Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 56

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Theoretical Perspectives: To Be Is To Consume - The Construction of Consumerist
Subjectivities in Contemporary Society
Neoliberalism3 has altered human subjectivities to incorporate the notion of
resilience, meaning an ability to ‘adapt and bounce back’ from unexpected and
adverse events via ‘technologies of the self’,4 specifically through the employment of
entrepreneurial and individual skill.5 According to neoliberal philosophy, perpetual
consumption serves as a protective shield from risk as it increases the profits of
manufacturers, ensures global prosperity, and deters ill-being, allowing all people to
live long and fulfilled lives. ‘Cultural apparatuses,’ such as the media and advertising
companies, disseminate the belief that consuming is the only rational way of dealing
with unknown and potentially harmful events.6 In response to these subliminal
‘pedagogical modes of rationality’, anatomical forms endlessly consume items
despite ‘seeing through’ their quality.7 The individual understands the ineffectuality of
perpetual consumption as the items they acquire are deliberately created to fail,
breakdown and/or become unfashionable and therein constitute wasteful spending
practices.8 The futility of commodity consumption is not critically appraised to the
point of opposition as individuals now suffer with what Giroux terms ‘social amnesia’,
wherein they forget all other values and commodification becomes the only
acceptable state of being.9
Once individuals adopt this cognitive state, the ‘war’ waged by those who
own the means of production against those who succumb to its charms (consumers)

3

Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as ‘a theory of political economic practices that proposed that
human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills
within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and
free trade.’ This political-economic discourse originated from the liberal philosophies of Hayek, Smith
and Friedman and was used by Thatcher (UK) and Reagan (United States of America) to create an
individualised world interconnected through borderless electronic and market contracts and sustained
via high employment and global consumerism. Ibid., 2.
4
Alan Peterson, “Governmentality, Critical Scholarship, and the Medical Humanities,” Journal of
Medical Humanities 24, 3-4, (2003): 189.
5
Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life. The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2014), xi, xii, 58.
6
Henry Giroux, Twilight of the Social – Resurgent Public in the Age of Disposability (Boulder:
Paradigm, 2012), 62.
7
Ibid., 98 – 108
8
Jay Bernstein, “Introduction,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay
Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991),13.
9
Giroux, 2012, 113.