University of Notre Dame

Department of Sociology
http://www.nd.edu/~soc/

Working Paper and Technical Report Series

http://www.nd.edu/~soc2/workpap/

Number 2003-07

In Search of The Good Life without Consumer Goods: Meaning and Resistance in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement Joseph D. Rumbo Department of Sociology University of Notre Dame Stephen Zavestoski Department of Sociology University of San Francisco

In Search of The Good Life without Consumer Goods: Meaning and Resistance in the Voluntary Simplicity Movement By Joseph D. Rumbo Department of Sociology University of Notre Dame And Stephen Zavestoski Department of Sociology University of San Francisco Submitted to: Journal of Consumer Culture Professor George Ritzer, Editor University of Maryland-College Park

WORKING DRAFT: Please do not QUOTE or CITE Without authors permission: jrumbo@nd.edu smzavestoski@usfca.edu

ABSTRACT The struggle over meaning in a consumer society is at once psychological and cultural. Its stakes involve a host of adverse consequences or social-psychological costs required to maintain consumer lifestyles. To alleviate these costs, practitioners of Voluntary Simplicity (VS) shift the basis of their self-identifications from the pursuit of consumer goods to intangibles such as interpersonal relationships and mental, physical, and spiritual well being. As they also reject hegemonic meanings of the self as a consumer, we contend that VSers engage in a form of resistance against the culturally pervasive ideology of consumerism. We explore the psychic terrain on which this resistance takes place as a struggle to cultivate authentic meanings of selfhood and well being in ways not defined by consumerism. Although resistance movements against consumerism typically begin with the reclaiming of psychic space, social change is not likely unless they move beyond the individual level to effect macrosocial changes in consumption practices. We argue that decentralized forms of anti-consumerist resistance such as VS will continue to be unsuccessful until they can forge a collective identity oriented toward larger issues of social and environmental justice.

I.

INTRODUCTION Many commentators have been critical of the influence of consumerism on the social-

psychological and cultural fabric of contemporary life. Perhaps the most visible of these critics has been Jurgen Habermas (1984), who describes corporate entities increased permeation into psychic, private, and public spaces as colonization of the lifeworld of everyday experience. We contend that, by controlling the production of meanings that circulate throughout these various spaces, the hegemonic forces behind free market consumerism selectively shape perceptions of self, of others, and of society in general. This is not to say that the consumer is a cultural dupe whose every move is at the whim of corporate elites (Slater 1997). Consumers also exercise agency through meaning-making efforts of their own. That these meanings can only be understood in the context of dominant meanings produced by markets, however, is what ultimately makes the development of a meaningful and stable self problematic for the individual in a consumer society. The mere act of carving out ones existence has become increasingly complicated in information-rich capitalist economies, in large part because the process of developing and maintaining an authentic self has become inextricably linked to fulfilling ones role as a consuming participant in the seemingly boundless world of marketplace goods and services. Although the rising centrality of this connection provides consumers with ready-made pathways for self-discovery and identity construction, the cumulative social-psychological toll paid by those who wish to maintain a consumer lifestyle illuminates a dark underside to consumerism; with consumers engrossed in a multifaceted and constantly renewed struggle for psychic survival (Lasch 1984) amidst a sea of selling messages exhorting them to define themselves in myriad ways through consumption. We contend that Voluntary Simplifiers (VSers)those who

choose to consume below their means for a variety of reasons we discuss belowaim to alleviate the pressures and stresses related to this struggle by developing non-consumption strategies for life enhancement. In the cluttered advertising environment of today (Goldman and Papson 1994, 1996; McAllister 1996; cf. Rumbo 2002), the struggle for psychic survival consists of many battlefronts where consumers must filter, process, and/or avoid selling messages that are mostly superfluous and unsolicited. At its core, this struggle involves the problem of meaning in consumer society; of what meanings marketers wish to convey as they attempt to position their goods and services within the consumers mind, and of the negotiated meanings that emerge when these messages are interpreted by their targeted recipients. As marketers tend to portray the goods and services they promote as indispensable vehicles for the realization of such virtues as authenticity, self-worth, happiness, and fulfillment (Cf. Zavestoski 2002), the struggle over meaning in consumer society also extends to the self-concepts and identity matrices of individual consumers. This portrayal is theorized herein as a hegemonic consumer self that is analogous to a fragmented postmodern version of Lears (1994) insular and highly privatized separate striving subject. The various permutations of this self can be seen as different interiorized modes of subjectivity (Langmann 1992, p.58) that are artfully linked by marketers in selling messages purporting that the consumption of a good or service will enhance ones well-being and self-image. By using these subjectivities to segment consumers into narrowly defined market clusters, marketers cumulatively orient the perceptions of consumer selves toward seeing certain types of goods or services as necessary components of their identities, thus preparing the lifeworld of the self for colonization.

As propagated by the majority of media channels large and small, the production of a hegemonic consumer self also adds a profoundly cultural dimension to the struggle over meaning in consumer society. In addition to framing consumption as the means for the cultivation of selfhood and articulation of identity, marketers further legitimize the widely held belief that consumption should be the primary locus of social comparison and status display. They exhibit an insatiable appetite for mining the reservoir of contemporary cultural meanings to make symbolic connections between the various wares they promote and the many popular cultural trends that have become part of the everyday lived experiences of consumers. Drawing from such an unbounded range of cultural references enables marketers to align various goods and services more closely with the commonly held cultural repertoires of consumers (Leiss, Kline and Jhally [1986] 1997, p.193). Armed with the staggering amount of meaning-making power at the disposal of giant corporate entities, these references enable marketers to target selves for colonization by creating new constellations of meanings that revolve around the goods and services they promote. This inquiry examines the psychological and cultural terrain over which meaning is negotiated in American consumer society. It employs a critical synthesis of social psychology and the hegemony theory of Antonio Gramsci (1971) with postmodern notions of fragmentation and simulated realities to hone in on the issue of meaning with respect to selfhood and identity in contemporary consumer society. We are doing this to critically examine two key questions of social-psychological and cultural relevance for scholars of marketing and consumption: 1) As part of the struggle over meaning in consumer society, what are some of the main factors that lead people to accept or reject a consumer lifestyle?; and 2) How can resistance movements

