Abstract
Political consumerism is consumer choice beyond self-interest. Allegedly blurring the public–private threshold and overcoming the limits of traditional politics, it epitomizes in many respects late modern governance. Reflecting on the meaning and scope of consumer political agency, scholarship has engaged with the governmentality perspective. Important studies have ensued, together with irresolvable disputes and a neglect of the relationship that consumers establish with their objects of concern. To address this question, and drawing on the philosophical contributions of Roberto Esposito, the article elaborates on the notion of immunization. Being immune means having nothing in common with others, no obligations towards them. This analytical register may significantly broaden our understanding of current changes in political agency. A review of three main issues (responsibility-taking, downshifting, and the public) shows that the paradox of political consumerism – like other forms of governance that replace political obligations with private autonomies – is that it endeavours to (re)establish or strengthen the communal ties while at the same time using immunization as its fundamental resource.
Political consumerism (hereafter PC) can be defined as consumer choices beyond self-interest, that is, choices made by considering the consequences for others. Its targets are business and government practices in regard to issues of justice, fairness, environmental protection, animal welfare, and so on. Three basic types of action are involved: boycotts, ‘buycotts’ (that is, selective shopping), and symbolic actions, mainly consisting of attacks on producer or product images (‘subvertising’, ‘culture jamming’, etc.).
In itself, the political use of the market is not new. It has a long tradition, well-known examples of which are the 1773 Boston Tea Party protest which helped trigger the American Revolution, or the early 1900s anti-sweatshop White Label Campaign. ‘Consumption has nurtured civic life at key moments in modern history’ (Soper and Trentmann, 2008: 5). Yet, while consumer protest once implied a demand for political recognition, it now seems to express and demand a reconsideration of politics. ‘Citizens today, and especially the younger generations, prefer participating in looser and less hierarchical informal networks as well as various lifestyle-related, sporadic mobilization efforts … directed towards spheres distinct from traditional politics’ (Stolle et al., 2005: 250). Today’s PC is therefore portrayed as a major alternative or complement to traditional forms of political participation; as a means to create social capital by involving people in new networks and institutions; as a key accompaniment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives (to be effective the latter need a public interested in firms’ social and environmental performance). On the other hand, consumers may be misled by ‘greenwash’ or ‘sweatwash’: superficial changes in government or corporate behaviour. Shopping, moreover, is related to financial resources. This gives rise to issues of social justice (middle-upper social strata are over-represented among political consumers). There is also a risk of overestimating the phenomenon: traditional and political motivations are often intertwined.
There are temporal, institutional and cultural connections between late modern PC and neoliberal reforms. Focused on individual entrepreneurial capacities, property rights, innovation, flexibility, reduced or rearranged state intervention, free markets and free trade, a devaluation of traditional politics and the integration of the post-modernist critique of Fordist capitalism in the name of freedom, autonomy and creativity (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Harvey, 2005; Hay, 2007), these reforms have produced a ‘new governance’ characterized by the expanding public role of private actors, with the regulatory power of the state being flanked or replaced by voluntary engagements through contracts or single-handed obligations grounded on the autonomy of private agents. Contemporary PC builds largely on this rationale, and it should be analysed in the context of this broader phenomenon. Growing scepticism towards, and disaffection with, traditional politics seemingly induces an increasing number of people to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a globalized economy, and the rearranged institutional and cultural set-up of ‘advanced’ democracies, in order to fulfil their other-regarding concerns, their sense of justice and of personal responsibility beyond the limits of traditional belongings and duties.
One recurrent theme in the debate is the extent to which these opportunities correspond to an actual agency. What is meant by acting as a political consumer? In addressing this question, PC scholarship meets Foucault’s governmentality perspective. It does so for good reason. Whereas the mainstream literature on governance – in itself a contested notion (Kjaer, 2004) – builds on traditional views of power, authority and legitimacy, focuses on rules and institutions, and assumes that the objects of governmental action pre-exist the latter, the governmentality approach pays greater attention to actual practices and the role that narratives, knowledges, beliefs, ways of thinking, operational technologies perform in the simultaneous constitution of government and its objects (Bevir, 2010; Lemke, 2007; Sending and Neumann, 2006). The way in which this approach deals with issues of government and subjectivity, however, is as attractive to some PC scholars as it is problematic for others. In what follows, I argue that this discussion, though providing important contributions to theoretical and empirical research agendas, is ultimately irresolvable. Moreover, by focusing on questions of scope, it neglects questions of relation. PC centres on the idea that ‘citizen concern for their private lives can be used in a beneficial way for society at large; [that] privately oriented virtues have a public role to play’ (Micheletti, 2003: 160). The issue, then, is not only the extent to which consumers are endowed with political agency, but how such agency is exerted; the type of relationship established with what lies beyond self-interest: ‘the others’, ‘the public’, ‘the exploited’, ‘the environment’, ‘the common good’, or whatever object of concern is singled out. To address this problem I introduce the concept of immunization. This analytical register, I argue, makes it possible to circumvent difficulties in accommodating qualified accounts of agency to governmentality theory. By reviewing three issues prominent in the PC literature (the public, responsibility-taking and downshifting), I offer a first exploration of the insights that this notion may provide into the promises and perils of replacing political obligations with private autonomies.
