Erosion and Experience

The Metaphor of Erosion

As a conceptual framework, we draw on the frequently used metaphor of erosion to discuss how public—as well as psychologically private—spaces have been fundamentally altered by the onset and persistence of contemporary consumer ideology. However, we hope to deepen and more accurately use erosion to understand the educational aspects of consumer society and its structural reciprocity to the current landscape of schooling. Scholars such as Egan (1983) have used the metaphor of erosion in their work on the decay of democratic possibilities in schools and the publics they simultaneously shape and serve. In these writings, the term has commonly been used as a synonym for erasure or disintegration—terms that signify the production of an absence.

Our argument, however, suggests that critical scholars should engage with the notion of erosion in a way more attuned to its geological origins and one that more accurately—from our perspective—represents the educative aspects of capitalism and consumption. To this point, we argue that erosion is not a signification of destruction; rather, it conveys a subtle, gradual transformation, one that works not to eradicate but to change the fundamental existence and behavior of its object. Erosion reshapes formations into new configurations, often cutting deep grooves on surfaces or effacing peaks into plateaus, concepts that, in their metaphoric extension, take on compelling similarities to Dewey’s (1916) notion of “bad habits” (p. 58). These habits, for Dewey, were those routines “that possess us instead of our possessing them,” and in this transferal of ownership “mark the close of [the individual’s] power to vary” (p. 58). Within the examples in this chapter, as well as within the larger example of consumer culture itself, an erosion of certain formations of mind has taken place, one that has potentially worn the traces of consumerist drives deeply into individual psyches but has done so in a subtle manner, one that forecloses our ability to consider these shifts objectively. As such, we learn consumerism as a natural aspect of our own autonomous public and private identities.

Democracy, Education, and Acquisition

In addition to the metaphor of erosion, we draw on Dewey’s notion of the democratic purpose of education, both inside and outside of schools. In 1933, Dewey presented his vision of an educational utopia (which is outlined in Dewey’s newspaper article from the New York Times, reproduced in Schubert, 2009, pp. 11–12); this vision condemned the “acquisitive economic society” as the force preventing democratic educational environments from existing both within formal institutions such as schools and outside of them, in other everyday life contexts where we learn and grow. Dewey became concerned that “an attitude of acquisition—the capitalistic ethos, if you will—penetrates our being in ways we scarcely realize” (Schubert, 2006, p. 82). Schubert (2006) further argues that acquisitiveness as a cultural force “staunchly prevents the kind of education that Dewey proposes as most desirable” (p. 82). This attitude of acquisitiveness is closely linked to what, writing in postdepression America, Dewey (1930/1984) called the “dominant corporateness” that had become prominent in the United States (as cited in Mackey, 2009, p. 179). Indeed Dewey (1930/1984) went so far as to claim that “the need for the present age is to apprehend the fact that, for better or worse, we are living in a corporate age” (p. 64). Dewey discussed how corporations were gaining more power, which led to more mass production, “growing standardization,” and “mass uniformity” (as cited in Mackey, 2009, p. 179). This corporateness also helped seed a consumerist mind-set within the general public. More recently, Perkins (2004) has used the term corporatocracy to describe how Western corporations have ascended to power and how they, in conjunction with big banks and governments, control schools, businesses, and media and thus are strongly influential in shaping cultural, economic, and social life. Perkins also helps us understand the connection between corporateness and consumerism, as he explains that one of the functions of this corporatocracy is to encourage an attitude and practice of consumerism: “every opportunity is taken to convince us that purchasing things is our civic duty, that pillaging the earth is good for the economy and therefore serves our higher interests” (p. ix).

Dewey saw the growing ubiquity of consumerism as a foil to democracy, his criticism of economic relationships as a driver of social relations nearing a Marxian timbre in some instances (see Schubert, 2009). Molnar’s (2005a) work on school commercialism clarifies this point to some extent, as he locates Dewey as antipodal to the education first conceptualized by Edward Bernays, the pioneer of propaganda’s use as a tool within public relations and advertising. Given the omnipresence of consumption in our lives, it seems currently impossible to understand education in its broadest articulations “without a conception of the part played by consumption” (Usher, Bryant, & Johnston, 1997, p. 18). In much the same way, we argue that it is difficult to understand contemporary American (and increasingly, global) culture and identity outside of the context of consumerism and commoditization.