against consumerist meanings move beyond the individual (or psychic) level to form a politically efficacious social movement? A cursory assessment of the social-psychological costs of dealing with marketing communication and maintaining a consumer lifestyle will follow this introduction. Next, the phenomenon of Voluntary Simplicity (VS) is explored to illustrate an instance in which marketers hegemonic definitions of a consumer self may be recognized, contested, and ultimately supplanted in favor of less materialistic strategies for the cultivation of an authentic self. In addition to evaluating the prospects for widespread social changes in consumption practices that can emerge from anti-consumerist movements such as VS, the remainder of the paper will discuss how, in the context of an organized social movement, the resistance of meaning can move from the psychic realm to become a culture-wide perceptual shift that alters predominant orientations toward consumption practices. II. THE SOCIAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL COSTS OF CONSUMER LIFESTYLES The prevailing wisdom of marketplace proponents holds that the abundance of goods and services available in capitalist economies offers greater freedom of choice for consumers. In this consumerist democracy, every purchase is said to constitute a vote for ones preferred consumables, thereby serving as some sort of proxy for personal and political empowerment. However, critics rightly point out that consumer freedoms do not occur magically, isolated from their larger socioeconomic contexts. This consumerist notion of marketplace freedom runs the risk of conflating freedom with liberty, a word that came to be understood in Western philosophy as freedom without constraint. In actuality, evidence of constraints is ubiquitous in a world rife with socioeconomic injustice and environmental degradation. The prices required to ensure the freedoms offered by consumer markets are paid by a host of subjugated others under global

capitalism, be they sweatshop workers, service-sector laborers, or nonhuman life forms (Cf. Rumbo 2000). By conceiving of freedom as something magically guaranteed by the invisible hand of market supply and demand, conventional economics has failed to account for the social-psychological costs of maintaining a consumer lifestyle (Cf. Lasch 1979, 1984; Schwartz 1994). In an effort to remedy the limited ontological status of economic costs to include those costs which cannot be measured in dollars and cents, this section provides a cursory overview of the social and psychological costs that lay beyond the purview of most economists. It is hoped that this will inform a more exhaustive conception of market freedom in capitalist economies. Mainstream economics refers to costs that cannot be measured directly as opportunity costs, which refers broadly to those things that are given up or forsaken by the consumer in order to consume some good or service. However, the opportunity costs they often overlook encompass expenditures of time, energy, and/or material resources that in some way relate to performing the many physical and mental tasks required of consumers. Such costs refer to shopping, consuming, and all of the ancillary activities related to seeking, buying, and maintaining consumer goods; including the mental processing of selling messages that marketers deliver to us through a variety of media and strategies. More importantly, these costs also include the many socially and psychologically harmful consequences not accounted for by most economists; consequences that arise when consumers relentlessly pursue a consumer lifestyle with its requisite other-directed cultivation of individuation and social status display (Cf. Reisman 1950). These and other costs point toward inherent drawbacks to the unbridled freedoms of consumer society. For many consumers, the costs of pursuing market freedom may exceed its rationally calculated rewards, thus doing more to degrade rather than enhance their quality of life.1 In response to this overabundance of consumption-related costs, VSers tend

to see the efforts necessary to sustain a meaningful self in consumer society as less and less worth the investment of their time and energy. The Iron Cage of Consumerism Some critics of consumerism contend that the unrestrained pursuit of market freedom can impede the development of a healthy and authentic self. Indeed, there is mounting evidence from anti-consumerist movements such as VS that a preoccupation with such freedom can leave numerous basic needs unmet. According to psychologist Barry Schwartz (1994), the pursuit of market freedom often impedes the path toward some of the most fulfilling and intrinsically valuable aspects of human life: By embracing the freedom of the marketplace in all aspects of our lives, we find that many of the things we value most deeplymeaningful, satisfying work; intimate, compassionate friends, family and community; real education; significant spiritual and ethical commitment; political involvement; and even, ultimately, material well-being are increasingly difficult to achieve.2 (P. 10) Schwartz (1994) debunks market freedom as an illusory concept. He contends that our pursuit of unlimited economic (and social) freedom has paradoxically turned modern life into an iron cage (p. 24); suggesting that Webers ([1904] 1998) iron cage is as applicable to contemporary consumption practices as it has been to rationalized systems of capitalist production (Cf. Ritzer 1996). As a central component of the consumers economic socialization, the alleged myth of marketplace freedom may mask the use of consumerism by market forces as an implement of homogenization and totalitarian social control (Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 1972; Marcuse 1964; Ewen 1976). The homogenization of consumer selfhood also serves a rational economic function in that it is vital to the stability of the marketplace. If consumers preferences were truly exogenous to markets, markets would be unable to respond to the complexity, spontaneity and

unpredictability of such heterogeneous desires. Instead, marketers ensure the survival of markets by generating a wide selection of lifestyle-based market clusters, each consisting of similarly situated consumers who tend to perceive their marketplace engagement as an exercise of freedom. In this sense, it may be argued that possessing market freedom requires that consumers embrace the ideological confines of consumerisms iron cage; a cage that is socially constructed in part through the development of a seductive type of false consciousness. This consciousness leads participants in consumer society to accept hegemonic definitions of the self as a consumer while morally divorcing themselves from the adverse social and environmental consequences of their consumption practices. This is not to say that the consumer is entirely devoid of agency. As economic actors, consumers are free to exercise their own agency through purchase choices, even if this freedom is delimited within the sphere of consumerism. Although this iron cage may not be entirely dominant and totalizing, its social-psychological, cultural, and economic pressures invariably demand that we think and act like consumers. As practice, this is manifest in the expenditures of physical energy required of market actors in order to perform the many activities and functions involved in maintaining a consumer lifestyle. At the level of meaning, consumerism situates consumers in a struggle to selectively apportion precious psychic space to planning and executing these activities and functions, including the processing of increasing numbers and types of marketing messages. Faced with greater time pressures and conflicting role demands, the many duties required of the consumer extend beyond consuming at the point of purchase to encompass such disparate activities as seeking product information (especially for more expensive and durable goods), comparing prices, managing ones credit, and maintaining ones possessions in working

