Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

uilding walls to prevent climbing – barriers simply become additional
structures to be explored and known.
7.4 Do iPod owners really need social welfare?
To claim that a revolution will spring from a custom painted computer
case seems a little ludicrous, and indeed there is a tongue-in-cheek
element to many of the projects undertaken during this research. The
iPod Social Outreach Program, for instance, raises the question: Do
iPod owners really need a social welfare program? It’s not a question
that has an easy answer.
The consumer practices examined in this research are not driven by
material or economic need; participants generally possess greater
freedoms, material resources and personal agency than the majority of
the people in the world. Given this, it would be easy to dismiss such
practices as the leisure pursuits of a privileged few – as indeed they
are. However, consumer culture has arguably become the dominant
form of existence for a large section of society and the practices examined
here appear to play an increasingly important role in shaping
this environment. Coupled with this, we have seen that the excesses of
consumer society, ‘the showy products through which a productivist
economy articulates itself’ (Certeau, 1984, p. xvii), bring their own
form of impoverishment and lack. With increasing precision consumers
are positioned as renters, trespassers, even criminals, within their
own material culture.
In Thing Theory Brown asks: ‘If society seems to impose itself on
the “corporeal imagination,” when and how does that imagination
struggle against the imposition, and what role do things, physically
or conceptually, play in the struggle? How does the effort to rethink
things become an effort to reinstitute society?’ (2001, p. 10). Through
dismantling, repairing, and reconfiguring the products of mass-production,
consumers rethink their relation to the world and in doing so
they claim ownership and agency within an alienating environment.
Practices of consumer production establish a degree of plurality and
creativity within consumer culture. As consumers figure the world in
new and alternate ways, they make evident the constructed nature of
normative practices of use. Qualities that were positioned as natural
conditions of the object are revealed as commercial strategies manifest
Conclusion
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