#post-consumerism

I've been enjoying going through back issues of Duke's Public Culture journal. For those of us who grapple with the "vote with your dollars" type of talismanic consumerism, some excerpts from Jennifer Wenzel's paper, "Consumption for the Common Good? Commodity Biography Film in an Age of Postconsumerism." Public Culture 23:3 (2011)

I read each of the films in turn, examining how they use the medium of documentary film to narrate the life stories of the commodities in question: Jamaican tourism in Life and Debt, Nile perch in Darwin’s Nightmare, and Ethiopian fair-trade coffee in Black Gold. These films aim to change consumer behavior by charting complex, transnational networks that implicate viewers in distant economic and ecological crises. They appeal to viewers as consumers and citizens by engaging the tangled webs of ideology, moral responsibility, and desire that shape their relationships to commodities.

[Drying Nile Perch carcasses from Darwin's Nightmare]

Although I am not arguing for a strict chronological narrative, I do examine these films in terms of an emergent shift from an ethos of overconsumption to a putative ethics of consumption—from consumerism to postconsumerism. Postconsumerism posits consumption as an altruistic act whose benefits accrue not immediately (or not only) to the consumer but rather to the producers (as in fair trade), the planet (as in green consumerism), or others in need (as in “portion of the profits” donation). Postconsumerism privileges the consumption of seemingly defetishized commodities that dare tell their stories; such narratives, however, evoke new forms of desire that threaten to leave untouched (even as they are felt to address) the relations of inequality obscured by the commodity form and thus might generate change only in the realm of the imaginary.

Stephanie Black’s 2001 film, Life and Debt, offers a valuable primer on the impossible economic choices facing newly independent nation-states in the mid-20th century and the experience of contemporary globalization as an unjust loss or lack of opportunity for millions around the world. Global trade and aid policies shape the daily struggles of Jamaicans, as the film demonstrates by tracing not only the fate of commodities such as green onions, potatoes, bananas, chicken, beef, and milk but also the fiscal pressures of structural adjustment and debt servicing. Life and Debt tells a similar story about each of these commodities, whose production has been crippled by US trade policies that eliminate domestic and international markets. Subsidized US produce floods Jamaican markets; transnational firms (including McDonald’s) promise to source local beef and potatoes but never find them up to standard, and US-based Chiquita even protests the sale of Jamaican bananas in the United Kingdom — an arrangement explicitly described as a postcolonial gesture of recompense. The one “commodity” spared this fate is Jamaica itself, reduced to an object of consumption by foreign tourists; Life and Debt warns that the social unrest provoked by the suppression of every other sector of Jamaica’s economy also threatens the tourist experience. To revise Dean MacCannell’s classic account of tourism as commodification, it becomes difficult for “modern workers, on vacation” to “mak[e] a fetish of the work of others,” when those others are being put out of work. 

The cast of characters in Black Gold, Mark and Nick Francis’s 2006 documentary about Ethiopian coffee, is probably as large as that in Darwin’s Nightmare, and its geographical itinerary certainly ranges across a far broader terrain. Compared to the brooding chaos of Darwin’s Nightmare, however, Black Gold seems positively cheery and simple, its narrative structured around a single protagonist, Tadesse Meskela, general manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union in Ethiopia. The film tracks his travels as he meets with growers and auctioneers in Ethiopia and buyers, roasters, and retailers in Europe and the United States, in order to advocate for the 74,000 farmers he represents by seeking fair-trade markets for their coffee. Like Darwin’s Nightmare and Life and Debt, Black Gold links its commodity biography to the history of global capitalism, by positing the fate of Ethiopian coffee on the world market as a case study in contemporary neoliberalism.

[Scene from Black Gold]

Meskela-as-coffee might seem the quintessential figure of a more critical commodity-narrative-as-defetishization, the epitome of what Michael Pollan calls “food that comes with a story” and thus “represents a not-so-implicit challenge to every other product in the supermarket that dares not narrate its path from farm to table.” But it is important to be clear about the limited effect of what Pollan calls the “radical” act of commodity narration. Commodity biographies with sympathetic underdog protagonists (whether commodities, guardians, or their hybrids) may simply invert the relationship between the commodity and the narrative of its production. Whereas the conventional commodity keeps the story of its social production hidden safely out of sight, here the commodity shouts its story to the world; the story becomes its face, rather than its forgotten secret. As Peter Hitchcock writes, “Commodity desire is not more inevitable than responsibility — both desire and responsibility are produced within regimes of truth that are irreconcilable — their contradictions are themselves an index of the world system.”

In the era of postconsumerism, the “supermarket narratives” that Pollan posits as radical have become business-as-usual, marketing by other means, value-added activity, in the updated idiom of enlightened globalization. Multinational corporations targeted by antiglobalization campaigns write their own commodity biographies; for example, Starbucks offers its own “stories” about coffee from Ethiopia, Kenya, Sumatra, Java, and Guatemala. Commodity biographies can thus generate a “ ‘double’ commodity fetishism” in which the story of production “re-enchant[s]” the consumer: I still think fondly of Meskela every time I buy Ethiopian coffee. Again, when Pollan writes of “the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing,” it is important to spell out the social stakes of such pleasure. The world of commodities becomes divided between those who tell their stories and those who don’t; this narrative differentiation between things is, of course, mutually constituted by a social differentiation between people. Some consumers will pay a premium for products that dare tell their stories, yet this shift in consumption (and narrative) habits might represent less a change in conditions of production than a democratization of connoisseurship: new stories, not new histories. For elite consumers, some commodities have always been unfetishized in this sense, enveloped in the aura of their artisanal or otherwise exclusive production; in postconsumerism, such values appeal to a broader demographic, at the same time that consumers also become connoisseurs of narrative.

Having watched Darwin’s Nightmare, one could not begin to know what to do about Nile perch. But this problem is not new; even as Ishmael implores his readers to be economical, he knows that they now know that men shed blood to fill the lamps in whose glow they turn page after page of Moby-Dick.

Postconsumerism tends to offer solutions at the level of the imaginary while leaving structural inequalities, what Althusser called “real conditions of existence,” largely unchanged, even if partially or fully revealed. This is obviously true of the knowledge-mistaken-for-action manifestation of postconsumerism, perhaps less obvious but nonetheless still true when consumers act on what they know. There are several reasons why choosing a different product may have greater effects on the consumer’s state of mind than on the objective conditions of production. One obvious problem is that commodities (and their corporate guardians) are not necessarily reliable narrators of their own stories; for example, many chickens labeled “free range” never see, let alone graze in, anything like the vast (or even modest) pastures such a label evokes. A more complex set of problems, however, inheres in postconsumerism’s fundamental ambivalence about consumerism itself.