Commodity Activism

Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

Roopali Mukherjee, Sarah Banet-Weiser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814764022
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto dei media e dell'intrattenimento

Buying (RED) products—from Gap T-shirts to Apple—to fight AIDS. Drinking a "Caring Cup" of coffee at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to support fair trade. Driving a Toyota Prius to fight global warming. All these commonplace activities point to a central feature of contemporary culture: the most common way we participate in social activism is by buying something. Roopali Mukherjee and Sarah Banet-Weiser have gathered an exemplary group of scholars to explore this new landscape through a series of case studies of “commodity activism.” Drawing from television, film, consumer activist campaigns, and cultures of celebrity and corporate patronage, the essays take up examples such as the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, sex positive retail activism, ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover, and Angelina Jolie as multinational celebrity missionary. Exploring the complexities embedded in contemporary political activism, Commodity Activism reveals the workings of power and resistance as well as citizenship and subjectivity in the neoliberal era. Refusing to simply position politics in opposition to consumerism, this collection teases out the relationships between material cultures and political subjectivities, arguing that activism may itself be transforming into a branded commodity.

PART ONE
Brand, Culture, Action

The titles are revealing: Love Marks; Emotional Branding; Citizen Brand. All are books written in the past several years meant to guide marketers and advertisers on how to navigate the increasingly blurred relationships between advertising, branding, emotion, and politics. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it became clear that advertising and brand managers were developing new strategies to capture the attention of ever-more-savvy consumers by appealing to affect, emotion, and social responsibility. Indeed, the definition of the contemporary “consumer” does not simply point to what kinds of purchases one might make; more than that, the “consumer” is a political category. And, consumption itself is part of what one is, part of the complex framework that constitutes identity. In the contemporary terrain of global, national, and narrow-scale marketing, brands have begun to assume increasingly complex sets of political and activist functions. Within the multidimensional contexts of branding, marketers are increasingly turning to campaigns that encourage consumers toward highly cathected and deeply emotional relationships to brands, so that products bear what is called, in market-speak, “love marks.”

The chapters in this part explore, from different vantage points, the contradictions that characterize the contemporary relationship of consumer culture, the commodity activist, and branding. Neoliberalism and the technological and cultural apparatuses that support and validate this political economy have hastened critical transformations in the interrelations between the consuming subject and political culture. As such, in order to theorize who, and what, the “consumer” is in the current era of neoliberalism and branding, we need different conceptualizations for key terms like “participation,” “activism,” “mainstream,” “authenticity,” “consumer,” and “producer.” Moreover, as our definitions of what constitutes the “political” shift under the impact of “new” media convergence and mobilized forms of cultural production and circulation, we need new analytics for understanding the contemporary activist subject and the ways in which this subject both creates and experiences “social activism.”

The authors in this part thus ask questions such as: What does it mean to “be” a consumer activist? How do we craft identities within the context of branding and marketing? What are some of the tensions between consumption behavior and political action within these contexts? The chapters do not arrive at the same set of answers for these questions, and indeed engage in provocative debate about what, and who, a “commodity activist” is: Is she a girl who participates in a Dove Soap–sponsored workshop on “self-esteem”? Should our conception of “commodity activist” include media conglomerates like ABC and its efforts to “build community”? How do we situate “green branding” within the context of commodity activism? Indeed, is the “commodity activist” a brand in and of itself?

The chapters in this part explore these questions by analyzing a series of examples of contemporary commodity activism. To begin, Alison Hearn theorizes the subject position of the “branded self” in contemporary consumer culture to make the argument that within neoliberal modes of governmentality and the symbolic and discursive logics of flexible accumulation and post-Fordism, self-branding emphasizes the instrumental crafting of a notable self-image. Such branded versions of subjectivity, collapsing and fusing with capitalist processes of production and consumption, Hearn argues, produce a “self” that is always already interpellated as highly individuated, competitive, self-interested, and image-oriented. This is a “self,” in other words, that effectively undermines any claims to community activism and solidarity. Exploring tensions between these modes of hyperpromotionalism and collective affiliation as they emerge on and through the youth websites “Ecorazzi: the latest in green gossip” and “Ecostilleto,” as well as the Disney-owned, green initiative “Friends for Change,” Hearn’s essay probes the consequences of the emergence of the neoliberal branded self for youth culture and community activism, specifically environmentalism.

Next, Sarah Banet-Weiser looks at the ways in which contemporary neo-liberal capitalism offers a new, market-inspired definition of “self-esteem” for young girls and women through the lens of the Dove Real Beauty campaign. Critics of this campaign frame their concerns within the discourse of hypocrisy; it seems, on the face of it, phony or duplicitous to launch a social activism campaign that targets the beauty industry by using—and thus promoting—Dove beauty products, a key player in the global beauty industry. However, Banet-Weiser argues that within neoliberal capitalism, this kind of strategy makes perfect sense: in a context in which distinctions between “authentic” and “commercial” politics are blurred through the retraction of public and social services, claims of “hypocrisy” make sense only if there is a clear distinction between culture and commerce. Commodity activist campaigns such as the Dove Real Beauty campaign are made legible within a broader context of brand culture, in which the “social activist” herself is shaped into a kind of brand.

