292 Peter Armstrong Towards a consumerist critique of capitalism: A socialist defence of consumer culture 293-315 Matthias Zick Varul A liquid politics? Conceptualising the politics of fair trade consumption and consumer citizenship 317-338 Eleftheria J. Lekakis From politicisation to redemption through consumption: The environmental crisis and the generation of guilt in the responsible consumer as constructed by the business media 339-366 Isleide Fontenelle Debates on consumer publics The potential of consumer publics 367-391 Adam Arvidsson Utopias of ethical economy: A response to Adam Arvidsson 393-405 Detlev Zwick Thinking beyond neo-liberalism: A response to Detlev Zwick 407-412 Adam Arvidsson The myth of metaphysical enclosure: A second response to Adam Arvidsson 413-419 Detlev Zwick Notes on aesthetics, politics and consumption On things and comrades 421-436 Olga Kravets Can the object be a comrade? 437-444 Stevphen Shukaitis Commodity as comrade: Luibov Popova – Untitled textile design on William Morris wallpaper for Historical Materialism 445-448 David Mabb Re-appropriating Che’s image: From the revolution to the market and back again 449-451 Antigoni Memou In praise of anti-capitalist consumption: How the V for Vendetta mask blows up Hollywood marketing 453-457 Ruud Kaulingfreks and Femke Kaulingfreks Commodity fights in Post-2008 Athens: Zapatistas coffee, Kropotkinian drinks and Fascist rice 459-468 Andreas Chatzidakis Book reviews Irish utopian realism? 469-473 Gavin Brown and Angus Cameron Consumption and its contradictions: Dialogues on the causes of buying 475-482 Georgios Patsiaouras the author(s) 2013 ISSN 1473-2866 (Online) ISSN 2052-1499 (Print) www.ephemerajournal.org volume 13(2): 203-216 The politics of consumption∗ Alan Bradshaw, Norah Campbell and Stephen Dunne If Politics, following Aristotle (1984), is a matter of analysing, comparing and ultimately creating practices of human association, we will do well to regard consumption practices as inherently political. Such a regard requires us to take a comparative-prospective disposition towards the roles and practices that underpin the production and distribution of subsistence and luxury. It also requires us to treat the functional mechanics of what political economists used to call ‘the mode of production’, that is, the set of practices through which human societies produce their means of survival and distinction, thereby reproducing themselves, as characteristically political. This special issue brings such a series of politically-oriented accounts of contemporary consumption practices together. Its contributors attempt to see practices of consumption for what they actually are, beyond the motifs of concealment and construction which we briefly discuss by way of introduction below, for the sake of debating what these practices might eventually become. Consumption, we argue, is political: to seek to analyse as if it were otherwise is to dogmatically seek refuge in a world of fantasy. ∗ We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Benefactions Scheme, Trinity College Dublin, which helped to fund the conference, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, for providing its setting, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya, for filming the proceedings, and the conference participants and audience, for their collegiate devotion and enthusiasm throughout. We would also like to thank Armin Beverungen, Nick Butler, Cormac Deane, Rashné Limki, Bernadette Loacker, Anna- Maria Murtola, Lena Olaison, Birke Otto and Stevphen Shukaitis for their help with the many and varied tasks associated within bringing this issue together. The ephemera collective would like to mark its particular indebtedness to Norah Campbell for her nigh on heroic efforts in coordinating a uniquely memorable and thoroughly enjoyable event. She was, in the spirit of the theme itself, the productive condition of possibility for everything that has been and will be consumed. editorial | 203 ephemera: theory & politics in organization 13(2): 203-216 This is not to say that we should disregard fantasy in attempting to account for the politics of consumption, however. The most enduring account of the natural state of consumption, as it were, comes to us in the form of a work of fiction – Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1994). Through Robinson’s memoirs, countless readers have vicariously gained experience of the Hobbesian predicament of absolute liberty, of the responsibility for social production in the absence of a social contract – where almost nothing is yet in place and where almost everything remains up for grabs. Defoe’s novel invites its readers into the engineering room of the social machine, an imagined but imaginative site wherein social conventions momentarily give way to the creation of the social and where current political practices temporarily make way for the production of new political principles. Little wonder then, as Karl Marx put it, that ‘political economists are fond of Robinson Crusoe stories’ (1976: 169). Defoe provides the abstract lie which allows political economists to bring the concrete truth of consumption into ever sharper relief. Marx is by no means an exception to his own rule. He too discusses Robinson’s predicament, most memorably in the context of revealing what he famously called the secret of the commodity fetish (1976: 163-177). By analysing the capitalist mode of production through the example of ‘its elementary form’ (1976: 125), the commodity which bears the stamps of usability and exchangeability, and by comparing the capitalist mode of production to a series of alternative modes of production (ancient, feudal, cooperative and, in Robinson Crusoe’s case, fictional), Marx sought to reveal the politics of consumption which routinely lie concealed behind the analytical categories deployed by his political economic contemporaries. ‘Bourgeois economics’, as Marx’s critique of political economy would have it, was historically and prospectively myopic (but otherwise correct) in that it produced: forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically-determined mode of social production,
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