Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel

Citation

Patterson, M. (2002), "Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel", European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 36 No. 5/6, pp. 733-737. https://doi.org/10.1108/ejm.2002.36.5_6.733.1

Mr Kipling

Mr Kipling, as you no doubt already know, makes exceedingly good cakes; and has done for about as long as most of us can remember, though it was, in fact, only 1967 that he first came to public notice. What I would not expect you to know is that Mr Kipling is the best friend that I have in the world. We correspond. I write to him, almost daily now, telling him of the small travails of my small life, and he replies, under a pseudonym, politely denying that he exists. He is so kind. He claims that he is merely the invention of an advertising executive, established in order to humanize a rather soggy line of cakes and biscuits. He only admitted this after a very long while; before then, he thanked me for my letters, and was afraid that he couldn’t help, but was glad that I enjoyed his products. (Litt, 1996, p. 27).

James Annesley has produced a text which, although written for audiences within Cultural and American Studies, has much of import to say to marketers. Blank Fictions is ostensibly a study of contemporary US authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Brian D’Amato and Douglas Coupland, who “prefer blank, atonal perspectives and fragile, glassy visions” (p. 2). Although many of these authors have received critical acclaim, and some have developed a huge following, they have also been dismissed as having questionable literary merit (Lee, 1993). For example, for American Psycho (Ellis, 1991), Bret Easton Ellis has been both vaunted for using “the consumerist surface, the thingness, of modern American life to satirize its greed, ignorance, complacency and moral bankruptcy” (Walsh, 1991) and vilified for producing a “how‐to guide to the dismemberment and torture of women” (Bruce, 1990, quoted in Young, 1992). Annesley’s analysis of these works naturally raises issues of concern within contemporary society. What comes as a surprise, although it should not, is that these very same issues deserve to be at the forefront of marketing analyses. In particular, Annesley is concerned with the expansion of capitalism into every corner of our lived experience, achieved through the relentless drive of commodification. This drive is described elsewhere as the modernization of consumption (Ussitalo, 1982), the marketization of society (Gould and Patterson, 1999), and the commercialization of mental life (Warde and Martens, 1998). While the commodification process and the marketization of society have certainly been the concern of macromarketers, the appreciation of these issues among the general marketing populace has been less forthcoming[1]. What we have, therefore, is a general lack of understanding (or concern) within the discipline about the consequences, intended or otherwise, of marketing activities. The commodification process is also interesting in that it is exactly these pressures which provide the strongest rationale yet (30 years after the fact) for the broadening of marketing’s domain. As every sphere of life is commodified and commercialized, so does marketing become an increasingly central human activity. We are gradually reaching a situation in which marketing is indeed everything and everything is marketing.

Mr Pink

I don’t tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, that shit’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned they’re just doin’ their job (Quentin Tarantino, 1990) Reservoir Dogs.

Annesley’s critique of blank fiction not only highlights the importance of the commercial in contemporary society but also foregrounds the centrality of the body as a site in which the commodity, the commodity’s image and the consumer cross paths. What is interesting about these arguments is that the body has struggled to establish itself as a construct at the heart of marketing and consumer research. The lack of attention paid to embodiment in studies of consumption owes much to the limited investigation of consumption activities beyond purchase, the dominance of the machine metaphor within consumer research and the Cartesian mind/body dualism on which it depends. In this way consumption activities have been centred on the consuming mind and divorced from their corporeality.

In chapter two, Annesley’s analysis of Beauty by Brian D’Amato (1993) underlines the primacy of the body in consumption. D’Amato’s central character, Angelo, performs radical cosmetic surgery on his customers, thus converting them into products to be used in the fashion and media industries, while they simultaneously act as advertising for his services. The kernel of D’Amato’s tale is that identity is essentially bound up with appearance and consumption. Given appropriate levels of industry and body work (Featherstone, 1991), bodies may be re‐created to reflect a desired appearance. Thus, in consumer culture the body is not treated as a given; rather, it is malleable, capable of being transformed by the judicious use of commodities. Indeed, the body has become commoditized such that it ceases to reproduce itself through the external production of commodities and does so instead through the internalization of commodities in consumption (see Baudrillard, 1988; Frank, 1991; Williams and Bendelow, 1998).

In chapter three Annesley takes his concerns with commodification and the body further. Through an engagement with Susanna Moore’s In the Cut (1995) he underlines the importance of the visual in late capitalism, suggesting that the gaze objectifies and thus commodifies the body. “The visual provides a driving force behind the production of a desire to consume and thus, by prompting consumption, adds fuel to the whole process of production itself” (p. 49). Annesley argues further that increasing sexualization within contemporary culture is simply an expression of advancing commodification that owes much to the growing importance of the visual.

