Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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intensive use of online social media makes these patterns more visible and less 

escapable as objects of reflection. It also turns our attention towards 

superdiversity as an area in which processes of cultural production and 

reproduction may acquire new – or at least visible – features, demanding new 

productive reflection and analysis (cf Blommaert & Rampton 2011). 

This paper has limited ambitions. We intend to provide a rough outline of the 

two forces we observe and we see as defining this pattern of culture-as-accent: a 

strong tendency towards uniformity and homogeneity on the one hand, and the 

inflation of details as metonymic marks of the total person on the other. Both 

forces co-occur in a dialectic in which the very forces of homogenization are 

always ‘footnoted’, so to speak, by strong and outspoken tendencies towards 

inflating and overvaluing details. In fact, much of contemporary cultural life can 

perhaps best be described as ‘uniformity-with-a-minor-difference’, and 

consumer capitalism plays into both apparently contradictory forces. The 

clearest examples of these patterns can thus be found in advertisements, and 

most of the illustrations we shall use in this paper are taken from that domain. 

The regimented society 

Our times are not different from most of Modernity – an era characterized by a 

tension between individualism and society, between an ideology of individual 

achievement and accomplishment, and the homogenizing pressures of an 

increasingly integrated society (see Fromm 1941 for an excellent discussion; 

also Entwistle 2000: 114-117, drawing on Simmel 1971). Consumer capitalism 

places itself right in the nexus of this tension, emphasizing individual choice 

while at the same time aiming at mass comsumption of similar products. 

Remember that Marcuse saw this feature as defining consumer capitalism: the 

paradox that we seem to believe that we are all unique individuals when we all 

wear the same garments, eat the same food and listen to the same music. This 

exploitation of an ideological false consciousness was, for Marcuse, the reason to 

see consumer capitalism as a form of totalitarianism. It was also Marcuse who 

identified the behavioral and social outcome of this: the fact that people’s 

consumption practices become the key to their social life. It is on the basis of 

shared consumption – owning or admiring similar commodities – that people 

form social groups. Identities are shaped by consumer behavior, and Bourdieu’s 

Distinction provided powerful empirical arguments for this. 

Marcuse’s thesis has been under fire for decades because of the totalizing and 

less than nuanced nature of his analysis (as well as, politically, the assumptions 

he used). Yet, the way our societies have of late developed may offer 

opportunities to return to the essence of the argument.  

Marcuse identified as false consciousness the fact that people, in order to 

participate in the totalitarian consumption modes, offer themselves to 

exploitation. The money required to purchase cars, refrigerators and television 

sets was earned by working longer and harder – by enabling the very producers 

of consumer commodities, in other words, to maximize profits by maximizing 

workers’ exploitation. This opportunity for false consciousness (i.e. for the 

‘ideological lie’ at the heart of the system) was predicated on a fully integrated 

society in which commodities circulated with speed and intensity, and in which 

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messages and images about such commodities – advertisement – appeared as 

the fuel driving this mode of intense circulation. People can only project 

particular ideas of identity onto, say, ownership of a BMW, when these ideas 

have been in circulation and have socially been enregistered, when they have 

become part of the common set of meaning-giving resources in a society. It is 

only, to adopt Bourdieu’s terminology for a moment, when a field has been 

shaped that people can take positions in that field. Concretely: we can only see 

our purchase of a BMW as an act of identity when other people see it in similar 

terms. We can then convert the fundamentally unfree relationship that is at the 

core of this transaction (someone paying a determined amount of money as a 

prerequisite for acquiring a commodity, in this case a BMW car) into something 

else: ‘choice’, the practice of selecting from within a huge range of alternatives, 

by a free and unconstrained individual. Choice has become the concept that 

embodies the ideological lie identified by Marcuse. It is in the ideological 

construction of ‘choice’ that we convert an unfree structure of market 

transaction into a practice that is the pinnacle of freedom: buying something 

after a process of selection, in which we compare and assess immaterial features 

of the commodities on offer – their ‘mythologies’ in the sense of Roland Barthes 

(1957). It is in this process, too, that we convert consumption from a transaction 

between two parties into an act that bespeaks just the consumer’s identity, into 

something that is about ‘me’ and ‘who I am’, not about the seller’s bank account 

(cf. Cronin’s [2000] ‘compulsory individuality’). 

There is no doubt that our era differs from preceding ones in terms of the speed 

and intensity of the circulation of messages and images on almost any aspect of 

life, online as well as ‘offline’, effective as well as aspirational. The internet has 

become a vast forum for the marketing of commodities, culture and selves, one of 

the spaces where superdiversity appears most visibly and palpably. It has 

shaped (and this process is not finished) a degree of integration to our societies 

probably unparalleled in history, and this in the face of an ever-growing increase 

in complexity and diversity. And with this increasing integration comes a range 

of social and cultural phenomena perhaps not new in substance but surely in 

degree, scope and intensity. As to scope: many of these phenomena are now 

effectively global and have become part of the general sociocultural scripts of 

populations in almost every part of the world. There is no need at this point to 

elaborate; a booming literature is documenting this process (e.g. Appadurai 

1996; Jenkins 2006; Varis & Wang 2011). 

This increased integration shapes and reshapes a plethora of fields: any aspect of 

human life can now be organized into structured and ordered mini-systems, 

which we called elsewhere ‘micro-hegemonies’ (Blommaert & Varis 2011). That 

is, miniscule aspects of life can be shaped now as targets for ordering practices 

related to commodification, and all of these fields are now subject to ‘how to’ 

discourses, to forms of regimentation and submission to ideals, strategic 

objectives and targets, and to infinitely detailed patterns of ‘management’ (i.e. 

homogenizing discipline) and accounting practices. In that sense, what we 

currently witness on the internet is an infinitely fractal reproduction of the 

sociocultural domains sketched in Bourdieu’s Distinction, a degree of elaboration 

and detail which is, in principle as well as in actual fact, infinite. The Foucaultian 

tension between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, absorbed into elaborate practices of 

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