Perhaps I’m not yet too familiar with Leida’s house rules and that’s why I’m still looking for a balance between sharing personal notes and theoretical generalisations. But since I don’t know how to separate the two, I would like to begin with the personal, with “I”.

First, let’s take on the term consumption. The thing is, having grown up in Soviet Estonia, I seemingly don’t have much to do with the term. That would make sense. Those were completely different times and change only arrived when Estonia became independent and a market economy was established. These statements are obviously not wrong but they are a little bit one-sided. Consumers did also exist during the occupation. It feels somehow silly to think back to that but I remember we used to have a “consumer protection” section in Estonian media at the time. The specific programmes were not important but they did have a role – the main concern for consumers was that they couldn’t always even have their lowest expectations met. Here, consuming meant something that was legally difficult to define and belonged more in the realm of daily struggles. Readers and listeners wrote about how a burst pipe had not been fixed and someone had to react to that. The most important right of the consumer, the right to choose was not realised.

Somewhere, there was a place for fantasies of consumption as well – involving everything you could not buy. In my case, Western pop culture, especially music. The fact that this world remained firmly out of reach, in some perverse way, made my life richer. And in that sense, that was an important lesson – I slowly realised that consumption and buying are two very different things. I was standing at the entrance and couldn’t enter but regardless, I was about to arrive.

As Estonia became independent and open, an important promise was made – consumers now truly had a choice and the choice was actually based on your changed political stance as a citizen. So, a rather logical connection between democracy and the market economy became the norm in political culture. My money had value and whenever I used it in the market, I became the owner of something I could use as I pleased. Mostly, there was not much else to discuss. Ordinary things were needed, other kinds, less often. But the main issue lies somewhere else, and in order to explain this, we need to take a closer look at history.

The idea of a consumer as we know it today was formulated in the early 1920s by Edward Bernays. Let us leave aside his biographical details for now (although I am tempted to mention, his mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister) and focus on the core of his ideas. Which is the line between need and desire. According to Bernays, consumers are those “who do not need what they desire nor desire what they need”. The thing is, the world of human desire had already been mapped by the stage of capitalism we are currently looking at. And in any case, that was a restricted world – once we start counting on fingers, it doesn’t take too long. It’s a different story with desires. That was an endless, colourful land of all possibilities. Bernays’ masterplan was to teach women to smoke. A cigarette, he said, is a phallic symbol and smoking will become a compass for women’s emancipation, an escape from the dominating male gaze. The question of consumption can be registered here – even if the process is not ignited by anything other than manipulation and deception, on a personal level, the impulse can be serious and real.

Capitalism in Estonia began for almost everyone with the satisfaction of their needs. This is when the first signals of the broadening opportunities of consumption and a recognition that market opportunities must be learned also arrived. I remember these processes primarily in connection to pop culture. It was easy to form a sense of taste when your options were limited. With the broadening opportunities, aversion, acceptance over time and other such reactions occurred. Largely similar processes could be seen in how Estonia related to global pop culture. Bit by bit people realised that we don’t necessarily need it. And there was a recognition that a large and incredibly powerful structure tried to manipulate your desires – such as Hollywood with its generic character creation and storylines or the pop music industry that offered sleek yet vapid designs – over time consumers in Estonia learned to react defiantly to that, which was predictable yet interesting anyway.

In the 1990s, the attitude that “we can all see through it” only took deeper root. Perhaps we still held on to dreams from a time when pop culture was still behind the Iron Curtain but by then, the mystique had dissipated and people were increasingly proud of not letting themselves be manipulated that easily. In a way, these attitudes were introduced by pirated cassettes produced in Poland and later, pirated CDs or video rentals with poor interior design – all of that brought pop culture from an exaggerated high status to a lower and more accessible position. And at least in my eyes, the peak of this cautious attitude was the first encounter between Estonia and big pop culture, Michael Jackson’s performance at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds for an audience of 70,000 in August 1997. Everything went seemingly well but I met several people who never quite solved the equation – the star status was only expressed in statistics, his persona was never born as god. And in the media, Jackson was compared to Coca-Cola, mentally the lowest unit of consumption we could think of.

That was a period when I and many other consumers of pop culture began to seek opportunities to protect our experience against being dismantled. How could we maintain distance, admiration and mystique? This was achieved in different ways. My choice was to read (for example) about music and whenever possible, write about it as well. I never looked for the opportunity to identify with what I read or find explanations for what something means. I just wanted to belong to a bigger world and to a degree that needed to be a world of fantasy – kind of in a similar way that in the past such fantasy was ignited by total isolation. But what happened was that my English got better and my reading began to incorporate more general cultural theory. And alongside that, although worded differently and under different circumstances, the same dilemma I began this text with came up. That is, whether to protect your personal world that had inevitably already been tied to consumption or exit it and face sharp theoretical questions about consumption but also society at large.

