In the chapter “Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption”, from their recent book Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose give a fine summary of the state of consumer/consumption theory.
It begins, appropriately, with a sketch of the profound ambivalence that has marked consumer studies since the early 80s, at least, but more generally since Benjamin. As Rose and Miller remind us, with the shift in focus from production to consumption, and the attention to the work and activity of the consumer-subject that this reversal implied, the characterization of capitalism as a hegemonic, top-down imposition of values has grown increasingly problematic.
“Many diagnoses of our ‘post-modern condition’ hinge upon debates about consumption: has consumption replaced production as the key to the intelligibility of our present; did the previous emphasis on production in social thought overlook the dependence of an economy of commodity exchange upon the simultaneous constitution of consuming pleasures; have consumption sub-cultures replaced class, region, religion, generation and gender as sources of interests and identifications? Alongside these debates has been an argument about subjectivity. It has been suggested that the perspective of consumption reveals features of our experience that were undervalued in most classical social theory - the active arts though [sic] which individuals shape their everyday lives with the materials provided for them by dominant economic, social and cultural forces; the role of subjectivities, pleasures and desires in the history of our present which is so often painted in the monotonous and sombre tones of state, domination, ideology and hegemony.” (114)
With this general opposition established, Rose and Miller turn to describing just how irreconcilable the subjective work of the consumer and the hegemonic prescriptions of the marketer appear to be.
“Yet there is a deep ambivalence underpinning many diagnoses, at least as they come to bear upon ‘the subject of consumption’, the individual who is imagined and acted upon by the imperative to consume. On the one hand, it is claimed that human beings, in engaging in acts of consumption and the relations surrounding consumption, achieve pleasures, exert powers, find meanings, construct diverse subjectivities and enact sociality in a creative and innovative manner. On the other hand, it appears that - to the extent that all these are construed as individual achievements, organized in a field whose dynamic is the quest for profit, structured in terms of wealth, culture and gender, shaped by a power relationship in which producers and their agents impose their meanings and values upon others - the pleasures, powers and meanings produced are, in crucial respects, false. The collective socialities are enacted at the price of turning a blind eye to the regimes of exploitation, illusion and exclusion that foster consumption, and the subjectivities so constructed are enfeebled or damaged.” (114-115)
That being said, Rose and Miller make it clear that their goal is less to “arbitrate between these two lines of argument” than “to make a contribution to the empirical bases of such debates, by examining a number of ways in which different images of the subject of consumption have operated internal to one element of the new ‘economy of consumption’: the shaping and advertising of products.” (115) Their interest will therefore confine itself to the “technical” features of the advertising-consuming process (115).
And this process, for Rose and Miller, is by and large a psychological one. “To understand this process, it is necessary to look beyond general shifts in cultural understanding or the imperatives of profit, and examine the ways in which the understandings of human individuality, personality and psychology elaborated by the psychological sciences have played a key role in the construction of consumption technologies.” (115)
Though the two authors intend to “look beyond” the fault line running through the discipline, their perspective nonetheless falls closer to De Certeau and Benjamin than to Adorno and Debord.
“For psychological expertise in advertising provides a site where we can explore the extent to which this has been less a matter of dominating or manipulating consumers than of ‘mobilizing’ them by forming connections between human passions, hopes and anxieties, and very specific features of goods enmeshed in particular consumption practices.” (115)
In contrast to those who find advertising to be a malicious tool for controlling “largely irrational or foolish” consumers, Rose and Miller prepare the reader for a more nuanced view.
“We abstain from a mode of analysis which links the unholy alliance of psychology, advertising and capitalism with a manipulation of desires in the name of private profit, social anaesthesia and commodity fetishism. We are concerned rather with what one might term the ‘productive’ features of these new techniques, the ways in which psychological knowledges have connected themselves up in complex ways with the technologies of advertising and marketing to make possible new kinds of relations that human beings can have with themselves and others through the medium of goods.” (116)
Though the essay in question focuses on the two decades following World War II, their perspective, and certainly their summary of the theoretical terrain, could just as well find application in the present.
That being said, Rose and Miller’s privileging of the psychological scene - i.e., the highly charged instance of the advertiser’s appeal to the consumer - is increasingly but a limited ‘moment’ in a more dispersed and more enduring process of consumer subjectification.
The so-called ergonomic turn of design has effectively extended the strategies of aesthetic appeal and identity to the product itself. Beyond the ad form’s brief, targeted solicitation of the consumer, products are now increasingly designed with ‘cues’ built right into them, to be ‘activated’ upon use, in settings and through willful consumer ‘activity’. Indeed, with the rise of firms like the Bressler Group, which offers “strategic product planning” services that wed branding strategies with an ergonomics-based user experience research methodology, we can no longer talk of advertising and consumer perception independently of product use and experience.
And yet, consumption studies of the kind described above have not, in my opinion, begun to seriously take into account the appearance of a new figure, the ‘user’, who cannot simply be reduced to a variation of the ‘consumer’. In fact, what Rose and Miller’s focus on psychology shows first and foremost is the insufficiency of the ad solicitation framework for understanding this new design paradigm and the culture politics that continue to shape its emergence.
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