Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 1 | Page 59

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also worth noting that consumers also antithetically experience frustration, as they
recognise their inability to buy more, and possess insufficient capital to purchase the
most expensive models of the respective products. Instead they accept second best
in a world that does not acknowledge secondary positions (only the best will
survive).28
Thus, it could be argued that ‘machines’ crave commodities like a drug addict;
acquisition fuels the habit further. Consumers relish the sense of euphoria felt from
buying goods, thrive on the electric impulses of ecstasy whirling through their
mechanical structures, sending messages to their nuclei that they need and want
more with immediate effect.29 Life upon this drug becomes a hallucinatory utopia, full
of magical treasures promising happiness but covertly killing the soul and social
morality.
Case Study: Resistance and Resiliency - The Social Exclusion of “Moral
Monst[ers]”30
Conversely, whilst individuals are portrayed as ‘desiring machines’ by Deleuze and
Guattari, data collected from an ethnographic study within the area of Meir, in StokeOn-Trent, refutes this.31 With the creation of a ‘new world’ order in the late 1970s,32
Meir experienced deindustrialisation and had its economic ‘heart’ abruptly ‘ripped
out’, leading to economic and social decline.33 Meir is now the ‘7th most deprived
area’ (out of 37) in Staffordshire. It hosts some of the poorest housing in the country
(‘79% of the population live in the top ten percent of the most deprived properties in
the city’) and its populace comprises of a large number of older people,34 the
unemployed (‘13.4%’), people on low incomes (‘32.4%’ work in manufacturing) and
those with few educational qualifications (80% do not have five or more GCSE’s
including English and Maths at A*-C grade).35

28

Ibid., 4
Ibid., 5
30
Michel Foucault, Abnormal-Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975 (New York: Picador,
1999), 62,73.
31
Deleuze and Guattari, 1984, 1.
32
Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 35.
33
Kevin Long, Stoke-On-Trent Past and Present. (Great Britain: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000).
34
The Office for National Statistics (2011, last updated 2013) shows that ‘5.6%’ of the population are
aged ‘60 to 64’, ‘8.3%’ aged ‘65 to 74’, ‘6.3%’ aged ‘75 to 84’, ‘1.5%’ aged ‘85-89’ and ‘0.6%’ aged
‘90 and over’.
35
City of Stoke-On-Trent Council, Meir ARF Draft Final Report (2012).
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