The Shift from Citizen to Consumer

In the late 1800s, the urbanization and industrialization of American society helped foster consumerism as a prominent American ideology, which was initially encouraged by the development of city centers and large department stores (Hoechsmann, 2010) and disseminated through newspapers and expositions such as World Fairs (see Hoechsmann, 2010; Williams, 1982; for discussions of the importance of world fairs in spreading consumerist ideology) ¹ and which eventually spread through schools, textbooks, and children’s literature (Spring, 2003). Consumerist ideology and the spread of mass consumer culture in the United States greatly expanded in the early 20th century and exploded by mid-century, spurred along by the further proliferation of department stores, by the continuing influence of world fairs, and especially by the rapid growth of the advertising industry that had originally developed in the late 19th century (Spring, 2003). Hoechsmann (2007) explains that the development and spread of a consumerist ideology was a gradual process, starting in the 19th century with “a trend toward the increased commodification of elements of social life” (p. 656) through, for example, the packaging and branding of basic foodstuffs such as oats (for a detailed analysis of the historical nuances in the development of consumerism, see Hoechsmann, 2007, 2010). In addition to this trend toward the commodification of everyday life, the late 19th and early 20th centuries experienced, with the help of early brand managers and advertising professionals, the development of what Goldman and Papson (1996) call the “commodity sign”—which consists of a brand name commodity combined with an image that is connected with or imbued with a particular social or cultural meaning and which boosts both the symbolic and economic value of the commodity. These trends led to a situation in which advertising “prompted desires for new products; it convinced consumers that existing products were unfashionable and, therefore, obsolete; it made brand names into playthings in personal fantasies” (Spring, 2003, p. 2). Advertising also ushered in a new consumerist version of capitalism, where the rational “economic man” model no longer held; instead, buyers were “driven by irrational emotions associated with particular brand names and/or products” (Spring, 2003, p. 2). Above all, advertising—operating in and through schools, radio, newspapers, billboards, magazines, theme parks, department stores, and eventually movies and television—helped shift the primary identity of Americans from “citizen” to “consumer” and has been involved in educating “consumer-citizens”—people who “accept any political situation as long as there is an abundance of consumer goods” and whose goals consist of “spending, maximizing their use of credit, and consuming as much as possible” (Spring, 2003, p. 4).

The “captains of consciousness” (Ewan, 1976) of the early advertising industry sought to position the consumer marketplace as a “realm of an encompassing ‘Truth’” (p. 67) and to turn workers into consumers through what Edward Filene, an early entrepreneur and department store owner, called in 1924 the “school of freedom,” which would teach workers to desire consumer goods rather than the control of the means of production (Hoechsmann, 2007). This “school of freedom” came “to play a hegemonic role” (Hoechsmann, 2007, p. 658), however, as it began equating consumerism with patriotism. Hoechsmann (2007) explains, citing Stuart Ewan’s (1976) history of advertising,

“Within governmental and business rhetoric,” states Ewan, “consumption assumed an ideological veil of nationalism and democratic lingo.” (p. 42). The “freedom” and American “feel-good” patriotism in American popular culture associated with the use of the automobile, for example, “mom, apple-pie and Chevrolet,” speaks volumes to the success of this ideological endeavor. In fact, by adopting “the double purpose of sales and ‘civilization,’” advertisements attempted to transform “pockets of resistance” (Ewan, 1976, p. 43) within the population, which was still coming to terms with industrialization and modernization. (p. 658)