The problem of agency
Politically-minded action entails an agency (motivations and possibilities to affect the market) broader or deeper than the one involved in traditional consumer behaviour based on taste and price. For many scholars the issue is not whether such agency exists, but why it is often misrecognized. The problem allegedly lies in the dominant ‘republican’ model of the citizen. This model conceives citizenship as ‘an all-encompassing identity [focused on] active participation in the affairs of the community, its defence, laws, and government’ (Soper and Trentmann, 2008: 3). By assuming a sharp divide between public and private, choice and community, consumer and citizen, most contemporary discussions of political participation have neglected the evidence that everyday life may be a locus of resistance and political action (Stolle et al., 2005); that the market may represent ‘an inroad – venue – into policymaking that otherwise may be rather closed to grassroots citizen participation’ (Micheletti, 2003: 12). The lamented consequence is that the expansion of consumerism has been depicted, by influential scholars like Habermas and Mouffe, as eroding ‘people’s already thinning engagement with the public world, destroying citizenship in any meaningful sense of the word’ (Soper and Trentmann, 2008: 2).
Also rational choice theory is regarded as negatively affecting the case for PC. Its selfish, means–ends rational model of agency has become a major framework for interpreting individual and collective behaviour, as if the market were merely a means for ‘releasing the individual citizen from the hierarchical, paternalist influence of the welfare state’ (Soper and Trentmann, 2008: 4). However, anthropologists and sociologists show the importance of consumption in creating and renewing sociality and cultural bonds. Economists like Marshall or Walras stress that ethical commitments, like altruism, solidarity, love, and charity, play a role in economic behaviour. Philosophers like Dewey argue about the importance of habits, customs and impulses, promoting a vision of ‘the choosing consumer as someone who by trial and error establishes ways of coping with experiences and challenges and of developing more enlightened paths of action’ (Bevir and Trentmann, 2008: 26). In short, there is plenty of evidence that human agents are neither totally autonomous, as rational choice theory contends, nor fully dependent on fixed norms and rules, as claimed by many students of institutions. Rather, agency is ‘situated’. ‘People always adopt beliefs against the background … of a social tradition, [yet] can act in novel ways for reasons of their own so as to transform both themselves and this background’ (Bevir, 2007: 38). Conduct is not entirely dependent on context.
To grasp the political import of consumerism, therefore, one should move beyond not only old-fashioned, idealized views of democracy but also flawed views of human agency as means–ends consistency or compliance with social norms. Only a free agent, in the sense specified, may significantly affect public affairs through consumption; and only if endowed with a capacity to blur the boundaries of public and private matters may a social agent be regarded as really free.
Consumer agency and governmentality
In seeking to reconcile freedom and constraint in social action, students of PC have applied a variety of theoretical frameworks: from actor-network theory to Giddens’s structuration theory; from Schatzki’s practice approach to the governmentality perspective. This last in particular, has proved to be as fruitful as it is controversial.
By distinguishing the ‘art of governing’ from old sovereignty and by stressing that power exists only in action, Foucault has been described as ‘among the first to put policy before politics, [granting consumers] a creative political will and power of their own’ (Bang, 2007: 217). Indeed, both of the basic elements in Foucault’s approach – (1) that power is not simply coercion and domination but has a productive character operating at the micro-level as the capacity to structure the field of action, to control the conduct of others, as action upon acting subjects and insofar as they are free agents; and (2) that such agents are therefore not simply subject to power but can actively shape themselves according to their own views of self-realization and achievement as ethical subjects – seem especially suited to dealing with PC in advanced democracies. The governmentality perspective maintains the focus on political power (an issue that practice-oriented approaches often tend to sidestep), while avoiding the exclusive macro-scale orientation and the traditional understanding of politics typical, for example, of many neo-Marxist studies (Jessop, 2007).
If Foucault could deal only to a limited extent with neoliberal governmentality, the latter is extensively addressed by the Foucauldian school that flourished in the 1990s (Barry et al., 1996; Burchell et al., 1991; Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999). The key mode of neoliberal governmentality, as a ‘relatively coherent mentality of government’ (Rose, 1996: 53), is depicted as government based on ‘action at a distance’; its key figure is the responsible, enterprising, self-governing individual (Burchell, 1996). On this view, ‘the regulation of conduct becomes a matter of each individual’s desire to govern their own conduct freely in the service of the maximization of a version of their happiness and fulfilment that they take to be their own’ (Rose, 1996: 57). As with Foucault’s original work on governmentality, however, this account does not yield immediately graspable implications as regards consumer agency.
A first interpretation is bluntly critical. It alleges that the governmentality approach is characterized by a general ‘hostility to humanism and agency’; by the belief that ‘epistemes or regimes of power-knowledge define, or at least limit, the intentions people can have’; and by a focus ‘on how social practices and traditions create forms of subjectivity to the apparent exclusion of the ways in which agents create social practices and traditions’, with consequent ‘problems in accounting for change’ (Bevir, 2007: 39, 40, 43). Seen in this light, PC does not consist of ‘life political choices embodied in communicative practices for politically creating economic, social and cultural life … [It is rather] the puppet of liberalism’s dark face as greedy individualism and coercive domination’ (Bang, 2007: 194, 224). The spread of discourses of ‘choice’, it is claimed, is ‘part of a broad hegemonic agenda of neoliberal restructuring’ (Malpass et al., 2007: 234). The way in which consumer agency is understood, thus, would be in itself ‘an artefact of market-driven economy, rooted in earlier developments in Western theology … [that celebrate] a Western version of actorhood and value-laden notions of freedom, constraint, and transcendence of constraints via choice’ (Arnould, 2007: 100). Responsibility-taking and consumer-citizenship would correspond to a ‘neoliberalization of activism’ that entails framing problems in terms of ‘wrong choices’, with consequent absolution of the state and corporate actors ‘because they are simply responding to what we want’ (Roff, 2007: 561).
