Unit Two, Lesson 1: The More Factor: Semiotics and Consumerism 81-96

Signs of Life Lesson 1: 1-22; 81-103

Introduction

1. Cultural juggernaut: critical mass takes over such as vampires, as romantic figures, not monsters, becoming a ubiquitous (everywhere) part of culture.  
2. Being a critical thinker is asking the question: Why is this romantic notion of a vampire so popular with youth culture? What appetites are being stirred?
3. High culture: art for the privileged and educated: ballet, classical music, and literature. Ruminating over the nuances of philosophy is another form of high culture. There tends to be a vain, self-congratulation in these indulgences, but not always.
4. Low culture: Troglodyte, mindless entertainments such as gladiator fights from the days of the Roman Empire to today’s versions such as the hit Jack-ass. Dining, too, has low culture with the “all you can eat buffet” in which “filling the tank,” not real eating, is the focus.
5. Folk culture refers to the art of the people, ballads that champion the interests of the common people, those who struggle under the “Man’s thumb.”
6. Commercialized culture: usurping or co-opting authentic artistic creation and commercializing it under the guise of folk art. This commercialized culture is most commonly referred to as pop or popular culture and it is the focus of this book.
7. Mass culture: the movement of people from agricultural fragments into mass concentrated urban centers.
8. Passive consumerism: taking in what corporate culture sells us without questioning its authenticity and quality and thereby keeping “the whole consumer-capitalist system going” (5).
9. Lords of Cool: They (corporate creations) tell us what to buy and what to visit: gadgets, cars, computers, music, clothes, social media sites, etc.
10. Familiarity Factor: This book focuses on popular culture because in part the students are familiar with it.
11. Sign: anything that carries a meaning. A vampire is a sign of a misfit, an outsider who understands the alienated teenage girl and therefore represents the teenage girl’s hunger for being understood and identifying with the misfit.
12. The world of signs is the text. Our textbook is the “window to the text.”
13. The Semiotic Method: decoding signs like the vampire pop culture phenomenon described above. The semiotic method is based on the fact that decoding a sign can be differentiated from any other sign within the system or code. In decoding, we consider the political dimensions.
14. To denote is to directly show and thus create an explicit sign. HomeTown Buffet is explicitly about large portions, “all you can eat.”
15. To connote is to indirectly show and thus create an implicit sign. HomeTown Buffet is implicitly about a unique way of American eating, which isn’t really eating at all but an attempt to “fill the gas tank” and perhaps degrade oneself into a mindless feeding frenzy. In the Shake ‘N Bake commercial a housewife is depressed until she pleases her husband, and his boss, by serving a new dish that wins her boss a promotion. The implicit message is that business is a man’s game while cooking and pleasing men is a woman’s game.
16.  Oppositional reading challenges the face value “preferred reading” of something that people assume is benign such as a Shake ‘N Bake commercial. In other words, we conduct an oppositional reading to find the insane and grotesque in what society assumes is normal and “okay.”
17. Abduction: the process of arriving at an interpretation by seeking the most plausible explanation for something. Some people are obsessed with arming themselves with guns, for example. They fear the invasion of The Other; thus their fear speaks to their unconscious tribalism and prejudice against “strangers.”
18. Using vampires as an example of semiotic analysis: Why was there a shift from vampire the monster in 1900 to vampire the sympathetic hero today? The vampire story has merged with common young adult narratives of being validated, finding belonging, and being a special standout (popular). Vampires are also ageless so they appeal to a culture that worships youth and disdains old age. Add to the fact that vampires are cool, glamorous and sexy and now you no longer have a vampire per se but a rock star “bad boy.” Sullen, misunderstood, craving love, and handsome as hell, he is the ultimate romantic symbol. The vampire has many interpretations today, which is to say it is “overdetermined,” capable of decodings.
19. Cultural mythologies: Semiotics deconstructs the assumed beliefs behind pop culture. These assumptions are called cultural mythologies. Here are two: Men define themselves by their income; women define themselves by the quality of their motherhood. These are called gender myths. Sometimes we conform to these myths unconsciously and reinforce the assumption that their true even if these roles violate our core, authentic self. Advertising feeds on cultural myths like conquering the great frontier and the making of a Jeep with headlights that look like horse eyes. Being a suburban consumer driving to Jeep makes you a “frontiersman.” A lot of mythologies, including racial mythologies, are based on stereotypes of which there are too many to name.
    

