reading summary8
BEYOND THE BOYCOTT
Anti-consumerism, cultural change
and the limits of reflexivity
This article focuses on the possibilities and limitations of reflexivity in contemporary anti-consumerism activist discourse. Opening by noting that much contemporary anti-consumerist discourse has a fraught relationship with what was once termed ‘identity politics’, in that it often attempts to reject or negotiate with an idea of identity politics that is figured as existing in the recent past, the article suggests that one way of both understanding this preoccupation, and of broadening out the terms of discussion, is to consider the various ways in which these discourses can be understood as reflexive. The paper therefore attempts to identify how various anti-consumerist actions and texts, including Naomi Klein’s bestseller No Logo, Anita Roddick’s manual Take it Personally, the work of ‘culture jammers’ Adbusters, and Reverend Billy’s ‘Church of Stop Shopping’ position themselves reflexively in relation to social and cultural change. Its discourse analysis considers what these projects understand as ‘activism’, the ‘type’ or characteristics of (anti-) consumers being imagined, and the implied consequences for consumption and production. In doing so, it draws from a range of theories about or relating to ‘reflexivity’, in particular the work of Scott Lash, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour. Following Haraway and Butler in particular, the article argues for an emphasis on the relationality of reflexivity. The more ‘relational reflexivity’ demonstrated by anti-consumerist activity, the more likely it becomes to be open to making egalitarian alliances, the article argues, and this factor needs to be included alongside affective ‘mattering maps’ and ‘chains of equivalence’ when considering the problems and potential of anti-consumerist discourse. In doing so, the article attempts to shift the study of anti-consumerist activism further away from simple celebrations of its ‘resistance’ and towards opening up a cultural economy of anti-consumerism, one which is also critically engaged with furthering its politics.
Keywords activism; anti-consumerism; consumer culture; cultural economy; reflexivity; relational reflexivity
Jo Littler
Cultural Studies Vol. 19, No. 2 March 2005, pp. 227 �/252 ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online – 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380500077771
Then we had an idea. Maybe if we banged together the heads of all these activists and reconfigured the fragmented forces of identity politics into a new, empowered movement, maybe we could start winning again.
(Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn 1999 p. xii)
There is an economy in the interior of a person. We need to find a new kind of vivid privacy.
(Bill Talen, better known as ‘Reverend Billy’ from The Church of Stop Shopping, 2003 p.83)
Introduction
Contemporary anti-neoliberal activist politics has frequently deployed a rhetoric of anti-consumerism, in which socially exploitative and environmen- tally damaging power relations are highlighted by focusing campaigns on everyday consumer products. Such tactics have not been confined to ‘grassroots’ politics: the success of Naomi Klein’s bestselling book No Logo , for instance, brought the global flows linking consumer brands with sweatshop labour into a new level of popular visibility, as well as being itself enabled by the broader context of the movements for global justice which the book in part documents (Klein 2000, Shepard & Hayduk 2002, Notes from Nowhere 2003, Wainwright 2003, Mertes 2004). Yet, whilst the study of consumer culture has notoriously expanded in a multitude of interdisciplinary directions over the past two decades (Miller 1987, Featherstone 1991, Slater 1997, Nava et al . 1997, Lee 2000, Schor and Holt 2000) academic studies of, or indeed engagements with, anti-consumerist activism have been sparse. Most academic work has tended to focus on histories of consumer activism (Hilton 2003), and the little study of contemporary anti-consumerism there is available is often more celebratory than critically interrogative. As celebrating the ‘resistance’ of anti-consumerism will not get us very far, a more fruitful route, I suggest, is to move beyond the limited binaries of ‘dominance’ and ‘resistance’ by extending models of cultural politics understood in terms of articulation and transformative practice, as developed by writers such as Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall and Laclau and Mouffe in particular (Laclau & Mouffe 1985, Grossberg 1997, Hall 1997). In other words, I am arguing that we could use some of the tools offered to us by cultural studies to understand and engage with contemporary anti-consumerist activism.
I start from the premise, informed by these perspectives, that a crucial question regarding any political position is its relative capacity for reflexivity. In this paper, I pursue this point in one particular direction by thinking through the various ways in which anti-consumerism activist discourses can be
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understood as reflexive, by weighing up how they position themselves as contributing to social and cultural change, and by considering the possibilities and limitations of their various forms of reflexivity. To do this I focus the discussion around four examples in particular, all of which relate, in their different ways, to various strands of anti-consumerism: first, Klein’s No Logo ; second, Body Shop-founder Anita Roddick’s manual Globalisation: Taking it Personally ; third, the work of the Canadian-based alternative media organiza- tion Adbusters (best known for defacing and reworking adverts for corporations such as Nike and Microsoft) and their global network of ‘culture jammers’; and finally, the work of Bill Talen and ‘The Church of Stop Shopping’, particularly as described in Talen’s book What Should I do if Reverend Billy is in my Store? , which reflects upon how and why the activist-performers enter branches of Starbucks and Disney and ‘preach’ against the corporations’ homogenizing tactics. The article attempts to identify what these anti- consumerist discourses understand as ‘activism’ and their own role in relation to it; the ‘type’ or characteristics of the (anti-) consumers they imagine; what narratives are being produced about how change happens; and what the implied consequences are for consumption and production. To do so, I draw from a range of theories about or relating to ‘reflexivity’, in particular the work of Scott Lash, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and Bruno Latour. These theories, whilst informing the account throughout, come to be foregrounded particularly in the last half of the paper, in which they are used to try to draw out the reflexive horizons of different forms of anti-consumerism. I am interested in the possibility that two different types of reflexivity might be identified at work in anti-consumerist discourse, as well as in cultural theory: first, a relatively narcissistic form of reflexivity that acts to shore up a romantic anti-consumerist activist self, and second, an understanding of reflexivity as a more relational and dispersed process.
As a researcher interested primarily in using and developing ways of understanding the cultural politics of consumer culture, as a subject who feels interpellated by many of these actions, as someone who has been imbricated in various ways with certain strands of anti-consumerist activism, and as many different types of consumer, my aim is at one and the same time to critique these discourses and think about how they might be developed. I am working from the premise that, as well as being co-operatively organized and sensitively conducted, the progressive, democratic aspects of boycotts need to be linked to imagined, or existing, alternatives to neoliberalism, without which they are in danger of becoming only a politics of resistance and rebellion (see Hilton 2003, Gabriel & Lang 1997). As such, this paper therefore starts from a neo- Gramscian, post-Marxist premise in which wide-ranging coalitions, connected through commonalities, chains of equivalence and articulation are more politically fruitful than isolated avant-garde gestures. Focusing on some of the possibilities and limitations of the reflexivity of current anti-consumerist
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arguments, on how they figure change happening, and how they envisage their own roles, I am suggesting, can help us think about how these alternative systems of consumption are imagined as being brought into being. This, in turn, it is hoped, might enable us to consider, in a more complex and nuanced way, some of the problems and possibilities of moving further ‘beyond the boycott’.