Consumerism is increasingly viewed as the way to enact “democracy” and “citizenship” (Kahn, 2010a, 2010b; McLaren, 1995; Saltman, 2000), as shopping has been positioned as a way to showcase the “American way of life” as superior to other political and economic systems (Spring, 2003). In this consumerocracy, freedom and equality take on commercial rather than democratic meanings, as the “common good” becomes regulated by corporatist ideology—by “the laws of the market, free competition, private ownership, and profitability” (Apple, 2000, p. 30)—as well as by consumerist worldviews. Political action and social activism become equated with the ability of consumers to “vote with their dollars in a free market” (McLaren, 1995, p. 88), as people are encouraged by politicians (e.g., the exhortation by George W. Bush, above) and the popular press (e.g., Time Magazine in 1955 posited that American economic and political prosperity depended on high levels of consumption [Grossberg, 1992]) to shop as the solution to various social, environmental, political, and economic problems (Kahn, 2010b). “Freedom” becomes equated with the opportunity to express who we are through what we buy (Kahn, 2010b; Norris, 2007). “Empowerment” and “responsibility” become viewed in “economic and consumerist terms” (Usher et al., 1997, p. 38), as the advertising industry frames what it does as a public service, “informing, educating, and empowering us for participation” in a world of consumption (Norris, 2007, p. 167).

James Kuntsler argues that one of the negative consequences of this shift from citizen to consumer is that whereas citizens have responsibilities for and obligations to their fellow citizens and communities, consumers have no such duties to their fellow consumers (as cited in DeGraff, Wann, & Naylor, 2002). To this end, Molnar (2005a) contrasts advertising’s ideology of freedom with Dewey’s conception of freedom, which is “expressed through the control of [manufactured] impulse[s] in the service of intelligent purposes” (p. 82) and is ideally enacted as shared social responsibility toward democratic ends. Relatedly, Bauman (2008) asserts that our responsibility as political citizens of a democratic polity is being transformed into a false responsibility for consumer identity creation—replacing political expression with a commodified counterpart. This process of transforming public responsibility and democratic engagement into private preoccupation marks a shift in the concept of citizenship (Barber, 2007).

Individualism, the Growth of the Private, and the Erosion of the Public Realm

Accompanying this shift from citizen to consumer has been a growth in individualism (Aldridge, 2003; Welton, 1995). The rise of consumerist ideology has created a society characterized by what Riesman (1961) referred to as “the lonely crowd” (see also Putnam, 2000). Molnar (2005a) explains that members of this lonely crowd “define themselves by their possessions and express their individuality by looking, smelling, and thinking like everyone else” (p. 80). Missing from this “crowd” is a sense of a “society” where people come together to collectively address social issues, which, according to Bauman (2002), is a hallmark of democratic politics. Jhally (2006) posits that advertising has helped create this individualized way of being, as it addresses only individual needs and desires and leaves out “those things that we have to negotiate collectively, such as poverty, healthcare, housing and the homeless, the environment, among other things” (p. 105). As Giroux (2005) states, advertising thus operates as a form of public pedagogy whose aim “is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain” (as cited in Kahn, 2010b, p. 49). Kahn (2010b) argues that this individualism bankrupts “robust ideas of political and social democracy, as personal agency, social freedom, and the obligations of citizenship are ideologically tethered to capitalist market relations and renewed profiteering” (p. 49). Thus, core understandings of both self and social commitments become indistinguishable from the needs of the market economy and of the private interests it serves—we begin to truly live for, rather than in, the social configuration of capitalism.

This focus on individualism, for example, has permeated mainstream approaches to environmentalism, including what Kahn (2010b) calls the “green consumerism” movement. In this “individualization of responsibility” (Maniates, 2002) approach, individual acts of consumer choice are promoted as solutions to what are actually larger structural problems (Kahn, 2010a, 2010b). Maniates (2002) traces this focus on individual responsibility in the United States to the 1980s when conservative discourses promoted personal responsibility and sought to limit state power over an economy that was “characterized as innately self-regulating and efficient” (p. 52). Responsibility for solving environmental problems shifted from governmental and corporate policies “to individual consumers and their decisions in the marketplace. This shift was altogether consistent with then-President Reagan’s doctrine of personal responsibility, corporate initiative, and limited government” (p. 53). The individualization of environmental responsibility continues to be promoted in popular discourse. When responsibility for solving consumption-related problems is individualized, people have very little chance to develop a “sociological imagination” (Mills, 1959) through which they can come to “think institutionally” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1991)—that is, to understand “institutions, the nature and exercise of political power, or ways of collectively changing the distribution of power and influence in society” (Maniates, 2002, p. 45).

