Consumer Capitalism Research Articles

The problem of criminal charisma: State authority and the politics of narcocultura in Mexico's drug war

AbstractThis article examines Mexico's “war on drug trafficking” through its affective and ideological dimensions. By ethnographically exploring two sites of official representations of organized crime in Mexico City—the Secretariat of Defense's Drug Museum and the Institute to Give Back What Was Stolen from the People—I analyze the strategies through which the Mexican state acknowledges and addresses criminality's charisma as a key challenge to its authority. In these official representations, the drug world becomes visible in partial and selective ways, such as through drug traffickers’ confiscated possessions, which project ideas of extravagant capitalist consumption and transgressive social mobility. The state's inevitable failure to contain or redirect this criminal charisma is a symptom of a deeper problem. Such charisma is a key element constituting organized crime as a political actor that menaces state power. It does so not only through violence, but also by means of its capacity to align and organize publics ideologically by doubling and mimicking the state's forms of meaning‐making and valuation.

Metabolic Cinema: From Hollywood to Socialist China

Drawing on Karl Marx’s ecological concepts of the “metabolic rift” and the “emancipation of senses”, this paper explores an alternative ecocinema that integrates the ecological with the social and the economic. Early Hollywood films, such as Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) and The Good Earth (1937), represent the metabolic rift in human relationships as a byproduct of the metabolic rift with nature created in the process of urbanization; hence, they can be regarded as precursors to an alternative ecocinema, which I refer to as “metabolic cinema”. The Story of the Golden Bell (Jinling Zhuan), a comedy film produced during the Chinese Great Leap Forward in 1958, offers an intriguing case for socialist metabolic cinema as a multisensory medianature that participates in and facilitates the metabolic process between humans and nature, as well as the social metabolism among humans, despite the period’s notorious ecological record. The film not only consciously moves away from the visual-centric model associated with capitalist consumerism by using the aural to rectify the once-aberrant visual but also demonstrates how romantic love, as one of the human senses, must be emancipated along with other senses through denouncing utilitarianism and commercialism and, subsequently, returning to need-based labor as the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between humans and nature.

Cultural Memory in the Context of the Art Episteme of Ukrainian Cordocentrism

The article attempts to comprehend the influence of cultural memory on the episteme of cordocentrism in the nation-building process in nowadays Ukraine, as well as to analyze the spontaneous activation and prove the effectiveness of the re-actualization of the gestalt of indigenous national consciousness, which manifests Ukrainian cordocentrism through the aesthetics of aísthēsis, and which, in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian hybrid war, becomes a reliable protection of cultural memory while preserving the sovereign existential unity of the nation. The activation of the updated art episteme in the domestic space coincides with the international search for alternatives to art forms that are derived from consumer capitalism, one of those alternatives being the paradigm conventionally named "New sincerity". This latter, stimulates cultural oscillation between the concepts of outdated, as of today, patterns of postmodernism and modernism. It is hypothesized that such transformations might allow the commodified society of consumerism to get rid of the limitations of the collective memory imposed onto it and cultivated by the market ideology of "paradigm wars" and the de-skilling of the art business in particular. These transformations might also allow the society to overcome the overwhelming civilizational crisis that has been much discussed in the recent decades in publications dedicated to art history and contemporaneity, as well as those dedicated to cultural and civilizational changes and strategies.

KAZUO ISHIGURO: THE INTERNATIONAL AS A THIRD SPACE

This article envisagesIshigurian fiction as a site of compromise wherelinguistic and non-linguistic ingredients are mobilized to engage with the international bookmarket and its exigencies. This paper, thus, addresses Ishiguros texts as commodities, and sets out to uncover the complex and intricate processes whereby the authornegotiateshis status as a language migrant, cognizant of the aestheticdilemmas inherent in World Literature as well as of the stakes involved in writing for a global audience. It will similarly undertake to interrogate the ambivalent position of Ishiguro as a Japanese-bornBriton, and to explore the way otherness translates in hisworks, while coping with the tensions inherent in hisbicultural profile itfurther examines the motivations of the Western prize machinery in establishing Ishiguro as a literarymegastar through the authentification of his oeuvre with a strinkingly lavish over-awardedness.Concurrently, it seeks to probe the hijacking of the majority- if not the totality- of his works by the mighty movie industry which perfecty and faithfully encapsulates the essence of capitalist consumerism. This recuperation inevitably calls into scrutiny the very nature and substance of Ishiguros fiction, besides interpellating us to the canibalizing tendencies of the entertainment business in the West, while at the same time problematizingIshiguros stancecaughtbetween marketability imperatives, audience expectations and authorial integrity.

