History and Refusal: The Resistance to Consumer Culture in Contemporary American Fiction

[Glenn Scheper]

> http://www.bucks.edu/~docarmos/diss.html
  Stephen doCarmo's Dissertation

Thanks Tim!
Reading this long page was like taking a course.
So many new ideas on capitalism! Which I snip...
emphasizing modes of dissent.
...many, many other good ideas were omitted...

every act of defiance is transformed into a salable product

newer, more sophisticated modes of dissent better suited to the increasingly 
monolithic and seemingly irresistible capitalist economy

A space without an exterior-something as inalienable as the air we breathe or 
the sky we walk under-capitalism becomes an indomitable foe, uncannily adept at 
absorbing every blow struck against it.

That foundation or first principle is, of course, capitalist economy itself, for 
"every position on postmodernism in culture," Jameson tells us with a 
distinctively unpostmodern decisiveness, "is also . . . and necessarily an 
implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational 
capitalism today" (3). Once we have re-learned our "relationship to the 
totality" (52) by making capitalism the raison d'etre girding our maps, we "may 
again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and 
regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our 
spatial as well as our social confusion"

more temperate modes of dissent better suited to their cultural era.

paraphrase: Marxist cost:usevalue :: semiotics signifier:signified, and
is akin to the impossibility of trying to find the "real" or signified.

When, for instance, in the case of opinion polls, those questioned (the 
"objects" of the study) mindlessly say what they are supposed to say, following 
the trends, letting the terms of the poll dictate their responses for them, they 
are actually waging war against the ideology of the real. Insofar as their 
responses are ingenuine and inauthentic, the opposite of real, the masses are 
sabotaging the "banal" theories and institutions that presume to study them, 
know them, and disclose to them the "truth" about themselves.

What is important is that such strategies of the object represent a "fatal" 
endgame for Western rationality, which is predicated upon a subject/object 
dichotomy wrecked whenever subject positions are refused.

paraphrase: power/efficiency uses concensus, so marginalizes minorities.

Acquiring indecisiveness and inefficiency, then, is the remedy for fascistic 
thought

Meditating at length on the merits of the subject's desire to know and master 
its environs, as well as on the object's expulsion of every will to knowledge 
and power, White Noise ultimately refuses to choose between their unreconcilable 
strategies, declining to tell us which offers the better or wiser mode of 
dissent in a late-capitalist culture.

"if one sets out to do a critique of metaphysics" - the shorthand name 
poststructuralists give to the systems of rationality necessitating belief in 
truth and reality - one will find "there is no escape from the metaphysical 
enclosure. You cannot simply assert, 'I will be anti-essentialist' and make that 
stick," they warn, "for you cannot not be an essentialist to some degree.

The trick, as it were, is to always bear in mind that any essentialist "truth" 
(the violence of patriarchy, for instance, or the oppressiveness of consumer 
culture) is necessarily contextual and constructed, not fundamentally true, and 
may thus, in certain situations, become counter-productive or worthy of 
abandonment.

consumers "poach in countless ways on the property of others" to defy social 
institutions that might otherwise seem unbearably constraining
(see me with thumb on the WordsEx.exe stealth button reading this discourse)

Though corporations, governments, and capitalist social institutions may indeed 
want to condition us to be good, productive, uncritical consumers, their 
ponderous and officious "strategies," as de Certeau calls them (36), are never 
entirely immune to consumer "tactics" (37), or less systematic, more spontaneous 
acts of defiance that "mak[e] use of the elements of the [strategic] terrain" 
(34) and exist as "maneuver[s] 'within the enemy's field of vision' . . . and 
within enemy territory"

The type of tactic he describes may be "an art of the weak" (37) and a tool of 
the "marginalized" (xvii), but that marginalization, defined by the all-but 
inescapable activity of consumption (even those in the culture industry consume 
their own products), is so "massive and pervasive" that it is "becoming 
universal"

the consumer culture we live in is "too constraining for [us] ever to be able to 
escape from it and go into exile elsewhere"; in fact "there is no longer an 
elsewhere"
	-but-
capitalism also loses its capacity for singularity of intent, since any "closed" 
system, returning to Niall Lucy's words, "always already contains sufficient 
'give' (or 'tolerance') to provide a little room for manouevre."

	P:
Vineland also tells us the loss of the real is no excuse for indecisiveness or 
apathy, since reality's effects, at least, continue unabated, with "real" people 
(even if that word must now be set in quotes) suffering the "real" consequences 
of "real" political policies.

dissent is not contingent upon escape and that contentious political 
consciousnesses can be forged within the consumer marketplace, using the very 
goods it provides.

Proving that consumerism's technological trappings can be used as easily for 
liberation and disappearance from power as for indoctrination and control, 
Leyner provides us a model for escape within, rather than from, the 
"metaphysical enclosure" of late capitalism.

We can solve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined 
angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic.

Irony's most damning attribute, though, is that it is "singularly unuseful when 
it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks"

if a "spirit of detached spectatorship, and [an] inability to think of American 
citizenship as an opportunity for action, . . . enter[s] such a student's soul" 
(11), it will surely, Rorty believes, owe in large part to the spirit of 
capitulation and indecisiveness promulgated by such postmodernist

If in the past, he says, an "intellectual stepped back from his or her country's 
history and looked at it through skeptical eyes," it surely meant "he or she was 
about to propose a new political initiative"
...
For postmodernists, though, there can be no new initiatives, since these would 
necessitate more of the power-infected rationality they can observe, denounce, 
and "mock" but never effectively replace.

	P:
Thomas Pynchon and Mark Leyner seem particularly vulnerable to Wallace's 
accusations of impotent ironicism
...
Wallace, however, makes what is essentially a category mistake by denouncing 
such techniques, for Pynchon and Leyner, unlike him, are clearly not interested 
in "constructing [some]thing to replace the hypocrisies [they] debunk." Their 
ambition is only to make more tolerable, more humane and liveable, the 
consumerized, image-laden culture they (as Wallace rightly asserts) hold to be 
untranscendable. That they share an ironic posture they believe can help them do 
this with many "Culture Trust" products is not proof of that posture's 
ineffectiveness.
...
Pynchon or Mason. While these latter authors may posit the inescapability of 
capitalist consumerism, they still let us know in no uncertain terms that some 
wars it wages and some political factions it harbors are unjust, cruel, and must 
be moved against.

"the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the 
framework of a market economy"

mass culture is what sells and normalizes capitalist ideology, "mummifying the 
world" with its "priestly hieroglyphic script" "address[ed] . . . to those who 
have been subjugated"

And that's all from before CHAPTER ONE!

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.