copyright (c)1994  Jillian Sandell
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SHOPPING FOR A CHANGE:
_THE HOUSE OF MIRTH_  AND  _PARIS IS BURNING_
Jillian Sandell

Edith Wharton is a well-known name within the canon of American 
literature and is famous for, among other things, her desire to be
respected as a writer, not only of quality fiction but also of best-sellers.  
Although she has remained a popular writer for most of this century, the 
most recent resurgence of interest in Wharton's work seems to date from 
the release, two years ago, of the film version of _Ethan Frome_.  However, 
it was the 1993 release of Martin Scorsese's _The Age of Innocence_,
a box office success, that seems to have secured her position as a best 
seller once again, a fact that she would no doubt relish.  Sales of the 
re-issue of the book (a movie tie-in with a sultry Michele Pfeiffer on 
the cover) placed it last fall for 11 weeks on the New York Times 
best-seller list, with 4 weeks at number 1.  Her unfinished book 
_The Buccaneers_ has been posthumously completed by another writer 
and released this year, and her other novels and short stories currently 
claim prominent positions in many bookstores.  However, the novel that 
first made Wharton famous, and remains the most widely read of all her 
works, is _The House of Mirth_, published in 1905.  From the start it was 
a critical and popular success.  It was the fastest selling book in her 
publisher's history, selling over 140,000 copies in 2 months, and it was 
the book that finally gave Wharton the kind of attention and sales she so 
desperately wanted.

Since Wharton's own sense of identity as a writer was so intimately bound 
up with the buying and selling of her books (as opposed to her merely 
having an artistic urge to write), I want to use _The House of Mirth_, 
and Wharton's career as a writer, to explore the implications of an 
identity organized around the marketplace.  Also, since the novel represents 
a group of people whose shared identity is self-consciously organized around 
consumption, I specifically want to question what kind of individual and 
collective politics are possible from such an identity.  In contrast to 
_The House of Mirth_, I will discuss Jennie Livingston's film _Paris is 
Burning_ to suggest that it is not only what is consumed in acts of identity 
formation that needs to be problematized, but the very act of consumption 
itself.  Despite many differences between the two texts, the kinds of 
consumer behavior enacted in contemporary New York drag balls and in _The 
House of Mirth_ are not so different and are, in fact, I will argue, two 
versions of the same thing.  I therefore want to challenge the idea that 
alternative comsumption habits are any more progressive than normal
ones, and suggest that at the end of the day the most a consumer identity 
can ever provide is pleasure and escape, not social change.

_The House of Mirth_ follows Lily Bart as she lives among the rich of 
New York City at the turn of the century, a world in which, because of her 
modest income, she can only ever vicariously live, but a world of which 
she is desperate to be a part.  Lily is a woman whose identity is entirely 
constructed through the commodities she surrounds herself by, and she is 
unable to define herself except through the perceptions of others.  She is 
also a woman caught within the prevailing cultural attitudes about 
middle-class femininity which embraced the idea of women as passive and 
beautiful, and she is perceived by all around her as no more than a 
beautiful work of art, a person whose outer shell is stunningly crafted 
but who lacks any interiority.  This world in which she lives is informed 
by, and organized around, the operations of the marketplace.  Business 
and social relationships alike are discussed in terms of costs and payments, 
credits and debts, and returns on investments.  Lily is a piece of human 
merchandise that she goes about marketing in order to find a husband.  
Her assets include her good taste and perfect manners (both things that
supposedly cannot be bought) but it is her beauty for which Lily is known 
and admired.  Lily is in love with, and is loved by Lawrence Selden.  
However, his financial status is as modest as her own and thus she cannot 
marry him, since it would mean (for her) social death, and so she continues 
on her quest.  Lily's attempt to find a rich husband comes to a sudden, and 
scandalous  end when she is accused of having an affair with a man from whom 
she has borrowed money.  Exiled from the world to which she has become 
accustomed, Lily unsuccessfully tries to support herself by having a series 
of jobs, each one further and further down the social scale, until finally 
she is reduced to a pathetic existence, too proud to ask for help, and 
she dies (possibly intentionally) from an overdose of chloral.

