Culture Shock

In this series of interlinked essays, cultural critic Daniel Harris delivers a scathingly satirical exposure of the illusions and hidden values in the aesthetic world of modern consumer culture.

Harris presents his insights with a grain of salt, admonishing that 'No one is entirely immune to the often irresistable appeal of the tastes I describe, least of all myself'. He paints himself as a debunker out to reveal the 'wigs and Groucho Marx noses' of consumerism, the absorption of nonconformist impulses into carefully tailored systems of marketing, the lies that advertisers tell us and that we tell ourselves about our buying habits; to explode the myth that one creates an individual personality through strategic purchasing. He takes the part of the modern intellectual hedonist, loving the safe and easy life that consumer products have created for him while despising the guilt-inducing, sensuality-denying holdovers from religious culture which plague its semi-materialistic worldview. In his words, 'consumerism is as symbolic and indifferent to the body as the most traditional forms of religion, and its vision of a material paradise is as inaccessible as the Christian vision of Kingdom Come, an otherworldly mirage that appeals to the imagination, not the senses ... the aesthetics of consumerism are ascetic and cerebral, incorporeal illusions designed to stir up dissatisfaction.'


It is on this basis that he begins his playful demolition derby through the iconography of the modern marketplace. Each individual chapter is devoted to a particular 'broad principle' of consumer aesthetics: Cuteness, the turning of children and animals into grotesque, deformed figures which 'trigger, with Pavlovian predictability, maternal feelings for a mythical condition of naivete'; Quaintness, the creation of a false sense of roots and romanticized history by the collection of historical artifacts as 'modernist sculptures denuded of both meaning and utility'; Coolness, the dangerous, macho demeanor of the urban predator condensed into clothing and gadgets; or The Futuristic, the spurious evocation of technological progress through the random alteration of purely superficial features like the ring of a telephone, the turning of computers and other appliances into black boxes filled with hallucinatory, protean imagery. Each of these trends, the illusory ideals they rest on, and the impulses and desires which give rise to them are gleefully exaggerated and deflated. Barbed phrases like 'five-star luxury crusades', 'the sacrificial dais on which lovers offer up their weekly paychecks', and 'puberty still remains mired in the trappings of the nursery' are tossed about with an almost Wildean abandon. Brand names are unhesitatingly juxtaposed in real-life situations, pointing up the ridiculousness of 'excited members of the Pepsi generation ... sunbathing in Coppertone and toasting each other with tumblers of Jim Beam Bourbon'. The cliches, imagery, and rhetoric of advertising copy is cheerfully mixed and matched, producing 'ice cream fudge bars chock full of saturated fats and bovine growth hormones' and computer games which involve 'reducing the Mutalisks' Valkyrie Missile Frigates to scrap metal'. References to pornography and sexual imagery are frequent - as are stunning insights into our own motivations and the way they are manipulated by advertising and by society at large.

Ultimately, Harris offers no answers or blueprints for a better future. One of the most appealing things about this book, for all its gratuitously intellectual language, is its lack of pretentiousness, its rejection of the 'holier-than-thou' attitude displayed by most social critics. Harris is, by his own admission, as much a victim of consumerism as anyone else, and recognizing this fact lends him the self-mocking tone and manic playfulness which are the mark of an excellent satirist. He is content to attack and destroy that which annoys him, without tying the threads of his diatribe into a neat prepackaged moral. He shows us the veil; it is left up to us to determine the best means of lifting it.