Page 24 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

Consumption in Context . 9

the consumer world, similarly viewing this world as dehumanizing
(1981, 1986, 1988). For Baudrillard, contemporary consumer society
has produced an endless whirlpool of communicating signs and simu-
lacra, ephemera masquerading as reality, where people are sucked in as
mere bystanders to the show. Certainly, when confronting a blank-faced
toddler (or teenager, adult, or elderly person) who is glued to the tele-
vision, Baudrillard hardly seems all wrong. There is no doubt that the
realms of advertising, television, and marketing have transformed the
roles of symbols and signs in contemporary cultures. As Wolfgang Haug
(1986) asserts, sign value is use value.
Concerned primarily with the political and economic processes shap-
ing consumer society, these theories as to how and why actual people
engage in the consumer world are based primarily on guesswork rather
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than fieldwork. In portraying the dynamic as largely being from the top
down, with consumers being relatively passive recipients of products
and services concocted by self-interested providers, this view tends to
underestimate the range of ways in which people can and do interact
with the world of consumption. In response to this perspective a number
of works do not condemn mass culture and consumption as hopelessly
uniform but instead view it as capable of being refashioned or resisted at
the individual or popular level. Early investigations into resistance in the
consumer sphere, such as those by John Fiske (1989) and Dick Hebdige
(1979), focused on consumers who were often seen to be able to turn the
juggernaut of mass culture to their own purposes. Seen as an antidote to
the pessimistic view represented by the Frankfurt school, these works
have also been criticized for romanticizing the scope and effectiveness of
such resistance (Abu-Lughod 1990; Miller, Jackson, Thrift, Holbrook,
and Rowlands 1998; Sholle 1990).
With consumption so firmly embedded in daily life, it becomes in-
creasingly difficult to argue that it consists only of falsities and illusions
that, if stripped away, would leave people able to pay attention to their
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"true" needs. As Timothy Burke writes in his historical examination of
the role of toiletries—hair grease, skin creams, deodorant—in modern
Zimbabwe, a need is no less real for having been historically generated
(1996, 216). Constrained by class, economy, racism, and gender, con-
sumption is deeply embedded in social relations that people certainly do
attempt to reshape, but they do not do so freely. As James Carrier and
Josiah Heyman (1997) note, contemporary consumption is well within
the realm of political economy. It is also a cultural arena in which issues
of power, hegemony, and ideology confront each other and a medium