A few years before Wharton wrote _The House of Mirth_  social theorist 
Thorstein Veblen identified the idea of conspicuous consumption (the
precursor of today's keeping up with the Joneses and critiqued the way in 
which the middle classes spent excessive amounts of money on highly 
visible, though often ³useless², goods, the sole intention of which was 
to advertise wealth. The division of labor within middle-class marriages 
was drawn along gender lines; the husband invested his energy into business 
and accumulating money, while his wife was the family shopper and bought 
ostentatious clothing, jewelry, furniture and ornaments.  Therefore, although 
both men and women attained their sense of identity via these visibly ornate 
goods, and were equally invested in consumer culture, men tended to be 
producers when  women were ³consumers².  As a young woman raised  the era, 
Lily fully understands that without the trappings of wealth she would have 
little value to the people with whom she mixes.  She has been brought up 
to believe that middle class women were indeed the consumers of luxury 
goods, and so her unreflecting and excessive desire for clothes, jewelry 
and other items are more than individualized greed.  Instead, it is an 
expression of a society that encourages people to define their identity 
and create a sense of value, through luxury goods.  In other words, the 
sense of collective identity that Lily and her milieu have is constructed 
via the commodities that they purchase and display.

Before discussing the implications of defining one's identity in this way, 
I want to first, as an aside, draw attention to the distinction between 
use-value and exchange-value that underlies this discussion of relationships 
in _The House of Mirth_.  Marx identified the basis of capitalist exchange 
as being when first, a non-owning need coincides with a not-needing ownership; 
and second, when there is the possibility of expressing the equivalent value 
of these two items via a third value (money).  When these conditions are 
met exchange in the marketplace can then occur.  Even though the two items 
must be of equivalent *exchange-value* the desire to have the item is, in 
fact, based upon its *use-value*.  However, as W.F. Haug has pointed out 
in _Critique of Commodity Aesthetics_ (1971), the item must not only have 
use-value, but it must also have *the appearance of use-value*, and thus, 
what the use-value appears to be is liable to be no more than an illusion 
(this idea has been utilized to the extreme in contemporary advertising).  
Since there is so much importance on the aesthetic quality of the item, the 
appearance of use-value becomes detached from, and as important as, the 
commodity's being itself.

It is no wonder then, that in _The House of Mirth_ Lily places so much 
importance on appearing to be wealthy by wearing expensive clothes and 
acquiring costly habits such as gambling.  For Lily, any cost of participating 
within the community of New York's middle-class is a capital investment. By
investing money on her appearance, Lily hopes to get a return on her 
investment and acquire a rich husband.  Early in the novel she says to Selden 
that a woman must marry to escape a drab life, whereas a man can do so if he 
chooses.  Selden's clothes are worn and dingy, but as she points out to him, 
it doesn't keep people from asking him to dinner, whereas if she were shabby 
no one would be interested in her, ³a woman is asked out as much for her
clothes as for herself².  Lily perfectly understands that it doesn't matter
whether or not she is financially solvent, so long as she can give the 
*appearance* of being so.  Indeed, toward the end of the novel it is the 
fact that Lily appears to have been compromised despite the claim being
false, that leads to her downfall and ultimate death.  Her appearance, and 
the appearance of everything and everybody, becomes reified, in other words
the qualities associated with visual appearance are abstracted and objectified 
from people and activities, so that they become commodities in their own 
right.  However, Lily simultaneously embraces and criticizes this process 
of reification.  She is perfectly aware of her class status and the kinds 
of appearance and behavior she is required to enact and embody in order to 
sustain her social position.  But she is also critical of the necessity of 
doing it.  She participated in conspicuous consumption but also
seeks to transcend this role forced on her and she yearns for a more
meaningful form of existence.