1 I will start this process by discussing Naomi Klein’s No Logo : not
because it is representative, but because of its important and fascinating status as an international bestseller.
Interior economies
A key feature of many contemporary anti-consumerist texts and actions is a rejection of, negotiation with or attempt to create a new form of ‘identity politics’. The political, Anita Roddick states, for example, spinning around that old motif of second-wave feminism, is personal: and so ‘the future of the world depends on us all taking it personally’. But to Naomi Klein, focusing on the personal, on identity politics, has primarily been part of the problem:
Many of the battles we fought were over issues of ‘representation’ �/ a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language. From campus feminists arguing over ‘representation’ of women on the reading lists to gays wanting better ‘representation’ on television, to rap stars bragging about ‘representing’ the ghettos, to the question that ends in a riot in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing �/ ‘why are there no brothers on the wall?’ �/ ours was a politics of mirrors and metaphors.
(Klein 2000, p. 107)
Her generation of university students, she argues in No Logo , were ‘media narcissists’ who focused on identity politics and on changing representations of gender, ‘race’ and sexuality, but left issues of social inequality untouched. ‘We were too busy analysing the pictures being projected on the wall’, she writes, ‘to notice that the wall itself had been sold’ (Klein 2000, p. 124). The demands of these kinds of identity politics, in Klein’s narrative, were partially met but mainly co-opted by corporate marketers, who absorbed the demands for equality of representation into their pursuit of private capital to be shared by the few.
This tale of the co-option of left identity politics is a familiar one. As well as being told by Klein in No Logo and historicized by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool , it is frequently dropped into conversation by academics such as Paul Gilroy, who has talked of how corporations have ‘filleted’ progressive ideas (Frank 1997, Smith 2000, p. 21).
2 As Sheila Rowbotham put it in
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her cultural autobiography of the 1960s, ‘ironically, openings created by social movements were to present market opportunities’, leaving ‘our hopes . . . appropriated, our aspirations twisted’ (Rowbotham 2000, pp. xiv�/xv). Recently the trope of co-option has been contested by Sam Binkley, who highlights the role of 1970s countercultural texts as contributions to thicker, more complex versions of late capitalism and the shift to post- Fordism, and in doing so enables us to conceptualize such phenomena as involving more complex transmutations and articulations than the image of a simplistic ‘takeover ‘ can at times allow (Binkley 2003).
No Logo ’s response to the perceived co-option of left identity politics is in part, as we see above, to argue that identity politics was not substantial or concerned with economic justice enough in the first place and as such should be dismissed. Yet, I would argue, this brings us to a contradiction, for it is precisely No Logo ’s ability to make connections between identity politics and social inequality, precisely its act of linking these personal anecdotes and comments on media representation to examples of the extremities of global labour injustice which has created much of its cultural resonance and power. Take, for example, the beginning of the book, where Klein describes the ‘ghost of a garment district’ in Toronto where she lives in order to set the global outsourcing scene. Here, whilst ‘old Portuguese men still push racks of dresses and coats down the sidewalk’,
[t]he real action . . . is down the block amid the stacks of edible jewelry at Sugar Mountain, the retro candy mecca, open at 2am to service the late- night ironic cravings of the club kids. And a store downstairs continues to do a modest trade in bald naked mannequins, though more often than not it’s rented out as the surreal set for a film school project or the tragically hip backdrop of a television interview.
(Klein 2000, p. xiii)
Rather than simply take Klein to task for invoking an essentialized ‘real’, we might learn from observing something of the pragmatics of its function. Here the ‘real’ of ‘the real action’ is not only what is perceived as quantitatively important, but as most qualitatively and experientially significant. In other words, what is being posited as being to some extent most initially socially pressing and culturally engaging (most ‘real ’), is the Generation X and Y Northern/Western youth from which Klein writes �/ and to a large extent, to which she writes. However, at the same time the narrative can demonstrate a reflexive awareness that it is addressing and privileging this particular constituency. For instance, as Klein’s authorial persona shifts from downtown Toronto to a factory on the outskirts of Jakarta, where she interviews Indonesian factory workers (described as global ‘roommates of sorts’, connected through products and brands), she ruefully acknowledges how
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being the Western foreigner, I wanted to know what brand of garments they produced at the Kaho factory �/ if I was to bring their story home, I would have to have my journalistic hook.
(Klein 2000, p. xv)
The book is presented as an exercise in defetishization, in connection-tracing, in linking the products of the contemporary life Klein shares with her assumed audience back to the stages of their production, and there is a degree of reflexivity about to whom, how and why the story is being told. But we can also see how the success of No Logo ’s critique of brands is dependent on Klein’s acute eye for the vagaries of Western, middle-class, Generation X and Y consumer culture. It speaks primarily to those in such groups with similar broadly sketched cultures of taste and habitus (those who have bought Nike clothes, those who can remember designer label culture, those who have ever been interpellated by ‘youth’ media) and such capacious lifestyle groupings have an extensive reach. Judith Williamson, wondering why Klein was focusing on the Nikes and the Tommy Hilfigers rather than Intel and major banks, ‘[g]radually . . . grasped that No Logo is, at heart, a sort of Bildungsroman �/ the story of young North America’s disillusion with capitalism, and its outrage at discovering the iniquities which fuel its own lifestyle’ (Williamson 2002, p. 211). Many of No Logo ’s chapters open with Klein’s anecdotes about her own past and present experience. She recalls, for example, the classroom tyrant who went around checking designer t-shirt labels were not fake; recounts selling brands in the clothes shop Esprit; and describes how she and her brother begged her wholemeal parents for fast food (Klein 2000, p. 27, pp. 143�/145). In this way, it functions to make connections between the structures of feeling inhabited by her readership and the context of global socio-economic inequality and exploitation.
To understand more fully why this is important we might borrow a suggestive phrase from Lawrence Grossberg (adapted from a phrase of Rebecca Goldstein’s, and merged with ideas of Deleuze and Guattari) of mattering maps .
3 These ‘define where and how one can and does invest, and where and
how one is empowered, made into an agent’ (Grossberg 1992, p. 82, p. 398, Grossberg 1997, p. 368). In other words, ‘mattering maps’ are a way of considering how we not only have cognitive connections with cultural formations, but affective investments in them, investments of emotion, and feeling (feelings which are often prepersonal and are not necessarily libidinal). No Logo works to sketch a ‘mattering map’ for citizen-consumers of Generation X and Y who can recognize their own experience. The book’s mis-en-scene features snapshots of Klein’s past and present that range across a variety of emotional states including shame, desire, embarrassment and pride. Alongside its investigative journalism into new protest cultures and the material origins of trainers, alongside its political exhortations, then, it speaks
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of and to emotional investments recurrent for a wide North American/ European young constituency. This gives the text an affective pull that many other works analysing commodity fetishism do not always have.