It is this that the critics of the governmentality perspective find unacceptable: the idea, allegedly supported by the latter, that via responsibilization self-governing capabilities are made to align with the neoliberal political agenda (Lemke, 2004); that moralizing the market through economizing morality is a core element of the neoliberal social order (Shamir, 2008); that flexible, reversible engagements based on personal integrity, responsibility and morality only reinforce the importance of the ‘solitary decision-maker’ (Roff, 2007).
Other scholars, however, find the Foucauldian question of how conduct and context, subjectification and subjection, technologies of the self and technologies of domination, impinge upon each other intellectually stimulating and empirically productive. Foucauldians, indeed, recognize that ‘citizenship is no longer primarily realized in a relation with the state, or in a single “public sphere”, but in a variety of private, corporate and quasi-public practices from working to shopping’ (Rose, 1999: 166). A seminal work applying the governmentality approach to consumerism is Miller and Rose’s study on the use of psychological expertise for marketing and advertising purposes. Consumption is depicted as depending on ‘fabricating delicate affiliations between the active choices of potential consumers and the qualities, pleasures and satisfactions represented in the product’ (Miller and Rose, 1997: 31), these being brought into existence and rendered thinkable by new techniques of calculation, classification and inscription. This reading of consumption opens space for analysis amidst unqualified assumptions of capitalist manipulation and abstract ideas of consumer free choice. This space has been filled by a number of studies. Lockie, for example, investigates organic food consumption, showing that the ‘technologies for rendering “the consumer” knowable and actionable “at a distance” [result in] disjointed, incomplete and very much contested processes’ (Lockie, 2002: 287). Binkley, while focusing on Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, also adopts a perceptibly Foucauldian standpoint by regarding consumption as a domain where ethically-minded life projects can be pursued by reconciling ‘the autonomous subjectivity of a critical consumer with the sense of belonging conferred by social membership’ (Binkley, 2008: 603). Barnett and colleagues elaborate further on ethical consumption as a form of ‘action at a distance’. They maintain that ‘consumption practices are always already shaped by and help shape certain sorts of ethical dispositions … in a loosely Foucauldian sense, [as] the activity of constructing a life by negotiating practical choices about personal conduct’ (Barnett et al., 2005: 28). A range of motivations, incentives and desires, many of which are explicitly political, is ‘worked up, governed, regulated by an array of actors who make possible certain forms of individualised conduct’ which give rise to ‘large-scale forms of collective action’ (Barnett et al., 2005: 29, 27) and the eventual blurring of the ethical and the political. Ethical consumption corresponds to ‘moral selving’, that is, ‘the mediated work of creating oneself as a more virtuous person through practices that acknowledge responsibility to others’ (Barnett et al., 2005: 30).
The governmentality approach therefore seems able to produce important contributions without pre-empting inquiry into the political agency of consumers.
1
Yet a suspicion remains. Emblematic in this regard is an article by Barnett et al. (2008), who argue that the Foucauldian narrative is weakened by an unacknowledged functionalism. Neoliberalism is presented ‘as a discourse that constitutes practices, institutions and identities’; as a hegemonic strategy that can be fulfilled or resisted only in so far as it aims ‘to bring into existence various forms of neo-liberal subjects’, with the consequence that ‘this approach cannot, in the final analysis, actually account for “success” or “failure” either empirically or conceptually’ (Barnett et al., 2008: 625, 628). One may object that, by means of the notion of ‘practices of resistance’, Foucault stresses the unpredictable dynamics of power relations, the swerve that makes domination of people always incomplete. He recognizes that, if resistance is generated by the very power it opposes, the former is more than a passive reflection or rebound of the latter (Allen, 2009; Foucault, 2004). Yet this is deemed insufficient. From a Foucauldian perspective, it is claimed, PC constitutes a fundamentally reactive domain, ‘rather than one from where dynamics of socio-cultural change may actually emerge’ (Barnett et al., 2008: 628). Foucauldians conceive action and interaction in strategic terms as if agents convey already-formed instrumentally rational plans, assigning as a consequence a central role to knowledge and information. Yet resistant, creative consumer responses draw to a major extent on normative rationales concerned with how to live and what is worth striving for, and grounded ‘more on self-referential principles and actions [than] on adherence to prescriptive codes’ (Barnett et al., 2008: 642). Moreover, the self has a narrative constitution. People constantly construct subjectivities through ongoing joint action by means of argumentative, rhetorical practices of accountability. People’s self-reflexive capacity, their ability to think about strategies and objectives, to interpret and apply norms, should not be underestimated. The normativity embedded in consumer practices entails ‘aligning externally addressed norms with [one’s] own frames of moral and practical reference as a pre-condition for assessing their validity’ (Barnett et al., 2008: 646–7). In conclusion, the relationship between governing actions and the formation of subjective dispositions require more precise specification than is often provided in Foucauldian analyses … in terms of resistance and refusal… It requires greater consideration of narrative conceptions of the self and of personhood in order to understand the recursive, reflexive relationship between habitual practices and capacities to deliberate reasonably, … to anticipate responses, to improvise … What needs to be added-on to the analytics of governmentality is something missing that is really essential to the coherence of the original account itself. (Barnett et al., 2008: 648–9)
From governmentality to immunization
It is evident, therefore, that the engagement of PC scholarship with the governmentality perspective is enriching and puzzling at the same time. Criticisms of the pessimistic accounts of consumer agency allegedly entailed by this perspective are counterbalanced by the intensive application of the governmentality approach in the PC field. Yet time and again the idea surfaces that the Foucauldian approach implies an ultimate inability to account for the creative capacity of consumer conduct.