This is most powerfully demonstrated in the novel during the ³tableaux
vivants (³living pictures²) at the Brys' party.  Tableaux vivant were
a popular form of entertainment at the turn of the century and involved the 
creation of scenes presented on stage by costumed actors who remain silent 
and motionless in an attempt to recreate famous paintings.  In her 
re-creation of Joshua Reynolds' "Mrs. Lloyd", Lily makes a final attempt to 
present her ³real² self to Selden, and creates an image of herself 
both  beautiful and virtuous.  Indeed, Selden himself perceives that he has 
finally glimpsed the real Lily Bart.  But if this is the real Lily,
despite her good intentions, she is once again reduced to merely an object 
of visual beauty.  The fact that she has misplaced her intentions is, 
however, not her fault alone, but also the fault of the society in which 
she lives.  Lily's mistake is in trying to demonstrate her use-value though 
a constructed image, rather than through human acts and qualities, and she 
longs for a position in society where she does not merely "appear" but 
"acts".  My formulation of Lily's project in this way clearly echoes 
John Berger's statement  about western art, that "men act, women appear".  
However, I want to suggest that this gendered division of labor   
is problematic when taken in the context of capitalism, where the 
distinction is often less a question of male/female and more one of
producer/consumer.  Producers act in the world, while consumers appear. 
Thus, it doesn't matter that the image she tries to present is a virtuous 
one, because *appearing* or *feeling* virtuous (via the identity she has 
constructed) is not the same as *acting* virtuously or *being* virtuous.

I want to move now from New York City at the turn of the century, to 
New York City in the 1980s, and to another group of people whose shared 
identity is self-consciously organized around consumption, and where 
the *appearance* of wealth is reified to almost hyperbolic proportions: 
and that is the sub-culture of drag balls represented in Jennie Livingston's 
1991 film _Paris is Burning_.  In this film the desire to make oneself into 
the perfect object of beauty is to become, like Lily, part of the wealthy 
middle class.  The connection made by late capitalism between wealth, beauty, 
social privilege and power has been criticized by many as being one of false 
promise.  But the drag balls of _Paris is Burning_ suggest that there is 
actually an element of truth in this connection, since to at least appear
be rich and beautiful is to have power and social prestige, albeit merely for 
the duration of the ball.  Thus, the reality of such power and prestige
remains precarious, and the utopian aspect is only derived from the 
possibility of briefly escaping the disempowered social positions of the 
participants, who are working class, mostly black and Latino, gay men.  
Once in the ball, these men live (for a moment) the middle class lifestyle 
they all want.  As one of the men comments, all they have to do is capture
the great white way of living, or looking, or dressing.  The assumption
is that all you need to be white and wealthy is to have the right clothes, and 
in these balls the men act out their fantasies of an alternative social order, 
or at least the existing social order with them being positioned differently 
within it.  For example, during the category of ³executive realness
one of the contestants acknowledges that while in real life you can't get an 
executive job without the right social background and education, in the 
ballroom you can show the straight world that you know how to (appear to) 
be an executive.  The crucial word here is clearly ³appear² since 
is uncertain whether these men can do the work associated with such an 
identity, and so no matter how much they may *look like* an executive, 
they cannot be an executive, and one wonders how long they would survive
if they exchanged places with the CEO of a New York corporation.  In 
other words, enacting the desire to be a part of that community via a 
constructed image can never be ³real² except in the ballroom.

Like the new rich in New York 100 years earlier, this is a group of people
striving for a sense of community and creating it through shared 
consumption habits.  In other words, just as _The House of Mirth_ represents 
a group of straight white middle-class people at the turn of the century 
constructing an identity through consumerism, so too _Paris is Burning_ 
shows homosexual working-class people doing the same thing.  Clearly there 
are differences between Lily Bart constructing herself as a beautiful woman
and Venus Xtravaganza (a gay man) doing the same thing.  But nevertheless, 
the fact remains that despite the different patterns of consumption enacted 
in these two texts, they both end up at the same place.  They are two groups 
of people trying to create a sense of community by creating images through 
shopping.

