stimulant

Or so said a friend of Nagle’s. He pointed out that Americans are often not only obsessed with things, but with the process of buying them. Being a “good shopper,” or “going shopping” are ideas that are significant independent of what is being bought. I’m not quite sure how this dovetails with the idea that historically, advertising’s role shifted from informing consumers to create desire from the raw material of need to its current incarnation of manipulating consumers to create the raw material of desire, and transform that into “need.”

The reason all this is on my mind is because of Saks Fifth Avenue’s new ad campaign:

It’s so fucking blatant. There’s no infomation at all, just the imperative to want. And it’s not that this is a big jump, culturally. As Philip Greenspun says,

Not being a materialist in the U.S. is kind of like not appreciating opera if you live in Milan or art if you live in Paris. We support materialism better than any other culture. Because retailing and distribution are so efficient here, stuff is cheaper than anywhere else in the world. And then we have huge houses in which to archive our stuff.

But something is undeniably off-putting about its self-consciousness, its smarmy flagrantness. So strange! I need to think more about this.