You aren’t what you eat
by Steve
Amongst all the goodness in the first issue of the New Inquiry magazine, one article in particular stood out – The Resentment Machine, by Freddy De Boer. It is available in full in that link back there, so you should probably read that rather than this, but anyway, it challenged me in all number of ways (I should probably offer some sort of summary here, but even after multiple readings I won’t do it justice and you’d be better off just reading the real thing, or failing that reading what follows in the next paragraph…), but one quote near the end particularly got to me.
“There is a problem, though. The value-through-what-is-consumed is entirely illusory. There is no there there. This is what you can really learn about a person by understanding his or her cultural consumption, the movies, music, fashion, media, and assorted other socially inflected ephemera: nothing. Absolutely nothing…There are no Apple people. Buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else. Nothing separates a Budweiser man from a microbrew guy. That our society insists that there are differences here is only our longest con.”
Undoubtedly, on first reading this it felt right. We shouldn’t define ourselves or others by what we consume. There is more to life than consumerism. Society shouldn’t be so shallow to judge on cultural tastes, when that neglects people’s character, courtesy and values. Cultural consumption has little, if any, meaningful worth or value.
And yet. And yet on second reading it struck me more plainly that I was that guy – Mr Cultural Consumption Man. To at least some degree I define myself by my cultural consumption, and have almost certainly been shaped by it.
Getting into indie music in my early teens helped me define myself as someone different from my peers. I had my music. Then Britpop happened and everyone around me was suddenly into similar music, so I moved on to (what I thought, and probably still think) was better stuff, and definitely more obscure. I kept my music to myself, the eternal inverted snob. If I gave too much away, a little bit of me would be gone too. Which is pretty sad when you’re talking about a bunch of middling indie records. But still.
In a broader sense that music moulded me. The early nineties was the last golden age of music journalism in the UK. The music press was still weekly, still vital and didn’t talk down to its readership. It brought in critical theory and wider cultural concerns to discussions about pop and rock music. It not only pointed to great bands, it pointed to great films, books and art. And so did the bands themselves. The Manic Street Preachers would have literary quotes in their sleevenotes, Suede would talk of art and arthouse film. Old Smiths articles and record covers would lead me to Oscar Wilde, 60s kitchen sink dramas and Warhol. Chances are I wasn’t growing up a sexist, racist pig, but having role models in indie music certainly led me on a path away from that and towards the vaguely left-leaning position I take today. They definitely widened my reading and viewing habits, opened up new worlds and new perspectives.
Even beer has defined me. Or I’ve defined myself by beer, I’m not sure which. In my youth, most of my contemporaries would be swilling lager, or alcopops. My friends and I gravitated towards the beer and ale. At first, it was probably because it was cheap and the pub we went to had a decent selection. But it also felt a little bit like a statement – we weren’t the lager louts, we were probably old men in training. Enjoying good beer probably helped shape my appreciation of good food, or of any proper craft. My experiences, through consumption, have for better or worse help make me, given me a certain worldview.
But of course I still get the argument above, and still feel a little guilty about it. Defining myself by what I consume is probably at best foolhardy and at worst a little dangerous. There is a deeper me than what I watch, or listen to, or drink. Just drinking good beer and listening to good music won’t make me a good person.
And however I may define bad taste doesn’t guarantee that someone is a bad person. I shouldn’t judge them. But naturally I do. I have matched certain tastes to certain behaviours, and have sometimes been right. I’ve met angry, inarticulate lager drinkers listening to awful bands, for example, but I’ve also met some great people with terrible tastes (by my definition). I’ve met Mac bores, and met lovely people who iWorship. While I suspect cultural consumption can be some sort of societal barometer, I know I shouldn’t trust myself to use it. Sometimes taste and character are coincedental, sometimes they reflect one another. It is difficult to decide which, so probably isn’t a helpful social strategy. It also makes me a terrible snob, inverted or otherwise.
But I do find it interesting that the article doesn’t really touch on cultural consumption in terms of reading books. I suspect that is just as much of an issue. I find it odd when I go to someone’s house and don’t see any books. I love to see what people are reading on the train. Perhaps to digress a little, but nevermind, one reason e-readers are so popular has be that you can read what you want without anyone judging you.
I don’t really know what the answer is, or what conclusion to make. Feel free to help me out in the comments. But, I think I’m leaning towards thinking that definition-by-consumption isn’t so bad when we define ourselves, providing that we don’t see it as a get-out – we don’t automatically become a good person because we read great literature, listen to wonderful music and drink fine beer. Surely to some extent we are the result of our experiences, and cultural consumption does colour those. We see society and humanity as much through books and films and music as we do through face-to-face interaction, for better or for worse.