Afterword

In this Afterword, I use the observations from the special issue 'Music, Affect and Politics' to discuss what I see are recurring questions in the studies of music and affect: (1) the tension between new materialism and historical materialism and its implications for theorizing the interrelations between music, sound, politics, and affect; and (2) the affective politics of music and sound as a field of ideological struggles. In doing that, I push further the reflection on affective politics of music in relation to the capitalist mode of production. Employing a Marxist analysis of affect’s circulation, affordances, and dispositions, I reflect on the ways authors in this issue consider the material realities of capitalist consumer society, class-based habitus, and commodified forms of life. I take a historically-informed, process-oriented approach to affect and put into dialogue the theory production and the sociopolitical condition of global capitalism that shape our epistemological approaches. This perspective, I argue, can led us to critical approach to affective politics of music in the interrelation between the micro- and macro-political and the much-needed critical dialogue between historical materialist and new materialist approaches.

The Contested Terrain of Sporting Consumption: Navigating Meaning, Identity, and Late Capitalist Marketing through Sneaker Customization

This discussion critically examines and questions assumptions about the meanings and motivations of sporting consumption. We argue that the practice of sneaker customization demonstrates the contested terrain of sporting consumption, wherein contemporary consumerism is characterized by a dynamic interplay between top–down structural determination (by mass commercial forces) and bottom–up creative agency (by everyday consumers). Based on in-depth interviews with 15 sneaker consumers, we narrate the complexities of late capitalist consumer culture through three overlapping “tensions” between the commercial sneaker industry and everyday sneaker consumers: (1) Sneakers as a vehicle to express individuality versus to demonstrate conformity; (2) Sneaker customization as a means of artistic expression versus being a commodity rationalized to maximize profit; (3) An affective versus instrumental attachment to sneakers. Overall, the analysis illuminates how the cultural and affective meanings that consumers attach to sneaker consumption operate; sometimes in conjunction with, more often in opposition to, but always in tension with the meanings that the sneaker industry attempts to embed through its ever-expansive means of marketing and advertising.

The Evolving Attitudes of Institutional Economists: From Growth to Degrowth

The growth imperative characteristic of consumer capitalism rests on continuous mass production, fueled by fossil fuels, legitimized by the assumption that wants are infinite. Institutionalists have generally attributed growth to technology, a manifestation of the community’s knowledge base applied to increasing throughput to produce goods. That same technology, however, may precipitate degrowth, a decline in the throughput making growth possible. The first section attributes the Great Acceleration to continuous mass production, requiring the corporate form of business enterprise. The second section explains the degrowth movement focusing on the work of George Kallis. Degrowth arose in response to the adverse effects of growth, providing an ecological critique of mainstream economics. Degrowth advocates minimizing throughput. The third section briefly traces the evolution of institutionalists’ attitudes towards growth, attitudes guided by the principles of instrumental valuation and social provisioning. The fourth section offers a conclusion, focusing on pecuniary emulation pushing people to live at the pecuniary standard, a standard that continues to rise with increases in throughput and innovation.

Raftland

‘Raftland’ floats at the spot between short story and prose poem, blurring and bridging the two to encompass an evocative work that addresses and explores plastic pollution in the world’s oceans as well as the far-reaching costs of rising and heating waters. It is a work of assemblages, a poetic piecemeal raft of the comings and goings of a newly flooded society whose degradation of language and livelihoods traces its way back to our current wanton anthropocentrism and consumer capitalism. A dystopic, speculative tale centring on a community forced to inhabit ever-moving raftworlds and continually prove their worth, it is a work that stresses humanity’s catastrophic engagements with the ocean in an effort to prompt renewed vigour towards greater awareness and respectful ontologies to both the planet and its greatest life-giving substance. It is a warning.

