Discuss, using two carefully analysed examples, how the cultural obsession with the acquisition and consumption of ‘authenticity’ drives the New Economy in the Twenty- First Century.
This topic treats the core question of the module: what is of value in the ‘New Economy’? What really underpins the endless cycles of mass-consumption today? This essay topic focusses on one central aspect of value in the new economy: authenticity – which means the pursuit of the “true me”. As shown by Peter York, both in The Hipster Handbook documentary and in his Authenticity is a Con (both available on Moodle), this has become such an intense pursuit that it drives one of the most powerful currents of consumer cultures. And the commerce with authenticity is extremely powerful – so powerful in fact that it pushes aside all other considerations, even when it pays lip service to ecological and ethical concerns (see Potter’s argument). In the name of consuming more and more so-called ‘authenticity’, the metaphors, stories, concepts, and affects that form a so-called ‘authentic style’ grow to such excessive proportions that they can no longer be rooted in any sense of reality or truth. Indeed, the very idea that we can buy authenticity is in itself problematic: if authenticity is the essence of a person, if it is unique as such, then it cannot be produced and reproduced by any process of consumption. If authenticity can only be found in me, then how can it be bought from a shop? Or is this search for ‘my self’ a sign of a collective tendency toward Narcissism (see Twenge’s argument)?
And yet, this is the engine of the new economy: to find and consume, possess and display, things that claim to be ‘authentic’. Authenticity is one of the main forms in which positional and imaginative value judgements can be seen today. How does this positional and imaginative modes of valuation reflect the ethics of contemporary consumption (see Beckert)? A good analysis will be able to show how the contemporary economy is driven by positional and imaginative consumption – which is a type of consumption that is no longer primarily centred around the functional value (or use value) of an object, but around its positional and imaginative value. This type of consumption is centred around the ways in which any object, regardless of its functional value, feeds into the formation of the performative identity of the consumer: how does a thing make ‘me’ look? Value today becomes, for any business, intimately tied to
positional desire: “how will an object, a service, or an experience make Me look by comparison to others?”. As clearly shown and defined in The Hipster Handbook, value is determined by “what is rarer, what is newer, what is harder to produce and get”, by what allows an individual to “show his/her superior taste by knowing about it first, by possessing it first” (listen to Mark Greif – 45’30”). It is not what a product or service does, but how a product or service makes its consumer appear. The argument that explains how this economy works is that everything revolves entirely around positional and imaginative value judgements. Such value judgements express only intentions or modulations in the appearance of things to us, those who make judgements of value – but this does not mean a change in the essence of their functions. This means that to produce value means to work on those aspects of products, services or persons that seem to make them significant and worthy of notice. Production therefore includes not simply the creation of new objects, but of new metaphors, stories, concepts, and affects that accompany objects. So valuing things in imaginative and positional ways always contains and requires considerable ambiguity: which ‘thing’ represents ‘me’? which fashion, which trend? And so on and on. Indeed, this ambiguity is a crucial part of the power of understanding value in positional and imaginative modes.
The value of any ‘thing’ thus becomes always negative: temporary, insufficient, short-lived, and needing urgent “upgrading” according to ever shorter cycles of fashion. The ‘New Economy’ is bound up with the emergence of a new and permanently dissatisfied, impatient, and entitled consumer, one that has no obligations, only entitlements. Examples of this new economy are everywhere: we live in it, we are it.
What is the central source of value then in contemporary consumption and production? The selected bibliography here offers numerous ideas for your essay:
READINGS