mrt, Appadurai, 12/2

 "As for the fetishism of the consumer, I mean to indicate here that that consumer has been transformed through commodity flows (and the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them), into a sign, both in Baudrillard's sense of a simulacrum that only asymptomatically approaches the form of a real social agent, and in the sense of a mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production" (p. 519).

        While Appadurai offers many interesting insights into globalization and the five dimensions of global cultural flows, this excerpt was what really stuck out to me throughout both of my readings of this piece. Appadurai uses Baudrillard to make a connection between these two theories, but my first thought was how much this reflected Marx and Engel's about the class that rules material production controls mental production. I think it's safe to say that in the current late-stage capitalism we experience in America, advertisers are indeed control of material production, meaning they control the intellectual force of consumers as well. I also noticed an interesting connection between this idea that the consumer does not hold any real agency and Adorno and Horkheimer's ideas surrounding the 'illusion of choice' and the rule of pseudo-individuality. Consumers believe that they hold agency in the sense that they are able to choose which product to buy (for example purchasing a Maybelline mascara instead of one by Covergirl), but either way they stand to serve the needs of the advertiser. Consumers become fetishized in this system because they feed the ever-growing production called for by capitalism, allowing the ruling force to stay in power because they control said production. Appadurai discusses this by saying "these images [global advertising] are increasingly distortions of a world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a consumer" (519). We become passive participants in the system of production which has in every way become ideological. As Althusser says "the author and the reader... both live... 'naturally' in ideology"-- I would argue this could also be said about the consumer and the producer. I think there is also an interesting connection between Appadurai's ideas concerning globalism utilizing the tools of homogenization and Adorno and Horkheimer's idea that culture is infecting everything with sameness.