The balls in _Paris is Burning_ take place in fashion houses which literally
become the new homes and families for the participants, many of whom, like 
Lily Bart, are outcasts from the social class of which they wish to be a 
part.  The categories in which the contestants participate are reminiscent 
of the tableaux vivants in _The House of Mirth_.  In both, the aim is to
imitate as perfectly as possible the visual appearance of someone or something 
else.  In Wharton's novel the category is famous works of art; in _Paris 
is Burning_ the categories are various modes of dress such as military,
town and country, real women, and executive dress.  Lily neither becomes
nor is, Mrs. Lloyd in her re-presentation of Reynolds' picuture but
rather chooses this image as a vehicle to express and articulate her 
identity;  the men in _Paris is Burning_ equate the real identities with
constructed versions of them.  Jennie Livingston's film, and the way it 
represents the investment these men have in consumption, fashion and beauty 
as a form of power, suggests that the politics of style should not be 
dismissed as any less meaningful than other forms of social transformation. 
By adopting transgressive identities, and creating them through consumer
goods, these men are not merely cultural dupes, or passive consumers of 
mass culture, but are actively adopting and selecting certain images and 
styles over others.  _Paris is Burning_ represents a form of sub-culture 
that provides gay men with an important source of pleasure and a form 
of empowerment unavailable elsewhere.  However, we should be clear about 
what exactly this empowerment is, and what it represents; we are invited 
to celebrate a community whose shared goal is the fantasy of cross 
dressing as straight and/or white and/or middle-class.  Indeed, the ultimate 
claim to ³realness² is to be able to pass as straight.

There is nothing new or radical about people in western culture constructing 
an identity via consumer items.  Women in particular have been expected to 
make-up their faces and bodies with clothes, cosmetics and accessories in
order to attain male standards of beauty.  However, whereas early feminists 
argued that women who do this are capitulating to patriarchy, more recently 
the performative aspect of such acts has been emphasized, the argument being 
that actively constructing an identity for oneself can be part of an 
oppositional politics.  Most famously Judith Butler argues that images of 
femininity and masculinity can be reclaimed to subvert essentialist notions 
of gender and sexuality.  This is important in comparing _The House of 
Mirth_ with _Paris is Burning_, since the latter clearly has the greater 
subversive potential in terms of ideologies of gender and sexuality.  
However, it is still unclear whether or how the identity constructions 
taking place in the drag balls can challenge the existing social order.

It is true that rejecting the realm of fashion and beauty as a potential 
arena of political action falls into the trap of trivializing cultural 
actions that are coded feminine, also that when these cultural practices 
are treated as meaningless, the ideological processes at work have succeeded 
in becoming invisible, which can make them all the more dangerous.  However, 
despite the subversive possibilities, a reclaiming of the performativity of 
identities *still* relies upon the link, in capitalism, between 
identities and the commodity.  Thus Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_, 
and the gay men in _Paris is Burning_, in desiring to make themselves 
into a perfect object using commodities, are all interpellated as ideal 
subjects of capitalism.  They may resist, subvert or redesign some 
element of the ideological practice, but they are still, as Louis Althusser 
would say, interpellated as ³good subjects². 
 
According to Althusser, ideology functions by transforming individual people 
into social subjects by acts of hailing or interpellation.  Cultural
practices hail us with messages that we interpret according to where we are 
situated in the social system.  Interpellated subjects know where they 
fit into the prevailing ideology and act in ways that reinforce the status 
quo.  In other words, to invoke the title of this very publication, while 
bad subjects upset the machinery of ideological practices, good subjects
work all right all by themselves.  Using Althusser's notion of ideology,
both of these micro-cultures of New York function as ideological practices.  
They offer pleasure and escape from the usual social order, but ultimately 
return the participants to their previous place in that social order, and 
they function ideologically by reproducing the social conditions and social 
relations necessary for patriarchal capitalism to continue.  Any 
transgressive element that may occur remains within the parameters
of the sub-cultures.  Thus Lily and Selden can only admit their love for 
each other during the tableaux vivants.  Since neither of them is rich, 
such a declaration, within the context of the middle-class society of which 
they are a part, transgresses existing social norms.  However, once the 
moment has passed they must return to the outside world, Lily on her quest 
to find a rich husband and Selden to his uneventful life.  By the time they 
have realized that they really care for each other it is too late, Lily 
has completed her downward spiral to life in the working classes and, 
finally, dies of an overdose of chloral.  Lily makes a valiant effort 
to become what she appears but without the necessary material and social
status her individualized acts of consumption will never be enough to 
alter the social order of which she longs to be a part.