As such, No Logo demonstrates the importance of taking into account the complexities of consumer identity, affect and desire when discussing alternative systems of consumption. This is particularly marked in the context of anti-consumerist discourse, which has, historically, often been characterized by its inability to acknowledge consumer desire in anything other than reductive terms (Belk 2003, Galtz 2004).
4 Equally, however, it also gestures
towards a gamut of potential problems with the role of identity politics in popular anti-consumerist and global justice texts. For instance, might the focus on the interpellated individual consumer who is having their lifestyle connected to wider sites and frameworks of exploitation lead to an individualized consumer politics? Who exactly can have ‘identity’ in these discourses? Who is allowed to say ‘I’, and who is included in the ‘we’? And how do such specific mattering maps map on to imagining wider social changes in systems and networks of consumption and production?
To pick apart some of these issues we might start with the last question. Anti-consumerist activism in No Logo is positioned as contributing to cultural change in both explicit and implicit fashion. Firstly, through the anti-capitalist activism which the second half of the book is devoted to documenting. At times, this can be presented in almost vanguardist mode. Descriptions of the protests and social movements taking place from Seattle onwards can be depicted as the leaders of an anti-consumer revolution whose expansion and victory is almost inevitable (see Ritzer 2002). Jonathan Dollimore has used the phrase ‘wishful theory’ to describe theory that forces itself to find what it wishes to see (Dollimore 2001, pp. 37�/45), and occasionally the glorification of the protests might be thought of as a kind of variant on this (what we might call ‘wishful journalism’), which can at times push beyond the boundaries of a usefully promotional performative-becoming.
Secondly, activism works implicitly , through the function of the book itself. The text’s implication is that readers have to find their own way to activism. Yet, for those outside activist circles, or uninvolved in the kind of educational spheres where such activism is examined, the act of reading No Logo is itself probably one of the most significant investments in ‘the movement-of- movements’ that many people will make. This brings us to one of the most important, overlooked and problematic points about No Logo : the great issue �/ unspoken of in the text and Klein’s following book, Fences and Windows �/ of the role for books like No Logo in putting such debates on the agenda and turning them into ideas that will seem to be popular and feasible. In short, the issues of mainstreaming, coalition building and creating broad-based counter- hegemonies. In effect, to discuss this is to discuss the role of the commodity of the book itself as a form of activism . It is to focus on the role of the book as praxis, or
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on what Gerard Genette would term its epitext, the discourse which is generated around a book which works to give it meaning (Genette 1997). Whilst No Logo has taken a fair amount of flak for being published by a subsidiary imprint of News Corporation (Flamingo is owned by Harper Collins, which is owned by News Corporation) the argument for why this mode of publication is in itself is a useful politics is that, by using these tools of the transnational corporations, it has a discursive reach, and a popularizing role, that would be denied to it if it had published with a small independent publisher. No Logo ’s marked and widespread success may well, ironically, have already had just as much if not more impact than the protests it documents. Yet, this factor is one with a strange status in the book’s account of how change happens. It is simultaneously acted out and erased.
This disjuncture directly relates to another: the fetishization of the brand as cause and root of the ills of contemporary capitalism in No Logo rather than but one component of ‘the problem’ of a globalized late capitalist system. Clearly, using the multinational brand as a way of critiquing neoliberalism has enormous strengths and is a useful trope around which to generate a broad range of affective alliances. Yet one of its problems is that, as Michael Hardt has pointed out, ‘it still risks focusing too much on corporations and leading to a politics that is merely anti-corporate’ (Hardt 2002, pp. 221�/2). It can mean, for example, only attacking large corporations whilst ignoring government policies that foster their inequalities. Klein begins to address some of the ramifications of the limitations of brand-based politics in the penultimate chapter in No Logo , ‘Beyond the Brand’. Here, for example, she points out that when one logo is campaigned against, even when being used tactically to illustrate broader issues, ‘other companies are unquestionably let off the hook’. She also notes that ‘anticorporate activism walks a precarious line between self-satisfied consumer rights and engaged political action’, and argues that the ‘challenges of a global labor market are too vast to be defined �/ or limited �/ by our interests as consumers’ (Klein 2000, p. 428). Such gestures towards ‘moving beyond’ brand-based politics continue into her next book, Fences and Windows , which ends by stating that symbols such as brands ‘were never the real targets; they were the levers, the handles. The symbols were only ever windows. It’s time to move through them’ (Klein 2002, p. 246).
The fetishization of brands as responsible for contemporary capitalism also leaves the fact that No Logo itself is clearly a logo only too painfully exposed to critique. In many ways, this fetishization of branding also has parallels to how advertising was ‘scapegoated’ as, almost by itself, responsible for capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s, the critique of which position in turn became the staple fare of academic studies of consumer culture in the 1990s (see Nava et al . 1997). One task therefore seems to be to consider how it is possible to use branding as a way into such debates without fetishizing it; to find languages to distinguish between its various modes, between the discourses to which ‘the
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brand’ in question �/ whether Nike Air, or No Logo �/ is articulated; for, as Liz Moor has pointed out, ‘branding’ can function as an empty signifier, or a screen on which to project various interests (Moor 2004). In the terms in which I am particularly interested here �/ of thinking about No Logo ’s reflexivity as an activist text �/ what this means is that there is a mismatch between its popular activist role and the explicit politics foregrounded in the book. There is a slippage between how ‘branding’ signifies neo-liberal branding, the populist promotion of the book itself and its non-neo-liberal alternatives. In short, the role of popular anti-neoliberalism as itself a type of promotional discourse is simultaneously acted out in praxis and denied at the level of discussion .
No Logo therefore stages a rejection of identity politics whilst performing a reconciliation and reworking of it. It emphasizes the role of activist enclaves and vanguards in broader political change, but its own success and implicit function, through its very accessibility and through offering a widely identifiable mattering map, renders it more of a populist strategy for generating counter-hegemonic discourse. It castigates branding as the key cause of neoliberalism, yet itself demonstrates �/ through its own strategy as a populist text �/ a more sophisticated understanding of the political uses of promotion in socio-political discursive change. There is a disjunction, then, between a praxis that is very sharply attuned to the role of discourse in social and cultural change, and an explicit, foregrounded narrative that does not discuss this, and chooses to focus on relatively small enclaves of avant-garde activism. We might regard this as an example of performative rhetoric or of a text working through its own contradictions and strategies. However, at another level, it also undeniably indicates a lack of reflexivity about the role of the book as praxis and �/ despite how the function of the book itself contradicts this �/ a strain of romanticism about the perceived purity of ‘activism’.