condition. These requirements also include a host of obscured and/or hidden costs that exemplify what Ritzer (1996, p.121-142) refers to as the irrationality of rationality, such as waiting at checkout lines, returning defective or unwanted items, disputing incorrect merchant charges, and navigating tedious customer service voicemail trees. In its more sinister manifestations, these hidden costs extend to dealing with predatory or deceptive merchant practices (Blumberg 1989), pursuing illusory savings of time and/or money, engaging in demeaning scripted interactions with employees (Hochschild 1983), and spotting deceptive marketing techniques. These and other hidden costs related to consumption cast doubt upon the assumption of conventional economists that consumers are always rationally oriented toward maximizing rewards and minimizing costs. They suggest a shift in the traditional role requirements that define consumer-producer relations toward a postmodern cultural logic that is markedly more irrational, atomizing, and seamless than its modern predecessor (Jameson 1984; Cf. Ritzer 1996, p.153-159).3 To maintain a consumer lifestyle and, more importantly, to protect ones psychic space, this cultural logic requires the postmodern consumer to perform the aforementioned duties while navigating an oversaturated marketing communications environment that is replete with a perceptually taxing array of often indistinguishable sign values (Baudrillard [1972] 1988; Gabriel and Lang 1995; Rumbo 2002). Meaning, Marketing, and Making Distinctions under Postmodernity In this postmodern world of advertising clutter, the proliferation of an economy of sign values is held to be a central feature of the shift from the production to the hyperreal simulation of reality.4 The blurring of distinctions between reality and hyperreality in this fastpaced economy of signs problematizes the interpretation of meaning for consumers. Similarly,

the interpenetrating issues of meaning and identity under postmodernity often demand that consumers distinguish between a putatively real or authentic self and the market-driven modes of subjectivity through which consumer selves construct their often multiple and conflicting identities. As culturally available permutations of the hegemonic consumer self, the construction of such identities is also ideologically laden.5 Accordingly, the contested viewpoint advanced by cognitive sociologists and others that culture is manifest in peoples heads (DiMaggio 1997, p.272; Cf. Shore 1996) makes the struggle over meaning in consumer society more than a cultural iron cage. It is also a mental cage wherein meaning is selectively distilled through economically socialized and culturally framed mental fields that reinforce hegemonic notions of consumer selfhood (Zerubavel 1991, p.122, 15-17). DiMaggio borrows the term schemata from psychological research and rephrases it in a more cultural light as both representations of knowledge and informationprocessing mechanisms (p.269). These schemata resonate with more critical approaches to cultural studies and social psychology in that they speak to the taken-for-granted cultural and ideological assumptions undergirding the normative social arrangements and hegemonic definitions of selfhood that prevail under free market consumerism.6 The information-processing function of schemas is best illustrated by describing schemas as lenses or frames we employ to make sense of social situations. The importance of the concept lies in the way that our schemas have come to be dominated by the normative practice of selfconstruction through consumer goods. In other words, the lenses through which we view the world increasingly make sense of that world in terms of consumer goods and their meanings. Of course, as the dominant schemas of consumerism normalize the construction and conveyance of the self through consumer goods, these normative lenses also affect how we make sense of the

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self. Breaching this consumer normativity is considered deviant. In understanding the world through such schemas, we begin to supplant the schemas that may have been used to interpret meanings in non-consumerist terms. Restoring a non-consumer self as a meaningful cultural schema is one of the challenges of VS that we discuss later. The market-driven availability of certain cultural schemata compels many individuals to adopt cognitive filters as a way of navigating the perceptually daunting universe of marketing and consumption-related information. These filters represent coping mechanisms, such as ad avoidance strategies (Cf. Speck and Elliott 1997), that function to buttress the psyche against the colonizing impulses of omnipresent corporate selling messages. The sophisticated and elusive mindset of this postmodern consumer has required marketers to develop new strategies for cutting through the sea of advertising clutter to successfully deliver selling messages (Rumbo 2002). The more emotive and visceral these strategies become, the more clear it is that meaning in marketing communication is not reducible to a strictly cognitive understanding. The negotiation of meaning between marketers and their target audiences is also dynamic and ongoing, as is the case when these new strategies pass through gaps in the protective cognitive filters of recalcitrant and jaded consumers. These gaps illuminate failures in the consumers existing ad avoidance strategies (Cf. DiMaggio 1997:272). Such perceptual shortcomings are often exposed when marketing strategies create a seamless interplay between a selling message and other aspects of real life that enables that message to pass through the filters of its targeted recipients. Among visual media, these strategies include more deceptive and/or intrusive practices like camouflaged ads, product placements (McAllister 1996, p.104-130), the use of loud noises, more fast-paced and violent imagery, other distortions of time, space, and reality, and exaggerated realist conventions that simulate common scenarios from everyday

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life (Goldman and Papson 1994, p.26-27). Consumers must also employ cognitive filters when sifting through marketing communication from other media; including camouflaged junk mail that appears to contain a check or that does not list a return address, telemarketing, pop-up browser ads, spam emails, and place-based ads designed to seize the attention of presumably captive audiences (e.g., outdoor ads, ads in bathroom stalls, ads in buses, doctors offices, etc.). When one accounts for all of the avenues used by marketers to deliver selling messages, the psychic costs of being a consumer encompass the innumerable and often painstaking processes through which the meaning of marketing communication is continually renegotiated to remedy perceptual gaps and refortify the consumer self against new marketing tactics. Of course, our model of the consumer assumes that, in order to protect the sanctity of ones selfhood and simplify ones life, many (if not most) consumer actions are dedicated to warding off market colonization rather than inviting it. Our model also considers that many of the drawbacks in the struggles over meaning and selfhood in a consumerist hyperculture may arise when its costs exceed human psychobiological limits (Bertman 1998). The success of consumerism, however, depends on individuals experiencing their myriad consumption-related acts not as psychic struggles, but as information gathering vital to the exercise of agency in the marketplace. For most consumers, the constant intrusions into daily life by marketing messages are uncritically (and perhaps eagerly) embraced as perceived opportunities to acquire necessary consumption-related information. It seems that this mindset is better characterized as the voluntary complexity of todays information-seeking consumer society rather than as VS (Rudmin and Kilbourne 1996). Perhaps the ultimate contradiction of the consumerist hegemony lies in the fact that consumers have welcomed many of these intrusions into their lives. Consistent with Gramscis

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(1971) notion of hegemony, the meaning-making power of ideologies such as consumerism goes beyond the ability to produce false consciousness among consumers. In order to procure consent on behalf of the dominant capitalist ruling order, the ideology of consumerism also thrives beneath the level of consciousness (Marx and Engels 1964) to naturalize the consumer way of life and the main taken-for-granted assumptions upon which it rests. By perceiving the self as being free to define his/her own marketplace preferences, todays consumer sees many of these costs as opportunities, and the assaults of marketers on the psyche as mere background clutter to be dealt with on an individual basis. This individualistic orientation places the responsibility for any negative consequences solely on the rationally calculating and sovereign consumer who, it is maintained, freely chooses the extent to which he/she participates in consumerism. Consuming the Self: Affluenza and Addiction As these negative consequences inevitably spiral out of control for some consumers, the more alarming personal costs of maintaining a consumer lifestyle extend to a host of maladaptive consumptive disorders that can impede the development of a healthy and authentic self; many of which have become more widespread over the last thirty years. Indeed, certain trends point toward the emergence of consumptive disorders as a major problem facing consumer society, including rising incidences of credit card debt (Ritzer 1995), compulsive shopping (which is now just a click away for PC-owning consumers), shoplifting, and other illegal or deviant consumer behaviors. These developments offer troublesome empirical evidence against the taken-forgranted assumptions of free market consumerism. Whereas signs of an unhealthy relationship between consumers and the things they consume may be explained by hegemony theorists as a problem of consciousness, they are clinically labeled by psychologists as addictions. Such a definition is advanced by Schwartz

