Following our discussion last Friday concerning Jay-Z and Lupe Fiasco’s “product songs” and how they used them to define themselves, I was reminded of a piece of short fiction that I read in The New Yorker a while back. It’s called “Raj, Bohemian,” (located here: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/03/10/080310fi_fiction_kunzru) and tells the story about a young hipster in New York and his encounter with mass consumerism. I point out the “mass” in “mass consumerism” because that’s what brings the hero in this story down—the thought that other people are controlling his use of the products he defines himself with. It seems like the main character’s raison d’etre is to differentiate himself and his friends from the mainstream, and if you live in New York City, the way to define yourself is to have different or cooler products than the next guy.
I’m not going to do a story summary, but it turns out in the end that the way most of his friends supported their cool, unemployed bohemian lifestyle was to be the front line in a new form of corporate advertising—the word of mouth. They sold their friends on new products, and the company paid them for it, hoping that their coolness in the social sphere would help the products trickle down into what we know as mainstream society.
What I found interesting was how differently people in the story reacted to this discovery. The sellers themselves obviously had no problem with it—they saw no disconnect in that they were using their social lives as a way to sell products. The main character, however, felt cheated to his very soul. His definition of himself depended so much on his products—his chic-yet-ironic clothes, his bootleg art movies, his trendy vodka. The idea of his identity being sold to him through his social life only so he could propagate it more was deeply disgusting.
Though this was a work of fiction, it didn’t sound too far-fetched. I found this story relevant to our last two discussions having to do with the Adorno/Horkheimer and de Certeau articles and the question of identity through products. I think A/H would probably argue that the character really hadn’t discovered anything new in knowing that his possessions were sold to him by his friends; anyone who defines themselves by mass produced products to that extent is not an individual anyway—he is a product of a sales pitch. I certainly think that this was part of the point that the author was making—he’s the archetypal consumer. He attaches complex social meanings to products, he is always moving, never satisfied with what he has, and above all, is not a producer. His full-time occupation is being on top of the heap, above the mass consumer society, and the ironic part is that he’s their strongest devotee.
De Certeau, however, would probably take issue at the very notion that defining yourself by products is bad at all. If products are just an external extension of your tastes and interests, which in turn represent the person that you are (or wish you were) why not put them on display? He would argue as well that these products mean different things to different people—if the protagonist in the story did pick up on products from his friends who were getting paid to disseminate them, what does it matter? He would still identify the products with the person that recommended them, and think of that personal relation when he looked at or used the product. In a lot of ways, the exchange of products is like a conversation—tastes are compared and contrasted, discussions piqued.
The fact remains, however, that there is something deeply wrong, even disgusting, about a situation like the one described in the story. Part of it is the Big-Brother-like hand of corporations infiltrating holy ground, the social sphere, so that even talking to your friends is a form of advertisement. This isn’t so strange, though. We compare and make judgments about products with our friends all the time; it’s a topic of conversation. The real center of the problem is the inescapability of it all. As the protagonist says, “There must come a time when you’re allowed not to be a consumer.” I think the choice of the word “allowed” in this is very interesting. The experience of being a consumer today does not engender a feeling of individuality or personal power, at least for me. We are “allowed” to be cool, we are “allowed” to buy products to heighten our social station: patronization is the name of the game.
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