Semiotic Analysis Primer or Template

1. What colors are used and what do they represent? (see page 35)
2. Is the image realistic, impressionistic, romantic? Why?
3. Who is the intended audience?
4. What emotion does the image convey?
5. What is the composition and layout?
6. What is the underlying message or “text”?
7. What viewer response is desired by the image’s producers?

Chapter 1: Consuming Passions 81-96

 

One. Why do we choose to buy things that are different from other people’s “wish list”?

We shop for a variety of reasons:

1. Identity, to express our worldview or aspired economic-social class
2. Belonging (to join the tribe that has a code of dress and belongings and to create an immaculate, impeccable aesthetic so everyone knows exactly what tribe we’re in such as owning an iMac and a Mini Cooper, which makes people believe we’re members of the cognoscenti)
3. To gain the esteem and admiration of others
4. To make a political statement
5. To feel the false security of surrounding ourselves with things, which makes us feel, falsely, invincible and likable.
6. To be cool or hip
7. To be masculine
8. To conform to the ideal female image
9. To distinguish ourselves from others and to assert our uniqueness and individuality
10. To embrace the paradox of being an “anti-consumer” and outlier rebel by being a consumer of “anti-consumer” items like Subaru cars and Patagonia “utilitarian” jackets.
11. Some of us develop an acute, pathological addiction to consumerism because “buying things” becomes a distraction from our boredom, the “existential vacuum,” and “buying things” helps us stay in a world we feel we can manage when we have larger life problems that render us feeling helpless and hopeless. Can’t find love? Buy a new BMW. Problem solved. You’re not athletic? Buy an expensive skateboard. Problem solved. Not as skinny as you like? Buy jeans three sizes too small and hope you’ll be able to fit in them in the next three months. You’re still fat but those skinny jeans sure look good in your closet. This addiction is called “impoverishment through substitution.”
12. Related to Number 11, you’re overcome with feelings of relevance; thus, the shopping quest becomes the quest for relevance. Feeling irrelevant is insufferable part of the human condition and we will do anything to feel like “we matter.” For example, “If I buy the new iPad, I’ll be on everybody’s radar screen. People will talk about me on Facebook. I’ll be relevant. Hooray!”

The case of skinny jeans

Jeans in the 1960s became “a uniform of defiance of middle-class proscriptions” and a sign of “solidarity with the working class.” 

Over time, however, jeans evolved into part of the fashion mainstream movement, becoming part of the corporation, the Man, the very thing original wearers of jeans despised. 

When business takes a grass movement and makes it chic and popular for its own profitable enterprise, we call this process “co-opting.”

Now jeans, baggy or skinny, can be associated with hip-hop, hipster, Beat, New Wave, indie, alternative, skateboarder, etc. 

Fads, Zeitgeist, Mass Production, and Mass Consumption

Each era or zeitgeist has its own fad, which becomes consumed and then disposed of. This fad is then replaced by a new fad that ushers in the next zeitgeist. 

Modern advertising and mass production go hand in hand. For example, television shows in different eras give us different images of cultural identity, which become consumer opportunities and for some shopping addicts imperatives, meaning they have to acquire the “hot cultural symbol” like puka shell necklaces and angel flight slacks from my middle school years in the 1970s. In the 1980s, the “uniform” in San Francisco was jeans and a black leather jacket. 

A lot of sixth graders in 2014 wear “Little House on the Prairie” lace-up boots. They’re popular because of The Hunger Games films.

A lot of young people wear expensive yoga pants (Lululemons) with their outfits. 

A lot of young men are wearing pink to show that their masculinity can stand up to this “hot” color. 

The Principle of Mass Consumption

There needs to be shifts in consumer consumption. The more shifts the better. This is accomplished when advertisers can convince you that “you are what you buy.” 

Advertisers need to create “built-in obsolescence,” the idea that the things you buy will be passé and irrelevant soon after you buy them, so that you’ll have to buy the new cool stuff that will make you, once again, relevant, until of course, your new stuff, too, becomes irrelevant. 

Clothes, cars, gadgets, phones, computers, social media sites, pads, jewelry, fashion accessories, furniture, home décor are all subject to built-in obsolescence. 

Mass production “creates consumer societies based on the constant production of new products that are intended to be disposed of with the next product year” (86). 

Consumption has become the crucial force behind our economy, even more so that production (86). Economist Michael Mandel argues that a consumption economy is not sustainable. 

The book argues that consumption is such a dominating force of our existence that it has created a radical transformation in the way we view ourselves. 

