Page 157 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

Living room wars 148
the social takes effect. This heterogeneity of the present does not just refer to the
juxtaposed coexistence of a liberal plurality of distinct, mutually independent cultures
and societies (which could be said to have existed to a certain extent before the
Europeans imposed capitalism on the rest of the world). In the capitalist postmodern
world, heterogeneity is not based on foundational essences, but is a contingent
articulation of the fluid and moving play of differences in which ‘cultures’ and
‘societies’, tumbled as they are into endless interconnections (to paraphrase Clifford
Geertz 1988:147), constantly construct, reconstruct and deconstruct themselves. Any
identity of a ‘culture’, a ‘society’, and any other social entity (‘nation’, ‘ethnicity’,
‘gender’, ‘audience’, ‘the people’, and so on) is merely the conjunctural articulation of
constantly changing positionalities, a precarious positivity formed out a temporary
fixation of meaning within the capitalist world-system. Paradoxically, then, heterogeneity
arises precisely as a result of the hegemonizing, globalizing, integrating forces of the
modern capitalist order. It is for this reason that the system, this totalizing system of
global capitalism in which we are all trapped, is nevertheless a profoundly unstable one,
whose closure can never be completed.
Crucially, however, this postmodern heterogeneity is not just the consequence of the
excessive flux of the social which produces a surplus of meaning that the system is
unable to master, that is, put in order. To assert this would be tantamount to making a
romantic metaphysical statement. What is historically particular about capitalist
postmodernity’s ‘true realm of uncertainty’ has to do with the system’s ambiguous stance
towards the infinitude of the social itself: as much as it wants to control it, it also depends
on exploiting it. It is in the very nature of capitalism, particularly consumption capitalism,
to inscribe excess in its very mode of (re)production.
The dynamic of perpetual change is of course characteristic of capitalism per se, not
just consumption capitalism. But what distinguishes the latter is the way in which
perpetual cultural (de)Construction, perpetual (de)construction of meanings and identities
through for example the fashion system and planned obsolescence, has become the
linchpin of the economy. That is to say, the culture of consumerism is founded on the
idea that constant transformation of identities (through consumption) is pleasurable and
meaningful. This exploitation of the pleasure principle implies that consumption
capitalism is, as Jon Stratton has remarked, based on an excess of desire: in contrast with
earlier, production-oriented capitalism, which catered to given, and thus limited, needs
and demands, consumption capitalism relies on providing for socially produced, and
therefore in principle limitless, needs and wants (Stratton 1990:297–8). This occurs not
only at the level of consumption, where the consumer is constructed as always ‘wanting’.
In postmodern culture the poststructuralist dictum that subjects do not have fixed
identities but are always in process of being (reconstructed and (re)defined is not just a
theoretical axiom, but has become a generalized cultural principle. The historical
institutionalization of excess of desire in the culture of capitalist postmodernity (most
directly for example through the discourses of advertising and marketing) exploits the
fundamental excessiveness of the social in the creation of an escalating, and ultimately
uncontrollable, proliferation of difference and identity, or identities-in-difference. Excess
of desire opens up the cultural space for the formulation and proliferation of
unpredictable needs and wants—i.e. meanings and identities—not all of which can be
absorbed and incorporated in the postmodern order of the capitalist world-system (see,