Taking it (all?) personally
What a particular action or text is perceived as contributing to a broader context of cultural change is, then, one question that can be asked. Another question is whether some anti-consumerist calls-to-arms might actually recommend more individualized solutions than the modes of consumption they critique. A potential threat of anti-consumerist identity politics is that it might degenerate into the quasi-pathology of consumer heroism or individua- lized forms of consumer activism, rather than emphasizing the relationships and connections between consumers and producers (and consumers and consumers).
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One example is Anita Roddick’s book Take it Personally: How Globalisation affects you and powerful ways to challenge it . This is an ‘action guide for conscious consumers’ featuring lists of resources, alongside the writings of global justice campaigners, NGO workers and journalists. The text predominantly inter- pellates the reader as a ‘rational choice’ consumer who, once equipped with enough information, will be able to challenge globalization from a personal perspective (Roddick 2001, pp. 42�/3). The personalized identity politics of this anti-consumerist text engenders an over-investment in individual agency, in which a series of mainly middle-class individuals are awarded the task of remoulding consumption. All the sections �/ which include topics such as ‘activism’, ‘people’ and ‘environment’ �/ feature personalized introductions by Roddick. These include narratives of her own growth as an agent-of-change, from hanging around in her mother’s café (framed as the prototype for the Body Shop) to her rise as a philanthrophic CEO bearing touristic witness to the effects of globalization.
I’ve held mutated babies genetically handicapped by toxic waste dumped in local streams. I’ve spied on illegal loggers in Sarawak. I’ve seen babies living near Mexican tobacco fields that were born without genitalia �/ and if anything made me take it personally, that did.
(Roddick 2001, p. 7)
Whilst Roddick’s pronouncements do consider the relationships between producers and consumers in the North and South, there are important limitations to its ‘identity politics’. In this example, for instance, the persistent focus on ‘otherness’ (and the innocent sanctity of childhood) is clearly problematic. It indicates little of the complexities of Northern consumer subjectivities that rely on these abuses for their lifestyle. The personal anecdotes are unproblematically self-congratulatory; compared to Klein there is little sense of reflexivity about either her role or the emotional investments that matter to her. Because of this, Roddick’s narrative of the corporate success story of a CEO who still identifies with ‘the people’ can easily slip into a rhetoric of patronage rather than egalitarian connection. Its self-aggrandise- ment enlarges the role of the individual, pushing it closer to the grandiose individualism of celebrity, rather than dissolving it into singularities of shared experience (Deleuze 1995, pp. 6�/7). Klein, in contrast, as we have seen, registers awareness of the dangers of slipping into a politics which degenerates ‘into glorified ethical shopping guides: how-to’s on saving the world through boycotts and personal lifestyle choices . . . the challenges of a global labor market are too vast to be defined �/ or limited �/ by our interests as consumers’ (Klein 2000, p. 428). In Take it Personally , Roddick’s strain of personal-growth terror-tourism, combined with the consumer-exoticism that is the Body Shop’s stock-in-trade (Ware 1992, pp. 243�/8, Kaplan 1999, pp.
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139�/56), can at times lend the title of the book an unintentionally ironic flavour.
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There are, however, also similarities with No Logo ’s more extensive forms of reflexivity; as both books dramatize the historical genealogy of a particular ethics of the activist self, and narrating the reasons why they have come to formulate the relationship to their ‘selves’ that they have.
6 In his discussion of
‘The Cultivation of the Self’ in the third volume of The History of Sexuality , Foucault points out that complex processes of ‘individualism’ include
the intensity of the relations to self, that is, of the forms in which one is called upon to take oneself as an object of knowledge and a field of action, so as to transform, correct, and purify oneself, and find salvation.
(Foucault 1986, p. 42)
It is possible to see how No Logo and Take it Personally might map onto this schema. No Logo can be read as a narrative in which Klein often takes herself as ‘an object of knowledge and a field of action’, dramatizing her own move towards an attempt to purify herself and ‘find salvation’. But this latter stage is gestured towards as a goal to be reached: the text does not offer any codified account of achieved heroic anti-consumer salvation, unlike Roddick’s narrative. In both cases, there is less reflexivity about how the anti-consumerist activist self actually becomes an object of knowledge: how Klein and Roddick are in a position to write in the first place.
This is important because, whilst the ‘movement-of-movements’ is not predominantly ‘white’ in global terms, in Europe and North America it has been known for featuring large amounts of white middle-class activists, although there are signs that this is changing. Bhumika Muchhala, active in the ‘Students against sweatshops’ campaign in the US, puts this very interestingly:
As with the mobilizations at Seattle and elsewhere, it’s predominantly a white movement. Though the conditions in sweatshops resonate with Latinos and the Asian diaspora, these people aren’t yet as politically active on campuses �/ perhaps because they don’t feel comfortable in organizing culture .
(Muchhala 2004, p. 199, emphasis added)
In other words, for those who are low in different kinds of social or cultural capital, it can be hard enough to even get a foot onto the pitch, let alone attempt to reconfigure the rules of the game. The point of observing this is not to attack No Logo , a text which often explicitly attempts to encourage multiple points of identification (placing, for example a high importance on the exploitation of ‘black’ cultures) or Take it Personally, but rather to help us understand how Klein and Roddick are able to be in the very position to write such books.
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Unholy investments
Whilst Roddick’s identificatory investments are presented as being seamlessly unproblematic, and Klein’s more complex investments are all presented as happening in the past, evocative mattering maps of anti-consumerist activists which assess both the vagaries of their route to activism and complexities in the present do exist. Bill Talen, for example, who becomes the persona ‘Reverend Billy’ of ‘The Church of Stop Shopping’, which epitomizes anti-consumerism in one of its most entertainingly camp forms, is more revealing of his activist investments. The preacher and his gospel-singing church are perhaps best known for their Situationist-inspired invasions of branches of Starbucks, in which they stage impromptu theatrics against the café chain’s bullying of smaller traders, its exploitation of coffee growers and the homogeneity of its consumer environments (see http://revbilly.com, Kingsnorth 2003). The performances have also included a range of similar street and shop activist- theatre events including anti-consumerist ‘conversions’, blessings on sidewalks and choreographed mobile phone actions in Disney stores. The church motif works as an ironic strategy to pre-empt accusations of puritanism, humour- lessness and ‘worthiness’ because of its anti-consumerist ideological stance, and dramatizes the oddness of attempting not to participate so fully in corporate consumer culture (which ‘[o]fficially . . . is absurd, an anti-gesture, like an American who didn’t go west, who didn’t go into space, who had sex without a car’ (Talen 2003, p. xiii)).
