Consumers, Commodities and the Things They Obscure

Obscurement as a consumerist strategy ensures that we remain consumed in it and not be critical of it. 

What we do not want to know: while being soaked in comfort

As I type my thoughts while witnessing a massive snowfall in a remote village called Chicham in Spiti, 13,615 feet above the sea level, I have little or no idea about the business model of tourism in such a desolate destination. I stood on the Chicham-bridge last evening – Asia’s highest bridge overlooking a canyon-like trench – and felt clueless about its engineering. I am even more puzzled by the politics of its being – connecting a few sparsely populated villages. 

As I inhaled the diesel fumes of the vehicles passing by, I was apathetic towards the carbon foot-print left by my private car. The number of trees that were brought down to build the concrete structure that accommodates me cannot be my pressing concern if I want to be overwhelmed by nature. What an ambiguity! As a consumer, I do not have the allowance to contemplate and introspect. All we care for: is convenience and comfort. 

As a tourist or a traveler, we have the liberty to be utterly indifferent about the economics of tourism’s ever-extending commercial arm that has hefty environmental costs. We have the liberty to be insensitive towards local people and their cultures – both of which are getting transformed due to our presence and our demands for luxury. While I consume the serenity of the valley, I do not want to spoil my solitude with the thoughts of migrant workers, putting their lives at risk, and working in sub-zero temperatures to build these smooth roads that brought me here. 

I am happy with my experience and some spectacular landscape shots, as I pack my bags and move towards the big city where I belong – where the market is waiting to excite me with newer options; where algorithms would bombard me with prompts of commodities, depending on my search-history.

Liberties of liberalisation: we just want the delivery on time

IKEA has arrived in Delhi after years of anticipation. Lego has opened its interactive showroom in Gurgaon – a first in India. Fancy commodities and gadgets are already being ordered online and delivered at home in no time – mediated by endless apps. Access and availability, which is so taken for granted now – was unthinkable even until a couple of decades ago. 

Earlier, we had to endlessly wait for a foreign-friend to return from the West; or coax the frequently flying relative – to liberally share some duty-free items. Liberalisation has taken waiting out of wanting. Admiration, aspiration and its fulfillment – are all well within the flirting-range of those classes who can afford.

In a span of less than 20 years, one feels that window-shopping is passe. Everything can be screen-shopped in installments or added to the wishlist. What we often mistake for easy-abundance, quick-access and fast-disposal actually narrates how our relationship with commodities have radically transformed. In this era of short-lived life-span of commodities, we excessively indulge with the surface of commodities and gadgets. Not that we were ever deeply invested in the making and disassembling commodities and household gadgets, earlier. 

However, in the post-liberalisation era, our flirtatious relationship with things have made us more and more surface-centric. Conversely, we are increasingly more indifferent to processes behind the glossy curtain of consumption. We just want the delivery on time.

Consuming what the commodity reveals: not the toils and turmoil

We cannot care any less about the source, the extent of hardships, and complexities in the timeline of fancy, packaged food items reaching our refrigerators. As consumers, we are not expected to be interested in the political economy of the SEZ, where it is produced or assembled. We have to time or reason to exchange bare minimum pleasantries with the delivery boy who brought the imported bacon home, stored in the obscured warehouses. We are expected to care even less about the poultry and the farm and its procurement of materials or its treatment of labourers and animals. We are happy to consume what the commodity wants to reveal. What it wants to reveal is invariably a soothing image. Consumerism is essentially all about the production and reproduction of that pleasing image that hides all the toils and turmoil behind consumption.

Let us consider another example. It is amazing how we operate so many gadgets or use so many commodities without having any idea about its internal dynamics. As a photographer, one needs not know anything about the internal mechanisms of a camera. They can take decent images by familiarising themselves with buttons of the camera that are on the exterior of the gadget, as all camera-phone users do, at ease. I need not have any idea about the circuits of this laptop to use it creatively. Operators need to know how to make the machine work; and not bother about how it works internally. Similarly, most commodities have ‘impenetrability of its interior’ and ease of ‘control of its exterior’.

‘Impenetrability of the interior’ is not merely confined to our lack of knowledge about how things and systems function. It is an all-encompassing opaqueness regarding the politics of its production, economics of profit-making, complexities of competition, inevitability of its obsolescence and problems posed by its disposal. 

We are not supposed to be concerned with the expulsion of froth produced by the body-wash that leaves our body and enters the choked pipelines of urban sanitation. Such adverse considerations may impact the indulgence of infused rose-tranquillity while bathing. It may disturb the pleasure of the warm-water sprinkler – manufactured by burning coal at the back-end, which makes the water reach the overhead tank and turn it hot. We must remain oblivious to the non-renewable sources of energy that inculcate floral aroma in a fluid base and package it a plastic bottle – in order to find bathing immersive. 

What remains obscured, keeps life glossy. Similarly, we do not have to open our gadgets and commodities to make them function. And if something goes wrong, the management of that dysfunctionality can be outsourced to a service-station equipped to handle the internal complexities.

Consuming obscurement: or, obscurement as a consumerist strategy

Consumers mostly flirt with surfaces of commodities and surfaces of consumption-spaces – without bothering about the politics of its distribution or the history of its evolution or the trajectory of its extinction. Barring managers, scholars and activists – there is no need for any consumer to develop an(y) understanding of the nuances of demand and supply; complexity of labour-strikes; unethicality of human exploitations; environmental costs of a commodity; the nature of global-chains of outsourcing and assembling; balance-sheets of profits and losses. 

In order to be a consumer, one needs to earn, desire, browse, select, pay, consume and dispose. Unless something has gone terribly wrong, the consumer is not even required to reflect or introspect on the consumerist act. The most paradoxical part, and yet the most pleasurable part of consumption is that the process of buying, using, exhausting and disposing can continue without any compulsion to theorise the act of consumption. 

Consumers are primarily concerned with surfaces of commodities. Consumers can find pleasure in consumption, precisely because the complex web of interrelationships between the productive, consumerist, distributive and desiring process – are strategically hidden behind the glossy surfaces, lucrative ads and exciting product designs. This obscurement is integral to the inherent consumerist logic. Without obscuring it cannot make profit. It cannot please our senses. It cannot fulfil certain functions and connote certain meanings. 

The essence of consumer culture is to keep the desire alive and not to reveal its organising principles. Deep-sleep in an air-conditioned room; zipping through an expressway, living a high-rise life – all to remain perpetually disinterested in enormous amounts of coal being burned to keep us cool and functioning. To indulge in consumption is to consume this obscurement.

If consumption is about ‘surface’, it is also about obscuring almost everything beneath this surface. It obscures the unpleasant experiences of: labour, hardships, garbage. It obscures negotiations with various levels of bureaucracy, officials, political parties and a host of other stake-holders. The beauty and strategy of consumption lies in curating this obscurement without letting you and me realise what has been obscured. 

It is important to acknowledge this obscurement as integral to the philosophy of consumption. A strolling consumer in a theme-mall on a lazy afternoon has no business in knowing about the waste-disposal system of the mall is, or about the unethical labour-contracts prevailing in the mall, or about the exploitative land deals that has enabled the mall to be there. In fact, such consumer-concerns and curiosities are bad for the business.

Consumption is essentially about keeping you and me soaked in things and experiences that are good to look at, easy to think with, pleasant to touch and smell. This is the unsaid but obvious strategy of consumption – to ensure that we remain consumed in it and not be critical of it.

Sreedeep is a sociologist with Shiv Nadar University. He is the author of ‘Consumerist Encounters: Flirting with Things and Images’.

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