Similarly, in _Paris is Burning_, the men may act out their fantasy lives 
for a few hours during the ball, but once it is over they all return to 
their regular lives.  They may want the lives that the constructed 
identities represent, but they do not have access to them.  This is most 
poignantly demonstrated by the murder of Venus Xtravaganza while tricking.  
During the film we learnt that his fantasy was to be a spoiled, rich white
girl" who, he says, "get what they want whenever they want it and they 
don't have to really struggle with finances... I want to get married in a 
church, in white, and live with my husband².  Venus' ambitions clealy
contain an element of truth because of the comparative privileges and 
advantages between white, middle-class women and the men who participate 
in drag balls.  However, despite him wanting this life, and constructing 
an identity for himself as if he had (or was going to have) this life, 
his fantasy is completely undermined by the fact that he hustled to 
make a living, was strangled to death in a hotel room, and found by 
a stranger four days later.  Venus believed that his individual act of 
identity formation would be enough to transform his life, but it 
wasn't.  The wider social order, of which he was a part, remained 
(by and large) untouched by his individual transformative act and, 
finally, he was murdered by a john.

Probably the only person who has really capitalized on the consumer 
culture of the New York drag ball scene is Madonna.  When she popularized 
the ³voguing² of the Harlem balls, she alone was able to use such 
constructed identity to really be a part of the glamorous world in
imitates.  The big difference, however, is that Madonna was already part 
of that world, and so no matter how ironically or subversively she 
may perform such gendered roles, the meanings of her actions are bound
to be different.  Indeed, by the time Madonna performed Vogue for the 1990 MTV
awards, she restaged it not as an imitation of the voguing of drag balls 
but instead (interestingly enough) as a tableaux vivant, complete with 
period European costumes, thereby imitating the wealthy of another era, 
an era when movement between classes was probably even more difficult than 
it is now.  Like the men in _Paris is Burning_, Madonna may be enacting 
a desire for shared community, but the era she is nostalgic for is one 
in which gay, black working-class men would have been even more invisible 
and disempowered than they are today.  Ultimately, the difference between 
gay men appropriating straight middle-class culture and Madonna (and 
other celebrities) appropriating gay working-class culture should be 
obvious.  The images may travel in both directions but the material 
wealth does not.  Both can experience pleasure and escape and a sense of 
community by appearing to be other people, but one group of people remain
in the same place within the social order while the other rakes in the 
millions.  Ultimately, both Edith Wharton and Jennie Livingston naturalize 
and normalize social inequality by fetishizing the lifestyles of the 
working classes.  I have already discussed how the unproblematic 
representation of drag in _Paris is Burning_ celebrates and fetishizes 
the victim status of gay men, but Wharton has her own particular twist
on the issue.  

Wharton sees the working classes as living an idealized and idyllic life, 
and this is most clearly demonstrated in the rather sentimental conclusion 
to her novel.  Lily has been reduced to working in a hat shop.  Here, more 
than ever, her beauty is not enough to help her survive; she is slow, 
clumsy and inept and gains little satisfaction from attaining her identity 
from what she (albeit unsuccessfully) produces.  When she loses her job and 
realizes that she cannot even earn a meager living for herself, her downward 
spiral from her former life is complete.  She has gone from a much courted 
member of high society, to a disinherited woman with no friends, home or 
prospects.  She is found, walking the streets, by Nettie Struther, a 
working-class woman who had previously met Lily when she was living in the 
home for poor women to which Lily had occasionally donated money.  Nettie, 
like the gay men in Harlem, idealizes the wealthy society of which she 
assumes Lily is a part.  But it is the working classes which, through Lily, 
Wharton herself idealizes.  Nettie, her baby and her solid husband (who
unlike Lily's friends, stood by Nettie when she appeared to be unvirtuous) 
are a poor, but close, family who in a humble dwelling and, unlike Lily, 
*can* survive on the kind of living possible from working in a hat shop.  
Indeed, they not only survive, but, as Wharton presents it, have carved out 
some sort of idealized virtuous life outside of the problems of the 
marketplace.  In other words, it is the *middle-classes* that Wharton sees 
as being the victims of capitalism.  This final twist, and depressingly 
sentimental ending, almost completely undermines the possibility of any 
oppositional reading of _The House of Mirth_.  Throughout her work Wharton 
makes clear how detestable she finds capitalism and consumer culture.  
However, by naturalizing and celebrating the working classes in this way 
she is reinforcing the very inequalities that the detestable system of 
capitalism creates.  She sees the working classes as the saviors and 
idealized future of the world, not because of the working class struggle 
to overthrow capitalism, but because they already live virtuous and idyllic 
lives.