Talen’s book, What should I do if Reverend Billy is in my store? , for example, describes moments of being empowered, of finding agency, and of working with people, alongside moments of ‘True Embarrassment’, of the ‘embarras- sing moment that is revelatory’ (Talen 2003, p. 66, p. 82) of disillusion, doubt and being ‘exhausted by loneliness’ (Talen 2003, p. 57). These reflections about investments are particularly interesting as so many texts around the global justice movement are ethnographic travelogues, stories that unpro- blematically celebrate anti-neoliberal activism without connecting this to the activities, lives and investments of those who do not have the time or cultural capital to be full-time activists, or without offering much reflexivity about the investments of the activist themselves (for critiques, see Soar 2000, Sayer 2004, Gilbert 2005). Talen’s complex narratives about the different relation- ship of people in ‘the church’ to consumerism, and some of the variable reasons for his own investments in the present as well as in the past, therefore form something of a contrast with how Klein and Roddick’s attempts to keep their own activist-present relatively ‘pure’.
Whilst being layered with irony, Reverend Billy’s narratives follow the tradition of positing psychological and material existence ‘outside’ of western consumer culture as ‘the real’, against which consumerism is merely a continuing shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave (Bowlby 1993). Anti-
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consumerism is linked in a chain of equivalence to psychological completeness and to the rediscovery of an Edenic type of community which has been lost �/ what Reverend Billy calls ‘ordinary life’ and what Jean Luc-Nancy calls ‘the phantasms of the lost community’ (Talen 2003, pp. xiv�/xv, Luc-Nancy 1991, p. 12). And yet, there is at the same time an impetus to break from this discourse, to understand the important social and cultural bonds which can be forged from contemporary consumption (watching the shoppers, he writes ‘they were locked in their dance together. Maybe theirs was a kind of community after all’ (Talen 2003, p. 56)). There is also a sense of community, not as a mythical wholeness to be reconstituted, but defined, in Nancy’s sense, as resistance to immanent power. For instance, Talen writes of how the ‘vivid privacy’ that he thinks it is necessary for activsts to find is ironically always accompanied by a community of support (Talen 2003, p. 83). There is also a concern to recognize ‘the reach and grasp of desire that drives the purchase’ (Talen 2003, p. 74) or an interest in the psychologies of consumer and anti- consumer behaviour.
The performance of ‘Reverend Billy’ is therefore an oscillating fusion of the languages of discovering relatively essentialized ‘real’ pre-consumerist identities, and of the possibilities of creating, of becoming new forms of post- consumerist communal beings. ‘There is an economy in the interior of a person’ Talen writes, and we needed to ‘find a new kind of vivid privacy’ (Talen 2003, p. 83). This ‘interior economy’ is, simultaneously, a quasi- nostalgic defence of a private space, one which constitutes the ‘real’ pre- lapsarian consumer imaginary, and a strategic way of attempting to understand and generate possible becomings, possible new anti-consumerist activist subjectivities.
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping exemplify the politics of ‘boycott culture’ mixed prominently with a flamboyant advocation of consumer abstinence.
7 But like the promoters of Buy Nothing Day , in which
consumers are encouraged not to buy anything on 27 November every year, it works less to advocate attempts to withdraw from corporate consumption as a continuous year-round general strategy and more as a promotional tactic to create discursive space for rethinking the relations of consumption.
8 The
publicity Reverend Billy and the Church has gained in the US and the UK in particular means that it works as a ‘lever’ or promotional tool to generate consideration of the effects of what consumers buy on them/ourselves, on the people who produce the goods and the environment; on the ties and alliances in question. Beyond this, its recommendations are either undefined or ‘open’, depending on your point of view, although a variety of potential actions are pointed towards: lessened consumption, alternative forms of consumption (second-hand swap shops), and unionized activity.
In turn, this begs further questions about not only what other types of change are imagined across the spectrum of contemporary anti-consumerist
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discourse as happening ‘after the boycott’ but also how these changes are imagined as emerging. Some of the contradictions about this issue, perhaps, are laid out most starkly in the activities of the Canadian-based anti- consumerist organization, activist network and magazine publisher Adbusters.
Meme machines and viral vanguards
Adbusters, which describes its activities as ‘tinkering with the corporate genetic code’, is most famous for its subvertising and culture jams: spoof adverts of corporate behemoths such as Nike, Marlboro and Calvin Klein, many of which appear in its eponymous not-for-profit magazine. Founder Kalle Lasn frequently invokes the cybernetic metaphor of ‘memes’ �/ the Richard Dawkins-derived concept, prevalent in digital theory, which describes ideas jumping, contagiously, in bio-hyperlink fashion, from one head to another (Dawkins 1989, Blackmore 2000, Terranova 2004). What we need, Lasn states, is
the ready for prime-time metameme �/ the big paradigm-busting idea that suddenly captures the public imagination and becomes a superspectacle in itself �/ [. . .] the meme-warfare equivalent of a nuclear bomb. It causes cognitive dissonance of the highest order. It jolts people out of their habitual patterns and nudges society in brave new directions.
(Lasn 1999, pp. 124�/5)
Adbusters is positioned here as a kind of viral vanguard, the evolutionary fittest pushing forward the almost-inevitable anti-consumer revolution. The nature of media influence is frequently described in overtly hypodermic terms (‘The commercial mass media are rearranging our neurons, manipulating our emotions . . . So virtual is the hypodermic needle that we don’t feel it (Lasn 1999, p. 12)). Just as Lasn’s cyberhumans have been programmed, they can be deprogrammed by the apparently irresistible revolutionary force of the ultimate culture jam.
This rhetoric carries traces of the model of the brainwashed, zombie- consumer. It is a model which can be tracked from modernism’s characteriza- tion of the duped and deluded masses (as Andreas Huyssen discussed so eloquently) through to Vance Packard’s classic 1950s text on advertising’s Hidden Persuaders and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (Packard 1957, Huyssen 1987, Debord 1994). At its worst, such perceived automaton behavioural patterns can work to stoke the self-righteous elitism of the all- seeing few. It is a language that also appears, in ironic form, in Reverend Billy’s sermon: ‘I believe that this will deprogram a consumer in the middle of a pseudo hip sip’ (Talen 2003, p. 6). As Don Slater discusses in Consumer Culture
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and Modernity , there is a strain in theories of consumer culture as spectacle which both ‘tend to produce highly totalized images of consumer society’, and which ‘appeal to a kind of libidinal self and body still lurking under the many layers of commodification and passivity’ (Slater 1997, pp. 126�/7). This paradigm, which can often inform Adbusters rhetoric, is of an unproblema- tically innocent consumer who is either placed ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ a hermetic system which appears to be produced in a zone beyond human agency.