The impression is that of some sort of impasse, which may be partly related to the coexistence, in the governmentality literature, of ‘two arguably incompatible modes of inquiry: the structuralist or archeological and the historicist or genealogical’ (Bevir, 2010: 438): the former hostile to ideas of human agency, the latter supportive of situated accounts of agency. Yet the problem lies deeper. Action ‘can be explicated with reference to elements of choice or causation depending upon the scale of analysis’ (Arnould, 2007: 100), making it hard to decide in favour of freedom or determination. Moreover, agency is a trans-historical concept, whereas Foucault works on the specifically modern declension of subjectivity. The source of the difficulty is clearly the double-edged character of the idea of governmentality. As an assemblage of political programmes, techniques and practices, it can be regarded as either supporting or frustrating attempts at purposeful action. As an understanding of power in terms of property of relationships rather than of agents, it may be seen as either enabling or hampering consumer responsibility-taking. Because governmentality requires for its very functioning an alignment of rationalities and technologies of subjectification and subjection, the direction of this alignment and the implications of its possible incompleteness ultimately depend on the eye of the beholder. Accordingly, the allegation of functionalism in the Foucauldian account of identity may be extended to the alternative view of consumers as carriers of their own normativity. The ‘narrative construction and account of the self’ are actually a way to interpret consumers’ discourses and practices, not an immanent property of the latter. Readers equipped with different interpretive lenses might see in the same set of phenomena indications of strategy, or signs of the inscription of such self-reflexive normativity in broader or deeper moral codes related to the modern conception of subjectivity and its neoliberal declension as self-entrepreneurship. If, in a strictly Foucauldian manner, understanding oneself as a choosing subject is seen to depend on the historically available grammar of living by which such choice is to be made (Burchell, 1996), then this heteronomous element in the constitution of the self questions whether individual agents can distance themselves sufficiently from their interpretive and motivational frameworks to really innovate them, since the lexicon by which ethical selfhood is reflexively constructed is limited by a horizon of meaning that cannot be transcended by a deliberate individual act of will – there is no subjectivity, in the strong modern sense of the word, behind social change. By the same token, accounts of sustainable consumption often stress that the post-Fordist expansion of competing networks of provision entails an expansion of ‘green options’ (Spaargaren, 2009). Yet one may object that the sociotechnical processes, social practices and narratives that make something appear as an ‘option’ constitute a landscape difficult to penetrate for the choosing consumer, representing instead a condition for making sense of that very choice.
In the end, it seems equally defensible to depict the political consumer as ‘an additional unit of governance outside the formal institutional framework’ (Brewer and Trentmann, 2006: 10), or as ‘the product of neoliberal marketization and coercion’ (Bang, 2007: 192). It is equally possible to argue about people’s expanding or shrinking agency; about consumers’ ultimate autonomy or heteronomy. The issue seems irresolvable, but the magnitude of the problem depends on the extent to which one focuses on the scope of consumer agency, on the interplay of subjectification and subjection, while forgetting to investigate the type of subject moulded in the process, and the relationship that this subject establishes with its objects of concern. Dealing with the latter issue may shed different light on PC and, by extension, on governance approaches that build on the agents’ private autonomy. To this end, the concept of immunization may provide a valuable analytical register.
The notion is not new to the social sciences. It plays a role, for example, in the philosophical anthropology of Plessner and Gehlen, while applications by scholars like Haraway, Baudrillard, Heller, Derrida, Butler, Sloterdijk, testify to a growing interest in it. As a key political concept, immunization has been impressively elaborated by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito (2002, 2006a, 2008), 2 and it is on his contribution that I will draw in what follows. Esposito’s point of departure is the idea of community. The word derives from the Latin munus, which refers to a special type of gift that requires reciprocation. Communal ties are relationships that bind members to a reciprocal, never totally exhaustible, commitment to donation which threatens their individual identity. What they share is what is not their own – a mutual debt, a circulating gift that does not belong to anyone in particular. Community is the outside of us, a non-possession, a deficiency. Its opposite, then, is immunity. Being immune means being exonerated, exempt from communal duties. Immune are those who have nothing in common with others, no obligations towards them; those who are owners of, identical to, themselves. Community and immunity, however, imply each other. By the very act of denying the latter, immunity presupposes community. Or, if community is to survive, its members need to protect themselves against the threat of reciprocal sharing, acquisition, contamination. Community, in other words, needs to introject the negative modality of its opposite.