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(1995, p.157), who likens the consumption of market goods and services to that of narcotics in that the consumer receives diminishing returns of pleasure from additional increments of consumption. When the pleasure the consumer initially experiences from consuming something gives way to a new homeostatic state of comfort, the novel pursuit of what one wants gives way to the routinized quest to fulfill ones needs (p.155,161; cf. Scitovsky [1976] 1992). With respect to marketing and self-commodification, Wexler (1983, p.124) contends that consumers engulfed in an economy of corporate signs may be afflicted with a symbolic addiction that decontextualizes meaning and confuses, through incorporation, internal desire with external object, person and symbol. Perhaps the pathos of overconsumption is best illustrated in the rising prominence of debt counselors, who specialize in helping afflicted consumers to reexamine their own beliefs and assumptions about financially and psychologically harmful consumption practices in order to impose limits upon their spending habits. As higher income levels tend to have more disposable income than lower ones, consumptive psychopathologies stand to have a disproportionately greater impact on bourgeois wage earners (Wexler 1983, p.123-126).7 Indeed, the growing upper-middle class phenomenon of affluenza provides evidence that a preoccupation with material rewards often emerges in tandem with an obsessive quest for career success (Cf. Linder 1970; Wachtel 1983; ONeill 1997). For example, ONeills ethnography of Milwaukee area professionals reveals that an overemphasis on the pursuit of material rewards has left many aspiring corporate climbers feeling as if their lives had mostly become meaningless and unfulfilling. The downshifters who chose to leave the corporate world experienced a crisis of self-meaning in which socially constructed definitions of the self as a consumerand as a requisite bourgeois wage earner managed to obscure the path toward self-discovery.

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The Social Costs of Consuming The aforementioned discussion of consumptive disorders illustrates an inherent contradiction in consumer society. If the costs of consuming are wholly psychological, then its prices are merely personal ones to be paid on an individual basis. Those individuals who experience pain and/or loss due to their failure to play the consumption game successfully are solely responsible for facing the consequences. This is certainly consistent with the individualistic view of selfhood advocated by American and now global capitalism, and it would tell the whole story if our consumption practices took place in some pre-social vacuum insulated from larger social and environmental consequences. However, a consumer society marked by a privatized competition to display status and project socially desirable images through consumption must inevitably entail some social costs as well. These costs derive from the culturally pervasive assumptions and beliefs about consumption practices that undergird the hegemonic construction of meaning in consumer society. For some critics, a culture that consistently fails to imagine a way of living without most of the requisite trappings of consumerism exhibits a deeply rooted pathos that is at once asocial, depoliticized, and dehumanizing. Richard Wilk (2001) even suggests that In a sense we are all like crack addicts in a consumer society. Although Wilk concedes that consumption can serve as a means for self-expression and the strengthening of social bonds, he also notes that wemake choices that are immediately or ultimately self-destructive, that erode or sever our connections with family and friends, and cause misery and pain to others in our communities (p.252). Pathologizing widely held attitudes toward consumption practices runs the risk of being labeled impractical, idealistic, ascetic, or even Draconian. However, if one could assume an

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extra-societal vantage point from which to examine the worldview that reifies our consumption practices, it might appear glaringly self-indulgent and narcissistic (Cf. Lasch 1979). This hyperindividualistic consciousness is even more apparent when compared with that of more traditional and indigenous cultures that are based on holistic relationships with human and nonhuman others (Cf. Weigert 1997, p.14). Although a perspective outside of consumer society is only attainable hypothetically, imagining such a vantage point may be useful in helping to illustrate how our reified way of life has contributed to the erosion of meaningful civic participation, social interaction, and close interpersonal ties. In other words, it may shed light on how consumerism has affected our relationships with the significant and generalized others in our world (Mead [1934] 1962).8 This hypothetical vantage point may also bring into relief the connection between the unexamined assumptions and practices that pervade consumer consciousness. Consumers are active if not always knowing participants in the commodification of some of the most intrinsically valued feelings for others, such as love, friendship, empathy, acceptance, belonging, and community. Despite the fact that consumers claim to see through the facile promises of marketing messages that attempt to simulate these feelings, many still end up pursuing them through consumption as if they were one purchase away. More significantly, the time and energy expended in order to maintain consumer lifestyles must come at the expense of time and energy devoted to family, friends, neighbors, and community. Note the irony: By consuming to fit into particular social groups or classes, the consumer may at the same time be expending so much time and energy as to jeopardize the relationships that he/she values most. But consumers deal with this dilemma creatively. After all, time and energy spent consuming to fit in socially can also serve to maintain better

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relationships with friends, family, and community. Marketing professionals who give consumers opportunities to sustain social relationships through consumption are keenly aware of this. Additionally, much shopping is a social experience in itself; a time when friends or family members bond through the ritual of consumption. At the extreme, shopping can be seen as an act of love for another (Miller 1998). Some objects, such as free trade coffee, are consumed as a way of doing ones part to protect indigenous cultures. We can also consume in ways that benefit breast cancer survivors, AIDS patients, families of victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and so on. While such consumption may take away from the time and energy needed to nurture important social relationships, consuming has also become a way of expressing such relationships. So while we may direct our self-presentations toward higher-income reference groups, thus pitting us against each other in a competition to upscale our consumer lifestyles (Schor 1998, p.105-107), such competition functions as a way of expressing the importance of certain relationships, while also conferring a more desirable image and social status. While some celebrants of consumerism see this as a perfectly acceptable way of nurturing social relationships (Twitchell 2002), others wonder whether they result in ephemeral and vicarious connections with others that supplant authentic and meaningful ones (Kotlowitz [1999] 2000). Others see technologically mediated interactions with real or virtual others as increasingly replacing face-toface interactions.9 Still others wonder whether, in a consumer society, real civic participation gives way to voting for ones preferences through purchase decisions (Ewen 1992; cf. Gabriel and Lang 1995, p.176). Regardless of ones perspective, there are ample signs that these shifts have not been embraced by all members of consumer society. Indeed, evidence of cracks in the

