Consumer Culture in America: Spectacle, Deception, Simulation, and Illusion in the Marketplace
About this ebook
In Consumer Culture in America, Wilber W. Caldwell observes that we are seduced, lured into a sparkling web so enticing that we perceive no reason to struggle. This book explores the enormous power of the marketplace that is reflected so vividly by the countless agents of our popular culture as it pulls everything into its all-encompassing orbit. Oblivious to the runaway, self-perpetuating power that seeks to controls us, we are lost in a maze of materialist illusions created by a system that possesses only limited perspectives and sensitivities in the realms of social justice, war, human exploitation, and the fragility of the natural world. Our politicians may pay lip service to these issues, but at the end of the day, they are only puppets, chosen and controlled by a system that understands the value of creating illusions, including the illusion that these issues are being addressed.
Consumer Culture in America first explores the history and development of modern consumer culture, then carefully examines its intellectual and ideological underpinnings, and finally scrutinizes the current situation. This book answers many of our society’s most compelling questions. Are our media-driven marketplace illusions so enticing as to effectively mute any possible outcry of resistance, silence the historically predictable anthem of the exploited by obscuring from them the fact of their own exploitation, and sate any desire aimed at breaking the chains of material bondage? Does this culture of the commodity effectively mask widespread inequity, poverty, powerlessness, environmental plunder, even murder and genocide? Are we willing slaves to an invisible force that shapes our beliefs and our desires while it blinds us to its own workings? Or does today’s consumer culture have another side? Does it also spawn unforeseen meanings and supply important material and symbolic resources that ordinary people can use to invigorate their lives, their identities, and their culture in an otherwise hostile world?
The ruinous effects of modern American consumer culture are complex and deep-rooted. At its core, cultural operations seek to alter our perception of reality itself by so intensely focusing our attention on the gleaming reflection of the commodity that we become unable to see the wider world. Any realistic remedy will entail removing the veil and exposing our blindness. Indeed, part of the solution may lie within the complex folds of the culture itself. We may already be discovering unforeseen meanings amid the glitter - symbolic resources that we can creatively use to invigorate our lives, reconstruct our trampled identities, and rekindle the flickering fires of both the individualism and the community that once burned so brightly at the heart of our democracy.