All societies cope with the problematic balance between community and immunity. As Simmel remarks in his classic ‘How is Society Possible?’, the a priori of social life is that life is not entirely social; human relationships depend on the negative reservation of part of the individual’s personality which does not enter them. For Esposito, however, only modern society places immunity at its core; or, vice versa, immunization becomes the key to understanding the specific conditions of political modernity. With modernity the necessary shelter against the expropriating threat of community – the need for life to protect itself – is no longer a matter of fact, but a problem and a strategic option. This is because the mechanisms of defence that had up until that moment constituted the shell of symbolic protection began to weaken, beginning with the transcendental perspective linked to a theological matrix. With these natural defences missing, ones that had been rooted in a common meaning for all, this sort of primitive immunitary shield demanded, in short, a further dispositif, this time an artificial one, that was bound to protect human life from risks that were becoming increasingly unsustainable, such as those caused by civil wars and foreign invasions. Modern man needs a series of immunitary apparatuses that are intended to protect a life that has been completely given over to itself when the secularization of religious meaning takes place … It is immunization that brings modernity into existence, or differently invents modernity as a complex of categories able to solve the problem of safeguarding life. (Esposito, 2006b: 54)
In short, the modern project departs from the preceding societal order by claiming the value of reciprocal immunization and replacing forms of organization associated with community with individualistic or private models. The birth of the modern individual, as a non-divided, self-sustaining, cohesive entity, coincides with its declared exemption from the debt that ties one to another. Moreover, the transition from early modern sovereignty-based government to the liberal and neoliberal governmentality coincides with a growing importance of the market as a regulating force alternative to the State, and of life as an object of regulation (biopolitics). Immunization, in other words, increasingly builds on the ‘essentially “vital” category of oikonomia’ (Esposito, 2006c: viii). Finally, as authors like Agamben (1998) have explored at length, and as Nazism tragically testifies, immunity, which is necessary to protect our life, when brought beyond a certain threshold, winds up negating it … [It] forces life into a sort of prison or armoring in which what we lose is not only freedom, but also the real sense of individual and collective existence … What safeguards the individual and political body is also what impedes its development, and beyond a certain point risks destroying it. (Esposito, 2006b: 51)
The relevance of the concept of immunization to our discussion now begins to emerge. The notion offers a key to understanding and assessing the societal implications of modern – especially late modern – forms of governance. Consider, in this regard, the importance of the contract, as a metaphor of the social order and as a regulatory institution. As a form of tie, the contract is ‘juridically “privatistic” and logically “privative” … A contract is first of all what is not a gift, the absence of munus’ (Esposito, 2006a: xxii). As a form of social regulation, the contract differs from both reciprocity and covenant (Elazar, 1997). Whereas both the latter entail a forward-oriented pledge, a contract entails a strict definition of the terms of exchange and a permanent liquidation of obligations. Contract allows fulfilment of one’s desires without engaging in personal, enduring relationships with others (Godbout, 1998). Contractual obligations thus epitomize immunization as self-referential interiorization of exteriority. Anything existing or happening in the world acquires significance only according to the terms specified by the parties, understood as rational, autonomous individuals, formally equivalent in their power, contingently tied and definitively released after completion of the exchange (Pellizzoni, 2008).
Contractual relationships have dramatically extended their scope in the neoliberal era, being at the basis of the public–private partnerships and private self-regulation upon which new governance largely relies. Contracts are indeed central also to PC, as actual deals (buycott), ‘missed’ deals (boycott) or ‘affected’ deals (symbolic attacks). Yet PC is about reversing the immunizing logic of the contract. It is about exerting one’s own contractual power in the market as a means to fulfil other-regarding concerns that political institutions are unable (or less able) to ensure. It is about (re)establishing or strengthening the communal ties, reversing or resisting an immunizing drift that students of late modernity describe in terms of democratic crisis, individualization, solitude of the global citizen, and so on. The question is therefore whether and to what extent PC succeeds. It is still a question about agency, but different to the one entailed in the debate on governmentality. In the next section I conduct a tentative exploration of this perspective, reflecting on three topical issues: the public, responsibility-taking, and downshifting.
Political consumerism and immunization: three conceptual explorations
The public
‘When compared with most other forms of participation, the phenomenon of political consumerism appears to be more individualized in nature’, providing, a typical example of “lifestyle politics”, in which the ordinary day-to-day decisions of citizens acquire a political meaning’ (Stolle et al., 2005: 263, 254). Boycott, buycott and even symbolic actions are typically loosely coordinated, leaving ample room for participants to choose their own individual behaviour. Yet it is ‘important to distinguish individualization and individualized from individualism and individualistic forms of action’ (Micheletti, 2009: 23). Political consumers act according to what they perceive as generalized or collective obligations of responsibility. This happens, for example, when shopping is conducted according to assessments of structural arrangements affecting workers in garment production. Responsibility-taking here is related to ‘knowledge about one’s own consumption footprint, resources to change it, and stamina to do so even if this means going against the social grain’ (Micheletti, 2009: 23).
Political consumers therefore aim at the public. Yet what is the public? Of the many available, Dewey (1927) provides perhaps the most fitting account: the public consists of all those who are affected by the indirect consequences of transactions in such a way that it is deemed necessary to have those consequences systematically cared for. Transactions, then, are public when participants also take account of third party concerns, or make themselves accountable for them. Yet where do political consumers find their public?
Consider, first, the rationale of many governance approaches. The case for replacing command-and-control regulation with voluntary and self-regulation is made on the assumption that the latter is more efficient than the former; and this is because goals and means are negotiated with, or defined by, those equipped with the best knowledge of the state of affairs in their own field – firms themselves (Vogel, 2006). In this sense, the self-specification of the terms by which auditors and stakeholders are to assess corporate performance is an intrinsic feature of CSR policies, rather than a weakness of design (Pellizzoni, 2008). In systems theory parlance, 3 this corresponds to a ‘re-entry’ (Luhmann, 1993): reproducing a distinction, making it visible and meaningful, within one of the poles of the distinction itself, so that the external becomes a category of the internal and otherness is recreated within the borders of the self. In our case, the public interest becomes a distinction internal to the private pole of the distinction between private and public. Consider, for example, how insurance programs re-enter the difference between monetary and non-monetary values by fixing a monetary value for the latter, as with the loss of human lives; or how firms re-enter the distinction between profit and environmental protection by assessing the economic viability of ecological programmes. The public, in such cases, is re-entered as a specification of the private. The latter is immunized from the former: what is public and what is private is privately established.
