On Planned Obsolescence

Written by M.M.F.

Published: 2025-07-20

The postmodern break from the modernist "tenet" of the "firm distinction" between high art and consumerism does not also represent, as Linda Hutcheon argues, the triumph of the "marginal," the "different," the other.[1] To render the work of art as a surface for commentary, criticism, reappropriation and nothing else is to situate both artist and audience in a space of no friction. If there is nothing outside of the text, there is nothing we make contact with except for texts. The subaltern cannot speak if no speaker is recognized as subaltern. If one cannot participate in collective movements when they put pen to paper or brush to canvas, so too do they lose membership in categories of social identification in their everyday lives. In our present moment of "late-capitalist individualism," Mattie Colquhoun writes, we have "left such things behind" in the twentieth century where they are thought to belong.[2] Fredric Jameson thus presents the following observations on the harmony between the postmodern condition and what is called "consumer society," or more to the point, a society in which individuals think of themselves as consumers before anything else:

I want to argue in this piece that the consumer protection campaigns of the 1970s served as a bridge between the New Deal postwar welfare state and the neoliberal turn initiated by Reagan and consolidated by Clinton, resulting in the reality of postmodernism that would permeate every area of Western culture for years to come. American liberalism had been premised on the ability of that welfare state to "win the peace" by maintaining consistent economic growth to stave off crisis and class struggle. After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the onset of stagflation, the working class ceased to be a cohesive unit to which a political party could appeal; the status of the consumer was more accessible as a nexus of mass politics. So it came to be that Ralph Nader and Public Citizen commanded popular support in the seventies as Congress passed waves of consumer protection laws: laws that would protect the consumer from being "manipulated, defrauded, and injured" by unsavory business practices.[4] Nader had conservative Republicans in Congress pressing FTC nominees to "become[...] real zealot[s] in terms of consumer affairs."[5] He even hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live.[6] By the time Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 with both houses of Congress under Democratic control, "perfection at last seemed attainable" for the consumer welfare movement.[7] But in the end, it was not meant to be... or was it?

Carter managed to clock in four years as an early neoliberal deregulator, but it was not until the Reagan years that the political meaning of consumer society came into plain view. The Great Communicator nailed the point home to an audience of 80 million Americans: "Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?"[8] Atop a platform of welfare reform and tax cuts for the rich, Reagan was able to appear as more of a consumer crusader than Nader had ever been. Antitrust enforcement virtually disappeared with the proclamation that the Sherman Act was a consumer welfare statute before anything else. Tax cuts were welcomed by those who least stood to benefit from them; the freedom of one to make money, after all, ought to be the freedom of all to make money. And no one batted an eyelash when Reagan crushed the PATCO strike in 1981. The striking air traffic controllers were regarded as "outlaws,"[9] while the unions were depicted as "greedy."[10] Just what were these cushy white-collar workers complaining about anyway?

David Harvey defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economy according to which "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade."[11] This is to collapse the class content of the traditional theory of the postwar managerial state into a single dimension. Economic growth, for Keynes, had been desirable precisely because "there would be more for everyone, rich and poor, labor and business,"[12] whereas in the neoliberal picture, there was no fundamental difference between rich and poor or labor and business at all: "people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all of the junk that's produced."[13] A society permeated by such ideological premises is naturally immunized against class solidarity, the thing that, for Marx, was supposed to drive the engine of history. What the hell am I supposed to have in common with my fellow worker? He buys Pepsi. I'm a Coke man.

