What Kind of Dining Set Defines Me as a Person?
June 4th, 2008 |
During my pilgrimage to City Lights bookstore, I came upon a book entitled Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity.
Unfortunately, I didn’t buy the book, and Amazon’s search inside feature let me down, so I can’t quote the passage I read in the Introduction. But in short, the author, Hal Niedaviecki, writes about his decidedly nonconformist history and the increasing frequency with which he’s funneled referential birthday cards about his individuality.
His well-meaning parents, witless to the irony of a multibillion dollar corporation responsible for untold conformist holiday behavior embracing individuality, feel validated by their selections. But Hal is depressed. His very uniqueness has been co-opted by capitalism.
The identification of this phenomenon isn’t new (which was the ultimate reason I didn’t buy the book). Thomas Frank and Christopher Lasch wrote about this in the 1990s. Naomi Klein has been crusading against it for almost as long, as has Kalle Lasn. Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book The Tipping Point is to a considerable extent about how consumer phenomena are products of social movements backed by economic investment.
One thing I find lacking in this discussion is the distinction between economic and social conformity. On one hand, there seems to be an unmistakable trend toward elevating consumption into an “experience” or identity instead of a mere economic transaction by connecting products to the trappings of social norms and values. This practice, in my opinion, is made possible by the explosion of psychological and sociological knowledge in the twentieth century. With the diminishing returns of economic maturity and sudden plenitude of social scientific knowledge, in many instances it’s simply cheaper to change the consumer than to change the product.
[Note: By far the best exploration of these related phenomena I’ve encountered is a BBC documentary entitled The Century of the Self (available for free online divided into four hour-long parts: 1 2 3 4). Starting with Freud and ending with Bill Clinton’s focus group-driven 1996 campaign, it traces how advances in the social sciences were leveraged for practical use in other fields, such as advertising and politics.]
From a sociological perspective, the primary tendency being exploited is our society’s disposition to associate various roles and subcultures not merely with a particular set of norms and values, but also a particular set of products its members are expected to consume, which predates the recent revolutions in advertising. Thorstein Veblen, an early sociologist writing at the turn of the 20th century, noted in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class, how members of the upper classes consciously adopt and cultivate a lifestyle of “conspicuous consumption,” procuring and displaying products with exclusive symbolic value, even at the expense of functionality (e.g., eating utensils made of silver instead of more durable metals).
More recently, Michael Solomon and Henry Assael have argued for a gestalt approach to symbolic consumption, producing evidence that consumers are motivated to assemble a “product constellation” to “define, communicate, and enact social roles.”
However, there’s a very different type of social conformity that exists outside of consumer behavior. This variable is probably more accurately described as a social cohesion, a relative consensus (or lack thereof) over those social norms and values. In other words, how much diversity exists in a society over the definition of desirable norms and values, and how entrenched or ossified are those that currently prevail in the society as a whole?
This variable has been explored to some extent in cross-cultural studies, such as this one by Jung-Soo Yi [pdf], which have employed a dichotomy of “collectivist” and “individualist” cultures to describe differences in social cohesion between, for example, Japan or Korea, and Canada or the United States. Of particular interest are studies that have examined the unique position of members of one type of culture assimilating into the other, such as those contained in Greenfield and Cocking’s Cross-Cultural Roots of Minority Child Development.
Although academic literature has focused primarily on identifying and contrasting levels of social cohesion in different cultures, there’s no reason it can’t also be applied to measure changes in one culture over time. Most would argue that there’s been a lessening of cohesion in American society during the last half of the twentieth century by this rubric. The popular narrative suggests that America enjoyed a cohesive afterglow in the years following World War II, which was fractured by the consciousness revolution in the 1960s and fragmented into a million pieces by Generation X in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m fascinated by how these two social trends—the commodification of conformity by economic interests, and the attenuation of social cohesion—have interacted with and often reinforced one another. With less social cohesion than a century ago, privilege is no longer a requirement to engage in conspicuous consumption. Everyone consumes to distinguish his or herself from everyone else. A hundred years after Veblen, Chuck Palahniuk’s office-drone everyman, despite an utter lack of wealth, status, or power, voices the same sentiment that Veblen saw in the privileged men of his time as they purchased silverware: “What kind of dining set defines me as a person?”
More subcultures create more business opportunities. There exists a potential market for every ethos, no matter how idiosyncratic, to express itself through consumption. And as long as it’s profitable, businesses will continue to provide that service, regardless of the consequences.
After all, even Lasn’s anti-brand organization, Adbusters, now sells a line of “ethical alternatives.”
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