I want to now return to the distinction I made early on in this article, 
in the context of _The House of Mirth_, and that is the distinction between 
being a producer and a consumer.  While this distinction has often been 
coded in gendered terms, so that men are producers and women are consumers, 
such a simplistic division belies the more complicated way in which 
capitalism works, especially when inflected by race, class and gender.  
Thus in Wharton¹s novel the middle-classes are divided into producers and 
consumers along gender lines, but this is not true of the working classes.  
For example, at one point Lily compares her life with that of her maid saying 
that they do the same work and the only difference is that they Lily gets 
³paid² less frequently.  However, what Lily fails to recognize is that he
maid sells her labor for a wage, and she produces something -- a service to 
Lily.  All Lily ever produces, by contrast, is an image.  Similarly, _Paris is 
Burning_, may focus on men, but all they produce are their ³tableaux vivants².
Thus, even though Livingston shows the men making their costumes (i.e., 
producing a garment) the purpose of it is not to make a living but merely to
construct an image.

What seems so interesting about Edith Wharton therefore, and the way in 
which she wanted both critical acclaim and to be known as a best-selling 
author, is that she participated as much in consumer culture as Lily Bart 
and the gay men in Harlem, but she did so as a producer, not as a consumer.  
It is clear that, right from the start, Wharton understood her position as a 
writer as being completely inextricable from the workings of the marketplace.  
She did not merely write books, but created a product.  In other words, she 
was not only interested in writing books but also in promoting them and 
selling them, lots of them.  She is well known for taking an extremely 
active interest in the promotion and sales of her works: she kept up on the 
weekly sales figures, the best-seller lists, knew which stores and libraries 
stocked her books, and was a keen advocate of energetic promotion and 
advertising.  She changed publishers mid-career in order to get bigger 
advances and better magazine deals and she blamed poor sales on bad 
advertising, rather than the quality of her writing.

What makes this connection even more interesting is the fact that Edith 
Wharton's books were often satirical exposes on the very communities
in which she was participating: high society (such as _The House of Mirth_) 
and the world of publishing.  Therefore, although she was aware of the 
intimate relationship between one's social identity and the marketplace, 
she simultaneously embraced and disavowed the connection in her own personal 
life, and problematized such connections in her books.  Wharton may have 
enjoyed the fame of being a writer but she never wanted to be a
celebrity.  Thus, for Wharton, capitalism may be detestable, but it is better
to participate as a producer than as a consumer.  This is why Lily's 
unashamed marketing of her self in search of a husband is quite different
from Wharton marketing her identity as a writer to sell her books.  In 
making herself a beautiful object, Lily may be involved in both acts of 
production and comsumption, but all that she produces by comsuming
commodities is am image, to be admired and collected.  While keeping up
with the Joneses may represent the enactment of competitive
pathological consumption, its utopian aspect is in the desire to participate 
in the world and experience of one's friends.  The conspicuous consumption 
in which Lily and her milieu participate can be read as their desire for a 
sense of community enacted via their shared identities as consumers in 
the marketplace.  Thus the relationship between the consumer and commodity 
has utopian  social dimensions, even if they are contained within the 
system of capitalism.  However, while such a desire for shared experience 
is admirable, to what extent it is really possible to create a sense of 
community via shared shopping habits?  And what kind of community exactly 
can it create?

