Consuming Cultures: The Magic of Global Capitalism

1
Consuming Cultures The Magic of Global
Capitalism Ishita Sinha Roy, Ph.D. Annenberg
School for Communication University of Southern
California
2
(No Transcript)
3
- 'Would you tell me please which way I have to
go from here?' - 'That depends a good deal on
where you want to get to' said the cat. -- Lewis
Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
4

Artist Barbara Krueger
5
The great hoardings and the publicity neons of
the cities of capitalism are the immediate
visible sign of The Free World. For many such
images in the West sum up what they in the East
lack. Publicity, it is thought, offers a free
choice. (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, p. 131)

6
Publicity is not merely an assembly of
competing messages it is a language in itself
which is always being used to make the same
general proposal. It proposes to each of us
that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by
buying something more. (John Berger, Ways of
Seeing, p. 131)
7
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation
by showing us people who have apparently been
transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The
state of being envied is what constitutes
glamour. (Berger, p. 131)
8
?Tin shack made of Coca Cola packaging (India)
Olmec Ash Ceremony (Mexico)
Publicity is addressed to those who constitute
the market, to the spectator-buyer who is also
the consumer-producer from whom the profits are
made twice over as worker and then as
buyer. (Berger, p. 142)
9
Can a photograph stop a war? Can it save a
life? Can it lead to understanding, Inspire
someone to help, Provide comfort and open the
door to compassion? Hope that it can, Pray that
it can.
What is often said about the power of the
image is indeed that its impact is immediate and
powerful even when its precise meaning remains,
as it were, vague, suspended-numinousThe
cultural practices of looking and seeing, then,
which are fore-grounded here, themselves rest on
complex conditions of existence, some of which
have psychic and unconscious dimensions Hall,
p.311
10
Louis Althusser reconceptualizes ideology as a
system of representation in which the subject is
caught and through which he recognizes his
identity, and place in the culture. Hall, Visual
Representation, p.312
Artist Barbara Krueger
11
Wolf-Lamb
Angel-Devil
Like all obviousnesses, including those that
make a word name a thing or have a meaning
(therefore including the obviousness of the
transparency of language), the obviousness
that you and I are subjectsand that that does
not cause any problems is an ideological effect,
the elementary ideological effect. Hall, p. 320
12
Test tubes
Hearts
It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it
imposes (without appearing to do so, since these
are obviousnesses) obviousnesses as
obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize
and before which we have the inevitable and
natural reaction of crying out Thats obvious!
Thats right! Thats true! Hall, p. 320
13
what thus seems to take place outside
ideologyin reality takes place in ideology.
That is why those who are in ideology believe
themselves by definition outside ideology one of
the effects of ideology is the practical
denegation of the ideological character of
ideology by ideology ideology never says I am
ideological. Hall, p. 321
14
1. Certain ideological ways of looking become
embedded in the culture, and are supported by the
commodification of such values.
2. The binary of Self-Other becomes a visual
strategy that is translated through sights/sites
of difference (race, gender, class, physical
deformity, etc.)
3. Race, it is implied, can be literally washed
clean in this case, through the use of a
commodity associated with a superior colonial
culture and its values.
15
Homi Bhabha talks about the fixed image, or the
stereotype in the context of colonial discourses,
where racial and sexual difference conflate to
produce a double articulation the body is
always simultaneously inscribed in both the
economy of pleasure and desire (the sexualized
Other) and the economy of discourse, domination
and power (the savage/child-like Other). quoted
in Hall, p. 313) Artist Barbara Krueger
16
Edward Said discusses the fantasy of the Orient
as a discursive space created by the West as the
site of all qualities that were Other to itself
(luxury, languor, sexual promiscuity, wealth,
decadence, etc.). There is a corresponding
fantasy of the West in the mind of this Other, so
that stereotyping discourses are a two-way street
in imagining and knowing the Other. Thus, as
Bhabha points out, the stereotype functions
fetishistically by displacing cultural/racial
fears and anxieties onto the site of the Other.
17
Child-Labor
Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false
image which becomes the scapegoat of
discriminatory practices. It is a much more
ambivalent text of projection, displacement,
guilt, and aggresivity, to construct the
positionalities and oppositionalities of racist
discourses. Hall, p. 377
18
Colonial discourse employs a system of
representation, a regime of truth, that is
structurally similar to Realism. It operates in
a closed system of recognizable and seemingly
obvious signs.
19
Since symbolic boundaries are crucial to
maintaining cultural order and determinacy,
marking difference, automatically demands that
the culture closes ranks and expels/stigmatizes
anything that is considered as impure and
abnormal. Hall, p. 237
20
One of the ways in which we try and manage the
problem of the Other is through desire, and by
assimilating the signifiers of Otherness into
commodities or accessories that are emptied of
their original meaning.
21
Signs of difference can now be viewed as hip
and cooleven marketable, within the
ideological framework of one world, one human
race.
22
As long as the subject remains trapped within
that order, it will be unable to mediate between
or escape from the binary oppositions which
structure all of its perceptions.Moreover, the
subject will itself be capable of identifying
alternately with diametrically opposed positions
(victim/victimizer, exhibitionist/voyeur,
slave/master). Silverman in Hall, p. 344
23
The visibility of the racial/colonial other is
at once a point of identity (Look a Negro) and
at the same time a problem for the attempted
closure within discourse. there is always the
threatened return of the look Hall, p. 377
24
When we re-examine the site/sight of our cultural
fantasies, we can begin to feel the image of the
Other beginning to look back at us. The emptiness
of commodity fetishism reveals our fascination
with absent spaces, and our willing immersion in
images as a way to counter our cultural
fears/anxieties about our own sense of Self.
25
The return of the gaze can assist in uncovering
the ideological operations behind colonizing
practices and motives for manufacturing
identity.
26
As also the cost of transforming the Third World
to the First World through global aspiration and
commodity dumping.
27
And it can once again turn our gaze upon the
third-world labor that is hidden or effaced by
the commodity brand names that they help produce,
and then also consume as a part of the capitalist
dream of product transformation.