This focus on individualism has also led to a growth of the private sphere and an erosion of the public realm (Aldridge, 2003; Arendt, 1958; Barber, 2007; Blokhuis, 2008; Stevenson, 2010). Hannah Arendt (1958), in close alignment to Dewey’s philosophy, argues that the public is a fundamental component of human life. Arendt suggests that we realize our fullest humanity only through public life, in the public realm, not through the false promise of consumerism. Klein (2000) specifically describes the explosion of branded corporate spaces that are privatizing and redefining the concept of “public space.” These branded spaces—for example, theme park malls and themed megastores such as Barnes & Noble, Nike, Virgin Records, or Bass Pro Shops—are often “aesthetically and creatively thrilling” and are “privatized public utopias” that tap into consumer emotions (Klein, 2000). But, as Klein reminds us, however much these “private branded enclaves” try to masquerade as public spaces and operate as “de facto [public] squares” (p. 183), they are not. In fact, although public town squares are “sites for community discussion, protests, and political rallies” (p. 183), within these privatized spaces, free speech is censored, dissent is squelched, and civil liberties are diminished.

Communication in a “Marketalkracy”

The overwhelming prevalence of marketing and advertising further contributes to the erosion and transformation of the public sphere and the enactment of democracy through shaping and restricting possibilities for communication in various ways (Jhally, 2006). In 2005, the estimated U.S. expenditure on advertising was $276 billion (Barber, 2007). Marketing influences all of our decisions; everything we decide, from what to buy to whom to vote for, is “with few exceptions, shaped and influenced by messages bought and paid for by those who would profit from our decision” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 81). Indeed, the advertising industry was initially created in the late 19th century as a form of “education” for the public, fostering a market for the mass-produced goods made possible through industrialization (Molnar, 2005a; Spring, 2003). Hoechsmann (2007) explains that advertisers sought to “model new identities for people to emulate and to depoliticize any resistance to [them]” (p. 659). Bernays saw “education” through propaganda as a “legitimate form of human activity” (as cited in Molnar, 2005a, p. 76), as a progressive tool of “democratic governance and the market economy” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 77), and also as “essential to keeping the wheels of politics and commerce turning while preserving social stability” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 76).

Advertising also shapes how we speak to one another through providing us with the very language, structure, and system that we use to do so. It has played an essential role in creating what Stasko and Norris (2008) call a “marketalkracy,” which they define as a “political regime that is centered around the language of marketing and of the market itself” (p. 126). Stasko and Norris identify a new kind of “literacy” that is characterized by familiarity with, knowledge of, and everyday use of corporate logos, jingles, images, and products. Additionally, the structure of advertising, with its 30-second sound bites, further constricts opportunities for public engagement by sacrificing meaning and complexity for repetition, persuasiveness, and a dronelike simplicity. Because marketing has been for most of its history a unidirectional mode of communication, ² there is very little opportunity to actually talk back to it or to engage in dialogue with it.

Molnar and Reaves (2002), drawing on Dewey, posit that a system in which marketing controls discourse and equates market choice with democracy is profoundly antidemocratic because “it subverts the intellectual qualities and debases the civic relationships that make democratic life imaginable” (p. 41). In other words, advertising subverts the qualities that make an experience educative; an educative experience, for Dewey, was part of a “continuity of experiences that promote individual and community growth” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 83). Advertising, then, miseducates, in the sense that it, like all miseducative experiences,

has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness. Then the possibilities of having richer experiences in the future are restricted. (Dewey, as cited in Molnar, 2005a, p. 81)

For Dewey, miseducative experiences limit further experience in part because they are disconnected and create “dispersive, disintegrated, centrifugal habits” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 82), which makes it difficult for someone to reflect on, integrate, make sense of, and ultimately have any control over future experiences (Molnar, 2005a). Here, it is crucial to note that we are not arguing for a simple binary heuristic for evaluating the total construct of advertising. Rather, the critical point is to understand advertising as a pedagogical form that—via its close association with and ontogenetic links to consumerist desires—poses a structural threat to the concept of democratic social spaces and democratic habits of mind. In short, whereas the content of advertising messages could lead individuals to the species of educative experiences that Dewey idealized, the very structural underpinnings of advertising, especially the unerring profit motive—the marketer’s raison d’être—serve as a foil to democratic ends.

