Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

26 

the ‘cultural junkie’ so often present in culture critique, of masses put to sleep by 

silly television programs and consumer habits. Someone who wears a Nike T-

shirt, with the brand visible to all, not just submits to the order imposed by Nike, 

the producer. S/he also consciously produces him/herself in a particular identity 

format. Of late this dialectic understanding of such processes have been captured 

under the neologism ‘prosumer’ – a consumer who at the same time produces 

something (say, a YouTube film or a Facebook entry; see Leppänen & Häkkinen 

2012). The ‘prosumer’ may be present across the whole spectre of consumer 

society, in fact drive that whole system by its dialectic of consuming and 

producing; and the more compelling the rules of consumer culture become, the 

more we will see the productive side of this oppression – it will, each time, create 

someone in a particular format of recognizability. There is, thus creativity in this 

process as we actively ‘work on our accents’. The creativity is seriously 

constrained, but it is there nevertheless (cf Blommaert 2005, chapter 5). 

 

 

Figure 9: the Bentley man. 

 

 

 

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Conclusions 

There are numerous stories about the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, especially 

about the astonishment and inarticulateness of East-German citizens when they 

entered West-German supermarkets for the first time. When confronted with 

shelves containing dozens of brands of shampoo, they just did not know what to 

choose and asked more familiar customers what the differences in price between 

shampoo A and shampoo B reflected. Was shampoo B better? Did the bottle of B 

contain more shampoo than that of A? Were the cheaper ones harmful? And why 

were larger bottles sometimes cheaper than smaller ones? It took West-Germans 

a lot of thinking before they could answer such – altogether rather obvious – 

questions. 

The East-Germans showed us something quite important: that in consumer 

culture, details are the true objects of marketing. It is the suggestion that 

products do not differ superficially, but that these superficial differences are in 

fact fundamental ones – so fundamental that a choice for or against them would 

reveal our true selves, both to ourselves and to others. Consequently, we 

surround ourselves with elaborate discourses on the importance of details, and 

have now turned our whole life into a rhetorical complex in which we rationalize 

our choices and preferences for particular details. We are now held accountable 

for every choice we make in life, and the worst possible answer when someone 

asks why we have chosen this commodity over another is ‘I don’t know’. Since 

every choice is seen as possibly defining our true selves because it always can be 

seen as derived from what we are ‘deep down, we need to explain and 

rationalize all of our choices. Social media become a landscape full of accounting 

practices, in which we construct elaborate and infintely detailed life-projects, 

dispersed over a myriad of aspects of behavior and life. Each of these aspects, we 

have seen, is subject to standards, to normative expectations. Yet, we continue to 

see them as fundamental of our total being, as reflective of our true, unique 

selves, of our authenticity. Authenticity, in turn, emerges as the battleground for 

cultural practices in superdiversity, with an expansion and intensification of the 

fields and objects arpound which authenticity can be articulated and contested 

(cf Blommaert & Varis 2011). 

The overall picture we get from this is that of culture as an accent. Most of what 

we do in organizing our lives is oriented towards conformity to others. This is a 

compelling thing, because we need this level of conformity in order to be 

recognizable by others, in order to make sense to them. Culture, after all, is that 

which provides meaning in human societies. But at the same time, we 

continuously create ‘accents’ in relation to the standards we have to submit to: 

we construct very small spaces of uniqueness, of things that we believe we do 

not share with others. I also wear a suit but with a different necktie; and I wear a 

Breitling watch which, to some, will tell that I’m in fact and deep down a non-suit 

person, someone who loves the outdoor, a rugged man of action. Armed with 

these paraphernalia, we enter the daily social arena in search of recognition, 

both as someone who fits a broad category, and as someone who deviates from 

it. It is because of these deviations that others will perhaps find me more 

interesting than most, a more layered and mysterious character, someone 

creative and inventive – so creative and inventive that I create ‘my own style’ by 

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28 

means of a unique combination of features, all of which can be read 

metonymically in relation to social categories, and all of which will provoke 

judgments by others. 

 

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