Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions Baz Kershaw Maurya Wickstrom . Performing Consumers: Global Capital and Its Theatrical Seductions. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 186. $35.95/£18.99 (Pb). There is a telling moment in this short but expansive book about the powers of commodification and consumerism in the "brandscapes" of American, and therefore global, capitalism. Little girls are with their mothers and grandmothers in the restaurant of the Manhattan branch of American Girl Place: the mecca of the tween-oriented disciplinary system that is American Girl Dolls. Owned by the implausibly named Pleasant Company, this Place peddles the American Dream (which Performing Consumers sees as a paradoxically pleasurable nightmare) in the form of miniature role models—dolls, modelled on various clichés of the short, New-World history of capitalism's expansionist success. There is Kirsten, the blonde Swedish immigrant of 1854; Kaya, the pigtailed American Indian of 1764; Addy, the straight-haired African American of slavery-era 1864; and Kit, the "resourceful" child of the Great Depression who saves her family from ruin. Each of these "loveable" figures is given a "typical" life story and surrounded with detailed period objects that, argues Wickstrom, achieve a reproduced authenticity powerful enough to "conjure the material reality of the doll so fully that it is hard not to get drawn in, to feel one's self to be part of that life, or at least to want to be" (97). But in the store's café, matters are not going according to the plan set out by Pleasant Company. The only boy in the café is "slumped" over his Gameboy, while the mother "in fiercer and fiercer tones" orders him to turn it off. At the next table, one of the granddaughters exclaims over her sandwiches, "Cream cheese and cukes, gross!" (133). That "gross!" is the only explicit resistance voiced in the book by one of the myriad consumers who populate its account of "corporate performance" and its "theatrical seductions." The rest, in their many millions, seem happily willing to swallow the dream that is really a nightmare—even though they know it is fake, a "really made up" event. What causes the spirit of protest to be infantilized in this way? Where must the critics of consumerism venture to find rebellion against such abject docility? The answers to such questions seem to be suspended in the book's horrified attraction to the objects of its studies: Wickstrom wanders through the cavernous wastes of retail USA like a latter-day feminist Dante, drawn incessantly to catalogue the paradox of its magnetic repulsion. Thus Performing Consumers provides a resonant tour of three other sweetly sickening "brandscapes" that match the horrendous dollhouse vision of the American Girl Doll empire. [End Page 470] The first tour surveys the horrors of the Nike and Ralph Lauren stores, where the shoes stand in for footloose "cool" and the fake guess-which-century opulence celebrates ostentatiously cluttered "taste." This stress on fashion allows a bouncy treatment of pertinent theorists (Hart and Negri, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Massumi) who are marshalled in an argument that hinges on the consumers' complicity: "We are incorporated vascularly into capital as we circulate through its passage-ways, responsible for every aspect of what it needs to thrive" (40). This shopping trip is a gentle stroll compared to the two journeys at the heart of this compelling travelogue about a peculiarly contemporary affliction. Wickstrom's account of her visit to the Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas is like a weather report from hell, "white hot" in its determination to wring an appalled admiration out of the spectacle of disgusting waste. Aspiring to classical relevance through its animatronics of Bacchus, Venus, Apollo, and the "Fountain of the Gods," the theatrum mundi provides Wickstrom with a somewhat strained trope for its immersive powers, as if faux-ancient historical resonance might bestow magical justification on the rubbish that it really is. Benjamin and Adorno's prescient intimations of the "hollowness" of consumption trigger an ironic twist in the argument: "[i]n a consummately commodified environment, we are reassured that, through the commodity itself, the devastating effects of greed...

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