In a marketalkracy, advertisers appeal to consumers’ irrationality while “freedom” is equated with the ability to enact any impulse or desire, without the mediation of what Dewey called “intelligent judgement”:

It may be a loss rather than a gain to escape from the control of another person only to find one’s conduct dictated by immediate whim and caprice, that is, at the mercy of impulses into whose formation intelligent judgement has not entered. A person whose conduct is controlled in this way has at most only the illusion of freedom. Actually he is directed by forces over which he has no command. (Dewey, as cited in Molnar, 2000, p. 6)

Molnar (2000) explains that the current system of advertising illustrates Dewey’s argument: “In the name of freedom and individuality, advertising encourages individuals to give in to their impulses so that they may be controlled more easily by others” (p. 6). Molnar (2005a) further posits that whereas Dewey advocated for educational experiences that integrated individuals and communities, advertising fragments continuity and alienates individuals from community.

With the unerring assault and transmogrification of public spaces, the ease by which individuals accept consumerism is apparent: The images and products offered are made to appear as remedies to the same alienating effects they produce, such as the loss of social bonds, the repression of agency in one’s life, and the amount of labor exacted to simply maintain one’s social position. Consumerism thus conceals its destructive character and problematic implications and makes the public realm or political change seem unimportant and unnecessary. In fact, public space itself is often used to advance consumerism when viewed by marketers as a resource to be exploited via the slow churn of erosive logics. Not only is the public lost, but it is also replaced with things that advance consumerism: monstrous billboards hanging down apartment buildings, political leaders calling on people to shop, and the widespread use of schools to advance consumerism.

Consequences of School Commercialism

The literature on school commercialism includes “critiques of the influence of commercialism on children’s lives,” “commentaries on the media- and advertising-saturated nature of late 20th century American childhood,” and “analyses of corporate influence on public institutions and discourse” (Molnar, 2006, p. 623). In this section, we provide an overview of some of the negative consequences of school commercialism, including the ways in which it (a) fosters market values over human values and creates consumer-mindedness among students, (b) promotes poor health habits, (c) turns curriculum and pedagogy into corporate advertising, and (d) erodes democracy as it miseducates.

First, scholars have critiqued school commercialism for fostering market values over human values and for creating consumer-mindedness in students. Because corporations have made such inroads into schools, students come to learn the values of marketing (that one should always be dissatisfied and that the way to relieve dissatisfaction is through buying something) and the values of consumerism (that consumption is the path to happiness)—in essence, they learn market values at the expense of human ones (Molnar, 2006; Molnar et al., 2009). Shaker (1999), reporting on research from Greenberg and Brand, explained that students who regularly watched Channel One were more likely to agree that “money is everything; a nice car is more important than school; designer labels make a difference; I want what I see advertised; and wealthy people are happier than the poor” (p. 2). Molnar (2005a) explains that market values are only concerned with buying and selling. They

offer no guidance on matters of justice or fairness, and cannot, therefore, represent the interests of all children. Turning children over to the market ensures that they inevitably will be treated as an expense to be reduced or a resource to be harvested. In the process, some children and their families necessarily will be considered more valuable than others. (p. 134)

However, as critics such as Riesman (1961), Packard (1957), and Jhally (2006) have argued, consumerism and consumption do not lead to happiness and fulfillment but, rather, to “alienation, loneliness, and a loss of freedom” (Molnar, 2006, p. 633).

Education scholars also highlight the vast increase in the marketing of junk foods and other foods with little to no nutritional value in schools and point to the ways in which school commercialism contributes to poor health habits (Linn, 2004; Molnar, 2003, 2004, 2005a, 2005b; Molnar, Garcia, Boninger, & Merrill, 2008; Nestle, 2002; Schlosser, 2001; Schor & Ford, 2007). Molnar et al. (2008) conducted the first nationwide survey on food marketing in schools and, based on their data, estimate that between 16.4 and 19.6 million elementary schoolchildren in America (of a total population of 30.1 million American elementary schoolchildren) are exposed to marketing for foods high in fat and sugar and foods of minimal nutritional value. They go on to explain how important and disturbing this finding is, given that young children are being exposed to such nutritionally poor foods exactly at the ages where they are “developing personal preferences, buying habits, and eating habits” (p. 506). Molnar (2003, 2004) also specifically focuses on how public schools in poor urban areas are hit hardest because they are most in need of funding and thus most likely to look to corporate agreements to fill funding gaps. He goes on to point out that “health problems in young people, which may be exacerbated by some commercial activities in schools, are particularly acute in poor and ethnic minority group communities” (Molnar, 2003, p. 371; see also Molnar, 2005a, 2005b; Schor, 2004).

