Identifying Consumption: Subjects and Objects in Consumer Society. By Robert G. Dunn. Philadelphia: Temple UP, June 2008. Paper: ISBN 978-1-59213-870-8, $23.95. 235 pages.
Review by Mary C. Carter, University of Oklahoma

Only recently have critics in cultural and language studies, particularly in response to postmodern analyses, begun to examine how identity is constructed through consumption. Robert G. Dunn claims that such critique is imperative because modern practices of consumption form “the most powerful link between the economic and socio-cultural realms” (3). Whereas commodity critique has in the past been effective to analyze the socioeconomic effects of capitalist culture, in Identifying Consumption Dunn focuses on the subjective relationships between commodity objects and human actors, and how those relationships serve to structure individual identity.As Dunn notes in the introduction, unpacking the nature of the effects of consumption and its subsequent repositioning is an interdisciplinary process; consequently, his analysis draws from many sources. First, Dunn attempts to plot a structural lineage for a theory of consumption, beginning with the commodity critique of Marx. While Marx does anticipate the structural detachment of the commodity object in keeping with the overall alienation of the worker, he could not perceive the enormous influence of what he called a “‘mysterious thing’” (qtd. in Dunn 27). His omission of a deeper analysis of the commodity object is overlooked, argues Dunn, because the breadth and depth of its social imbrication was impossible to fathom. Tracing Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, Dunn then moves to Georg Lukacs, who posits that commodification restructures social relations. Dunn sees the commodity as increasing in value to the worker as a possession, and as such, as an indicator of position within a larger social organization.The influences of modernity, which Dunn notes “can be read as the systematic commodification of need and want,” are also accounted for (4). He follows the motif of increasing alienation next to Georg Simmel, whose critiques of modernity focus on the abstraction and social detachment created by monetary exchange. Dunn uses Simmel to connect overarching structures with individual subjectivities, emphasizing the relationships between them. According to Simmel, culture occurs at the point of interiorization of objects and exteriorization of subjectivities. This is one of Dunn’s most convincing evidential connections between material analysis and individual interior life. Dunn also uses the class analysis of the Frankfurt school as a bridge to theories that see the consumption of commodities as a way of expressing status or of experiencing desire, pleasure, social control, narcissism, and hedonism. He cites Veblen and Galbraith to show how artificially created needs are initiated by production and by the impulse of economic drivers, creating a never-ending cycle of consumption in pursuit of elusive status.The metamorphosis of the commodity object from a necessity to an artificially created need is well substantiated by Dunn in the first part of the text; next, he looks at the influences of postmodern theories of consumption.The turn to textual analysis and to anthropology is a postmodern necessity for Dunn as he extends his theory of consumption beyond Marxist critique. He interprets the relationship of commodity to consumption to consumer through semiotics, the form of analysis used by Boudrillard. In this understanding, the commodity becomes a sign with multiple layers of signification in a semiotic system contained within and structured by the political economy. The value of commodity is not merely economic, but also constructed so that it signifies in a greater web of social meaning. Boudrillard perceived the slippage between sign and signifier as representing a potentially dangerous avenue of social control. Dunn next examines the usefulness of an anthropological view, noting that anthropology may be the postmodern discipline: it considers all realities to be constructed culturally. Due to its focus on tribal societies, anthropology’s lens of analysis disregards issues of class stratification and instead observes how social relations are structured in part through a system of goods. Dunn posits British cultural studies’ penchant for drawing from multiple disciplines as a way to address the subject that also recognizes agency.The move toward agency and away from structural forces is a key point that Dunn uses to discuss the subjectivity of consumption. While Boudrillard locates commodities within a semiotic system of signification among other commodities, Dunn looks beyond the limitations of his structuralism to acknowledge consumption as driven also by the agency of the consumer. By positioning consumers as agents seduced by aesthetics and pleasurable attributes, or compelled by sensual materiality, he proposes them as reflective consumers of commodity goods seeking to fill a need unaccounted for by sign/signification analysis. He posits the notion of insatiability as the elusive drive behind the acquisition of goods and as the crucial point where economic structures interact with individual subjectivities. Capitalism cannot exist without insatiability, and factors of desire, emulation, and larger signification all play a role in compelling consumers’ insatiability. Commodity consumption signifies in the larger culture as lifestyle choices or as outward manifestations of how individuals fit into their cultural surroundings. Dunn argues that discussions of status relations are decreasingly centered around class and more often focused on lifestyle. Lifestyle is clearly demarcated through specific patterns of consumption of goods and experiences. Lifestyles are often sold packaged as total experiences and take on an iconic life of their own, primarily built through the consumption of related goods. Observing that style and its antecedent fashion are notoriously capricious, Dunn observes that style is the perception of what defines a lifestyle, and that fashion is its realization. A vital component of the drive for consumption, fashion dictates that the old must be replaced by the new, keeping the stimulus for production intact in a self-perpetuating cycle. Consumers look to fashion as a lifestyle indicator to pattern their choices on those characteristic of a desired cultural group; these choices function not only as outward indicators of cultural belonging, but also as ways in which individuals continually construct themselves.Dunn offers no either /or choices as to the roots of modern consumption; instead, he expertly constructs a careful lineage of the transition of the commodity object to one of insatiable consumer desire.