Page 56 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CONSUMPTION

discursive explanations, resources and maps of meaning available to members of
cultures. Even fundamental psychological notions such as attitudes, emotions and
the inner mind can be approached through the examination of shared language.
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Links Anti-essentialism, body, discourse, emotion, identity, language, representation, sex

Consumption To consume suggests to use or to ingest. Thus the process of cultural
consumption in capitalist societies concerns the use to which the commodities that
circulate in the market place are put. In particular, consumption in the context of
cultural studies is centred on the generation of meanings in the process of
consumption.
The critique of the consuming practices of contemporary Western cultures is
tightly linked to the analysis of both capitalism and commodification. That is, it has
commonly been argued (for example by Marx in the 1850s, Adorno in the 1940s
and Althusser in the 1970s), that commodities carry embedded ideological
meanings that serve the interests of capitalism and which are taken on board by
consumers through the very act of consumption. However, during the 1980s and
1990s this view of consumption within capitalist social formations has been the
subject of criticism on two fronts. First, it has been argued that commodities do not
of necessity carry ideological meanings supportive of the social order but may
themselves be the basis for transgression and resistance. Second, it has been
suggested on the basis of empirical research that consumers are active creators of
meaning. That is, consumers do not simply take on those meanings that critics have
identified as being ‘within’ commodities but are capable of generating their own
meanings through the interplay of commodities and consumers’ cultural
competencies.
Consumption-oriented cultural studies argues that while the production of
popular music, film, television and fashion is in the hands of transnational
capitalist corporations, meanings are produced, altered and managed at the level of
consumption. For example, Fiske argues that popular culture is constituted by the
meanings that people construct rather than those identifiable within texts. While
he is clear that capitalist corporations very largely produce popular culture, he is
more concerned with the tactics by which these forces are evaded or are resisted.
Fiske argues that the culture industries have to work hard to get us to consume mass
culture and that consumers are not passive dopes but discriminating active
producers of meaning.
The work of McRobbie illustrates the transformation in thinking that has taken
place within cultural studies. In her early work, she is suspicious of the consumer
culture from which ‘girl-culture’ stems. For example, the teen-oriented magazine
Jackie is held to operate through the codes of romance, domesticity, beauty and
fashion, thereby defining the world of the personal sphere as the prime domain of
girls. In her account of working class girls, McRobbie explores the way in which this
culture of femininity is used by them to create their own cultural space while at the
same time securing them for boyfriends, marriage, the family and children. Later,
she critiques her own reliance on the analysis of documents and suggests that girls