Molnar (2003, 2004) suggests that corporate marketing programs often undermine or are in direct contradiction to the health and nutrition messages that schools are teaching through their health and physical education programs. In addition to physical health problems, Molnar (2005a), drawing on Schor’s (2004) work, also contends that school commercialism is linked to an increase in materialism among children and youth, which some research in turn links to harmful outcomes such as “increased smoking, drinking, and illegal drug use; a series of mental health disorders, including personality disorders and poorer achievement in school and in activities outside of school; and antisocial behaviors, including carrying weapons, skipping school, and vandalism” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 9). Furthermore, Molnar, Koski, and Boninger (2010) point to a number of psychological harms that some research has associated with increased exposure to advertising and commercialism.

School commercialism also has negative impacts on curriculum and pedagogy and may have problematic implications for curricular content and teachers’ and administrators’ pedagogical freedom. Molnar (2006) emphasizes how school commercialism has the potential to bias and distort curricular lessons. In an earlier work he explains,

A teacher who hands out “supplemental” instructional materials that market candy, personal care products, sport shoes, or soft drinks is manipulating children for the benefit of a special interest and undermining the integrity of the curriculum . . . Commercialism thus places schools in the position of ignoring their academic responsibilities and aligns them with corporations that in turn influence the content, tone, and tenor of what is taught. (Molnar, 2005a, p. 10)

Giroux (2005) argues that with the omnipresence of school commercialism, students become “subject to the whims and practices of marketers whose agenda has nothing to do with critical learning and a great deal to do with restructuring civic life in the image of market culture” (p. 151). For example, if corporations are providing computers, software, buildings, curriculum materials, and other products and services at schools, teachers might be less likely to engage in critiques of those corporations. When teachers use corporate-sponsored materials, students are also harmed when such “learning” activities teach them “to be uncritical and loyal consumers of particular branded products, or teach them, without reflection, to adopt points of view favorable to corporate sponsors” (Molnar, Koski, & Boninger, 2010, p. 74). Finally, as marketing and advertising make further inroads into schools, children and youth become fluent in the “literacy of consumption” (Norris, 2007, p. 168), a hegemonic form of literacy that only simulates learning. Although students are fluent in this language of the market, they are much more limited in their ability to “talk back” to or critique corporate power (Stasko & Norris, 2008).

Much of the educational scholarship on commercialism in public schools also focuses more broadly on how school commercialism erodes democracy and miseducates, extending beyond the aforementioned classroom practices and into the actual functions and purposes of education itself. Molnar and Reaves (2002) argue that their more than a decade’s worth of analyses of school commercialism underscore a disturbing reality: that “the ideals of John Dewey have been eclipsed by the propaganda techniques of Ivy Ledbetter Lee and Edward Bernays” (p. 37). Several contemporary theorists and educational scholars suggest that there is a profound tension between the commercial objectives and the democratic ideals of education. Political philosopher Michael Sandel (2004) argues that

the commercialization of the classroom highlights the tension between unbounded markets and civic ideals. The purpose of public education is not to provide basic training for a consumer society, but to cultivate citizens capable of thinking critically about the consumer society they inhabit. Infusing the classroom with consumerism is at odds with this civic purpose. (para. 13)

Giroux (2000) also stresses the distinction between the commercial and civic aims of education: “students become subject to the whims and practices of marketers whose agenda has nothing to do with critical learning and a great deal to do with restructuring civic life in the image of market culture” (p. 173). Clearly, these articulations of schooling divest themselves from the Deweyan ideals of democratic engagement as an act of beneficence for the total social sphere, and recast schools as site where private profit—rather than public development—serves as the engine for curricular, instructional, and institutional decision making.