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Indeed, the phenomenon of ideological structures acting as barriers to revolutionary agency proved to be one of the most provocative and contentious problems for Marxist theory in the twenty-first century. Against the dominant currents of so-called Marxist humanism, according to which human subjects are "somehow, in some last instance," the prime movers of social processes,[14] Althusser proposed that the ideological apparatuses of the state were tools for subjective construction: ideology "interpellates" or "hails" the concrete individual subjects, creating the sort of subject it needs in order to reproduce itself.[15] In the case of neoliberalism, as Richard Wolff argues, workers "had to be called to think of[...] themselves and everyone else as free market participants," and not as members of concrete social classes engaged in class struggle: "individual worth [is] measurable above all by one's achieved level of consumption," because one's consumption is "the appropriate reward for their individual contribution to production."[16]

Marxism was supposed to herald the development of a collective subject, the proletariat-for-itself, and for a time, it seemed that the category of "consumer" worked well enough as a stand-in. The struggle of working people could be identified easily enough with a struggle against a corporate culture that sought to liberate itself from accountability to consumers. After all, such liberation entailed collective organization, perhaps even class consciousness, on the part of the capitalists: "boardroom Jacobins," as Perlstein calls them.[17] Surely, the struggle of consumers against such concentrated corporate power could at least stand in for class struggle by proxy. But it was precisely this struggle-by-proxy that was so effortlessly hijacked by the forces of the Right. The individual subject constituted as a consumer could not be counted upon to develop class solidarity in moments where labor unions and welfare recipients were under assault, because the identity of the consumer is individual before anything else: consumption, after all, is something one does as an individual, on the basis of contractual relations with other individuals. This profound shift in political conception was felt just as much on the Left as on the Right. Wolff continues:

Wolff's point is that the Left resigned itself to a political program that could no longer testify to the contradictions of capitalist society. It is not just that the Left sidelined revolutionary demands in favor of reform and compromise, but rather that it formulated demands on the basis of a consumerist ideology designed to channel revolutionary energy into its own reproduction. What is a demand for higher wages, after all, if not a demand to be able to consume more? What is a demand for consumer protections if not a demand for better conditions for those who are already well enough off to consume more? Faced with such thorough interpellation as we see in contemporary "consumer society," the old model of class struggle feels like a fever dream. Where could one even start?

While the general public settled into its newfound identity of consumption, the managerial state ballooned, with no less than twenty new agencies created between 1970 and 1979 and a six billion dollar budget to keep them afloat.[24] In 1984, the Supreme Court awarded these agencies the power to interpret the laws that governed them.[25] The sheer size of the new administrative state coupled with the deferential legal environment under Chevron encouraged an "extremely aggressive" Executive Branch, no matter what party was in control of it, since any President would depend heavily on the agencies in order to enact any sort of agenda.[26] The Reaganites were thus able to mount a campaign against regulation with the power of the regulatory state: Reagan could go around a recalcitrant Democratic Congress and relax environmental regulations by simply appointing Anne Gorsuch as the new head of the EPA. This newfound power of the state was met with confusion on a Left already suffering from the failures of 1968 that now found itself defending the "bureaucratic machinery of the modern state" from being "smashed" by the state itself, in an ironic reversal of Lenin's position in The State and Revolution.[28]

As Reagan continued his assault on the labor movement and civilians continued to dislodge their own identities from their class relations, political reality became less like a site of mass participation and more like a finely-tuned product sold to a carefully-curated demographic of customers. Only about half of the country bothered to vote in presidential elections in the eighties and nineties, and by the time Bill Clinton appeared on the scene in a technicolor dreamcoat to rescue the country from Reagan's successor, another 18% had been peeled off by Ross Perot's independent campaign. Two years after that, the Republicans took control of the House in a "landslide for conservatism."[29] 41% of eligible voters showed up for that one,[30] and most of them hadn't even heard of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America."[31] Cultural positions became more heavily identified with "symbolic forms of political moralizing," because political participation was more about one's behavior as a consumer and less about one's position within the class struggle.[32] Political positions, on the other hand, dissolved into bureaucracy: to be "on the Left" or "on the Right" had more to do with which public figures one would prefer to have in charge of the "state machinery," which in turn amounted to little more than which one of them one would like to have a beer with. Postmodernism reigned supreme, and its grip on politics was not going to be dislodged by some dirty hippy uprising in Seattle.