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shiny veneer of consumerism is furnished by thosesuch as VSerswho have opted for nonconsumptive strategies for the pursuit of authenticity and fulfillment. III. THE SEARCH FOR MEANING IN THE VS MOVEMENT The extensive social-psychological costs born by consumers in a consumer society lead some individuals to experience a crisis of meaning. Zavestoskis (2002) ethnographic study of VSers, for example, found that resistance to consumerisms promise of fulfillment and happiness through material goods emerges out of experiences of inauthenticity. VSers seek, instead, to cultivate the experience of an authentic self through interpersonal relationships and the development of emotional and spiritual attachments. VS, in other words, is a move toward a cultural schema in which a non-consuming self is sought through an emphasis on personal relationships, spirituality, and intellectual pursuits. But what are the implications of such a move? When individuals seek to find bases of self-definition other than the material goods offered to them through the market system, what are the consequences? Or, put differently, what are the forces keeping more people from making such a shift? The answer to the first framing of the question, we contend, has to do with the social-psychological costs entailed in making such a move. To seek self-meaning through nonmaterial means places individuals at the margins of consumer society. How, then, do individuals who make this move sustain it? What are the obstacles to retaining the psychological space they have wrestled from the hegemonic control of marketers? We will explore these questions in turn. But first, understanding how resistance to consumerist meaning places individuals at the margins of society suggests an answer to our second framing of the question abovewhat are the forces keeping more people from making such a shift? As long as the social-psychological costs of making such a move are greater than, or are perceived to be greater than, the costs of

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constructing and maintaining a self through consumer goods, individuals will choose the latter. Choosing the former demands that individuals cultivate presentations of self through nonconsumptive strategies. Unless these strategies are acknowledged by other social actors, the individual is likely to face a crisis of self-meaning. The Consumer Lifestyle: Onus or Opportunity? Until now, we have portrayed individuals in the consumer society as targets of the constant barrage of marketing messages issued by corporate interests through an ever-increasing array of media channels. In addition, we have implied that navigating a universe of consumption-related information places a significant psychological and social burden on individuals. Yet what we describe as burdens, some perceive as valuable opportunities for acquiring the cultural competency needed to sustain a meaningful social existence as a consumer. In fact, many people actively seek more marketing information than is available passively. People will pay an entrance fee to auto shows, wedding shows, boat shows, home shows, garden shows, and other types of product-based exhibitions. What do they get for their money? They get what they must perceive as valuable information about new products and other consumer goods and services. The fact that people seek out this information suggests marketing messages may not always be burdens, and in fact can be desirable commodities in and of themselves. Indeed, any time a consumer pays for the privilege of wearing clothing that doubles as an advertisementas evidenced by the popularity of clothing bearing the Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Abercrombie and Fitch, Nike, and Reebok labelsshe/he demonstrates that self-commodifying advertising is often perceived to be an opportunity rather than a burden.10 We explain this apparent counterexample to our argument by drawing on the Meadean perspective of interaction, which holds that meaning lies in the response of the other. It is not the

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intended meaning of our actions or presentation of self that makes interaction possible. Rather, it is the shared meaning that is established when others in the social context respond in anticipated ways. Because consumer goods serve as primary vehicles for establishing and conveying shared meanings in consumer society, choosing not to consume an item typically lacks the ability to convey socially recognized meanings about the self. We often tend to communicate messages about ourselves more through the things we do, such as consume, than through what we choose not to do. Given this, voluntarily subjecting oneself to marketing pressures makes considerably more sense. The perceived burden of failing to create a meaningful self through socially expected ways (i.e., material goods) makes subjecting oneself to marketing messages worth the burden. Without the meaning the individual is able to derive from the marketing message, she/he frequently runs the risk of failing to construct meaningful self-representations that elicit the desired responses from social others. In other words, mass-marketed consumer identities represent a form of almost universal currency. Choosing to engage non-consumer-based identities, therefore, is like trying to exchange a form of currency that is not recognized by consumer society. If non-consumer-based identities do not get validating responses from others, such identities become extremely difficult to maintain. Motivational Bases of Voluntary Simplicity Engaging in Voluntary Simplicity--or any other non-consumption-based strategy for defining oneself--introduces the potential for a crisis of self that poses as great a burden as managing the psychic space marketing messages constantly colonize. This creates a strictly selfish incentive for abandoning consumer goods as the primary means of self-definition. Before accepting this explanation as the primary motivation for adopting a VS lifestyle, considering

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alternatives might be worthwhile. For example, concern with how ones consumption habits impact others might also provide a motive for abandoning the consumer lifestyle (Shaw and Newholm 2002). And yet, in a global economy, these impacts occur beyond the immediate purview of most consumers. As Wilk (2001) points out, Because affluent people are so far removed from the consequences of their consumption, conventional social and moral controls seem to have little force. Even with the best intentions, most people simply have no access to the information they would need to make moral choices about their own consumption (p.256). Even with the best intentions and the requisite knowledge, there is reason to believe peoples habits of consumption will persist. Such habits, after all, provide the basis of meaning in peoples lives. Newholm and Shaw (2002), for example, found that even self-proclaimed ethical consumers occasionally make consumption decisions they know result in outcomes that violate their moral standards. Despite such cognitive dissonance and moral ambiguity, people choose what is comfortable, familiar, and socially meaningful even if they know it also causes discomfort or pain for others. This justification for choosing VS is essentially framed herein in moral terms. In other words, the choice not to consume certain things is a moral choice. While this may represent a valid motivational basis for particular individuals to choose VS, as we discuss below, it is often insufficient for generating the type of collective identity that precedes collective action (Poletta and Jasper 2001). In addition, anti-consumption messages that rely on moral exhortations have traditionally been dismissed as holier than thou approaches that may even have the effect of fetishizing consumer goods that are morally off-limits more desirable. Witness the demand for drugs, or, if the addictive properties of narcotics make the comparison unfair, consider the black market for the trade of endangered species.