The philosopher of education Kerry Burch (2000) argues that most schools today are “not producing critically reflective democratic citizens; they are far more engaged in the mass production of idiocy” (p. 197). He goes on to state that he uses the term idiocy purposively to make a clear distinction between public and private spaces and dispositions. He explains that “the ancient Greek etymology of idios refers to a ‘purely private person,’ one who could participate in the polis as a citizen, but did not” (p. 197). As privatized, corporate spaces, schools are less able to conceive of students as active citizens and more likely to position them as “passive consumers-to-be-sold” (Molnar, 2005a, p. 45). Rather than positioning students as citizens, school commercialism “serves up students as a market for advertisers, which ultimately encourages students to identify their locus of power primarily in their role as consumers” (Norris, 2007, p. 167). Commercial activities in schools provide students with experiences that serve the interests of corporate sponsors rather than students; school commercialism is therefore inherently miseducative because it promotes “unreflective consumption” rather than critical thinking and because it addresses students as consumers and appeals to their desires and impulses rather than fostering within students thoughtfulness and community-mindedness (Molnar, Koski, & Boninger, 2010, p. 5). Furthermore, school commercialism undermines public education’s role as a civic institution seeking to promote civil society and encourage learners to participate fully in their communities (Molnar, 2005a).

Identity, Lack, and Consumerism

Drawing from the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan (1981), both jagodzinski (2004) and Bracher (1993) suggest that grasping the dominance of designer capitalism and its consumptive drive—despite its many deleterious effects—requires an understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of lack, the psychic sense of absence that emerges when one rejects individualistic desire to exist in the social world. Within psychoanalysis, the fundamental submission of one’s personal desires for the sake of engaging in social life and language creates a sense of loss, of alienation from the now-repressed elements of one’s own identity. Thus, for both Freud (1961) and Lacan (1981), the phenomenon of social being is always already characterized by a repression of who we are and what we really want. From the viewpoint of psychoanalytic theories of culture, this lack, then, becomes the point of mobilization for the machinations of advertising, consumerism, and capital. As jagodzinski (2004) notes, “marketing strategy always determines youth’s desires first, and then develops the advertising campaign and product that fills their ‘lack’” (p. 154), a concept that was not lost on the founders of the advertising and public relations industries. However, the primacy of lack as a feature of identity ensures that these advertisements and products conscript individuals into a seemingly inexhaustible pattern of consumptive behavior that might easily be construed as symptomatic ³ (Hoechsmann, 2007). Thus, consumerism acts as an erosive educational force within psychic, psychologically private spaces as well, constitutive of Deweyan “bad habits” of mind (Dewey, 1916), ones that, when engaged in the repetitive, potentially neurotic fashion described by psychoanalytic thought, become part of how individuals understand, communicate, and perform identity itself.

Usher et al. (1997) take up a similar line of critique in arguing that consumption is connected with a variety of everyday social practices—including lifestyle practices, confessional practices, and critical practices—all of which involve learning. Of particular interest here are lifestyle practices and confessional practices, because they are both focused on processes of identity formation. Lifestyle practices involve expressive modes of learning, are focused on the creation and re-creation of identity, and involve “the self-referential concern with style and image” (Usher et al., p. 18). The authors explain that this ongoing re-creation of identity, with its concern with aestheticization, creates the need for “a learning stance towards life as a means of self-expression and autonomy” (p. 18). This form of learning is grounded in postmodern conceptions of consumption as a means by which people differentiate themselves from others, align themselves with particular groups, and express individuality (Featherstone, 1991). Therefore, given their emphasis on “novelty, fashion, taste, and style,” lifestyle practices are practices “of a consumption which is potentially unending, since as desire can never be satisfied, there is always the need for new experiences and new learning” (p. 18). As Norris (2011) notes, “the latent promise of the signifier is perpetually unconsummated” (p. 119). That is, because the fulfillment promised by consumption is always unconsummated, we “mourn what is incomplete yet cannot come to pass” (p. 139). Individuals use confessional practices to help them understand themselves; these practices take the self as the object of study and involve self-reflection and introspection. Within confessional practices, what is consumed is the self, as individuals engaging in confessional practices assume that “there is deep hidden meaning buried ‘inside’ which, once discovered, opens the door to happiness, psychic stability and personal empowerment” (p. 19). Like lifestyle practices, confessional practices are never complete—“there is a constant need to change in order to adapt a changing self and a changing environment” (p. 19); thus, confessional practices also necessitate engaging in lifelong learning. However, as described above, diverging sharply from the aforementioned Deweyan accounts of learning, these pedagogies of consumption lead to the development of the radically individualistic social landscape of designer capitalism—a space that is inimical to Dewey’s notion of democratic life.