Now consider consumer ‘sovereignty’. Sovereigns, Carl Schmitt tells us, are those who set their own norms. Consumers are sovereign precisely in this sense. Consumer power basically presupposes agents who behave independently of each other and whose agency depends on this very separation. It ultimately rests on individual specifications of corporate and government answerability. Consumer agency thus seems to depend on immunization against external interference – the stronger the latter, the stronger the former. Consumers re-enter the difference between tastes and social issues in their choices of taste. The public is therefore reached empathically: it is the ‘significant other’ that one grasps when making a shopping choice. The public is produced in the agents’ mind, affecting their motivations. Of course, one gathers information and may discuss with others. Yet in the decisive moment – the moment of the purchase, when consumer power materializes – one is alone, sovereign of one’s own choice, according to one’s own vision of the public.
Consequently, behaving as a citizen when consuming ultimately means deciding by oneself what the public is and how its good can be fulfilled through one’s own buying choices – immunizing oneself against possibly unaccommodating intrusions. This seems at odds with the practices of accountability to which the literature on PC often refers. Consumer responsibility-taking, for example, may be defined as a person’s accountability for actions, inactions, and attitudes associated with her roles in society, in our case the societal role of consumer; … a voluntary and personalized activity in which the individual consumer uses her unique capabilities, interests, and needs to assess and act on how her ‘consumption footprint’ affects sustainable development at home and abroad, [engaging] in a kind of reflexivity or contextualized, sensitized understanding of one’s role in societal processes. (Micheletti, 2009: 22, 23)
Yet the problem is precisely for what and to whom one makes oneself accountable. What the literature offers – cases in point are the already mentioned Lockie (2002), Barnett et al. (2005, 2008) and Binkley (2008) – are often examples of accounts for oneself: the way in which making a particular choice expresses a certain normative understanding of oneself as related to ‘otherness’ (people, the environment, etc.). Sometimes accounts are addressed to actual others (typically, members of a consumer group). Yet since each participant in group discussions is the ultimate assessor of how others’ advice, comments and reactions affect one’s own normative self-understanding, the eventual addressee of such accounts is, again, oneself. In short, since the normative benchmark of the political consumer is the self, the public is reached through a re-entry; it is a category of the self. The stress of PC scholars on the ethical grounds of PC (where ‘ethics’ is understood, à la Foucault, as a matter of self-referential operations) or on the blurring of the ethical and the political has, in this sense, a perceptible immunitarian flavour. Indeed, as Mouffe (2005) remarks, political issues cannot be transferred to an ethical register without questioning the very essence of the political. If the latter lies in an irrepressible differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’, otherness cannot be subsumed into selfhood without denying its actual alterity.
We have here, therefore, a different perspective on which to reflect on the public–private relationship in current PC. Beyond questions of non-traditional settings and formats of action, beyond matters of autonomy or heteronomy, the issue becomes whether and to what extent political consumers find their public in a ‘Deweyan’ rather than a ‘Luhmannian’ manner. The latter may seem to be the case of individual and even ‘joint’ shopping (that is, persons who jointly buy wholesale, often establishing a direct relationship with farmers and producers), when these groups avoid public expressions of concern, keeping their motivations and actions undisclosed to third party scrutiny. Yet joint shopping may have a symbolic value that exceeds its impact on the sales of particular producers or retailers (Hobson, 2002), representing a kind of public discourse conducted by means of acts rather than words, and where exemplarity replaces argument. 4 The same may apply to those fair trade practices that include events like fashion shows, arts and crafts exhibitions, or cookery demonstrations. More in general, whenever consumer action is ‘collective, organised, and involves high levels of conscious mobilisation’ (Barnett et al., 2005: 40), a Deweyan public may be formed and the private and public spheres may be straddled in a novel way.
Responsibility-taking
Immunization may affect not only how the public is addressed but also how responsibility towards it is shaped. For Iris Marion Young, consumer responsibility cannot be understood according to a traditional ‘liability’ model focused on causal chains between harms and behaviours imputable to intentional agents. This model should be replaced with a ‘social connection model’ whereby persons acknowledge their own share of responsibility for participating, through long and loose social links, in the ‘institutional processes that produce structural injustice’ (Young, 2006: 119), like worker exploitation in sweatshops.
A major problem of responsibility-taking, then, is that consumer action often does not produce any directly observable consequence as regards the object of concern. Boycotts, buycotts and symbolic actions may be sanctions on ascertained praiseworthy or blameworthy behaviours. Yet consumers are typically confronted with major uncertainties. Markets are volatile, which means that the aggregate effect of shopping choices may lead to unpredictable outcomes (a boycott, for example, may have unintentionally amplified effects, disrupting a sector that is facing a general crisis). Moreover, unforeseen changes, such as new processes or materials or new company owners, may frustrate a well-conceived protest. Worse: the results of action may be ambiguous. Consider boycotts aimed at modifying employment conditions in developing countries. Restricting the use of child labour, for example, may lead to shrinking family incomes. How then are we to assess the trade-off? And is this our task, or should we respect the workers’ preferences, even though they prolong social injustice? What is the right choice? To buy or to boycott? Which is better: less child exploitation or more money for their families? One may say that the goal is to change the conditions that generate this unhappy alternative. Yet, again, which is the appropriate way may be unclear. Which is better: improving people’s incomes or strengthening their rights? And is consumer responsibility-taking suitable for promoting a change of context conditions? Would not other types of political action be more appropriate?
In short, the less insight into complex networks of relations there is, as typical of a globalized economy, the more that responsibility-taking is bound to be affected by considerations of own and corporate remits and aims, rather than causal links. Establishing a line of conduct becomes more a matter of normative commitments and value judgements than of gathering evidence and forecasting the consequences of actions. The social connection model is mainly forward-looking and grounded on principled (rather than factual) beliefs, inasmuch as it does not build on ascertainable causal chains but refers to ‘carrying out activities in a morally appropriate way and aiming for certain outcomes’ (Young, 2006: 119). This is the driving force behind the current ‘moralisation of the market’ (Stehr and Adolf, 2010). The Foucauldian theme of the ethical shaping of the self again emerges, suggesting once more that, in late modern conditions, such shaping is endowed with immunitarian implications. As the example of child labour shows, immunizing oneself against considering its undesirable consequences may be premised on deciding to boycott a firm. More in general, principled behaviour entails immunizing oneself against contradicting evidences and claims.