To conclude, now the texts began signalling something different that tied consumer habits to responsibility and demanded that I take a closer look at what is behind it all. The key terms in this type of cultural critique were spectacle (in Guy Debord’s case) or the culture industry (Theodor Adorno). When I was looking at spectacle, I noticed that it was an attractive facade that functioned as distortion, hiding certain truths about human nature. In Adorno’s work, the culture industry was a total project, rationalised to the extreme, that cancelled the idea of art by commodifying it through certain processes (such as standardisation). And the conclusion was that as a consumer, in the end you are always deceived. There is no way out of passivity and getting stuck in what Adorno so lowly called “social cement”.

As a backlash, two ideas began to slowly take root. The first spoke of a certain kind of enlightened consumer, also known as a fan. A fan is more sensitive and conscious and their activity in the field of culture is productive, they are far from being passive. The second mode, in part, similar to the first, although considerably more complex, promised that increasingly, a completely new kind of art will be consumed. Let’s go back to Adorno for a second. He said that truly sincere art strives to express something that is, in fact, inexpressible. Unfortunately, often this breeds unbearable compromises and everything ends up settling into a familiar and recognised formal framework. So, we also need forms that are radical precisely because the task itself seems unsolvable. The result could be dramatic and sharply intense – for Adorno, an example of this would be Franz Kafka’s novels. Yes, it’s a world on the other side of consumption, away from the culture industry. But when we take a slightly different angle, what I find radical and ambitious, is a large part of Afro-American pop culture, carrying an expressive embodiment in a way that culture had never exhibited before. Let’s look at the rhythmic tensions in Louis Armstrong’s band or the ghostly expression of blues together with its transformations in rock music or soul’s different emotional codes in correlation with the American fordist production line normativity.

Many of us can highlight and defend such lists. That is significant because we are at the core of popular consumption displaying the objects of our desires to others, and trying to construct different social relations based on that. In that sense, once it seemed that the consumer had already won, their desiring mechanisms had object counterparts that could be bought and sold. Except that there’s an issue here, as follows: the spectacle has not been an archetype of any functional consumption model for a long time. We have streaming services and attention economy and so the notion of spectacle seems outdated, wasteful and loud and as such, also a completely useless investment. I don’t even know exactly when and why that happened. Technical possibilities are another topic but I also think that postmodern capitalism instilled in us a mix of boredom and irony against such grand gestures. Spectacle, I must say, is increasingly understood as a hindrance to truly effective, seamless consumption.

In 1990, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the so-called societies of control. In many ways, he developed Michel Foucault’s idea of “disciplinary society” further. However, the difference is that when the models of self-discipline described by Foucault were realised in institutions created for these specific purposes, such as prisons or factories, control societies encompassed different layers of society and operated in a far less centralised manner. The practices of consumption are a great example here – how we define ourselves as consumers, how we own the banks etc. And it should be stressed here once again – we do not need to focus on a specific kind of spectacle. Spectacle means distance and also the opportunity to be someone who reveals it and dismantles the idea. Today, we need to ask to what extent this is even possible. Pop culture is no longer made up of globally shared events that form hierarchies that rise and fall in a certain regulated rhythm. For the consumer, pop culture is scattered, overflowing and simultaneously fits everywhere.

In 2005, the British music critic Paul Morley published a book titled Words And Music and subtitled A History of Pop in the Shape of the City. Pop music has repeatedly tied itself to the metaphor of the city before – in rock or hip hop, there are plenty of examples. But here, the title claims pop music itself is a city. One of the two main characters of the book is Kylie Minogue’s 2001 pop hit Can’t Get You Out of My Head. And quite early in the book we find the following passage:

A beautiful sports car designed by devilish angels appears out of nowhere. Kylie being Kylie – or, as the case may be, not being quite herself – climbs into the car and, seeing a key in the ignition with ‘TURN THIS’ written on the key-ring, starts up the engine. The fresh clean noise of the engine sounds like music to her ears.

The actress playing Kylie Minogue, who just happens to be called Kylie Minogue, is driving through an industrial landscape towards a city. She has to be driving, not walking, because her journey, a journey that is at the heart of this story, is all about her interaction with machines. She is driving at night or day along a highway through miles and miles of factories. She is driving towards a city full of anonymous, mysterious lit-up buildings.

So, in Morley’s book, there are no roots, no history, no origin. The sports car that everything begins with appears out of nowhere. There is no truth to rely on in order to dethrone the tyranny of spectacle. Morley’s book is missing any kind of locality, territoriality – what matters is flow, drift, free and even loose, a passive crossing of borders. But crossing of borders not in the expansionist sense of border violation but just the moving from one point to another. In a way, this is modern capitalism on a miniature scale – those tied to a specific place will be socially left behind. The elite is, of course, mobile and belongs nowhere.

We can now imagine an argument that says this is exactly what the dulling of the imagination in consumer society looks like – the result of all the decades of garbage and spoil. But actually, we do not find that here. At least, this is not quite the right way to word it. Afterall, in modern capitalism, the world is rich, more colourful than before. It just operates in a closed space. Let’s imagine a music fan in paradise. On the one hand, there are no disappointments – no betrayals or decay. On the other, no explosions, no events. It is an ordered cybernetic intensity, moderate reservation of attention, no shock and disturbance and obviously no noise.