Consumption pt1

What terrifies people about being a mass consumer? Why do images of scale and industrialized consumption repel and offend?

Environmentalists and social advocates mix images of mass (the recurring image of the urban sidewalk with its pulsing masses of people, or the sci-fi cityscapes of dystopic futuramas warning us from the path of authoritarian governance, or the endless piles of accumulated junk [http://www.chrisjordan.com/]) to ward us towards some social change; we personalize or customize the accessories to our lives to make them seem more 'ours' than before. Advertisements refer to a floating 'you' to fend off the impression of impersonal address and to illicit more direct responses from listeners. Personally, I respond very strongly to some theories of gender or patriarchy that reduce questions of opression to specific modes of thought held by a mass of people; a cerebral explanation that transforms actors into mass consumers of ideology or rhetoric.

These thoughts repel because people do not think of themselves as someone else's other, someone worth merely a passing glance or casual relation. People often find their lives quite significant, and to suddenly find yourself on the outside looking on to yourself as something small, peripheral to understanding illicits fear. "Mass consumption" singifies the ultimate irrelevance one can come to represent in the eyes of another, but also the inability to assert yourself as yourself, losing touch with the social reality (objects, ideas, people) that create a person as a subject. If that reality becomes only one entity in a sprawling matrix of indistinguishable places/people/ideas/things, it also becomes lost along with what it means to be yourself. All reality and individuality is relational, and if those relationships can't be distinguished, we loose a sense of what it means to be, to know yourself.