Laurie Ouellette examines a cultural product—television, and specifically, the media network ABC—that has historically operated as a private, for-profit industry, tracing the development and transformation of TV in its role as a responsible “citizen” in a neoliberal context. Examining the ABC Better Community initiative as a case of the growing role of television as an agent of civic responsibility, Ouellette unpacks the campaign not as a “corporate ruse” interested only in promotion and profit but rather as a “template” for a kind of “good government” that is both created and sustained by neoliberal governmentality. The transformation of the public sector within the context of neoliberalism reveals how “do good TV” adds to the “value” of a media conglomerate such as ABC as it shifts from an overt compulsion to profit to a more “virtuous” commitment to social responsibility—a responsibility that is ultimately realized and sustained through profit.

We close this part with an essay by Jo Littler, who examines a broader expression of brand culture, “green branding,” arguing that the discursive ironies of green branding work as a form of commodity activism that encourages individuals to address environmental, social, and political concerns through consumption. Littler reminds us that green products navigate a range of contradictions—they may operate as a fetish serving the needs of a small group of people, they may mark the emergence of a liberating form of grassroots democracy-from-below, and they may also epitomize a gross instance of corporate “greenwash.” Tracing the conceptual relations between “green governmentality” and “productive democracy” through her analysis of a single green product, the nappy, Littler reminds us that green commodity activism as it takes form within neoliberal brand culture remains double-edged. While neoliberal culture insistently contains possibilities for their full emergence, contemporary modes of green activism and branding can paradoxically be forceful in spurring social action toward broader progressive objectives—regulating corporate behavior, changing popular expectations, and, crucially, pushing beyond green capitalism into green cooperativism.

1
Brand Me “Activist”

ALISON HEARN

In 2006, Time magazine named “YOU” person of the year. Arguing that the Internet and social network sites had facilitated the emergence of “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before,” the magazine went on to celebrate Web 2.0’s revolutionary political possibilities, suggesting that the new Web demonstrated “the many wresting power from the few,” which might then lead to “a new kind of international understanding.”¹ But, what kind of power does creating a Facebook profile, posting personal videos on YouTube, designing a cool avatar on Second Life, or “tweeting” your thoughts hourly constitute? What form of revolution is fomented when individuals follow their favorite celebrities’ “green dos and don’ts” or vote on which green project Disney should support with 1 million of its billions of dollars? Who is this “ME” imagined by Time’s interpellation “YOU” anyway?

This chapter will examine the versions of selfhood assumed and partially produced by contemporary forms of “commodity activism,” with reference to three popular “green” websites emanating from, and totally dependent on, the economy of Hollywood celebrity: ecorazzi.com, ecostiletto.com, and Disney’s friendsforchange.com. I argue that Time magazine’s imperative “YOU” and its concomitant response “ME” mark the conflation of selfhood with neoliberal modes of governmentality, the economic logics of post-Fordism, hyperconsumerism, and promotionalism, and marries this conflation to social activism. As the boundaries between work and life erode, broad-based structural, systemic, and collective problems are routinely reduced to issues of “personal responsibility” and “the reflexive project of the self,”² or the constitution of “ME,” becomes a distinct form of labor in the guise of self-branding. This chapter interrogates the naturalized elision seen in many contemporary forms of commodity activism between radical individual empowerment, necessary for the market, and collective and communal affiliation, necessary for long-lasting political change. While acknowledging that new media technologies and social networks can enable increased social and ethical accountability on the part of corporations and government, this accountability is never simply given. This chapter insists that, in order for significant social change to take place, dominant templates for meaningful selfhood must also be remade; ultimately, a conceptualization of selfhood tightly bound to the logic of neoliberalism and the post-Fordist market is one of the core components, and central limitations, of “commodity activism.”

The Empty Self in Consumer Society

American psychotherapist Philip Cushman argues that the “self” is a cultural construct, which expresses “the shared understanding within a community about what it is to be human.”³ Cultural historian Warren Sussman asserts that procedures of self-production and self-presentation have always reflected the dominant economic and cultural interests of the time. Invariably, “changes in culture do mean changes in modal types of character.”⁴ In other words, our forms of self-production and self-understanding are deeply conditioned by our economic and social context; dominant modalities of “self” are both summoned into being and illustrated in our cultural discourses and institutions. The ways we come to internalize or embody these versions of “selfhood” are always contested and in flux, constituting examples of biopower in action. As Michel Foucault has famously written, “Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men.”⁵

During the 20th century, Anthony Giddens argues, we have been “disembedded” from more traditional forms of sociality and community, such as the church or family. As we develop ever more abstract systems, institutions, and technological forms, which pull us out of our cultural, spatial, and temporal situatedness, established modes of identity and selfhood are dislodged and thrown into crisis.⁶ Cushman describes the terrain of modernity as marked by social absences and a lack of coherence and tradition. We experience this “interiorly as a lack of personal conviction and worth,” and we embody it “as a chronic and undifferentiated emotional hunger” that “yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost.”⁷ Cushman describes the modality of selfhood in the growing post–World War II consumer landscape, then, as an “empty self”; this self must perpetually consume in order to be filled, organized, and effectively identified, but it can never truly be satiated. As Zygmunt Baumann writes, midcentury consumer society “proclaims the impossibility of gratification and measures its progress by ever-rising demand”;⁸ desire is its principle engine.

Under the conditions of post–World War II consumer society, the self must personally maintain its coherence over time and does this through the reflexive creation of its own story, or biography: “A person’s identity is not to be found in behavior, nor—important though this is—in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going.”⁹ For Giddens, as for Cushman and Baumann, this reflexive project of the self is intimately linked to the processes of consumption. And, while these sociologis...