The Consumer Message: You Are What You Buy

There is a ubiquity of media images and messages that tell us we are what we buy and we absorb this message unconsciously. Many argue we are in some ways helpless to fighting this message.  

Everywhere we go, there are “stimulation triggers” to buy stuff. This is even more true in the age of smartphones. 

Laurence Shames, “The More Factor” (90)

One. What is the history of American speculation and optimism? 

In the first paragraph, Shames writes about the façade of business in our country: We make a business look thriving even when it isn’t. Speculators dumped empty town, got a nose count, and let people go their way. 

In an age closer to ours, and one that didn’t exist when Shames wrote his book, we had the Internet Bubble. 

Two. What two powers propel the history of American business?

One, of course, is the potential for enormous profit. 

Two, is the myth of infinite growth, the idea that America will keep booming, the idea of More, an idea that is difficult to believe in our current age of a shrinking middle-class and the Avaricious One Percent. Or put it this way: There may still be growth for the 1% but not the rest of America. 

America was built on the idea of frontier, not just geographically but as a concept. Gadgets and social media sites are a new “frontier” today. The HBO series Deadwood captured the notion of frontier in the 1870s. 

America’s open space became a breeding ground for the idea of frontier as ambition. 

The American trinity became frontier, opportunity, more (92). 

Three. Why is More a Monster that kills morality?

Because we read on page 92, bottom paragraph, that More makes Americans “backward in adopting values, hopes, ambitions that have to do with things other than more.” We also read “the ethic of decency has been upstaged by the ethic of success.” This idea is reinforced when we observe that Christian Protestant America has equated the work ethic with being “godly” and this work ethic is rely just a smokescreen for blind ambition and self-interest, two sins of the Christian faith.   

More has become erroneously synonymous with success. We’re so obsessed with More we take short vacations or don’t vacation at all. We’re so obsessed with More we live in a consumer debt society so that in 2014 average credit card debt is over 15K. 

Rather than aspire to pay off our debts, Americans are a nation of “restless striving.” We always have to shop to alleviate the anxiety of irrelevance and to participate in the Myth of More. Otherwise, we fear we’ll be left out. We’ll be left behind and we’ll be all alone and no one will love us unless we have Gucci, Apple, and Mercedes.

We are a nation of philistines who only measure success in metrics that can be counted with numbers like the size of a bank account, the acreage of a mansion lot, the number of cars in the driveway and the cost of those cars. “What kind of a job do you have? What is your income? What kind of car do you drive? Where do you live?” 

We are not a nation that values intangibles that cannot be measured in numbers like empathy, altruism, artistic creativity, meaning, belonging, community, and literacy, to name several. 

My brother lives in Berkeley, which appears in part to pay some credence to the intangibles. It’s a nice place to raise your children.

Four. Can More last forever?

Every bubble must burst. In fact, real wealth in America has been in decline since the late 1970s. Recently, there have been “steady declines for the lower 93%.” 

Even though the frontier of unlimited growth died over a hundred years ago, its myth persists today (94, paragraph 25). 

More is a form of insanity called concupiscence. 

We can define concupiscence as limitless, selfish desires that don't sate our appetites. To the contrary, the process of feeding our concupiscence only serves to make our desires greater than before. The result of concupiscence is insanity. For a recent example, we can look at Tiger Woods who is an example of concupiscence, which is the sum of temptation plus opportunity.

Some of us don't go completely insane in our quest to feed our desires. We mature, grow up, and join the adult world. Part of being an adult is knowing our limits in eating, spending, pleasure-seeking, etc.

In other words, being an adult is about conquering concupiscence.

When we mature and realize we must assert limits on ourselves, we often have an awakening to Existential Ache, the realization of two things:

One, we are not, as we once believed in childhood, the center of the universe.

Two, we come to realize that our desires will ALWAYS outstrip our capacity to satisfy them.

Failure to realize the latter principle of Existential Ache results in concupiscence, the futile struggle to appease our ever-growing appetites.

Concupiscence is stimulated by opportunity and imagination. We have the money to sate our appetites and we imagine the satisfaction of increasing our appetites while finding the necessary resources to satisfy those freshly honed desires.

Example of concupiscence:

A businessman travels frequently to Miami where he frequents a swanky club. The club's outer rim terrace is cluttered with women of the most exquistite beauty and pulchritude. But inside, it is rumored, in the VIP suite, the women are even more beautiful than the one's visible on the outside plaza. So the businessman pays the handsome fee to become a VIP and comforts himself with the thought that he, as an exclusive club member, has access to Miami's most lovely women.

