Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler [Paperback]

Thomas Frank (Editor), Matt Weiland (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1997

From the pages of The Baffler, the most vital and perceptive new magazine of the nineties, sharp, satirical broadsides against the Culture Trust.

In the "old" Gilded Age, the barons of business accumulated vast wealth and influence from their railroads, steel mills, and banks. But today it is culture that stands at the heart of the American enterprise, mass entertainment the economic dynamo that brings the public into the consuming fold and consolidates the power of business over the American mind. For a decade The Baffler has been the invigorating voice of dissent against these developments, in the grand tradition of the muckrakers and The American Mercury. This collection gathers the best of its writing to explore such peculiar developments as the birth of the rebel hero as consumer in the pages of Wired and Details; the ever-accelerating race to market youth culture; the rise of new business gurus like Tom Peters and the fad for Hobbesian corporate "reengineering"; and the encroachment of advertising and commercial enterprise into every last nook and cranny of American life. With its liberating attitude and cant-free intelligence, this book is a powerful polemic against the designs of the culture business on us all.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In this thought-provoking collection of essays, editor Thomas Frank and other contributors to the contrarian journal the Baffler examine the unprecedented ascendancy of business as the dominating force in American life. If the closest historical parallel is with the Gilded Age and its all-powerful robber barons, Frank and his ilk clearly see themselves as the muckrakers out to expose the absurdities and abuses of big business. Today, however, advertising has come to permeate every aspect of our society, and corporations are in the business of manufacturing culture--what Frank calls the "Culture Trust." These essays analyze the ways in which this Culture Trust has co-opted the power of dissent by appropriating the language and symbolism of nonconformist youth culture, from hippie slang to grunge fashion; in other words, when the media markets rebellion, it becomes just another consumer choice. As evidence, the essayists explore the image of consumer as rebel pioneered by publications such as Details and Wired, as well as the preeminence of "revolutionary" business gurus such as Tom Peters. The result is a highly original book, a satirical and savage indictment of '90s consumerist culture.

Review

You'd have to look back at the fights between New York intellectuals in the fifties to find the sort of verbal firepower unleashed here. -- Nation

[Frank is] ... perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment, and certainly the most malcontent... Although he has been to graduate school ... both his thinking and his prose hark back to a time when the radical left was something more in America than conferences and seminars attended by Foucault-steeped professors. Frank has thrown off the mandarin jargon; for him it's about wealth and power, haves and have-nots, loud and simple--it's as if he were channeling Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills and Thorstein Veblen through a boom box. -- The New York Times Book Review, Gerald Marzorati

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (October 17, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393316734
• ISBN-13: 978-0393316735
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 0.6 x 5.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #230,142 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, informative, loud, almost shrill July 15, 2002

By Stephen R. Laniel

Format:Paperback

I consider myself a die-hard leftist, and I agree with most of the conclusions that the authors of _Commodify Your Dissent_ come to. It reminds me a lot of Noam Chomsky, another leftist who reveals modern consumer culture for what it is.

The problem is that the left is remarkably short on solutions, or even the feeling that solutions are possible. _Commodify Your Dissent_ is a collection of essays whose premise is that the U.S. situation is hopeless:

* as many other authors have said, our main means of dissent - our writing, particularly irony - has been swallowed up by our enemies; it's now hip to be ironic, so advertisers adopt irony about advertising as their pose toward the world. So we can't use irony anymore.

* In the U.S., "identity" now means "what car I own and what clothes I wear." We define ourselves as consumers. Once again, we've moved so far in this direction that it's impossible to imagine a way out.

* The culture of business dominates American discourse. We look up to American business leaders as our new gods, and we assume that The Market will correct everything. Resisting The Market is futile, because it is infinitely more intelligent than any policymaker. Hence, leave the world to the Bill Gateses.

* Music is corporatized junk.

and so on, ad nauseum, for a couple hundred pages. After a while, we - or at least I - get numbed to it. Great, so the world has been utterly cheapened by corporations. Sure, corporations own the political process. And? What do I do about it?

_The Baffler_ has no suggestions, which in the end makes it a shrill mouthpiece of powerlessness. We've grown up on a steady diet of powerlessness. The left would assert that this is because the power structure *wants* us to think we're powerless; it helps them when few of us resist. Now _The Baffler_ - with the totally altruistic goal of helping us out - has told us again that we're powerless, has strengthened the case, and has done nothing to correct this impression.

_Commodify Your Dissent_ ends with one of the most shrill, paranoid, counterproductive essays I've ever read, bringing to a crescendo all the doomsaying that peppered the foregoing pages.

Nothing's wrong with being shrill and unproductive. I just thought it fair to warn people that they're getting more of what they're used to.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Food For Thought April 28, 1999

By A. Ross HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

A mix bag of 23 mostly provocative essays culled from the pages of The Baffler magazine, collected with the aim of critiquing the "new American cultural order." While a many of the ideas and theses presented will be old hat to thinking observers of popular culture, the essays are valuable in that they connect the dots in often highly entertaining (if sometimes overly snide and self-congratulatory) prose. The essays are separated into four sections: The Rebel Consumer, The Culture of Business, The Culturetrust Generation, and Wealth Against the Commonwealth Revisited. Of these, the essays in The Rebel Consumer and The Culturetrust Generation are probably the most lively, entertaining, and accessible to those who haven't thought about this stuff. Should be made required reading for all 9th graders.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Insiteful and funny July 19, 2002

By C. Colt

Format:Paperback

This collection of essays provides a gutsy, incisive, and energetic critique of American consumer culture that surpasses and even ridicules the limp, flaccid, self-referential verbiage that academics try to pass off as a "radical", and "critical" examination of culture and power. "Commodify Your Dissent" is a series of critical essays, or "salvos" as the authors prefer to call them, that were printed in The Baffler during the 90's largely in response to the hypocrisy, and gluttony of the America's expanding techno-consumer culture. Using lucid, forthright language, direct examples, and actual critical thinking (not the mental self-gratification generated by tenured radicals) the authors demonstrate how corporate America has commercialized the concept of revolution and employed it along marketing and production guidelines that are-guess what-conformist and conservative. In the 90's culture, as these essays so aptly demonstrate, "free thinking, revolution" and "breaking the rules" really amounted to a double-speak ideology centered around buying more gadgets and helping companies to make more money, a process that was reinforced in words and letters by such "radical" cultural critics as Camille Paglia.

This book is bound to anger a lot of readers because, it's gutsy, direct, and ruthless in its battering of the misused tropes and recycled clichés that enable legions of consumers, workers, and managers to feel like they're breaking the rules when in fact they are merely conforming to and reinforcing them. I know it's a hard fact to face, but buying a recycled pair of bell-bottoms is not an act of rebellion.