Why Johnny Can Dissent

Advertising is sowing the seeds of its own destruction. The production of a hipper, more subversive mousetrap-as-commodity doesn’t necessarily signal the downfall of collective, subversive action, nor does it mark the death of dissent as we know it.

Subversiveness through consumption relies on a myth of our past, produced through a nostalgia industry, that internalizes a particular view of the essence of American identity. The commodification of subversion should be seen as part of a cultural environment that similarly commodifies the past as nostalgia and cultural identity. We accept a variety of identity founding myths in the consumption of places like Celebration, Florida (merely an extension of the similarly powerful myth of authentic home-life at the center of most suburban development), as well as in the consumption of tourism, the visual commodification of particular cultures, which we imagine as frozen in time, unaffected by our gaze. Where we believe ourselves to be coming from produces our imagination about where we need to go. There is a movement of puritanical right-wing morality in this country; the catch is that they are just as duped as the lefty-quasi rebels reading Burroughs. Both strategies sustain each other, and should be understood as part of the same media environment

However, the strategy of rebellion eventually produces its own destruction. The effective advertisement of dissent does actually make people want to dissent. Particularly with the development of pastiche techniques as dissent (I wrote about this in the post about Chuck Taylor’s), it encourages consumers to be subversive readers of cultural artifacts: they recognize weaknesses and points of appropriation of images, becoming a strategy of deconstruction. This ultimately manifests in something like the ‘fair trade’ movement, which undermines the commodity fetish structure by explicitly politicizing the means of production in the act of consumption.

This is not to say that the undermining of capital through advertising is necessarily inevitable. The language of dissent in advertising comes steeped in highly-individualistic terms, and collective action most likely is required of substantial social change in terms of the means of production. Also, the politicization of consumption itself needs to come fill circle, from blind consumption, to wary consumption and non-consumption, back to a strategic use of advertising and cultural symbols in commodities to produce social change. By making advertising a total-social-experience – a lifestyle, a steady supply of malleable and highly potent symbols has been placed in the hands of people merely living their everyday lives. No image will ever totally determine how people use it, and the potential for meaning slippage increases as advertising more totally defines our entire lives (the Far Side cartoon “Giorgio Armani at home” applies here). Even as ads come to encompass both assent and dissent, third-ways open at every turn.

Duncan