Consuming outside inside out

Check this out. Read it form top to bottom. It’s dead on. Authors Heath and Potter say what I’ve been trying to figure out since I was sixteen and a particularly critically minded teacher asked the class whether any of us could genuinely claim that we stood outside the mainstream. It all seemed so futile, no matter what you did you were always a part of it – even in being anti-mainstream, the mainstream held synonymous with consumer culture, you were still whoring yourself to some label or brand – you were still its progeny, you were still a consumer. In The Rebel Sell, the authors point out the error in conflating mass culture and consumer culture; we can’t set ourselves apart from the mainstream by merely consuming differently. Consumption is the dominant medium, and unless we’re willing to shed this, we are just a part of the dominant culture as the next poor dumb indoctrinated bloke. (Can we shed this? Are we fuct here by an ‘ought-to-actually-can clause’? Marx might cry out about the realization species being. Is this a shortcoming in Marxist analysis?) The ball is taken further, when they illustrate how our counter-mainstream consumptive practices only exacerbate the situation. Sigh.

Oh and I came to this link from a comment on this blog: Marginal Utility, maintained by author Rob Horning. This blog is extraordinary. I can only aspire to one-day write with the clarity and insight that Rob does on matters that seriously matter. Honestly, I came across this blog because one of his blog posts was an assigned reading in one of my classes.