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Thompson (2000) elaborates this argument by using the example of sex. For Thompson, marketers are keenly aware that sex sells. He argues: Though it is tempting to say that it sells despite our puritanical view of sexuality, the truth may be that it sells because of our puritanical view of sexuality (p.74). Condemning consumer goods on moral grounds, in other words, may simply make them more desirable. Consequently, the more we attempt to dismantle American consumer lifestyles through moral condemnation, the more we may stimulate desire for material things. As Cross (1999) points out, such moral admonitions against consumer goods have always failed to provide adequate alternatives to the consumer lifestyle. Cross explains the failure of the countercultural movement of the 1960s and the subsequent voluntary simplicity and back-to-the-land movements in this manner. In the end, consumerism won out because it offered a more viable solution to the difficulties of meaning-making posed by everyday life than the devout asceticism advocated by its detractors. The motivations of many of todays VSers seem to be rooted as much in a desire to relieve themselves of the burdens of maintaining a consumer lifestyle as in moral concerns for the social or environmental impacts of consumption (Zavestoski 2002). The VS lifestyle represents a strategy for achieving the fulfillment and satisfaction consumerism ultimately failed to provide. In choosing VS, individuals implicitly reject the consumption of material goods as an approach to meaning making. More specifically, they reject what the consumer society asks us to implicitly accept: the belief that acquisition of goods and services, as represented in marketing messages, can facilitate the realization of our true or authentic selves, thereby enhancing our self-perceptions and easing the ongoing struggle to instill everyday lived experiences with meaning. In this sense, VS is not simply the practice of applying cognitive filters to marketing messages, it is the adoption of completely different cultural schemas.

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Some critics, however, argue that, new schemas or not, VSers do not actually make real reductions in consumption. Instead, this line of argument goes, they shift it to different sets of complementary goods that are viewed as more consistent with the VS lifestyle.11 But if VSers are ultimately out to achieve an authentic self, there is no obligation to do so entirely through nonconsumptive methods. A combination of a shift in the types and quantities of goods consumed and a focus on relationships or other nonmaterial sources of self-meaning may be sufficient. In such a scenario, no matter how small the reductions in consumption, positive outcomes for society and the environment result. But these benefits will remain minor and temporally distant if VS grows at its current rate. By transforming into a movement oriented around social change rather than individual change, VS may bring more widespread changes at a quicker rate. Our focus now turns to the inherent tension between the self-interested pursuit of a more simple lifestyle and the emergence of a full-blown and efficacious social movement. IV. AUTHENTIC SELFHOOD, LIFESTYLE, AND RESISTANCE In its current form, VS, unlike most social movements, is about resolving individual crises of meaning. It does not purport to be about overcoming injustices. How could it be? After all, much like the downshifters, VSers are primarily upper-middle- or middle-class individuals who have the means to meet all their basic needs. They do not have a stigmatized identity, nor do they seek restitution for past injustices; neither are they oriented around transforming oppressive state institutions. Given these oddities, what conceptual tools might shed light on the obstacles preventing VS from taking on the traits of an active and efficacious social movement? The resource mobilization and political process perspectives on social movements see individuals as rational actors engaging in economic cost/benefit analyses as a means of recruiting followers and identifying strategies. Yet as we have explained, VS is pursued for primarily self-

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centered reasons. For most VSers, there is no perceived need to become a movement participant. Another popular social movement theory, the frame alignment perspective, views social movement strategies in terms of attempts to define movement events, goals, and beliefs in ways that resonate with the personal experiences and values of the targets of mobilization (Snow et al. 1986; Snow and Benford 1992). The Center for a New American Dream, one quasi-VS movement organization, engages in framing activities. For example, their public education strategies rely on pointing out to targets of mobilization how their consumption habits are inconsistent with the value they place on intangibles, such as a healthy, happy family life. But such tactics are still focused on transforming individuals behaviors while failing to provide a sufficient motivational basis for movement mobilization. This problem might be addressed by a recent move in social movement theory to integrate perspectives by simultaneously drawing on culture and agency (Goodwin and Jasper 1999; Meyer 1999; Poletta 1999; Tarrow 1999; Tilly 1999). One approach involves a renewed focus on collective identity (Gamson 1992, p.55-58). Collective identity is defined as an individuals cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community. It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity (Poletta and Jasper 2001, p.285). Because these often conflicting personal identities must be incorporated into those of the collectivity, the formation of collective identity is primarily a negotiated process in which the we involved in collective action is elaborated and given meaning (Gamson 1992, p.57; cf. Melucci 1989). New Social Movements (NSM) scholars, among others, emphasize the importance of collective identity and a shared sense of meaning. These theorists see many contemporary social

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movements, such as the environmental, gay rights, and feminist movements, as efforts to validate new identities and gain recognition for new lifestyles. NSM theorists challenge the notion that resistance efforts whose aims are not explicitly or wholly political are somehow irrational or even pathological (Gamson 1992, p.54). As advocates of identity politics, these movements also contend that the articulation of identity may be seen as a significant political contribution in its own right. Demanding recognition for a new or changed identity, write Poletta and Jasper, can both secure concessions and permanently change the terrain of political conflict (2001, p.297). If developing a collective identity is vital to the transformation of VS into a powerful social movement, what are the possible bases of such a collective identity? We take up this question in the next section. VS Lifestyles and Consumer Resistance Although political resistance under capitalist regimes has been largely sublimated into the realm of culture, it is misleading to conclude that self-determinative political efficacy can be achieved simply by exercising ones right to pursue personalized lifestyle preferences. Similarly, it is perhaps even more dubious to argue that consuming in order to construct transgressive lifestyle-based identities qualifies as resistance against capitalism (Cf. de Certeau 1984; Fiske 1989; Hearn and Roseneil 1999).12 Melucci (1995a, 1995b), for example, would suggest that an orientation toward larger social and environmental justice issues is necessary; one that links individual transformation with collective action. In contrast, the motivational bases for self-actualizing human potential movements such as VS tend toward the personal and acultural, resting largely on individualistic notions of selfmeaning and personal growth that hinder these movements ability to orient themselves toward more collective ends (Schur 1977; Wachtel 1983, p.127-135). For the VS movement, the

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inadequacy of its lifestyle-based politics problematizes the possibility of forging a collective and coherent identity dedicated to resisting consumerism and its hegemonic meaning of the self as a consumer. More significantly, the contradiction between the VS movements pursuit of authentic selfhood and its dubious potential to precipitate macrosocial change is exacerbated by capitalisms tendency to systematically absorb decentered and fragmentary challenges to its dominant practices and normative definitions of self. Paradoxically, popularizing the notion of an authentic self is perhaps the greatest coup engineered by the architects of consumerism. As marketers have encouraged the widespread acceptance of this notion, they have been better able to position their goods and services as ones that will move an individual closer to true authenticity. In a culture where consumers are often motivated to strive toward authenticity, todays VSers do not seem to reject the belief in the possibility of an authentic selfthey simply seek alternative means to achieving it. These alternatives include spending time in thought or meditation, with friends and family, and in nature. They also include consuming goods that are more durable, sustainable, and/or less wasteful. We contend that this shift toward alternative means of consumption has had negative consequences for the efficacy of VS as a social movement. Unlike the VS of the 1970s, which emerged out of the back-to-the-land movement and emphasized minimalist forms of asceticism and self-sufficiency, todays VSers are sometimes criticized for failing to truly simplify. VS has thus been reduced to another lifestyle choice available to depoliticized, separate striving subjects who often masquerade as resistive consumers. Relatedly, the revival of what Lears (1983) calls therapeutic discourse in advertising reveals how marketers have adapted their strategies to address some of the existential crises and affective maladies that participation in consumer