Wrong. Rumors abound that there is an inner chamber, requiring a surreptious descent down a trap door, where the women are even more outrageously beautiful than in the VIP room. Our troubled businessman pays the bouncer $500 and is escorted through the trapdoor where, once again, he is comforted with the belief that he has access to Miami's most beautiful women.

Wrong. Rumors abound about another trapdoor leading to a chamber of even more rarified beauties and another and another until the businessman collapses with the despair that Miami's most beautiful women will elude him forever. He shrinks with anguish, forgoes all interests and passions, and spends the rest of his life languishing in self-pity.

This is the story of concupiscence.

And it is the story of Jeff Henderson before he "falls" in prison where his opportunities to fuel his concupiscence have all but ended.   

One. Concupiscence and Its Causes

1.  Concupiscence is the search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego without a moral compass. The result is moral dissolution, a fancy term for the loss of morality and sanity. Tennessee Williams became famous after writing the play A Streetcar Named Desire and lived in a fancy hotel where he had room service and escorts visit him every day. One evening he poured gravy over his banana split and realized he had become insane. He left the hotel, went to Mexico and resumed with his writing career.

2.  Concupiscence is the pursuit of happiness without a moral compass; in other words, you have no vision of anything beyond gratifying your base appetites and therefore have a misguided definition of happiness.

3.  When you have no vision beyond your base appetites, you are what we call “Bread and Circus,” which means all you desire is food and entertainment.

4.  Concupiscence compels you to feed your irrational appetites, which wage war against your powers of reason. For example, one of my students knows a guy who lives in expensive Brentwood and drives a BMW but he has to eat his sister’s government cheese and other handouts because he has no money for food. That’s not a reasonable situation.

5.  Concupiscence grows inside us when we have role models without a moral compass. 

6.  Concupiscence grows inside us from the anger that is born from having a sense of deprivation: “I’m gonna get mine.”

7.  The writer Jonathan Franzen gives concupiscence another name, Ache: Being overwhelmed by desires that always outrun our capacity to fulfill them.

8.  Another cause behind concupiscence is vanity, also called the libido ostentandi: The need to show off. A rich woman in Argentina, a landlady, wears a body length mink coat at an outdoor bazaar where the temperature is 105 degrees. She wants everyone to know she is of a higher stature. She passes out and dies of heat stroke.  

Another example: A student wrote an essay about his friend who, buying a BMW 5 series, had to work 2 jobs and drop out of El Camino College. The misguided young man’s didn’t know how depressed he was when he realized all his friends, the people who would be impressed with his BMW, could not see it since they were attending college. One day this BMW owner made a special trip to the college and yelled to his buddies to come look at his car but they had to go to his class and my student’s final vision of his friend was screaming from his BMW on the Crenshaw parking lot for someone to check out his car. No one cared.

9. As I said before, concupiscence is the result of temptation plus opportunity.   

Two. Concupiscence and Its Effects: Moral Dissolution

1.  If concupiscence goes its full course, we arrive at a condition of moral dissolution like Tennessee Williams mentioned above. Here’s another example: A man cheats on his girlfriend or wife once and feels the searing pain from his conscience. He cheats on her 1,000 times and feels nothing because his conscience has decomposed into what we call moral dissolution. In other words, he’s lost his soul.

2.  Another word for moral dissolution is debauchery, which means the moral pillars that hold up your morality have fallen and your morality has fallen with them.

3.  Ennui; you’ve filled your senses with so much pleasure that you can no longer feel anything. You have become incurably numb to life and now must suffer the desperation of needing to feel anything, no matter what the cost. This process is also called the “hedonic treadmill” in which you constantly have to spike the pleasure quotient before you adapt to the pleasure, become numb to it and have to spike the pleasure again. This cycle goes on and on with you always losing.

 

4.  Nihilism; the death of meaning. There is no right or wrong. Life has no meaning. The world is merely a playground for your desires. The world is a giant margarita glass and you suck on the straw, slurp every last drop and then die. Hedonism always ends in nihilism.  

Essay Option for Second Typed Essay

Reading the Signs (96): 1, 3, 5

One. Connecting the Texts: Shames asserts that Americans have been influenced by the frontier belief “that America would keep on booming” (para. 8). Do you feel that this belief continues to be influential into the twenty-first entury? Write an essay arguing for your position. To develop your ideas, consult John Verdant’s “The Ables vs. the Binges” (152) and Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Bright-Sided” (532).