Mr Spock

Unhappiness is the state which occurs in the human when wants and desires are not fulfilled (“I, Mudd”, Star Trek, Stardate 4513.3).

In the next three chapters (Shopping, Labels and Decadence) Blank Fictions aims to disabuse its audience of the notion that consumers are “the passive victims of late capitalism’s cultural logic” (p. 98). Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1979), Annesley argues that the consumer is not completely under the control of the commodity but also uses it to construct her/his own culture. Contemporary consumers use their consumption to perform an expressive function. This is achieved through activities which Holt (1995) describes as integration, classification and play. Integration acts in much the same way as cannibalism in that the consumer ingests the power of commodities to become that which they are not (Friedman, 1991). Classification enables the consumers to categorize themselves and others according to their consumption patterns. Thus, consumption has become the means by which we as individuals define our existence and our selves in relation to others. “The question ‘Who am I?’ is one which is as likely to be answered in terms of consumption patterns as in terms of an occupational role by many people in western capitalism” (Bocock, 1993). Consumption as play captures the notion of consumption being the locus around which social interaction revolves. In particular, it is the system of consumption which consumers utilize to generate a sense of community in an individuated world. In an analysis of Lynne Tillman’s (1991) Motion Sickness, Annesley also shows how our experiences are mediated and represented by our consumption behaviour. Tillman’s “narrator haunts shops, cafés, tourist traps and marketplaces. The experiential events in her journey are thus given an obviously economic edge and her reflections on her internal reality are seen to hinge as much upon what she has bought as upon what she has seen and where she has been” (p. 67) This is consistent with Holt’s fourth consumption type, consumption as experience (1995, pp. 1‐16).

Annesley’s argument here is that blank fiction effectively captures the sophisticated, literate and active nature of contemporary consumers. This is possible because such fiction mirrors consumption by being “deeply engaged in the commodifying mechanisms of late capitalism … [and yet managing] … despite that engagement, to articulate concerns about that process (Holt, 1995, p. 134).”

Mr Muscle

Loves the jobs you hate (Ad copy)

Annesley is careful to position his work in opposition to postmodern readings of blank fiction, which see it as “the mute product of late capitalism’s cultural logic” (Holt, 1995, p. 136). For him, blank fiction does not represent the empty and meaningless outpourings of diseased minds but rather cleverly addresses and reflects the key dynamics of contemporary culture. Blank fiction has an obsession with the minutiae of consumption, its embodiment, its meanings and its decadence; notions which loom particularly large in the contemporary psyche.

Crucially, from the perspective of marketing, Annesley’s text provides another wonderful example of how literary sources may be utilized to critique marketing activity. In terms of addressing the “marketing as art” issue most commentators are content to suggest that marketing looks to the artistic world and artistic endeavour for inspiration. This is a call for marketing to once more seek out its creative roots, to work with the current fascination for form and style. For others, it is a call to re‐examine our representational practices, to play with and undermine the traditional and one‐dimensional means by which we usually write, represent and reflect upon marketing thought. However, other commentators are more forceful in that they suggest that marketing should in fact aspire to artistic status and abandon the pursuit of science altogether: “The aestheticization of marketing practice has major implications for marketing scholarship, since there is no point in attempting to assess ‘artistic’ accomplishments by ‘scientific’ procedures and methods” (Brown, 1996). Annesley himself best describes the utility of art, and especially fiction, in providing a critique of the commercial sphere:

Though it might seem more obvious to analyze late capitalism through reference to specific interpretations of commodification, economic theory and social history, fiction does provide a useful way of knowing and interrogating these conditions. Unlike historical or economic texts, fiction can offer speculative and suggestive positions without being required either to prove its hypotheses or to substantiate its intuitions. These concerns seem particularly important in the late capitalist period, where the attempt to impose a defined theoretical order on the complex and unstable conditions may prove both problematic and intellectually risky. Fiction … does something different. Sketching and tracing an image of the world in terms that remain sensitive to its complexities, it manages to communicate a sense of the range of contradictory forces operating in that world (p. 82).

Blank Fictions, although not positioned as such, is an important marketing text. It argues that topics such as commodification and commercialization should be the concern of all. As such, Annesley’s text represents a call to return to the roots of marketing thought. For, since marketing aligned itself almost exclusively with the managerial classes in the 1950s, societal issues such as these have been repressed and have been left to social theorists and macromarketers to consider. Although the latter may seem to be an obvious bridge between managerial and social issues, treatment of these issues has all too often been ignored or distorted in marketing texts (Dixon, 1992). The acknowledgement of texts such as this may serve, therefore, to redress the imbalance.

Note

1. 1.

   1. See special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management (Vol. 11, 1995) on the commodification of marketing knowledge for an exception.