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society leaves unresolved. As a result, marketers have infused elusive ideals such as authenticity, spiritual growth, happiness, and fulfillment into consumer goods and services. These requisite material and experiential trappings promise simplicity, convenience, and comfort, but may actually hinder the pursuit of personal growth and social change. Discussion The idea that VS is simply another lifestyle option available to consumers can be usefully compared and contrasted with postmodern thought, which has supplanted notions of a real or authentic self in favor of a decentered, arbitrary, and unmotivated self whose multiple identities are constructed mainly through consumption practices (Firat and Venkatesh 1995). As articulated by Kenneth Gergen (1991), postmodernism takes the self to be socially constructed through a matrix of arbitrary cultural conventions and representations. In the end, there is no real postmodern self, because ones definition of selfhoodand of reality in generalis merely a perspectival contingency to be continually renegotiated through the myriad power struggles of everyday life: .For good or ill, it is the individual as socially constructed that finally informs peoples patterns of action. And in the end, there is no means of moving past the constructions to locate the real (p.146). If VS is just another identity that we try on in the supermarket of consumption, then it too may be a rather privatized and ephemeral lifestyle pursuit that has been emptied of its social and environmental meanings. To wit, Zavestoskis (2002) content analysis of VS literature suggests that VS has become more of a lifestyle choice over the last 30 years. It is probably no small coincidence that this historical period corresponds roughly with the transition from modernity to postmodernity, with its attendant splintering of self and problematized quests for identity and meaning. Conversely, Zavestoskis study of VSers also points toward something markedly less

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postmodern: that VSers are motivated by a desire to shed layers of social construction and commodification in order to more fully discover themselves. VSers therefore endeavor to resolve crises of meaning that are plausibly more than existential: they may also be essential. Indeed, many simplify their lives in order to unearth the selfs purportedly real substance that often lays dormant beneath layers of social construction and advertised representation. This quest has not gone unnoticed by marketing professionals, who derive their meaningmaking power from a relentless and well-honed acumen for tapping into the cultural lifeblood of the postmodern moment. Although postmodern theory disavows the possibility of a unitary and core self possessing genuinely human characteristics, Denzin (1991) asserts that authenticity and real lived experience have yet to be wholly supplanted by the simulation of pseudo-reality in postmodern times: Lived experience did not die with postmodernism; nor has it fled the postmodern scene.... Postmodernisms claim to authenticity lies in this ability to capture, in vivid color, life and its meanings (p.45; emphasis added). For postmodernists, the T-shirt, or more specifically the logo on the T-shirt, does not just represent the self: it constitutes an integral part of the self. And yet, this is the central problem facing postmodern consumer society. Overrun by corporate megasigns, disoriented by the decontextualization of meaning, and entranced by hyperreal commodity fetishism, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and unreality for most consumers. Savvy marketers of the postmodern age deftly simulate our most basic needs and desires and, in so doing, convert them into commodities for sale. In this case, goods and services that mimic self-originated traits such as authenticity have been positioned by marketers as magical tonics to quench VSers thirst for meaning. The lifestyle-based individualistic orientation of most VSers has not only blinded them to the

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pressing exigencies of their immediate and larger social contexts, it has made their resistance efforts exceedingly vulnerable to commodification and cooptation. In the concluding section, we attempt to outline a course for the emergence of an anti-consumption movement that can overcome the allegedly self-interested basis of the current popularity of the VS lifestyle. V. CONCLUSION As the preceding discussion of VSers illustrates, developing a collective identity organized around consumer resistance promises to be an arduous task. The hegemonic control that marketers and their corporate clients exert over various psychic and cultural spacesboth being primary loci for the generation of meaningunderscores the difficult task of redefining meaning in anti-consumerist terms. Resisting hegemonic definitions of the self as a consumer starts at the level of the psyche with a contestation of those meanings as they are defined by marketers and their corporate clients. This involves the development of anti-normative dynamic, elastic mental structures that enable us to more effectively navigate the disorienting postmodern world of blurred distinctions and decontextualized marketing messages (Zerubavel 1991, p.122). As a collective action frame, this meaning-based resistance should extend to the realm of culture so that it can cultivate a larger perceptual shift in which people gradually come to reject the predominant consumerist notion that the self is to be constructed through consumption. More importantly for decentralized consumer resistance movements such as VS, a politically viable and efficacious rejection of consumerism needs to be articulated in terms of social and environmental justice, rather than as another self-help technique. Although challenging prevailing perceptions of the self as a consumer is a crucial first step toward social change, anticonsumerist movements such as VS are often rightly criticized for their failure to forge a

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collective identity and action frame designed to move, as Howard (1991) puts it, from changing selves to changing society. But how is this to be accomplished? More fundamentally, what constitutes a politically efficacious resistance against consumerism? What might its goals be? We have outlined some answers to these questions in the latter parts of this inquiry, but they are necessarily tentative and unproven at best. For broad-based anti-consumption movements, establishing a sense of collective identity and mobilizing collective action frames dedicated to larger issues of social and environmental justice is vital. This is perhaps best evidenced by the rhetoric and tactics of the growing anti-globalization movement, which has opposed global capitalism and consumerism primarily on the grounds that it is socially and environmentally harmful. On the other hand, as we have argued, the loosely affiliated VS movement remains a decentered, fragmented, and ultimately individualistic affair. This is not to suggest that selfawareness and selfishness are necessarily anti-social impulses. Changes in the self can provide the impetus for addressing broader concerns, such as bringing about a more just society, or instituting cleaner, less environmentally harmful consumption practices. However, given the fact that present-day VSers loom as disembodied and atomized castoffs of consumer society, generating a collective action frame may be unrealistic. Nonetheless, questions of political efficacy and identity are inevitably posed in terms of the time-honored tension between self and society. As VS has become primarily a lifestyle choice for would-be resistors to consumer society, its tenor and tactics have come to bear a striking resemblance to the splintered and particularistic identity politics movements of the postmodern age. Clearly, identity politics has served the valuable purpose of broadening traditional Marxist concerns with class status to address justice and discrimination issues on the