Overconfidence in those who profess the same principles is a frequent by-product of this attitude. Trust investments are especially relevant to PC, given the lesser role of taste and price. For this reason it is ‘crucial that civil groups continuously inform individual consumers about their consumption footprint and other-oriented responsibilities’ (Micheletti, 2009: 36). Yet, independent of their intrinsic trustworthiness, not always indisputable, 5 such groups are confronted with their own uncertainties. The well-known episode of the Brent Spar oil storage facility is instructive. The Greenpeace boycott campaign was based on the assumption that sinking the platform would result in major damage to the North Sea ecosystem; an assumption challenged by both Shell and independent experts. Greenpeace subsequently admitted that their claims about the quantity of oil stored in Brent Spar were inaccurate, while insisting that this did not affect their opposition, as part of a larger campaign against the dumping of waste into the North Sea. Who was right and who was wrong still seems unclear. If as car drivers we had followed Greenpeace’s advice and disregarded the opposite claims, we might have supported a mistaken choice.
If overconfidence leads to immunizing oneself against contradictory evidences and opinions, its opposite – that is, self-reliance – corresponds to a self-immune reaction, with typical results. Rejecting what seems trustworthy, shareable advice because of the risk of manipulation easily gives rise to abandonment of any proper selection criteria, thereby opening oneself to idiosyncratic, erratic enticements. The maximum of criticism may result in the maximum of credulity. Heteronomy may increase together with reflexivity.
Downshifting
In general, PC is about consuming differently, not about consuming less. Consumption is premised even on boycott or symbolic protests. A negative sanctioning power can be applied as long as it may become a positive sanction. It is because consumers are still ready to buy that they can exert pressure on corporate practices. A different view, however, is that of ‘downshifting’. Downshifters are ‘people who voluntarily choose to work less and/or consume less … in response to hyperconsumption and the stress, overtime, and psychological expense that may accompany it’ (Nelson et al., 2007: 141–2). Recycling, reusing, restructuring, redistributing, re-localizing are typical watchwords, as well as de-materializing (less use of raw materials and energy), slowing-down, promoting conviviality (communal life and social relations).
For many (e.g. Comeliau, 2003; Vivien, 2005) downshifting is synonymous with sustainability (‘different’ growth or development), which makes the distinction between downshifters and other political consumers rather subtle. The former, for example, may not disregard boycott and buycott (Elgin, 2000), while the latter often seek to combine quality and quantity targets, for instance, by selecting energy-saving commodities (Sassatelli, 2008). Part of the downshifting movement, however, regards voluntary simplicity, or sobriety, as a radical alternative to sustainability (e.g. Besset, 2005; Latouche, 2006). The latter is considered a deceitful notion, since it conveys the illusion that adjusting, or even speeding up, the economy may solve social and environmental problems. The ‘proper’ meaning of downshifting is therefore ‘a-growth’ or ‘after-development’: exit from the ideology of development, emancipation from the dominance of economy. ‘Different growth’ just means a further expansion of economy. Capitalism has shown an astonishing resilience, an ability to reorganize and diversify commodity production, create new markets, reframe and displace social and ecological problems. Nor is technological advancement, as such, a viable answer, since it typically produces ‘rebound effects’. An increase in eco-efficiency often corresponds to an increase in resource depletion. 6 Moreover, conviviality has little to do with consumerism. The market as a social institution is based on rivalry and competition; it is thus at odds with the pacific, egalitarian, cohesive society that should be the ultimate goal of a downshifting process. Attempts to reform economy therefore inevitably reassert its primacy. Combatting evil by using its own tools means perpetuating it. One has instead to slow down or even stop growth by drastically reducing resource use and work time; by imposing moratoriums on technological innovations; by supporting non-monetary forms of reciprocity and low-range or self-production chains; by boosting the cost of travel and promoting locality; by downplaying material welfare; by protecting and imitating the lifestyle of peoples not yet wholly colonized by individualism and productivism.
As one can see, immunization lies at the core of both the pars destruens and the pars construens of this argument. Attacking the excesses of market economy and individualistic society by using their own means is depicted as inducing the latter’s immune reply and its eventual strengthening. To change things, social action must in its turn immunize itself against the logic of current industrialism and economy, rejecting the entire ideology of societal growth and individual achievement. Immunization is also relevant to a critique of the radical downshifting argument. The strong immune response to productivism and market economy that is urged, one may argue, is likely to culminate in a self-immune reaction. If mainstream views of PC undermine their own purposes by relying on sustained or even increased consumption, and if the only alternative is consuming less, then citizens-consumers can succeed only by relinquishing their own power, shrinking their agency, cutting the ground from under their own feet. And what about conviviality, solidarity, egalitarianism, refusal of power? We find in this part of the radical downshifting argument elements of a recurrent intellectual theme where immunization again plays a major role. The critique of modern differentiation, secularization and individualization leads, as said, to advocacy of communal life. Yet, despite a plea for democracy (usually in terms of downscaled polities), the flavour of the discourse is unmistakably centralistic, if not utterly authoritarian in its premises and implications. Major social changes like those urged are unlikely to be realized in the absence of strong steering powers, if one is to prevent the more resourceful social groups from securing the larger slices of a shrinking pie for themselves. In order to survive, therefore, democracy must immunize itself against its own excesses: as Latouche (2006) bluntly puts it, self-realization and democratic equality are ‘hypostatized aspirations’. On the other hand, the view of community underlying the argument is utterly mythical. It makes sense only according to a modern concept of subjectivity, which provides the appropriate background for appraising the ‘non-modernity’ or ‘alterity’ of other ways of living together. Consequently, this type of critique implicitly reaffirms what it endeavours to criticize.
