Appadurai's Fetishism of the Consumer in Modern Advertisements

At the conclusion of our class discussion of Appadurai’s “Disjunction and Difference in in the Global Cultural Economy,” we raised the question of if we agree with his proposed idea of the “fetishism of the consumer” (517).  Appadurai puts forward the position that the two new concepts of production fetishism and fetishism of the consumer have superseded Marx’s original idea of fetishism of the commodity.  To briefly restate Marx’s concept, fetishism of the commodity is the regard of a product as divorced from its production.  That is, it forgets the origin of an item as the product of human and labor and instead reifies it as an autonomous object, thus providing it with an agency that it does not actually possess.  Appadurai shifts the focus of this fetishism from the commodity to the act of production and the consumer.  To define the former, “The locality…becomes a fetish that disguises the globally dispersed forces that actually drive the production process.” (517) In regards to the latter, fetishism of the consumer is a “mask for the real seat of agency, which is not the consumer but the producer and the many forces that constitute production.” (517-518) Appadurai then cites global advertising as a medium which has driven and actively perpetuates this obscuring of the true origin of agency, which in Appadurai’s estimation is the producer.  To answer our question from class, I do agree that to a large extent agency is falsely assumed by the consumer, who is in fact merely a commodified pawn that is identified and manipulated by the producer and production process.  To help explain why I buy into Appadurai’s unsettling and provocative argument, I’ll consider the same medium which he uses - advertising.

In Dr. Thacker’s Culture and Nature class we read an excerpt from Julia B. Corbett’s book Communicating Nature.  The chapter, titled “Faint-Green: Advertising and the Natural World,” discusses the exploitation of nature in advertisements.  Nature is used primarily to sell the product, regardless of if the environment is even connected with the item.  In this way, “By mixing the artificial with the natural, the environment becomes a commodity whose value is primarily economic.” (Corbett 148) The subliminal messaging coded into these advertisements through the manipulation of the environment in order to sell a product fits well with Appadurai’s argument for the fetishism of the consumer.  The influence of these ads for purchase of a product is not an active choice of the consumer, but rather their sentimental response to the presentation of nature in the advertisement.  In other words, the consumer buys the product because the producer is telling them to- any product can be substituted into the commercial, but the response which the targeted pool of consumers is consistent.  The failure of the consumer to recognize that they are buying this piece or presentation of the environment as much as they are the commodity only reinforces the power of the producer and production process.  The producer has simply realized what experience to manufacture to the consumer and is capitalizing on this. 

Corbett identifies four types of ads which feature the environment, all of which contain strategies which support Appadurai’s fetishism of the consumer.  They are: a.) Nature-as-backdrop, b.) Green product attributes, c.) Green image, and d.) Environmental advocacy.  The Nature-as-backdrop ads are particularly illustrative of the fetishism of the consumer, as there is no actual tie between the product and the idealized landscape presented.  In fact, these ads feature commodities that have no “direct or obvious connection to the natural world, but nonhuman icons are very much part of the overall persuasive message.” (150)  These advertisements use animals, landscape scenery, and the aesthetic appeal of flowers and trees only because they are useful in marketing the product.  I quickly began to notice that this was highly prevalent in car commercials, as well as granola bar commercials such as the 2012 Nature Valley Granola Thins commercial.

In the Subaru commercial, nature is meant to evoke feelings of empowerment and artistic inspiration.  The advertisement is so well crafted that it’s easy, even keeping these descriptions of ads in mind, to forget that the Subaru has absolutely nothing to do with the husband’s paintings.  As consumers, however, we make the association even when it is not actually there.  A similar phenomenon happens in the Nature Valley granola thins ad.  The sense of family and belonging, especially with the warm, sentimental feeling that nature provides, should be entirely divorced from a consumer’s decision to buy the granola thins.  I admit though, after watching the commercial I really wanted to put them on the list to grab the next time I was at the store.  With these advertisements, it is hard not to see Appadurai’s argument for the false sense of agency that a consumer holds.  So, are we buying products because we actually want and need them or are we simply playing into a production scheme to maximize profits based on consumer emotions?