Yet, whilst Adbusters uses simplistic binaries of heroic viral vanguards and brainwashed cultural dupes, it can also swerve away from this to make sophisticated gestures towards a more multifaceted war of attrition, towards a social constructionist view of the world in which campaigning for change is about ‘finding the leverage point’ (Lasn 1999, p. 131). Adbusters has also been an energetic proponent of a range of actions designed to provide actually- existing alternatives to corporate consumer culture, from its anti-Nike ethical footwear initiative (the ‘Black Spot Sneaker’) to alternative forms of media (www.adbusters.org, Littler 2004). It presents an anti-consumerism which oscillates from reductive vanguardism to an innovative and sophisticated politics of complexity (calling, for example, for ‘infodiversity’ as well as ‘biodiversity’); from assertions of the ‘hypodermic’ nature of media influence to complex analyses of the workings of late capital, strategic policy suggestions and ideas for creating alliances. The future paradigms Adbusters gestures towards often focuses on economic and environmental sustainability, which, they argue, should be achieved by a shift in public consciousness, by rewriting legal definitions of corporate behaviour and by unashamedly large-scale planning. Lasn, for example, citing the index of sustainable economic welfare (ISEW) developed by Herman Daly and John Cobb, argues that we ‘need more than ‘small do-goody gestures’ for the environment �/ start teaching a whole new economic paradigm, design cities with pedestrians and public transport in mind’ (Lasn 1999, pp. 89�/90, p. 112). This is combined with suggestions for political-legal strategies for change:
We must rewrite the rules of incorporation in such as way that any company caught repeatedly and wilfully dumping toxic wastes; damaging watersheds; violating antipollution laws; harming employees automati- cally has its charter revoked, its assets sold off and the money funnelled into a superfund for its victims.
(Lasn 1999, p.157)
Similarly, an often overlooked feature of No Logo is the extent to which Klein explicitly refers to the need to engage with other ‘political solutions’ beyond boycotts (Klein 2000, p. 442). As consumer boycotts are not enough, and company codes of conduct are not to be trusted, what we need, she argues
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towards the end of the book, is an updated version of union activity on a global scale:
In the twenties and thirties, when the crises of sweatshops, child labor and workers’ health were at the forefront of the political agenda in the West, these problems were tackled with mass unionization, direct bargaining between workers and employers and governments enacting tough new laws. That type of response could be marshalled again, only this time on a global scale, through the enforcement of existing International Labour Organisation treaties, if compliance with those treaties were observed with the same commitment that the World Trade Organisation now shows in it enforcement of the rules of global trade.
(Klein 2000, p. 438).
What is hoped for here are governmental and international law enforcing union-style curbs on the excesses of global capital (although it also leaves the door open for the possibility of creating new modes of non-capitalist business). These possibilities, Klein’s narrative implies, will hopefully be achieved through interconnections between activists in the embryonic movement-of- movements, which is where No Logo most explicitly locates the agency for change. Hope for reclaiming citizenship over consumption, creating public space and common ownership and greater global parity of resources are invested in the forging of links between very different groups: the workers in export processing zones, culture jammers, aging academics and anti-corporate campaigners; and so the book ends by repeating the Reclaim the Streets slogan ‘the resistance will be as global as capital’ (Klein 2000, pp. 443�/6).
‘Anti-consumerism’, then, and what it wishes for, is not a monolith. If an awareness of the role of popular discourse in shaping the citizen-consumer can be found, so to can romanticizations of activist enclaves that shore up its boundaries; if there are spaces where consumers are shaped as dupes, there are also sophisticated understandings of the affective investments and complex psychologies of consumer identities. Similarly, the type of consumer and anti- consumer being imagined, the role of activism to cultural and social change, and the scenarios imagined as happening after the boycott can all vary substantially. No Logo interpelates its audience of youthful Generation X and Y consumers by gesturing emotively towards a shared habitus. It enacts a politics in which change is ultimately conceived of as happening through global laws, brought about through the movement-of-movements, and displays a somewhat contradictory attitude towards its own role as activist-text. Adbusters energetically argues for large-scale social change by forming new principles of economic and environmental sustainability, and it imagines such change has the best chance of being brought about through ideological and discursive shifts. It can both imagine itself as viral vanguard waking up
2 4 2 C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S
the duped masses, and can operate in enormously sophisticated strategic ways to strike at points of neoliberal vulnerability and generate innovative new articulations and coalitions. Anita Roddick’s work primarily talks to a rational- choice consumer who needs to be educated into further change, towards which Take it Personally points as a didactic primer. Her imagined change will happen variously through activism, legal changes and individualized consumer power. Here, Roddick represents an interesting fault-line in, or limit point to, anti- consumerism. On the one hand, she and the Body Shop have had a great discursive impact by popularizing the issue of trade ethics and the appeal of ethical consumption; and on the other, The Body Shop is clearly not a co- operative organization, but a capitalist enterprise that avoids using the International Fairtrade Mark and sets its own rules for ‘ethical trading’. Reverend Billy makes specific, vivid performances against consumerism, and gestures towards some alternatives, but for the most part leaves future systems of consumption open or undefined. His Church of Stop Shopping simulta- neously addresses consumers saturated with postmodern irony and anti- consumers saturated with activist ennui.
Relational reflexivity
Here I want to highlight some of the varied yet interconnected understandings of that fraught and richly suggestive term, ‘reflexivity’, in order to draw out some of the implications of its workings in these texts and movements. In particular, I want to draw on the work of Scott Lash, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, as their nuanced writings appear to me to open up interesting further ways to think about the problems and possibilities of the anti- consumerist discourses I am discussing.
One way of understanding reflexivity is to turn to Scott Lash’s 2002 book Critique of Information which develops his earlier arguments (Beck et al . 1994, Lash & Urry 1994) about reflexivity as a vital, constitutive feature of the technological present. In the post-Fordist information society, reflexivity is no longer something which takes place in a separate, rareified (or reified) dimension of time and space from the everyday:
Reflexivity in the technological culture is not a separate process of reflection. There is no time, no space for such reflection. There is fusion of words and things, of thought and practice. To think is not just at the same time to do; to think is at the same time to communicate. In the technological culture, reflexivity becomes practice; it becomes commu- nication.
(Lash 2002, p. 18)
B E Y O N D T H E B O Y C O T T 2 4 3
Reflexivity in contemporary technological culture and life, then, is instanta- neous, is immanent to being (and Lash is very alive to how this techno-social landscape is fissured depending on a given person’s location and access to social and cultural capital). The time and space for separate reflection, a constitutive experience for privileged ‘moderns’, has collapsed. In articulating this paradigm, Lash both draws from a variety of theorists �/ particularly Deleuze and Derrida �/ who have problematized and sought to erase the distinction between representation and object and positions the generation of such theories as themselves being indicative of this social and cultural age. The generation of affective becomings becomes a key characteristic of this technoscape of informational reflexivity.
This, I think, provides a useful way to further our understanding of No Logo . For example, returning to the passage I quoted earlier, when Klein recounts that ‘[m]any of the battles we fought were over issues of ‘representation’ �/ a loosely defined set of grievances mostly lodged against the media, the curriculum and the English language’, we might read this as much as anything, as the bemoaning of the outdated methodology of a previous era: as a critique of representation itself. Certainly the activist-text structure of the book, and its enormously successful performance as information , embodies precisely the type of reflexive information Lash is discussing: it responds rapidly; it responds with inbuilt reflection; and it conspicuously generates information and affect. In these terms, No Logo becomes a paradigmatic anti- consumerist text of the information society.
