Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

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intensification of such questions, alongside an escalation of the ‘how to’ practices 

into new social and cultural fields (as e.g. wearing a Muslim headscarf or ‘hijab’; 

see the next chapter). 

 

Figure 5: Gothic make-up guidelines 

As said, globalization has turned these patterns of recognizability – of semiotic 

homogeneity, in other words – into worldwide scripts for social and cultural life. 

Patterns of uniformity acquire recognizability across borders, driven as they are 

by a consumption capitalism that looks for market expansion for the same 

products. Conformity is a market ideal; it is also turning into a social and cultural 

ideal. The internet with its global reach and increasing availability strongly 

contributes to this, and we participate en masse on online platforms that are 

supposedly about self-actualization and the freedom to connect, yet run by 

companies that are making a lot of money out of our identity work. Thus, we 

have “standardized presences on sites like Facebook” (Lanier 2010: 16): sites 

that, while getting rich on advertising money, provide strict cultural scripts and 

templates for self-representation which can lead to, in efforts to conform, “self-

policing to the point of trying to achieve a precorrected self” (Turkle 2011: 258). 

All of this sounds perhaps as pessimistic as Marcuse’s old statements, and to 

some degree it is – as Appadurai (1996: 7) puts it, “where there is consumption 

there is pleasure, and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the 

other hand, is a rather more elusive commodity.” But there is another side to the 

coin, and simplistic cultural defeatism is not a feasible approach. 

 

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The inflation of details 

While we see the tremendous pressures towards conformity as the key to many 

contemporary aspects of life, we also witness how these processes of 

homogenization inevitably contain a small space for ‘uniqueness’. And this small 

space is a space of details – the space in which while most of our behaviour is 

fundamentally in line with the micro-hegemonies that regulate it. In this space 

we do place some accents, small deviations we call characteristics of our own 

uniqueness.  These deviations can be, and usually are, extremely small – they can 

even be invisible to most people; see the small tattoo on the woman’s body in 

Figure 6. The tattoo would be visible only when the body is uncovered – its 

default invisibility here is the whole point. 

 

Figure 6: an invisible tattoo 

Note also, in Figure 7, how extremely small differences appear to invoke a broad 

and deep complex of differences in ‘style’ and thence, in ‘personality’. The three 

suits worn here are fundamentally overwhelmingly similar. Differences in color, 

cut, and attributes (e.g. the watch chain) determine the ways in which we project 

larger complexes of distinction onto the small differences. We are witnessing 

here the fundamental semiotic mechanism at work: details are metonymically 

inflated so as to stand for something far bigger and more profound, a difference 

in ‘personality’, i.e. in the script I offer to others as the way in which they should 

read and recognize me. 

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Figure 7: three different suits 

‘Choice’, now, is located in the nano-politics of these details. As said, the system 

of consumer capitalism drifts strongly towards conformity. Goods can only yield 

maximum profits when they can be standardized and sold to huge numbers of 

customers. So what we see is that our actual range of ‘choice’ is severely 

restricted: we can choose between small differences, we move within a narrow 

bandwidth of choice. All cars are in essence very similar, and their key features 

and characteristics are entirely predictable. Within this overwhelming similarity 

of objects, we distinguish between brands, models, colors, options and gadgets 

and believe such choices are fundamental. We believe they reflect our most 

essential personality features, we believe that others will also recognize us in 

those terms, and we know that such choices will have effects on the price of the 

commodity we purchase. In actual fact, whenever we make such intricate 

choices, we make them within a very narrow range of differences, none of which 

are in themselves fundamental, but all of which have been made to be seen as 

fundamental by means of the mythologization described by Barthes discussing 

the ‘new Citroën’.  

Producers play into this pattern, by continuously suggesting and emphasizing 

that the choice for a particular detail over others both reflects who you are and 

creates you in that way. Your ‘accent’, so to speak, thereby becomes the totality 

of your personality, and every possible choice you make in consumption is likely 

to trigger these metonymic associative attributions. Figures 8 and 9 provide 

illustrations for this. 

In Figure 8 we see the actor John Travolta in an advertisement by the luxury 

watch brand Breitling. The message in the advertisement is that, while Travolta 

is universally known as an actor, this is just his ‘career’; in actual fact, he is a 

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pilot, and this more adventurous (and again, invisible) identity of his is projected 

onto the Breitling watch. Breitling indexes who Travolta really is. 

 

Figure 8: the real John Travolta 

And Figure 9 shows us ‘the Bentley man’: an older and manifestly affluent man – 

tailored suit, classic haircut, and the Chesterfield sofa – who tells the rest of the 

world to sod off – the middle finger. The Bentley, that’s me, is the message. Again, 

this is not a ‘me’ people would often see (since I’m a distinguished gentleman I 

probably don’t show my middle finger as a routine), but that is the point: this is 

my true self, the self most people don’t usually see. In a classic metaphor, the true 

self is hidden, invisible and only perceivable to some – and on the basis of details 

that should be read in a particular way. The hidden tattoo reflects the true 

personality of the woman in Figure 6, the chain watch that of a person who 

wears that particular suit; the Breitling watch is the index towards Travolta’s 

true personality, and the Bentley car reveals that the man behind the wheel is 

someone who does what he likes and does not care about what others think of 

him.  

All of those small signals need to be read as indicative of the whole personality. 

Anyone who observes advertisements every once in a while will not fail to pick 

this up. While every commodity is in itself mundane and trivial, advertisements 

produce the ‘adjectives’ that make some objects stand out and become 

‘distinguished’ and distinguishing for those who purchase them. In a world of 

conformity, even such details – the stuff that makes us unique, that creates our 

‘accent’ – are offered along lines of conformity and submission. 

At the same time, however, we do see agency here. The consumer is not just 

someone who consumes – passively absorbs and unintentionally reproduces the 

commodity’s indexicals – but someone who produces a specific and ordered self 

through these acts of reproduction. At this point, we have to leave the imagery of 

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