Cultural Studies 4:

Production and Consumption – Where Are the Consumers?

Outline

Starting Questions Consumption: Marxist Views Consumption: Post-Marxist & Populist Views Other Views of Consumption Desire: Combining Marxism and Psychoanalysis Production of Desire -- Slavoj Zizek Desiring Machine: Deleuze and Gattari

Another example

Please comment:The plot of romantic love in 瓊瑤‘ s novels constructs weak women with dreamy eyes and no contact with economic reality; The negative content of contemporary Taiwanese love songs about lovers’ breakup makes us dwell on Romantic sadness and fault-finding. Violent films lead to violent behavior in teenagers. The sensationalism on TV news program appeals to and results in the audience’s interest in and gossip over 八卦news ．The focus on and objectification of women’s bodies in music videos lead to rape of women in real life. Contemporary inventions of telecommunication (e.g. Walkman, E-games, cell phone, the Internet) leads to human isolation. 手機對消費者的主體建構有二：鈴聲召喚、漏接焦慮（張小虹）．

Consumption: Marxist Views (1)

regulation of consumption: e.g. penopticon (Foucault; e.g. market survey; our i

dentity defined in terms of numbers.) production of consumption/consumers: e.g.

Culture industry and massification of consumers (Frankfurt school)

1) pseudo identity -- (no “real” human contact in Internet chatrooms)

2) creation of a false need – (Walkman—a recorder without recording functions; endless versions of Windows)

Consumption: Marxist Views (2)

production of consumption/consumers: e.g. interpellation (Althusser e.g. “natural”

response to/identification with the rings of cell phones, the exchange values of commodities sold in ads);

subject positions in discourse (Foucault; e.g. identifying with the protagonists in 瓊瑤‘ s novels)

The Practice ofThe Practice of Everyday LifeEveryday Life de Certeau

Dominant culture and the producers –cumbersome, powerful strategies of control; Consumption 主動的再創造 ("active re-creation" Poster 10

2); Provisional, fragmentary and invisible re-writing

and theft of the power imposed on him/her 機動性、零碎的、不明顯的改寫或竊取 , 利用「加於她身上的力量」在一個不屬於自己的地方「再創造」。

tactics of evasion, resistance, disruption, opposition.

The Practice ofThe Practice of Everyday LifeEveryday Life e.g.

Walkman -- criticized for its “anti-social, atomizing effects,” blocking off

the world and the “valuable.” e.g. “As long as they have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition [Shakespeare, the Bible and so on] has to say.”

two functions of Walkman – “escape” and “enhancement”

1. possible choices: pop music, audio books, background music”;

2. “when I’m listening to the Walkman I’m not just tuning out. I’m also tuning in a soundtrack for the scenery around me.”

(du Gay 89-93)

De-coding & Articulation and

Stuart Hall: preferred reading, negotiation, oppositional reading; articulation (“expressing/representing” and “putting together” textbook p. 9)

articulation of contradictory interpellations/subject positions.

Other Views of Other Views of ConsumptionConsumption

Combining Marxism and Psychoanalysis:

Slavoj Sizek -- use Lacan to analyze popular culture Deleuze and Guattari –against Oedipus complex.

Production of Desire – Slavoj Zizek

The sublime object of desire: that which we most desire but cannot have we are the barred subject. SPopular culture as Fantasy –false attempts to integrate the ‘impossible’ in the Symbolic, which actually avoids ‘the Real’ of our desire.e.g. Hitchcock’s films– revelation and purging of the viewers’ Oedipus.

Production of Desire – Slavoj Zizek

Fundamental homology between Marx’s and Freud’s analysis of commodity fetishism and of dreams (the logic of abstraction and symbolization)Dream: manifest content latent thought the unconscious desire Commodity: chancy determination of commodity’s value determination by labor-time (a secret) the unconscious desire

Commodity Fetishism

1. ‘a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx 1974, 77) 2. A misrecognition [of] what is really a structural effect of the network of relations between elements (exchange value or price) [as] “an immediate property of one of the elements” (commodity) (Sizek 23-24) to avoid the Real of our desire.

D/G vs. Marxism

Against desire as lack. Against oedipalization, which is supported by Capitalism. The prohibited = the desired. Desire = a flow prior to representation and reproduction Desiring Machines and Nomadic Subject

Marxism: production distribution consumption Exchange value = use value

Deleuze and Guattari: Oedipalization & Capitalism

It reduces all social relations to commodity relations 1) deterritorializes desire by subverting(de-coding) all territorial groupings such as the church, the family, local community, etc.2) It also reterritorializes desire by channeling(re-coding) all production into the narrow confines of the equivalence-form (logic of exchange value); within the state, family, law,commodity logic, banking systems, consumerism, psychoanalysis and other normalizing institutions. (Cf. Bogue 88; Kellner 89)

Our Body as Desiring Desiring MachineMachine“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id. Everywhere it is machines. . . “ produces a flow of desire; Connected with or interrupted by the other machines; e.g. organ-machine & an energy-machine; the breast; the mouth a machine coupled to it. (The mouth of the anorexic.) Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines.

Desiring Machinethe production of production: continually producing production, of grafting producing onto the product, e.g. A painting by Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine,' shows a huge, pudgy, bloated boy working one of his little desiring-machines, after having hooked it up to a vast technical social machine--which, as we shall see, is what even the very young child does.Composed of heterogeneous and independent parts.

Richard Lindner, 'Boy with Machine‘(1954, oil on canvas) (source)

The body without organs

Not an organless body, but body without organization, or the deterritorialized body; an interconnected system of flows and forces. “a body that breaks free from its socially articulated, disciplined, semioticized, and subjectified state (as an ‘organism’), to become disarticulated, dismantled, and deterritorialized, and hence able to be reconstituted in a new way” (Kellner 90-91)

Nomadic subjects

multiple personalities 1.consumption 2.when social codes [e.g. Oedipus] break dow

n in their channelling of desire, then the nomadic subject is possible, traversing the lines of the desiring machines inscribed on the body w/o organs

Model of the giant egg traversed by lines with a wandering point of pure intensity

Another example

為什麼台灣總是有時髦商品熱？中共的威脅、打壓 閹割焦慮 否認機制（ disavowal ） : 不能說清楚，不能講明白 政治焦慮轉移到商品消費1998 年夏天：葡式蛋塔滿足口腔期的匱乏．社會集體式的領聖餅．1999 年夏天：凱蒂貓收藏熱．收藏：肛門期的心理退化．張：既承認也否認泛政治化．

References

Deleuze and Guattari. Ronald Bogue. London New York : Routledge , 1989 Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reappraisal. Elizabeth Wright. Polity,1998. Postmodern theory : critical interrogations. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire : Macmillan , 1991 du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and Identities series. London: Sage, 1997.張小虹． 《在百貨公司遇見狼》． 聯合文學 , 2002.