Express Yourself!

Cultural Consumption and the War for Identity under Capitalism

Jenny Holzer, 1985

Morning Comrades.

It is increasingly rare that I wade into conversations about culture these days, mostly because I find the majority of the discussions useless, considering that again, the majority of these conversation lack a base understanding of, for one, what culture is, secondly, the referential framework is irrelevant to me and lastly and more poignantly, usually misses the point. It is absolutely not about whether or not I “like” whatever form of cultural expression is being discussed but rather that the the purpose of the discussed work is not acknowledged and with that, my interest and subsequently non-participation takes place.

Yet, I live for and love what we would generally all agree on what said culture is. Art, in most of if its practiced works is what gives me huge amounts of joy, inspiration and reasons to get up in the morning. Nevertheless, the conversations and especially the increasingly engineered and heated discussions about culture and the ever present culture wars I find so irrelevant as they, for the time being, distract from the class issues at hand. That’s not deriding the importance of culture, the relationships between a class and culture are logical and important, it’s merely the current conversation lacks honesty and insight. Willing or unwilling, I am not so sure about it. With that, let’s talk about culture though today, or rather, what it is not and what it is, because it is important, even, or rather especially, to me.

From the neon glow of 1950s billboards to algorithmically targeted Instagram ads today, the West, particularly the United States has long been inundated with the myth that freedom is found in ownership and identity is found in consumption. Before the internet made this illusion hyper-personalized and omnipresent, it was already deeply entrenched through decades of mass media, suburban planning, product placement, and Cold War propaganda. Television, advertising, and popular magazines created not only the desire to consume, but the very belief that participation in society was only possible through consumption. Capitalism’s ideological engineers, namely advertisers, corporate strategists, and state propagandists constructed a world in which the basic act of buying became moralised, aestheticised, and politicised. Owning a house, a car, or a branded jacket became synonymous with being a full citizen, a modern individual, a member of the "free world." In this schema, not only was consumption normalised as life’s central activity, it was mythologized as culture itself. Under this framework, to not consume was to not belong; to resist it was to reject modernity. But this is a fiction, one crafted by the forces of capital to disguise alienation as fulfillment, isolation as identity, and obedience as freedom.

Today’s dispatch argues that consumption is not, and cannot be, culture. Consumption is passive; culture is participatory. Consumption isolates; culture collectivizes. While western advertising agencies and capitalist ideology have long promoted the fantasy that consumption, especially of property, media, and lifestyle signifiers constitutes cultural identity and freedom, this is not only a false equivalence, but a destructive one. True culture is the collective, material product of shared labour, struggle, rituals, histories, and symbolic expressions grounded in lived reality. The American Dream has transformed from a political aspiration into a marketing device, and how capitalist ideology has redefined culture as a commodity while severing it from its material roots.