In the end, one may regard the radical downshifting argument as a utopian discourse with no pretence to immediate translation into reality; or one may take the preceding remarks as good reasons for rejecting it. However, the immunitarian logic underlying its critique of widespread assumptions (that current economic arrangements have margins for substantial reform; that the market is a viable means to drive technology according to public interests; that the rebound effect can be kept at bay; that individual enhancement is premised on the pursuit of collective goals like reduction of inequalities and injustices) prompts noteworthy questions. Is self-contradiction ultimately inevitable in both relying on and refraining from the market? To what extent and how is the latent inconsistency between simplicity and capacity, conviviality and individuality, recognized and handled in everyday practices?
Conclusion
PC questions major traditions in social and political thinking, and it features as an emergent component of late modern governance. It stresses that the boundary between public and private is blurred; that conduct is irreducible to context; that individualized responsibility-taking is gaining importance; that loose, informal networks and flexible, everyday life-related mobilizations give rise to new forms of sociality and political engagement.
Despite the aporetic character of the dynamics of subjectification-subjection, the governmentality perspective has proved fruitful. Within this framework, however, the basic question is still whether and to what extent consumers and markets really represent political actors and domains. The notion of immunization therefore qualifies as a complementary register able to direct attention to theoretical and empirical issues of no less importance. Seen from this viewpoint, PC highlights a problem and a possible answer to it. The problem is the increasingly fragile relationship between individual and community in late modern, globalized societies; the enduring need for elements of sharing, solidarity and belonging beyond individualism and instrumentality, and the growing difficulties encountered by traditional political institutions in satisfying that need. The answer is to make different use – ‘against themselves’ or by taking advantage of the elements of sociality they contain – of those practices and relationships which represent major locuses of individualization and means–ends rationalization. The point is not agency as such, but rather how it is exerted: whether and to what extent, through consumer action, social bonds can be strengthened or (re)established without relinquishing the values of individual freedom and self-determination; or, vice versa, whether and to what extent PC represents a further step in the immunizing drift of late modernity – a drift currently giving rise to a variety of ‘immunitary crises’, from financial crashes to fundamentalist attacks and preventive wars.
By proposing a different perspective on current changes in political agency, this article has suggested a novel direction in which efforts to connect state theory and governance and governmentality approaches (e.g. Bevir, 2010; Jessop, 2007; Lemke, 2007; Sending and Neumann, 2006) can be addressed. The foregoing discussion does little more than scratch the surface of the problem, yet it provides some clues. First, immunizing mechanisms are intrinsic to PC: they can be recognized in the construction of a consumers’ public, in responsibility-taking within a globalized economy, and in the attempt to prevent the self-defeating implications of amending the market by means of market actions. Second, immunization can be sidestepped: in some circumstances the quest for the public is arguably more than a self-reflective exercise. Third, precisely because nothing is decided from the outset, greater attention should be devoted to some key aspects of PC: for example, the alleged blurring or transfer of the ethical into the political, or the need for and risk of trust investments beyond interpersonal networks. More in general, seeking for ‘the others’, ‘the public’, ‘the common good’, ‘the exploited’, ‘the environment’ through consumer action is to be regarded as a challenge rather than as a given; something to be demonstrated rather than assumed; a normative standpoint whose political implications cannot be taken for granted.
To conclude: PC, like other forms of governance that replace political obligations with private autonomies, exhibits noticeable immunizing traits; yet this does not necessarily pre-empt its potentialities. The Spinozian notion of ‘multitude’, as opposed to the ‘people’ of the nation state, has recently been recovered to describe emerging forms of mobilization (Hardt and Negri, 2004). The latter ostensibly occupy a middle region between “individual and collective” … [expressing] a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One … The collective experience of the multitude radicalizes, rather than dulling, the process of individuation, [offering] the opportunity to individuate, at least in part, the share of pre-individual reality which all individuals carry within themselves, [and] establish[ing] the feasibility of a non-representational democracy. (Virno, 2004: 21, 25, 79, italics in original)
Without necessarily subscribing to the theoretical underpinnings of this account, it is interesting to note its closeness to how PC is typically portrayed. A good cue for inquiry along these lines is again provided by Esposito (2002). To illustrate the possibility of a constructive interplay between singularity and commonality, he provides the example of the mother and child. The extraneousness of the foetus to the mother does not lead to an immune reaction of the latter. A self-limitation of the mother’s immune system occurs, and it is ensured precisely by the genetic diversity of the foetus. Only because it is ‘other’ can the child become ‘own’. The defence of the mother–child community occurs through a reciprocal acceptance of difference which simultaneously asserts and opens up identity. The idea that ‘communication occurs when beings lose a part of themselves’ (Campbell, 2008: xxx), that individuation operates through – rather than against – a loss of individuality, an opening of identity to what is pre-individual and thus trans-individual, highlights the need for, and is at the same time a clue to, gaining deeper insight into the peculiar paradoxes of political consumerism: questioning the market by accepting its rules; aiming at the communal by enhancing the individual; searching for the public by chasing it into the mirror.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank two anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions that allowed me to refine some key passages in the article.