9
However, if ‘reflexivity’ has been understood, as here, as a driving and constituitive feature of modern informational society, it has also been understood, in a second, very different way, as a means of generating, or coming to elaborate upon or ‘know’ the self, as discussed for example in the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens (Beck et al . 1994). Giddens’ analysis of the generation of individualized forms of reflexivity has been taken up as a useful tool by academics in cultural studies, to, for example, understand contemporary lifestyle magazines (Gauntlett 2002). Giddens’ paradigm of reflexivity tends to foreground atomized and intensely individualized forms of sociality, from which ‘reflexivity’ can offer itself up to be understood as a relatively bounded form of narcissistic individualism (Giddens 1991), and the stories of Anita Roddick reflecting on her own self, her own heroic position, are perhaps particularly suited to being understood in these terms.
Yet, this second sense of being ‘reflexive’ does not necessarily primarily involve reinforcing hyperindividualized social relations. We might, for example, think of the strong tradition, particularly shaped in cultural studies through feminist and postcolonial theory, of ‘reflexivity’ involving a discussion of the situated position of the academic-author-self in relation to the subject under scrutiny. Broadly, such reflexivity involves scrutinizing the situatedness of the author as an attempt to evade the fallacy of Enlightenment-derived
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scientific objectivity: both to reject its positivist empiricism and to break from the brutal historical baggage of its derogatory classifications of otherness (Harding 2003, Haraway 1997, pp. 198�/304, 1998, Clifford 1988, hooks 1992). To not engage in such reflexive actions means, in effect, to collude to some extent with this tradition and its fantasies of transcendental authority. For many cultural studies scholars, making gestures towards or working from the position of a reflexive practice is a basic tenet of the discipline, as for a connected branch of social science, as outlined by Bourdieu and Wacquant in An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (1992).
This kind of reflexive writing also carries risks. It carries the risk of self- indulgent narcissism and valorizing expressions of ‘experience’ which emerge from ‘the self’ as of somehow greater validity than other discourses. It carries the risk of potentially ignoring both questions of psychology and the unconscious, and re-importing ‘objectivity’ through a conduit of possessive individualism.
10 In her book Modest_Witness , Donna Haraway thinks through
some of these issues. After noting how the separation of expert knowledge from opinion was a founding gesture of modernity (Haraway 1997, p. 24), she moves on to think through some of the problems with being reflexive, taking to task observing Bruno Latour’s reluctance to engage with a reflexive methodology because it seems to him to simply be a way of reproducing more of the same subject position. She argues that
Critical reflexivity, or strong objectivity, does not dodge the world- making practices of forging knowledges with difference chances of life and death built into them. All that critical reflexivity, diffraction, situated knowledges, modest interventions or strong objectivity ‘dodge’ is the double-faced, self-identical god of transcendent cultures of no culture, on the one hand, and of subjects and objects exempt from the permanent finitude of engaged interpretation, on the other.
(Haraway 1997, pp. 36�/7)
From here, Haraway makes the suggestive point that, as reflexivity could be thought of as simply ending up at the same position, instead ‘[d]iffraction, the production of difference patterns, might be a more useful metaphor for the needed work than reflexivity’ (Haraway 1997, p. 34).
Haraway’s model, in effect, highlights and extends the possibilities of thinking reflexive positionality and knowledge-production as relational and temporal processes, and as imbricated in complex, contingent conjunctures, distributions, systems and networks of power. This connects back to Bourdieu’s ideas about reflexive methodology as an anti-individualist strategy, a means of thinking how ‘persons at their most personal are essentially the personification of exigencies actually or potentially inscribed in the structure of the field, or, more precisely, in the position occupied within the
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field’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, p. 44). It emphasizes the relationality of reflexivity beyond the confines of a reflexivity which is solely anchored in individualism, by focusing on the nature of the alliances through which the individual is constituted and situated. Emphasizing relationality also has a resonance with what Judith Butler also gestures towards in her recent text Precarious Life , when she argues, (focusing on feminism) that
It seems more crucial than ever to disengage feminism from its First World presumption and to use the resources of feminist theory, and activism, to rethink the meaning of the tie, the bond, the alliance, the relation, as they are imagined and lived in the horizon of a counter- imperialist egalitarianism.
(Butler 2004, pp. 41�/2)
Both Butler and Haraway’s understandings open up more ways of engaging in what we might highlight as ‘relational reflexivity’. This, as I have been attempting to demonstrate, can help us extend our understanding of the work of contemporary anti-consumerism. It can help us think about whether, and how, the situated and specific nature of these knowledges and understandings being brought to anti-consumerist interpretations are being recognized; of how these understandings change in the process of ‘activism’ and travel somewhere else, become ‘defracted’, become different.
Reflexivity in anti-consumerist texts, we might say, then, can work to focus on the nature of the ties between consumers and producers and between consumer behaviours. This is partly how they gain their power; it can be the source of great affective reflexive strength, or the source of a more narcissistic reflexivity. All four anti-consumerist narratives I have looked at generate particular reflections about how certain aspects of their current subject-position came into being. Where it is most pronounced is in Bill Talen’s work, which, as I outlined earlier, is marked by both continual reflection about the located position and status of his acts, and a kind of temporal revisionism. Perhaps perversely, given his ranting persona, this is perhaps the space that is, in Donna Haraway’s terms, the closest persona out of the four to a ‘modest witness’.
Yet, leaving this argument here is clearly not enough. Just because Reverend Billy’s approach is very relationally-reflexive doesn’t mean it will necessarily have the most far-reaching effects: just contrasting the reach of No Logo with that of The Church of Stop Shopping is enough for us to see that. This brings us back to the issue with which I opened: of the importance of affective alliances and mattering maps. Clearly, there are more people in the Northern hemisphere who will identify with relationships to consumerism than anti-consumerist activism. Relational-reflexivity on its own is not enough: anti-consumerist discourse also needs to be articulated to popular interests to form counter-hegemonies, and to create affective mattering maps with those
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who can link to their various modes of habitus . What it is possible to say is that relational-reflexivity is one element that can make anti-consumerism more effective. It helps when anti-consumerism emphasizes the nature of a particular alliance in question and reflects on its own positioning or standpoint; when the connections between consumers become considered as well as the connections between consumers and producers; and when the interconnections between interior and exterior economies, and between affective and material currencies, become foregrounded. In other words, the more relationally- reflective anti-consumerism narratives are, the better, as it renders them the more open to making egalitarian alliances.
