consumption – Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com Informed reflection on the events of the day Sat, 14 Aug 2021 16:22:30 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.23 “Say Yes to the Dress” – Consumption and the Social Condition http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/05/%e2%80%9csay-yes-to-the-dress%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%93-consumption-and-the-social-condition/ http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/05/%e2%80%9csay-yes-to-the-dress%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%93-consumption-and-the-social-condition/#comments Tue, 28 May 2013 21:39:18 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=18937

“Say Yes to the Dress” portrays one of the existential dilemmas women in the age of consumer society face. It is an emotional rollercoaster of wonder, judgment, deliberation, budgeting, frustration and decision. “Say Yes to the Dress” is a reality-TV show on TLC. For some, the show might look like a scene straight out of Theodore Adorno’s nightmare of “mass deception,” the display of the human tragedy in a world of commodities. But “Say Yes to the Dress” also presents in 60-minute segments, why the critique of consumer culture misses the point: Commodities are more than the meaningless, exchangeable representations critical theory makes them out to be. Instead, commodities mean everything to people. We cry, laugh, scream, or fight over them and we triumph or fail through them.

“In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I [Iddo Tavory] have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition — the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in which social patterns set up these dilemmas that actors experience as crucial for their lives and how they define themselves.”

I have been following Jeff and Iddo’s project for a while, and I suggest that it will help to further the understanding of the social condition if we take seriously the daily dramas of consumption, both as comedy and tragedy. “Say Yes to the Dress” is one of these social dramas, based on the very premise that buying a wedding dress really matters, that people do not make their consumption decisions lightly.

Of course “Say Yes to the Dress” is an edited and selective social drama, following a similar script each episode. The bride comes into the wedding dress shop with her entourage (family and friends). The consultant clarifies the parameters of the desired dress, first with the bride alone: What does she want, what is her budget? Then, the two pick some options in a dressing room. The bride dresses, and the trial . . .

Read more: “Say Yes to the Dress” – Consumption and the Social Condition

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“Say Yes to the Dress” portrays one of the existential dilemmas women in the age of consumer society face. It is an emotional rollercoaster of wonder, judgment, deliberation, budgeting, frustration and decision. “Say Yes to the Dress” is a reality-TV show on TLC. For some, the show might look like a scene straight out of Theodore Adorno’s nightmare of “mass deception,” the display of the human tragedy in a world of commodities. But “Say Yes to the Dress” also presents in 60-minute segments, why the critique of consumer culture misses the point: Commodities are more than the meaningless, exchangeable representations critical theory makes them out to be. Instead, commodities mean everything to people. We cry, laugh, scream, or fight over them and we triumph or fail through them.

“In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I [Iddo Tavory] have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition — the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in which social patterns set up these dilemmas that actors experience as crucial for their lives and how they define themselves.” 

I have been following Jeff and Iddo’s project for a while, and I suggest that it will help to further the understanding of the social condition if we take seriously the daily dramas of consumption, both as comedy and tragedy. “Say Yes to the Dress” is one of these social dramas, based on the very premise that buying a wedding dress really matters, that people do not make their consumption decisions lightly.

Of course “Say Yes to the Dress” is an edited and selective social drama, following a similar script each episode. The bride comes into the wedding dress shop with her entourage (family and friends). The consultant clarifies the parameters of the desired dress, first with the bride alone: What does she want, what is her budget? Then, the two pick some options in a dressing room. The bride dresses, and the trial begins. She has to face her family and friends, who judge her dream dress, taking it apart. As this process goes on, personal choice becomes collective negotiation, a struggle between the self and its public perception. Tears of frustration and joy mix, culminating in the final decision for the “perfect” wedding dress. When the bride-to-be says, “Yes!” to the dress.

How we read the social drama that unfolds in “Say Yes to the Dress,” makes all the difference. Should we shrug at the superficiality of the act? Shake our heads over all the energy, money and emotions spent on the selection of a dress that is worn only for one day, that probably has thousands of look-a-likes around the country? Or, should we suspend our judgment and really try to understand what is going on here? Why do people fight for hours over dress length, color, beading and décolleté? One answer might be that the struggle over the perfect wedding dress is as much a struggle over what kind of bride one will be, what family one will have, what life one will live. “Say Yes to the Dress” from this perspective captures one of these crucial moments in life, when past and future meet in the events and choices of the present.