Discard Ecologies and the ‘Hyposubject’ in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007)

ABSTRACT This article posits the concept of excremental toxicity as a critical lens with which to explore the resistive and subversive ways in which pollution that is dumped onto precarious ecologies is reimagined in postcolonial writing beyond the norms of silencing that govern its distribution and police its visibility. Focusing on waste in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I analyze the novel’s construction of alternative decolonial and anti-capitalist configurations, affordances, and imaginaries of toxicity – both as substance caught in a nexus of racialized, neocolonial and settler-colonial, and consumer capitalist structures, as well as a modality of materialization that arbitrates on what appears in public perception as a legitimate field of mattering and what is displaced to the unseeable margins. These alternative configurations tackle toxicity’s invisibilization through strategies of externalization that seek to materialize toxic politics in various eco-somatic ways by bringing corporeality, particularly disabled, impaired, pathological corporealities to the forefront of cultural inquiry. Methodologically situating itself at the intersection of medical humanities, waste, and toxicity studies and drawing on Morton and Boyer’s formulation of the “hyposubject,” this article examines literary configurations of medico-juridical pathologies in the context of ecological devastation and contemporary neoliberal resurgences of racial imaginaries and extractivist practices.

National-Populism, Post-Truth, and the Logic of Postmodernism: A Multidisciplinary Insight into the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

2024 is said to be a decisive year for liberal democracy in the world. The national-populist phenomenon that has been on the rise in recent years occasions renewed and sustained academic debate on the existential challenges faced by liberal democracy. It is a paradigmatic assumption of the liberal mainstream that the rise of national-populist leaders and their constituency pose a fundamental threat to democratic survival. But are national-populism and the Western model of liberal democracy divorced in any essential way? If, as the liberals maintain, national-populism rests and thrives upon the post-truth condition of societal fragmentation and individual psycho-cognitive isolation characterizing contemporary society, we must investigate whether this condition is something foreign to liberal democracy and therefore removable as such. By mobilizing a multidisciplinary corpus, this article shows that postmodernism, defined as the cultural superstructure of consumerist capitalism, is what underpins and perpetuates the interrelated phenomena of infinitely increasing social fragmentation and individual isolation. In the most advanced contemporary stage, called “late postmodernity,” the subjects of Western consumerist capitalist societies are purely driven by a hedonist-narcissistic pleasure principle that defuses all potential for the radical contestation of the existing hegemonic power structure of the liberal-democratic state. The post-truth condition, of which national-populism is an outgrowth, poses no essential threat to liberal democracy as long as both are sustained and promoted, at the structural level, by the hegemonic mode of production.

Tales of Becoming: Borders and Posthuman Anxieties in Daisy Johnson’s "Starver" (2016)

This article aims at examining Daisy Johnson’s collection of short stories Fen (2014) and, most particularly, its opening piece “Starver”, through the lens of posthuman feminism by arguing that Johnson’s collection poses forward a relational ontology which refuses to consider human subjectivity as exclusively restricted to the confines of human bodies by blurring traditional boundaries as constitutive of oppositions such as nature/culture, human/non-human, male/female which have traditionally articulated anthropocentric worldviews. Johnson’s focus on the English Fenlands as a borderline, liminal topology mirrors contemporary preoccupations with the porosity and instability of allegedly firm borders and, by extension, of identity. Johnson’s collection ultimately interrogates the relationship between individuals and their environment, radically distressed by human intervention and capitalist consumerism, thus heading to the “sixth extinction” of the Anthropocene.

Educação da Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes como Transmodernização ao Consumerismo Capitalista

ABSTRACT Objective: to analyze the critical debates raised by the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (ENFF) in one of its courses, in order to highlight how this education fosters self-defense initiatives that marketing should acknowledge in consumerist discussions. Theoretical approach: the decolonial concept of transmodernity and Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed are used to base our analysis. Methods: with a decolonial perspective as our guiding epistemology, we collected data from an online course offered by ENFF. Initially, the authors viewed all videos individually, and subsequently, discussed the pre-analyses. The second round of analysis included coding the data, so we could reach categories of analysis. Results: an approach aligned with the pedagogy of the oppressed is adopted by ENFF’s, since it: raises awareness of its students about the hegemonic structure that oppresses them; criticizes the illusion this oppressive structure creates about benefiting all, emphasizing that a rupture is only possible if the oppressed are behind it; and proposes a path beyond this oppressive structure, specifically through agroecology. The education by ENFF can thus be interpreted as a transmodernization from capitalist consumerism, given it foments, from subalternized settings, self-defense awareness among its students, who come from oppressed contexts. Conclusions: consumerism has been scantly questioned in marketing. However, its activism has been hardly able to deal with the racism, sexism, and coloniality associated to this concept. By presenting a form of educational perspective that resides outside of capitalist principles, a new self-defense model can be considered in the search to protect individuals from market forces.

