Daniel Harris’s Aesthetic Attack On Consumerism
Review by Kristian Williams

Daniel Harris’ book, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism, offers a long-overdue examination of modern tastes, focusing on those which have been formed and exploited by consumerism.
Consumerism, as Harris describes it, is an elaborate system of false promises. While pretending to satisfy our desires, it instead operates to create desires which cannot be satisfied, promoting a slavish devotion to mass-produced commodities. "[T]he aesthetics of consumerism are. . . designed to stir up dissatisfaction, to provoke restless longings that cannot be fulfilled. They actively instill anxiety and discontent with our lot, reinforcing the conviction that others are living lives happier and more interesting than our own" (xviii-xix).

Consumerism’s use of aesthetics necessarily reflects this dual nature. Just as created desires and manufactured worries deprive us of real satisfaction, our world has become so crowded with images that there is no possibility of actually seeing it. Dazed and oblivious, we drift through a designer landscape where carefully planned details, though practically invisible, determine much of the texture of our lives.

This is where Harris’ book begins—with the understanding that "we no longer truly see our world" (x), and with the realization that the overlooked details do somehow matter. The concept of cute, for example, represents an "attempt to recover the repressed aesthetic data of our lives; to make this vast archive of subliminal images accessible to conscious analysis" (xi).

Each chapter explains one aesthetic principle, with the focus on how the principle affects us psychologically and how it is constructed socially. Harris brings us an analysis of capitalism from the point of consumption. One might suspect that a book like this would read like a long, uninspired issue of Adbusters, without the cool pictures. Instead, we are treated to a thoughtful but abrasive work of criticism. This ambitious project does not focus on one specific text, but takes on a broader system of values, an entire ideology underlying the particular narratives, artifacts, and identities that make up our culture.

Harris does a remarkable job demolishing the categories of cool, cute, zany, romantic, and countless more, showing them to be shoddy approximations of the meaning and value we secretly feel lacking from our lives. He also successfully politicizes each aesthetic element, decoding it and revealing the tensions it reflects, or the conflicts it obscures, in our attitudes towards and relationships with the people and the world around us. Through this lens, quaint becomes a shallow attempt to preserve traditional structures of family and home, and cute is seen as a fetishization of the deformed and the pitiable.

But perhaps the trick works too well. The reader is left with the impression that no aesthetic categories could survive such scrutiny, that all aesthetic attempts—as such—are equally empty. The result is a sort of aesthetic despair; one fears the impossibility of authenticity, the hopelessness of adequate self-expression. Harris’ approach also precludes the possibility of any politically correct (that is—anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist) aesthetic. His rendition of the dominant ideology is so encompassing as to leave no room for any resistance, or any alternative.

He writes: "They have built into consumerism symbolic forms of resistance to it, ineffectual strategies of rebellion that flatter the consumer with the belief that, far from being a marketing guinea pig, at the mercy of Madison Avenue, he is a courageous loner, a wacky oddball immune to the indoctrination of advertising. One of the key concepts of popular culture is controlled nonconformity. . .Consumerism has created the perfect disguise for conformity: rebelliousness. Our individuality is actually contingent on our obedience, on buying the same product that millions of other people are buying at exactly the same time in exactly the same stores, all the while laboring under the extraordinary misconception that shopping is a profoundly self-creative act that distinguishes us from the mindless herd." (xxiii).

In keeping with the spirit of his critique, Harris offers no political program and expounds no clear ideology. The book speaks seriously against consumer culture, against its artificially created desires and insecurities, against the standards it promotes and the spiritual poverty it creates, but also denies the possibility of any alternative. Hence, it serves to maintain the passive role of the reader/consumer. It draws attention to our docility, but only reinforces it by emphasizing the futile nature of rebellion. This attitude is not only defeatist, but reactionary. A sharp critic of consumerism, Harris himself can only judge progress by the very standards he decries, such that any move away from consumerism is, of necessity, a giant step backwards. He writes: "What, after all, would a world without consumerism be like? Surely not one that I myself would choose to live in. There would be no cities because cities are dependent on trade, nor money because there would be nothing to buy. . .To imagine a world without consumerism is to erase oneself, to devolve through eons of human progress back to an era in which all of our time would have been directed to scrambling in the dust for roots and berries, with not a second to spare for making art or reading literature. . ." (265).

Harris mistakenly assumes that consumerism—a system he himself describes as provoking compulsive acquisitiveness in order to maximize corporate profit without regard to human need—is the only possible basis for an economic system. Sadly, he cannot imagine an economic arrangement that is not driven by profit and so does not need to produce the insatiable desire for ever more consumer goods. He cannot envision a system that would provide for everyone’s material needs and allow them the opportunity to develop relationships and engage in meaningful pursuits without the distractions of commodity fetishism. Harris cannot conceive of a society in which it is not necessary—psychologically or economically—for a large mass of people to have the pathological need to buy.

This ideological retreat may owe as much to the focus of the argument as to the limits of Harris’ imagination. The perspective of the work is decidedly middle-class, with its attention centering on those to whom advertisers appeal. Hence, it considers capitalism from the perspective of those who have more than they need. Notably absent is any discussion of the consequences of consumerism for those who have too little, those who cannot reliably meet even their basic needs, those who lack the opportunity to pursue manufactured desires. Because of this, he overlooks the material consequences of consumerism. He forgets that his smugly Panglossian acceptance of the status quo is a luxury that the vast majority of the world’s population cannot well afford.

I would eagerly recommend this book, but it is hard to know to whom I should recommend it. People who already hate consumer culture mostly don’t need it, and those who like consumer culture would probably just think it irritating. Political activists will consider it irrelevant, and artists would find it discouraging. I suppose other cultural critics might find it useful. Maybe the guys from Negativland would like it.

Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic is available from Basic Books