But maybe we shouldn’t be so ashamed of what isn’t so cool or whatever. The whole guilty pleasures phenomenon seems built on saying publicly, “I might like this awful song, but because I’m aware that is it awful and that I shouldn’t like it please don’t judge me, it doesn’t make me a bad person.” Or maybe I’m just overthinking (or even underthinking) that one.
But defining others by what they consume is more problematic, albeit something pretty hardwired. At least for me. It will be a while before I can stop myself sighing at the guy playing on his iPad sipping a light beer from a large corporation. But I’ll keep trying. And I’ll keep trying to grasp this argument, because I suspect I’ve missed the point, or at least overlooked some key elements of it. Further installments may not follow, but I’ll keep on thinkin’, dear reader.
Wait until next year 
[…] return for a moment to The Resentment Machine, as referenced in my last missive, because heaven knows I’m not afraid of bludgeoning a subject/text to death, wringing out […]
LikeLike
Sunday morning catching up on my RSS feed. You’ve presented an interesting dilemma, one I’m likely going to mentally debate over the next several days. If you go very big picture, of course, you’d see no difference between a Bud man and a craft aficionado—they’re both drinking beer, right? But if you hone in closer, you’re going to see differences—personality quirks that lead a person to favor one camp over the other. It’s obvious that there are differences: you can see it in the marketing campaigns—in the US anyway, Budweiser seems to promote a sense of nostalgia which puts its drinkers into a larger national narrative. You’re a true American if you drink Bud, in essence. But even if you put every craft brewery in the country together, I suspect they don’t have Bud’s advertising budgets, but it seems like the movement makes a push toward discovery and uniqueness, emphasizing each brew’s individuality. So it’s clear that these parts of the industry view themselves differently, and they’re marketing themselves to different groups. (And you’re right, this does apply to other entertainments, too—preferred music genres, reading habits, television programming, probably religious preferences, etc. I wouldn’t put Big Beer, mainstream music, mass paperback fiction, and Christianity in one camp and craft brew, indie rock, literary fiction, and agnosticism in another, but you can learn a lot about how these industries see themselves by how they present themselves to the public.)
Where I’m going to be debating in my head, and which might be the thrust of the article you linked to but haven’t read yet, is the question of whether we’re predisposed to these differences or whether these differences are the result of our response to marketing decisions. I’m inclined to think that we’re predisposed—I would still consider myself intellectually curious even if I hadn’t had interests in books and beer and hadn’t sought out, say, David Foster Wallace over John Grisham or Ska Brewing over Budweiser. But the cynical side of me can see that there’s a good chance that my intellectual curiosity is more the product of marketing—that my favorite bands tend to be buzz bands from a few specific labels that have received positive write-ups on one or two specific websites; that my book preferences are largely determined by a publicity cycle (publishers’ press releases, book reviewers, blurbs from fellow authors) that’s centered within a few square miles in NYC and is more than willing to do whatever it takes—even if it’s turning the relatively free-thinking David Foster Wallace into something of a “free-thinking brand”—to sell their next book.
LikeLike
Thanks for such an in-depth reply – you should really start blogging again soon!
I’m kicking myself that I didn’t make the link to marketing – I think it brings a lot of the arguments into focus, and leads to thoughts about how we perceive marketing too. Some people don’t mind marketing, some people don’t notice it and some people don’t like it but are probably just as susceptible (non-marketing to a market of people suspicious of marketing sometimes seems just as much of a marketing trick as overt marketing).
And how much are we identifying ourselves according to the product, and how much are we identifying ourselves according to the marketing around the product?
To some extent, a billboard or TV ad feels a little more honest than the ‘buzz’ around something. At least you know what you’re dealing with. Yet at the same time I have Bill Hicks on my shoulder, whispering in my ear that all advertising is evil.
“Where I’m going to be debating in my head, and which might be the thrust of the article you linked to but haven’t read yet, is the question of whether we’re predisposed to these differences or whether these differences are the result of our response to marketing decisions.”
I’d love to try unpicking this, but I’m at work, and this would take a lot of thought – but my wooly answer would be I suspect that one feeds the other. There is a degree of predisposition that makes us more open to certain marketing, that then reinforces the predisposition. And so on. A virtuous circle, or vicious circle, depending on your standpoint I guess.
Anyway, a lot to think about, and far too many uses of the word ‘marketing’ in my reply.
LikeLike
Only the sidebar hedear manifest of this template layer of paper, followed by prior posts on another layer honourable below. Main thesis area categories included in the website and a one and only search not two colors adjacent – it’s either light-skinned or orange. Has precise hedear gist is a unique, one of a philanthropic theme sitting unreservedly uncovered on best of the pages links. Elegant.
LikeLike