Page 273 - Cultural Theory

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••• Nick Stevenson •••

witnessed consumer militancy in respect of Shell oil’s desire to dump old oil rigs,
Barclays bank’s support of apartheid and more recently GM foods (Vidal 1999).
Daniel Miller (1997), taking this argument further, has suggested that while poli-
tics is experienced as being hierarchical and bureaucratic, the practice of shopping
can be an empowering experience. Both Nava and Miller suggest that we see shop-
ping as a daily election whereby consumers, who wield considerable power, make
daily ethical choices in terms of the goods they purchase and the way they inhabit
public and private space. Indeed, argues Miller, a focus upon consumption, rather
than citizenship, might under this reckoning reconnect questions of welfare and
consumption? By this Miller does not mean abandoning citizenship (although its
rights focus gives it a legalistic orientation), but a rejoining of consumption and wel-
fare that sees them as equally important moral domains for the distribution of social
goods. Such a switch would recognise the moral and ethical concerns involved
within shopping, while refusing a certain masculine logic that sees it as a peripheral
activity. It matters greatly if we can afford a balanced diet, how safe the food is in the
supermarket, and whether mobile phones cause cancer.
Some of these points are well made. It is undoubtedly the case that consumption
is the place where politically marginalised groups (including gays, lesbians, young
people and women) have sought to forge an identity. Put in terms of ‘cultural’ citi-
zenship, consumption is one of the key places in the modern world where the ‘right
to be different’ is pursued. Where Bauman’s argument is perhaps at its weakest is the
recognition that this domain for many people is not experienced as either as post-
ideological or as atomised as he describes. The perspectives outlined above suggest
that while the relatively affluent have been the main beneficiaries of the expansion
of consumptive practices, such spaces and places have helped inform ‘new political
agendas’ that cannot be derived from a reformulated class politics. However, what is
noticeable, particularly in retrospect, about the ‘New Times’ arguments is that they
fail to raise substantive ethical and moral arguments in respect of equality and fair-
ness. This is a major weakness in a society that has witnessed the exaggeration of
wealth differences accompanying the spectacle of consumption. Accepting the legit-
imacy and complexity of popular pleasures, while protesting against material and
cultural exclusion, seems like a line worth holding.
The cultural patterns of the above discussions are suggestive about the connection
between citizenship and consumerism in a number of ways. Firstly, that ‘political
questions’ are very much part of contemporary commercial cultures. Commercial
and aesthetic cultures, in contemporary society, continue to simultaneously raise and
obstruct issues that can be related to the cultural nature of citizenship. Many mar-
ginalised groups have searched for an identity through a commercial culture not only
because other more ‘political’ avenues have been blocked, but because it has come to
signify, increasingly within our culture, a domain of pleasurability and identification.
This means that the politics of citizenship and questions of consumption cannot be
opposed in any straightforward way. However, it remains the case that while con-
sumption may raise ‘ethical’ questions, it only does so by being connected to more
formal citizenship criteria of rights, obligations and social exclusion. That is, we may
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