This confusion of the Left appeared within the space of cultural pseudopolitics as a psychological problem: critical consciousness sought to explain its own failures as if they were products of unhealthy minds as opposed to tactical missteps of actually-existing political movements. The activist Left attempted to come to terms with neoliberal austerity as the result of what Mark Fisher called a "deliberately cultivated depression," according to which one's social position was inevitably "their fault and their fault alone,"[33] while the academic Left engaged in what Christopher Hitchens described as "competitive solipsism," the "intersectional" discourses that could offer productive analysis on little more than the subtle white supremacist biases in Law and Order or the cop-friendly messaging of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.[34] These were now psychological as opposed to political problems because the radical currents no longer saw themselves as constructing a collective subject of history: critical thought instead turned inwards, focusing on membership of one identity group or another, on self-consciousness of one's own social biases and, ultimately, on what one might do or should do as a would-be "professional manager" of state policy.[35] And yet even these psychological problems were simply taken for granted, in the same way that preferences and utility curves are taken for granted in economic models, as if passed down from on high as facts of nature. To think radically was to think of oneself exactly as the bourgeois economists thought of others: as black boxes with preferences and qualities defined in a vacuum, abstracted from all reference to the tides of history.

In every case, the neoliberal production of subjects appears to us as a transcendental horizon of possible experience. We know that it is going on, we can see that we are indeed interpellated in this way, yet we can never directly encounter the conditions for this interpellation because we are just as much beholden to those same conditions. When we try to imagine a life outside of consumer society, we run into the same sort of problems as when we try to imagine the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, with time and space compressed into an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singular point in an ineffable void of nothingness. Even our attempts to resist end up hopelessly subsumed within the very process we are trying to resist. As Steven Shaviro puts it:

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Slavoj Žižek's elaboration of Althusser's Ideologiekritik is particularly useful for translating these matters into concrete terms. In consumer society, he argues, there remains a possibility of a "moment of genuine protest," a possibility that can be glimpsed but not fully realized in, say, the London riots in 2011, in which protesters looted malls and storefronts across the city in a "violent redirection" of "consumerist desire."[37] What was missing there was a materialist account of how these desires come to exist in the first place and, consequently, how they become "caught up" in the "deadly vicious cycle" of "violence and counter-violence" between consumerist desire which cannot be realized "properly" (by actually paying for whatever goods) and the ideological apparatuses which produce such desires that cannot be realized.[38]

Work a standard 9 to 5 and you'll find out real fast what it's like to be caught up in this cycle. In the pilot of Taylor Sheridan's Landman, a series as brutal as it is unapologetic in its recurring depictions of working-class life in a deep red state, Cooper Norris begins a new job as an oil roustabout in Odessa, hoping to work his way up the ladder until he knows everything he needs to know in order to run his own oil company. His supervisor, Armando, invites him to dinner after his first day on the job. He tells Cooper that most of his new co-workers are ex-felons working to earn back the money they lost when they first went in. "It's better if you work for it real hard. That way, nobody can take it away." The next day, Armando is killed in a rig explosion. The episode fades to black as flames give way to smoke. No matter how hard you work for it, it can always be taken away.

Those who claim an authentic anti-establishment position today often find themselves in the same toxic feedback loop as Armando. As soon as you think you've figured out the right way to consume, the way to really get what you want, you run up against the limits of bourgeois society: you loot the mall, or else the mall loots you. But if we understand how we came to see ourselves as consumers first and people second, we might get a better idea of how to develop the opposite sort of collective subjectivity upon which any politics of liberation ultimately depends. If we understand the role we have played in the consolidation of consumerist ideology, whether as overt political agents or simply as normal everyday citizens of bourgeois society, we will be in a better position to pave the way for a more promising political project, a project with one eye to the past and the other to the future, a project that will maintain the revolutionary kernel of the Lefts of generations past while avoiding the pitfalls into which those Lefts fell. This is not to say that there is any "going back," that we might simply hand-wave away our interpellation once the curtain is pulled back. The genesis of the subject cannot be undone any more than a language can be unlearned. But to understand the mechanics of this genesis is to understand the ways in which the subject of consumer society can acquire autonomy from or otherwise "subtract itself" from the cold waters of the capitalist society that produces it. After all, if ideology is produced like a commodity, so too is it produced in order to become obsolete—like a commodity.