Theater of Science and Technology: The Film The Middleton Family and the Robot Elektro as Cultural Apparatuses of 1930s Consumer Capitalism

Theater of Science and Technology: The Film The Middleton Family and the Robot Elektro as Cultural Apparatuses of 1930s Consumer Capitalism

The Commodification of Cold War Ideologies: the Reception of Casals in Japan and the Sinophone World in the Post-Cold War Era

Abstract This article examines the reception of Pablo Casals, the Spanish cellist and humanitarian, in Japan, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong in the post-Cold War era from the perspective of consumer capitalism. It argues that although the Cold War ended in 1991, instead of being criticised, the Cold War ideologies, including communism, anti-communism, socialism, and humanitarianism, were intertwined with and consolidated by capitalism in the post-Cold War era. This article reveals how the legacies of Casals were interpreted differently in these places within the context of domestic and regional politics and discusses how the Cold War ideologies were commodified in the post-Cold War era. By conducting a multilateral dialogue between Japan and the Sinophone world, this article attempts to gain a clearer understanding of the geopolitical history of East Asia in the post-Cold War era from a musical perspective.

Searching for Black Santa: The Contested History of an American Holiday Tradition

ABSTRACT This article explores the contested history and complex politics of the Black Santa in the United States from the antebellum period to the present day. For white journalists and entertainers during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the blackface Santa reinforced white dominance and the supposed inferiority of Black people. From the 1910s into the 1950s, Black educators and civic reformers saw the ‘Negro Santa Claus’ as a way of elevating Black self-esteem and countering racist versions of the character. For some activists and business leaders, the ‘Civil Rights Santa’ that emerged in parallel with the postwar African American freedom struggle could promote ‘good interracial feelings in the community’, and for others he belonged on the frontlines of the battle for racial equality. The Black Power Santa or ‘Soul Santa’ who came in his wake served as a symbol of Black cultural pride and economic self-determination. Finally, the modern Black Santa works to reconcile the more confrontational politics of earlier iterations with a celebration of American multiracialism and corporate responsibility. Across time and space, these different versions of the Black Santa embody competing and, at times, contradictory racial ideologies and representational politics, providing an important window into the relationship between civil rights, cultural politics, and consumer capitalism in the modern United States.

Leftist ad-persons and their creative craft: the formation of the advertising field in Turkey from the 1960s to 1980s

ABSTRACT A socialist advertiser/ adperson sounds very much like a contradiction. However, Turkish advertising was formed as a “field” from the 1960s to late 1980s by left leaning intellectuals and literary figures associated with the dominant socialist political party of the time. While entrepreneurial and profit-oriented agents were significant initiators, the field was essentially shaped by leftist/ socialist adpersons along with established/ entrepreneurial agents and entered into competition with such profit-oriented actors. Such competition, combined at times with cooperation, led to the creation of a field in the Bourdieusian sense. Thus, analysing the formation of the field, we can go beyond conceptualizing adpersons as mere cultural intermediaries and understand advertising as a social space in which multiple capitals operate. This allows us to reflect on the un(der)theorized work of left(ists) in the making of consumer capitalism during the post war period in Turkey.

Scenographic ‘stuff’: attending to everyday objects in performance (and beyond)

ABSTRACT In part responding to our increasingly material world, this article presents scenographic strategies as a highly appropriate and effective means for cultivating an attentiveness towards everyday objects, or stuff. The centrality of physical matter within performances is garnering more credit, in correspondence with a growing critical, new materialist interest in the potential of non-human entities. In such discourse, objects usually perceived as passive or inert are instead recognised for their affectivity. This article takes a specific look at everyday objects that, caught up within capitalist commodification, are often solely valued for their ability to assist human action and yet can be seen to demonstrate aesthetic-affective potential – a potential that, as illustrated here, can be appreciated through scenography. Drawing on the philosophies of Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter, Maurizia Boscagli’s unruly stuff and Yuriko Saito’s everyday aesthetics, an original conceptual framework is developed and tested out on three examples of performance practice. This process of critical analysis foregrounds scenographic sensibilities – that orient spectators towards the latent vitalities, hybridity and ecologies of stuff – and reveals how alternative, attuned experiences, that interrupt consumer capitalist logic, can be fostered through performances as well as filtering out beyond them.

