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eBook details
- Title: Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, And the Culture of Consumption. (Reviews) (Book Review)
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 184 KB
Description
Rob Latham. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002. 321 pp. $22.00 * Vampire bloodlust is objectifying and exploitative, but it also makes promises. It promises youth and the capacities we associate with youth: vigor, strength, empowerment. It promises, in other words, to amplify agency itself. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham develops a sophisticated, unrelentingly dialectical analysis of the complex relation between youth and consumerism in the context of U.S. capitalist development since World War II in general, and since the seventies in particular. The book foregrounds the ways in which "progressive possibilities and exploitative realities are mutually implicated in an overarching system of commodity production and exchange" (218). Latham draws on Marx's arguments about how technological apparatuses developed according to a capitalist logic operate in a profoundly contradictory fashion vis-a-vis the human population. If Marx's primary technological example is the nineteenth-century industrial factory, Latham's are recent innovations marketed for consumption by youth--"pri marily electronic ones (videogames, television, music videos, computers, etc.)" (4). Taking his cue from the metaphorics of Capital, he identifies the two sides of capitalism's contradictory social and historical tendencies in terms of a vampiric logic on the one hand and a cyborg logic on the other. Marx frames technological innovation as a direct result, amplification, and objectification of human labor, a process which takes a form under capitalism Latham characterizes as "both prosthetic and predatory" (3). Technological apparatuses as they operate within capitalism simultaneously amplify human labor power and dominate it. Taking on an apparent life of their own, they operate vampirically, as "undead" labor which perpetually absorbs--sucks--the energy from living labor. Latham insists at the same time, however, on "Marx's dialectical conception of industrial automation as at once the 'undead' objectification of human labor and the protocybernetic enhancement of its historical capacity" (138). The contempo rary trope of the cyborg, in other words--the prosthetic merging of human and machine--is already implicit in Marx's narrative of the industrial factory's extension and objectification of labor. The cyborg represents technological innovation's capacity to expand human agency, to liberate the human population from the realm of necessity, a potential made available but never realized within the exploitative, vampiric social relations capitalism enforces. The laborer becomes, in Latham's words, "a cybernetic organism--a cyborg--prosthetically linked to a despotic, ravening apparatus" (3). The "vampire-cyborg," the book's central figure, is thus "a perfect dialectical image in which unprecedented technological progress and primitive, inhuman exploitation coexist in a structure of profound contradiction" (4, original emphasis).