Addiction, Obsession, and Compulsion

I really liked the way in which you could trace through our readings for this week a trajectory of the creation and exponential growth of the commodity consumer.  They most definitely helped contribute to my understanding of today's economy (and sadly to my own understanding of myself as a consumer).  

Lipsitz points out the ways in which the postwar economy very much depended on increased consumer spending and an expansion of credit, and the necessity of early television programming to legitimize excessive and arbitrary spending, breaking from frugal Depression-era mindsets.  With the help of working-class suburban sitcoms, the economic situation was not only redefined, but ethnic, class, and family identities were transformed into consumer identities.  Once this break was in place it was necessary for television via the suburban middle class family sitcom to naturalize the homogenous definition of the ideal white, middle class, suburban (and consumerist) family, and this is where Haralovich picks up. One problem I had with Haralovich's article is that she doesn't acknowledge working-class suburban sitcoms, saying, "the working class is marginalized in and minorities are absent from these discourses and from the social economy of consumption."  Lipsitz explicitly points out that the working-class and minorities were in fact used to justify new modes of consumption through early working class sitcoms, and actually set up what would come later.  Although Haralovich is concerned with a later time frame, there is some overlap, as The Life of Riley debuted in 1949 and the second version of the series ran until 1958.  Father Knows Best ran from 1954 to 1960.  

It is through an understanding of the way in which consumers were positioned in the early days of television that we can understand how something like HSN ever came into being ("might legitimately be considered the fifth 'commercial network' in the US" WHAT???), or the ideas of 'mass customization' that Bruzzi explores.  Although only briefly mentioned, what interested me most about White's article was her discussion of the addiction, obsession, and compulsion that commodity consumption breeds (I think this may have hit a personal nerve as well).  If we look at the ways in which Haralovich and and Lipsitz trace how consumers (especially women) were positioned in relation to products, it is not actually that surprising that we find ourselves in such an economic predicament today.

As a side note, I can't think about 1950s suburban sitcoms without thinking about Douglas Sirk (and Far From Heaven).  Haralovich's quoting of Robert Woods Kennedy's theory that housing design should display the female as sexual being is definitely something that was taken up and unpacked by Sirk and Haynes in their films, and the *amazing* costumes in their films function to expose the entrapment of the 1950s housewife to serve the ultimate goal of commenting on the emptiness of 1950s domestic life.  The fact that Sirk was acknowledging this in the 50s shows that there was, on some level, an awareness of the detrimental effects of the economic changes in America while they were happening.