Page 316 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes than a demonstration of the facility with which pleasures [could] be squeezed out of acquired riches
right away and on the spot.”
In a producer society, one consumes slowly, prolonging the exposure so as to be seen.
The effect of consuming for the sake of communicating to strangers limits how consumption signifies
in producer societies. Efficiency and mobilization of labor reinforce social mythos and ethos that give
consumption its vocabulary. This condition changes once consumerism sets in.
Eventually, producer societies reach levels of efficiency and production where natural need cannot
clear the market, resulting in overproduction. Human desire must then be mobilized, as labor was, in
order to reach an economic equilibrium.
Consumption changes roles at this point, society now recasts “human wants, desires and longings
into the principal propelling and operating force of society.”
This reorganization attempts to change the nature of those wants and desires because it needs to
enlist them in the economy’s service. Like labor before it, desire is objectified by social discourse and
stripped of some significance in order for it to function as an economic input.
This objectification dislocates desire and robs it of personality. A commoditized desire loses some of
its more abstract meaning since it can so readily be weighed in terms of money. The personal
significance of our wants evaporates from the increased pressure and heat of mobilized desire. In
other words, producer societies tell you what you should want and what those wants mean;
consumerist societies do not care, so long as you want more and want it faster.
Individuals struggle to define themselves in that type of climate. The lack of meaning and emphasis
on novelty forecasts perpetual boredom as a sort of postmodern pathology, or ennui. Bauman quotes
Georg Simmel on this point, who attributed the postmodern ennui to this objectification of desire:
“[Things] appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and grey tone; no one object deserves preference
over any other. . . . All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of
money.”
It is important to note that both economic systems present impediments to the way people give
meaning to their labor and consumption.
For a person in a producer society, the anxiety about the value of his or her own labor translates into
a quest for peers’ validation by consuming in ostentatious ways. For a person in a consumerist society,
the pressure exerted by advertising and industry to clear the market of surplus goods increases the
speed of consumption in a way that provides many options but divests the consumer of his or her
attention to them. Like the immediate landscape seen from the window of a fast train, all distinctions
blur into their basest aspects. Lahiri’s characters in “This Blessed House” embody these economic
differences.
The Hypocrisy of Camp

Some would argue that Twinkle’s treasure hunt is a viable antidote to the instability of postmodern
life. If a postmodern economy insists on a speed of consumption that robs us of the ability to make
sense of that consumption for ourselves, maybe the best thing to do is to deny that life was ever about
making sense at all. The social geographer David Harvey sums up the problem in his materialist
analysis of postmodernity: “How can we . . . identify essential meanings? Postmodernism, with its
resignation to bottomless fragmentation and ephemerality, generally refuses to contemplate that
question.”
Postmodernism, as Harvey describes it, forfeits truth and coherence for options and play. This is the
sort of cultural logic implicit in Twinkle’s actions. Indeed, her very name suggests the evanescence
that she sees in life. By Twinkle’s rules, you can elevate yourself above cultural signification and
define taste and knowledge for yourself, but never with certainty or permanence. And why shouldn’t
this work? After all, she seems much happier than Sanjeev and much better equipped to deal with the
vicissitudes of life. She laughs at the kitsch of modernity, at the empty promises and truth claims. She
recognizes the inability of mechanical forgeries to reproduce the essence of divinity, and so she
laughs.The type of sign play with kitsch in which Twinkle engages fits under the description of

310 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY