Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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Figure 2: BMW advertisement. 

 

We have grown accustomed to such forms of advertisement in which the 

commodity is loaded, so to speak, with intricate sets of personality features, and 

in which the purchase of that commodity, thus, becomes a way of buying those 

features of personality that are contained, as a crucial and defining 

characteristic, in the commodity. One, thus, buys an indexical, and such acts of 

consumption are always, and instantly, acts of identity. This is the reason why 

the commodity itself does not need to be displayed in ads: its not so much the 

commodity we desire, it is the identity indexical that comes with the commodity. 

We buy the “adjectives”, to paraphrase Barthes.  

We have also seen in Figure 1 that we do not necessarily need to purchase a 

specific object: buying a brand is sufficient. The “adjectives” – the identity 

indexicals – are attached to brands, more than to specific objects. Figure 3 shows 

an example of how one can literally become the brand. The young woman 

depicted in it is said to be “librarian by day, Bacardi by night”. 

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Figure 3: Bacardi ad. 

The point here is to observe how commodities are linearly connected to identity 

features. Buying an object, preferably one with a recognizable brand, enables one 

to “become the brand”, i.e. to approach the identity archetypes indexically lodged 

in the brand. Young women drinking Bacardi, thus, can come closer to the 

attractive party girl suggested in Figure 3; a man buying a BMW can come closer 

to the ideal of “the best daddy in the world”.  

Objects and brands, thus, propose elements of stories of the self to their 

prospective customers. And so, whenever we buy something, we can provide an 

account or rationalization of this particular purchase with respect to who we are. I 

can explain my preference for a BMW to others by arguing that I am a family 

man; I can explain my predilection for Bacardi by arguing that I am not just a 

(rather stuffy) librarian during the day but also a party girl at night. 

Consumption, thus, becomes an essential ingredient in an escalating culture of 

accountability (escalating notably due to the use of social media) in which every 

aspect of our being and our lives can be questioned by others, and needs to be 

motivated, explained, rationalized. I buy an Apple computer, and I am supposed 

to explain this specific purchase by referring it to aspects of my personality. 

Answering “well, I just needed a PC” or “oh, I never thought of it” are 

dispreferred responses to questions about the reasons why we bought that 

specific PC. We are expected to be knowledgeable in the hugely complex field of 

specific indexicalities attached to specific brands and products, and we are 

expected to be competent in constructing such indexical accounts about the 

details of our consumption behavior. Consumption has been broken down into a 

cosmos of infinitesimally small meaningful chunks in which specific products 

project specific bits of identity. Bourdieu’s (1984) distinction appears to have 

achieved extreme forms of specialization. 

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Consumption, of course, is not a homogeneous field; buying a BMW is an activity 

that occurs in another zone of life than buying a Bacardi cocktail in a club, 

organic vegetables for dinner or a specific shower gel for everyday use. We made 

this point in earlier papers: specific zones of life and being are subject to specific 

microhegemonies. For every zone, we have the choice between a variety of 

‘scripts’ that bring order to the potentially chaotic field of consumption-and-

identity. Getting ready for work in the morning involves handling a dozen or 

more commodities, from the shower gel and toothpaste we use in the bathroom, 

over the dress, shoes, make-up and perfume we wear, to the organic breakfast 

cereals we eat and the low-fat milk we pour into our cup of fair trade coffee.  

If we would see such stages of a day in terms of ‘ideological’ coherence – a 

symphony of dozens of indexicals all collapsing nicely into a coherent ‘me’ – we 

would find a cacophonic and internally contradictory complex. While my 

preference for organic cereals and fair trade coffee might bespeak an ‘ecological’ 

orientation, the skin lotion I use might be tested on animals, the low-fat milk can 

be produced in fully industrialized conditions, and the shower gel can contain 

seriously polluting phosphates. The thing is that every separate item in this 

complex has its own ‘logic’, so to speak, and that we do not perceive the bundling 

of a range of different items into a complex activity such as getting ready for 

work as one complex, but rather as a sequence of separate orientations to 

specific commodities, each of which provides a reasonably plausible account of 

‘me’.  

This does not preclude adherence to larger ‘scripts’ that organize bundles of such 

features. The cacophonic complex of features can still be shot through by 

arrangements that combine a multitude of details into more elaborate identity 

scripts or genres, that allow a measure of deviance while displaying instant 

‘total’ recognizability. Figure 4 (an image already encountered in the previous 

chapter) might illustrate this; it is an image we found when entering “managers” 

into Google Images. 

 

Figure 4: “managers” 

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