Beyond the boycott
In his recent book, The Politics of Nature, Bruno Latour moves beyond thinking about how a phenomenon (here, ‘nature’) has wildly variable historically and cultural specific formations to unearthing, radically problematizing and dispensing with the very category itself (in effect, doing for ‘nature’ what Judith Butler did for ‘gender’). Instead, he suggests a complex schema for bringing its disaggregated elements �/ as part of ‘the sciences’ �/ into democracy. And in this radically reconstituted version of ‘democracy’, what will play ‘an indispensable political part’ is economics:
The simplistic character of which economics is so often accused becomes on the contrary its most striking quality, the only one that can produce a scale model of the common world. Thinking they had come across an instance of self-regulation, the adherents of natural equilibria made a small mistake on the placement of the prefix ‘self’. Yes, economics is a self-reflexive discipline, but it does not designate any self -regulated phenomenon: it simply allows the public to see itself, to conceive itself, to constitute itself as a public .
(Latour 1994, pp. 150�/1)
In this paradigm, economics will have a role in which it will no longer appear specialized in an abstract sense but will rather be a means by which we will make sense of our collective lives.
Whether we agree with the viability of Latour’s elaborate schema or not, it is a very suggestive image; one which, in its own, inimitable, fashion, has something in common with the growth in studies of cultural economy (du Gay and Pryke 2002, Amin and Thrift 2004, Merck 2004). These studies �/ thinking through, for example, the always-already ‘culturalized’ dimensions of ‘the economy’, and emergent working practices in the post-Fordist creative industries �/ have developed new ways of interrogating the old question of
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how economic/cultural form shape social identities, possibilities and life opportunities in a climate in which cultural economies have adopted distinctive new forms. What I have been implicitly suggesting in this paper is that there is, equally, much to be gained from thinking through the problems and possibilities of anti-consumerist activist discourse by using some of the theoretical tools offered by cultural studies and these adjacently networked disciplines of cultural economy and cultural theory. Theorizing anti- consumerist activism is just as important as theorizing new formations of trading floors, consumer debt or the fluctuating fortunes of advertising agencies. This is particularly the case as studies relating to anti-consumerist activism, particularly on co-operative movements and boycott cultures can tend to focus very heavily on historical and economic questions, and the little study of contemporary anti-consumerism there is available can understandably at times tend to be overly celebratory. Using and extending models of articulation and transformative practice can open up more possibilities for useful critical interrogation.
This paper has attempted to use such an approach whilst bringing theories of (and relating to) cultural economy and consumer culture into dialogue with contemporary anti-consumerist discourses. Whilst, in the past, it has been extremely useful to consider models of representation (such as the colonialist imagery of the Body Shop) it is perhaps now just as important for cultural studies to start engaging in the wider, much more messy and complex terrain which anti-consumerism occupies beyond representation; a terrain which includes how alternative economies elicit affectual investments (or not), and the social, theoretical and political economies �/ which are always, in their various forms, always-already cultural �/ of what is imagined as possibly happening after the boycott. Thinking about to what extent anti-consumerist discourses are relationally reflexive, I have been suggesting, is one of the many possible ways of doing this; that in attempting to extend beyond boycott cultures, it is often most productive to, at one and the same time, pay attention to investments and lives lived during (and before ) them. As cultural studies and the movement-of- movements remind us, acknowledging investments, contingencies and fallibi- lities can often work as a crucial means of engendering openness and creating further alliances; and if, in Latour’s terms, ‘the global economy’ is one means by which the collective can ‘see itself’, then much might be gained from reflexively interrogating anti-consumerist cultural economies too.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jenny Alexander, Caroline Bassett, Lynda Dyson, Jeremy Gilbert, Liz Moor, Jonathan Rutherford and Janice Winship for their comments, advice and encouragement.
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Notes
1 My intention here is not to interrogate the politics of boycotts themselves, which have been examined elsewhere from a variety of perspectives, in terms of both their ‘progressive’ and problematic aspects (Gabriel & Lang 1995, Hilton 2003). Boycotts are obviously not uniform in nature and can be deeply problematic (Moor 2004) as well as powerfully effective, as the recent case of Monsanto abandoning its worldwide production of GM wheat attests (Brown 2004). If they are sensitively researched and conducted, they have, in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms of what constitutes a progressive social movement, the potential to ‘extend the application of ‘equality’ into new domains and provide the conditions for it to be extended still further’ (Nash, 2000, p. 246, Laclau & Mouffe 1985). For details of current boycotts, see Ethical Consumer : http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ boycotts/aboutboycotts.htm.
2 In The Conquest of Cool , Thomas Frank both flags up what he calls ‘the co- optation thesis’ and begins to complicate it by locating the symbols of corporate ‘co-optation’ discourse in the broader context of the cultural turn: ‘with products specifically targeted to young people, hip consumerism was a more complex phenomenon than ‘co-optation’ would imply, a larger shift in the values of business culture than a momentarily expedient dalliance with the rebel doings of the young’ (Frank 1997, p. 10, p. 163). This is mainly dramatized through his historical case studies rather than theorized, and Frank primarily rails against the populism of ‘cultural studies’ rather than drawing on more radical elements used in cultural studies critiques of the cultural turn (such as the work of Paul du Gay, David Harvey or Scott Lash) with which his work is in many ways actually very compatible.
3 Rebecca Goldstein’s phrase comes from her novel, The Mind-Body Problem . The map is used to describe what investments one particular character values most �/ here, in terms of people. The ‘mattering map’ becomes a way of defining different subjective investments (‘I’ve been trying . . . to see the map for what it is: a description of our subjectivity and nothing more’ (Goldstein 1985, p. 173).
4 I am grateful to Roz Galtz for bringing this home to me (Galtz 2004). 5 It could be argued that there needs to be a multi-faceted approach towards
constructing consumer alternatives, including approaches that attempt to articulate some of the principles of co-operation to more mainstream discourses such as liberal feminist sentiment. This is a valid point, but, equally, it is important not to let such problematic discourse colonize the discourse of anti-consumption.
6 I was reminded of this by Sam Binkley’s work (2003). 7 For a wonderful critique of ‘hairshirt’ consumption, framed in terms of UK
policy recommendations, see Levett (2003). 8 See http://www.buynothingday.co.uk
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9 Talen’s text is not so primarily ‘informational’ as No Logo , as reflected in the very different publishing profiles for and sales of the books; and in some senses Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping’s main and widest impact is through reportage about the activities in question through journalistic commentary, as the book is primarily for fans.
10 Clearly there are arguments across the spectrum; arguments which perhaps in some cases are to some extent incommesurable. I am most persuaded by not insisting logocentrically on one single methodological position but rather to attempt to encourage a variety of approaches to producing critiques. In Lash’s terms, this is ‘the modesty of the ‘and’, of what Deleuze calls ‘the conjunction’ (Lash 2002, p. xii), the implication of which is to attempt to make useful articulations between them.
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