Eating the money: Diabetes and the embodiment of consumer culture

My research explores the relationship between metabolic health and the rise of capitalist food and labor systems, through interviews and long-term ethnographic research with Maya peoples of southern Belize. As work has been replaced with wage labor and farm foods with store-bought alternatives, diabetes has begun to affect Indigenous communities in Southern Belize. “Eating the money” earned by paid labor through consumption of commodity foods and accumulation of resources is seen to produce inequality and nutritional disease. The co-occurrence of diabetes with economic success represents the emergent and contradictory risks posed by integration into consumer capitalist economies. Concern over nutritional diseases like diabetes has led to reflexive critique of the deleterious health effects of modern food and labor relationships. Research participants’ narratives emphasize the nutritional consequences of consumer culture as well as the challenges of balancing health and economic concerns in a rapidly changing world. By engaging Maya paradigms of health as embodiment with social scientific literature on political ecology and cultural studies of food systems, this article reveals that diabetes is endemic to the commodification of food and work. These findings demonstrate the integral role of commodification and consumption-oriented cultural practices to the global rise of nutrition-related diseases.

Welcome to the shopping revolution! Commodifying selfhood and rearticulating consumer capitalism at the Metro Centre, Gateshead

Drawing on original archive material from the Tyne and Wear Archives, this article examines the sociological significance of the Metro Centre shopping mall, built in Gateshead in North East England in 1986, at the time the biggest in Europe. It explores how the Metro Centre marked a call to accept the new and ‘prevailing ideals’ of consumption and represented a key moment for the reformulation of selfhoods as consumer identity practices. Adopting Walter Benjamin’s notion of the ‘hollow mould’ of modernity, the article positions the Metro Centre as an embodiment and material form of wider social, political and economic shifts. Its geographical location at the epicentre of British de-industrialisation is highly significant and marks a key moment where citizens and consumer selfhoods were fused. The shifting discourses around consumerism that occurred during this time, against the backdrop of the increasingly populist ideology of Thatcherism, set the foundations for the emergence of a new neoliberal consumer citizen, who was promised choice, personal growth and wellbeing via consumerism. I will show how new neoliberal ideals of aspiration and meritocracy became interwoven into a new language of consumption that was heavily promoted by the Metro Centre. In fact, the Metro Centre was pivotal in promoting new forms of social exclusion and new articulations of global capitalist production. The article concludes by proposing that the Metro Centre came to embody new neoliberal notions of social ‘worth’, value and inclusion entwined with engagement in new processes and practices of consumption.

The War at Home: Photography, Political Violence, and Spectacle in the Russian Revolution of 1905

Abstract In early twentieth-century Russia, a disastrous war and social revolution shook the foundations of the imperial state, unleashing the press from censorship and demanding innovation in media coverage. At this very moment, new photographic technology was democratizing access and making high-quality reproductions affordable. This article explores how photography responded to and visualized the unprecedented political violence that engulfed Russia during the Revolution of 1905. Situating this “war at home” in a global context of early commercial and humanitarian photography of violence, it charts the emergence of distinctive visual regimes and spectatorial practices. As photographs made political violence visible within an unruly public sphere, they spotlighted some forms of violence and occluded others. Visual frames and narratives shaped new modes of representation and spectatorship, including regimes of commemoration, documentation, sensationalism, and forensics. This article opens with the most conventional photographic form, the studio portrait, and shows how it became imbricated with the political struggle and a forum for contesting the status of victim and martyr. The second section considers how the illustrated press crafted the terrorist bombing as a visual spectacle, using images with paratext to tell different kinds of stories. Shifting focus from the event to the body, the final section analyzes explicit photographs of the corpse. By exposing the violated body to the public gaze, these photographs posed a question fundamental to modernity, capitalism, and photography: who counts as fully human? This case study concludes with reflections on the categories of proximity and distance in the photography of violence. While the revolution was suppressed by 1907, it inaugurated a vibrant era of mass culture, capitalist consumption, and cultural pessimism, in which photography and film would play increasingly dominant roles.