That “Say Yes to the Dress” airs on TLC, the Teaching and Learning Channel, seems like a practical joke, but it is more than that. It shows the social conditioning that goes into our daily, and not so daily, consumption dramas. Of course there is socialization in the very act of “really wanting” the “perfect” wedding dress. But this should not take away from the act itself by rendering it meaningless. Instead, it should sensitize us for what goes on in these personal and social dramas, for how they connect cultural desires, economic valuations and the weaving of the social fabric in one act of emotional decision-making. To look for the social condition in consumption, means taking people’s decisions seriously, because they do.

The problem for us consumers is not that consumption is fake. Instead consumption, like the buying of a wedding dress, is, for the lack of a better word, “real.” In today’s hyper-commodified world, the social condition of the society becomes one of ever-expanding choices, symbolic meanings, and experiences. This produces personal satisfaction, but also anxiety, because choosing wrong has serious consequences for our “selves” and our social being. Choice and anxiety become simultaneously problem and principle of consumption, a social condition worthy of critical, but also respectful attention.

]]> http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2013/05/%e2%80%9csay-yes-to-the-dress%e2%80%9d-%e2%80%93-consumption-and-the-social-condition/feed/ 3 Juliet B. Schor’s Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/01/book-review-%e2%80%9cplenitude-the-new-economics-of-true-wealth%e2%80%9d-by-juliet-b-schor/ http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/01/book-review-%e2%80%9cplenitude-the-new-economics-of-true-wealth%e2%80%9d-by-juliet-b-schor/#comments Fri, 07 Jan 2011 16:31:58 +0000 http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/?p=1574

“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.

In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” and continued in the follow up “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.

Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works

One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.

But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of . . .

Read more: Juliet B. Schor’s Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

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“Austerity” is a watchword in the media these days in both domestic and international economic news. The recent downturn, the story goes, has meant that governments can no longer sustain entitlement obligations or take on any more debt. So too must citizens reduce their expectations and assume more personal responsibility, accepting less in return.

In her book Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, economist and sociologist Juliet B. Schor presents a different narrative, one that suggests the current environment is an opportunity to live a more satisfactory, which is to say richer, life. She offers a solution to the “work-and-spend” dilemma of modern consumerism she initially described in her 1992 bestseller “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” and continued in the follow up “The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need” of 1999. Her thesis rests on four principles: freeing up time by reducing work hours outside the home, shifting that free time to more self-provisioning, developing low cost, low impact but high satisfaction consumption, and reinvesting in community and other forms of social capital.

Why “Business As Usual” No Longer Works

One of Schor’s main assertions is that we must find another way to define wealth and well-being because, in a phrase, there is no alternative. The supposedly endless cycle of material expansion that fueled economic growth as part of what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumers’ republic” of the postwar era has been exhausted in America at least. Double-digit unemployment, evaporating home equity, and eroding pension balances have taken the gloss off the consumer spending that accounted for between two-thirds and 70 percent of the US economy in recent years.

But more than that, business as usual (or as Schor refers to it “BAU”) has run into another, less malleable barrier: the environment. Mainstream economics has by and large failed to account for the environmental effects (so-called externalities) of growth, a charge many progressives will no doubt find familiar. In particular, Schor debunks the Environmental Kuznets Curve that projects a bell-shaped ratio of economics to environment, that poor nations pollute until they reach a certain level of wealth, which they then use to buy ecological amelioration. The math has never worked in reality, Schor asserts, as every scientifically accepted measure of environmental degradation continues to rise, threatening impending disaster.

Whether anyone not already attuned to Schor’s sensibility will be persuaded by “Plenitude” is debatable. Going back to the Progressive Era, “the good life” in America has been defined by the potential of an unlimited horizon of material comfort, a central ideological construct of modernity that is still hegemonic despite the strains of recent contradictions. Even those who embrace choices such as conscientious consumption of both the green and blue varieties may not be able to picture themselves canning vegetables and living in DIY yurts, two of Schor’s examples of the new economics of plenitude (which seem like very old-fashioned economics to me).

Indeed, the fundamentals of plenitude are largely compatible with austerity. Working less and therefore spending less seem to go hand in hand in either scenario, and we must take it on faith that because they are of our own choosing we will somehow enjoy them more. Of the four principles, the reactivation of community seems to be the most compelling. And to give Schor her due, many of the tactics of plenitude she describes are being practiced in local communities, such as Detroit and other inner cities, that have been abandoned by consumer society and left to their own devices. In that regard, “plenitude” may be in store for us all.

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