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basis of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. At the same time, the decentering and splintering of many new social movements has made them considerably less effective at mobilizing to address more broad-based social and/or environmental concerns. More importantly, it has left many NSMs without an alternative social space or institutional infrastructure that can buttress themselves against the colonizing impulses of postmodern capitalism, whose niche-based lifestyle marketers and narrowcasters systematically convert the socially constructed need to express ones identity through consumption into opportunities to consume. As Kaufmann (1995) aptly observes: .it is striking and unsettling to contemplate how much the subcultural politics of particularity unwittingly echoes the structures of the post-Fordist economy. Multiplicity, choice, reshaping ones self, refining ones sense of identitythese days, these are the values of the marketplace as well as those of the opposition. Smallness has become a matter of both principle and profit in late-capitalist America: principle for the radical periphery, profit for the capitalist core. And the parallel makes it all the easier for the latter to capitalize on the former, often undermining opposition in the process. (p.159; emphasis added). Placed in its sociohistorical context, the tendency of some postmodernists to view consumptive expressions of identity as means to (or substitutes for) political empowerment typifies the twentieth-century transition from a culture-debating to a culture-consuming society, which has resulted in the degradation of the public sphere into a platform for advertising, not in the mass democratization of political efficacy (Habermas [1962] 1989). As quasi-social movements, consumer lifestyle-driven solutions to problems of social and environmental justice tend to come at a cost: the loss of autonomy from the very market systems that are being resisted in the first place. Motivated by a need for personal growth and awareness, VSers desire to simplify has been greeted with open arms by mass consumer markets, whose attendant goods and services promise to pave a direct path to the realization of inner peace and fulfillment. We contend that these pre-packaged solutions to crises of self-

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meaning tend toward the ephemeral and vacuous, offering the consumer disjointed and disposable consumption experiences in accordance with the aimless terminal materialism mindset of consumerism (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981, p.230-235). In the final analysis, acts such as basking in the spiritual glow of shopping at IKEA or gazing at simplifier lifestyle magazines like Real Simple and Budget Living may do little to simplify the road to selfunderstanding. Not only do these ritualized acts complicate our understanding of ourselves, they also serve to insulate us from the real injustices that pervade our social and environmental worlds. Whereas sentiments such as those of VSers run the risk of being marginalized if they are not articulated in consumerist terms, the profiteering logic of capitalism dictates that a truly organic, broad-based movement dedicated to furthering social and environmental justice must cultivate alternative spaces beyond mainstream market influence. Such alternative market spaces must also provide some sort of motivational bases (other than monetary savings) that compel disaffected and potentially resistive consumers to change their consumption habits in order to ensure a more harmonious relationship between themselves and their human (or social) and nonhuman (or environmental) others. And yet, as the growth of phenomena such as consumer coops and ethically minded investing illustrates, the alternative spaces cultivated by consumer resistance movements such as VS must by necessity be market-based to some extent. Ethically inclined consumers who wish to oppose consumerism on moral grounds invariably seek to make those purchase decisions that best serve to advance environmental and/or social justice. The real challenge lay not in how to moralize about the contradictions of consumption, but in how to impact the cultural mindset of consumer society such that consumers come to view their spending habits as those which are

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enacted in purposeful and ongoing transactions with their social and natural environments. This is not transactional in the abstract manner of conventional market economics. Rather, it means cultivating an empathic global interconnectedness by engaging in living and sustainable transactions that make tangible the links between consumer purchase decisions and both social injustice and environmental degradation. VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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VI.
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ENDNOTES

The dubious empirical connection between aggregate levels of material wealth and life satisfaction also suggests that consuming more does not necessarily translate into being any happier (Easterlin 1974, 1995; Scitovsky [1976] 1992; Durning 1993). 2 Despite the time-honored clich that reminds us that there are some things that money cannot buy, marketers manage to systematically commodify the many seemingly uncommodifiable components of a happy and fulfilled self to which Schwartz alludes. 3 Production gives way to simulation in the current third order of Baudrillards ([1981] 1988) simulacra, and he argues that postmodernity involves a shift from modes of production to a mode of simulation and information displacing the process of power from production per se to information and entertainment (Agger 1998, p.140). 4 For Baudrillard ([1981] 1988, p.146), the age of simulation is one in which the real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyperreal. 5 In part because they propagate mostly unidirectional and hence distorted communication (McCarthy 1978, p.306; Ozanne and Murray 1995, p.520), postmodern marketers blur the distinction between text and world so as to obfuscate the ideological content of selling messages that cumulatively depict consumerism as a way of ameliorating alienation (Agger 1998, p.125). 6 For example, Berger and Luckmann (1966) develop Schutzs (1967) notion of typifications as everyday heuristic devices that selectively frame our perceptual lenses and orient our actions according to such normative assumptions. Relatedly, Hall ([1986] 1996) contends that ideology involves the mental frameworks (including language, concepts, categories, etc.) that different groups deploy in order to render intelligible the way society works. Theoretical constructs such as Berger and Luckmanns (1966) symbolic universes and Halls mental frameworks are analogous in that they tend to cohere around the articulation of the preferred cultural values and ideological tenets of a particular social group. 7 Wexler (1983, p.24) likens the overly commodified bourgeois self to a state of schizophrenia and madness: When these effects of commodified social relations on the self are taken together, they portray a society which is producing madness as a fundamental social psychological tendency. 8 This includes the tripped other of the natural environment (Weigert 1997). 9 The postmodern consumers generalized other may be more accurately called a mechanical other developed through interactions with technology-based objects rather than sentient, copresent others (Halton forthcoming). 10 The flip side is also worth noting. That is, for those interested in intentionally avoiding paying for the privilege of advertising a label, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do so. Finding a logo-free T-shirt, for example, is easier said than done. In other words, making clothing choices that avoid self-commodification is a daunting task. This is the ultimate hegemonic move of consumer markets; by slowly eliminating the option to consume solely for an objects utility, we are compelled to think through the symbolic implications of every consumption decision. 11 The idea that individuals seek complementary sets of goods that are commensurate with certain modes of selfpresentation is known as the Diderot effect (cf. McCracken 1988, p.118-129; Schor 1998, p.145-167). 12 As the rising incidence of consumptive disorders indicates, the flourishing array of subjectivities cultivated by todays fragmented postmodern consumer is bound in a dialectical relationship of empowerment and enfeeblement (Langmann 1992).

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