Common Origins: Consumerism and Psychoanalysis

The connection we draw between psychoanalysis and consumerism has historical roots in the advent of advertising and public relations. In 1928, Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and an informal student of his theoretical contributions, wrote Propaganda, a treatise on his approach to maintaining his vision of a democratic social order. In this text he writes,

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. (p. 37)

Bernays did not see these hidden forces as problematic but rather as beneficent means by which to control a public in which he had little faith. Freud’s (and later, Lacan’s) views on lack and desire also characterized Bernays’s writing and approach to developing propaganda as a social engine. He writes that “men are very largely actuated by motives which they conceal from themselves, is as true of mass as of individual psychology” (Bernays, 1928, p. 75) and suggested that the skilled propagandist should think, in many ways, like a psychoanalyst—reading through the surface manifestations and articulations of desire to develop strategies targeting the obscured forces that guide behavior. However, the end result of implanting a psychic fiction that wholly comprises consumerist economic significations, as Bernays’s work would aim to do, is a perversion of the psychoanalytic method and the therapeutic end of divorcing individuals of symptomatic, repetitive patterns of harmful behavior.

Molnar (2005a) has noted that Bernays’s worldview has readily trumped Dewey’s in the historical and current cultural milieu. Yet, within the psychodynamics of the processes of consumerism and capitalism, Deweyan notions still have some life, although perverted by the ends of privatization and market ideology. The onset of designer capitalism and of the forms of consumption detailed by Usher et al. (1997) in some ways parallel Dewey’s (1916) concept of plasticity as an educational outcome. Plasticity, for Dewey, involved “the pliable elasticity by which some persons take on the color of their surroundings while retaining their own bent” (pp. 52–53), or personal style. For Dewey, this notion was an expression of the ways in which humans use cumulative experience as a means of interacting symbiotically with their environments. Via the logical ends of Bernays’s (1928) fundamental ideals for propaganda, however, designer capitalism has developed its own seemingly predictive means by which to mimic plasticity via the expression of consumptive identity. We are offered an array of products, via database-driven shopping websites and programs such as Amazon.com or iTunes, as well as the so-called semantic structure of Web 3.0, that know what we like, that reflect back to us a vision of our personal style wholly determined by product trend data. In these facile experiences, we are offered the chance to locate ourselves directly within the significations of consumerism and, in doing so, to allow our identity to be formulated for us under the unerring drive of neoliberal consumerism. These moments cannot, at least for Dewey, be anything more than the inculcation of bad habits and miseducative experience. The signifiers presented to us as material to fill our voids and make us whole may shift, but the core identity they produce is decidedly fixed.

Cultural Pathologies of Capitalism

Within modern psychoanalytic theorizing, these pedagogies of advertising and identity translate into problematic social orders rigidly structured around commodification. According to Barcan (1999), “consumer culture already provides arguably the most potent and tenable forms of myth, narrative and desire available in contemporary secular societies” (p. 37). Using Freud’s Greek archetypes, jagodzinski (2004) extends this criticism by naming the advent of late capitalism/neoliberalism as the “return of Kronos,” the lord of consumptive, murderous pleasure, signifying the erasure of a symbolic order arranged around law by and for acquiescence to the impoverished forms of enjoyment associated with consumptive indulgence. From this antidemocratic disposition, “a permissive society emerges where the expectation to fulfill one’s passions is wedded to the machinery of productive capitalist desire of consumerist fantasies” (jagodzinski, 2004, p. 80). In yet another perversion of Dewey, then, perhaps contemporary schools do prepare individuals for life in the contemporary life world of consumerism—for citizenship in a social sphere that has become almost wholly characterized by acquisitiveness.