Throughout this article I have repeatedly shown how problematic it is 
to construct, and understand, one's identity via the marketplace.  
Edith Wharton understood this well, but her way of dealing with it was 
to first locate, within her work, the morals and values (but not politics) 
of society within the working classes; but second, to celebrate and encourage 
her own relationship to the marketplace.  Thus, on a political level 
Wharton advocates the eradication of capitalism and idealizes relationships 
that supposedly occur "outside" of the marketplace, but in the "real world" 
she strategically embraces the identity of a producer within capitalism for 
herself.  In contrast, the men in _Paris is Burning_ see few problems 
with constructing an identity through commodities and, clearly, get a lot 
of pleasure from enacting middle-class identities.  However, the best 
that such actions can lead to is a temporary escape from a disempowered 
life, and, in the case of Venus, the worst is death.

Of course it's impossible to construct an identity in contemporary life 
outside of the marketplace.  Who doesn't use clothing to identify people 
we consider will have similar lifestyles and interests to us?  Or peruse a 
new acquaintance's bookshelf or record collection to get an idea if she has 
similar taste or politics to us?  Likewise, I am quite sure I am not alone 
in finding the purchase of consumer goods to often be extremely pleasurable 
experience.  Shopping is fun, and pleasure is a good thing -- we all need 
plenty of it.  But the kinds of pleasures associated with consuming, 
while often very "real" can only ever be transitory and precarious.  We 
always want more, this is the basis of capitalism.  By contrast, the 
pleasures associated with production (such as having an enjoyable job and 
producing something more tangible than an image) can be more concrete and 
long-lasting.  Also, I would emphasize that it is one thing to construct 
an *identity* via commodities, but it is quite another to attempt to 
construct a *community* in the same way.  A community based on shared 
consumer habits can never be more than an enclave of shoppers.  In issue #1 
of _Bad Subjects_ (September 1992), Joe Sartelle discussed how two 
ostensibly different groups of people (gay men and lesbians, and Star Trek 
fans) nevertheless have in common the fact that they have constructed their 
identities (in part) using consumer goods, creating a "virtual" community 
via the marketplace.  However, as he argued then, and I want to reiterate 
here, no matter how "real" such a community may feel, being part of a 
market is not the same thing as being part of a community.  No matter 
how conventional or transgressive the patterns of consumption may be 
(e.g. _The House of Mirth_ vs. _Paris is Burning_) and no matter how such 
acts may represent a shared, repressed, desire for community and equality, 
without political action such desires never leave the shopping enclave.

Indeed, Edith Wharton's own project to be a best-selling author of quality 
fiction while not particularly "transgressive" , still seems to be more 
useful than the projects of either Lily Bart or the gay men in _Paris 
is Burning_.  What Lily and the gay men do is "cope", but with little 
success (remember both Lily and Venus die).  They are situated in a 
particular historical moment and, given the material conditions of 
their existence, participate in their societies as best they can.  They 
have choices (albeit limited ones) and they choose to construct their 
identities via patterns of consumption.  Clearly the options available 
to us are not limitless: different kinds of identities are available at 
different times, and while they are not all equally "chooseable" (e.g. 
we cannot just "choose" to be an executive of a company), choices *are* 
available to us within the parameters of our social existence.  But both 
Lily and the gay men choose to construct their identities via consumption.  
Edith Wharton, on the other hand, although the product of the same 
historical moment as Lily, chooses to construct her identity via production, 
specifically to be a producer of books.  This is her way of coping with 
capitalism: to act in the world and create a product, rather than appear 
in it and create an image.  We cannot avoid consumption but we can avoid 
"buying into it" as an authentic way of constructing an identity.

Conventional and transgressive consumer habits alike (as represented in 
the works of Edith Wharton and Jennie Livingston) normalize and 
naturalize existing social inequalities.  The consumer behavior enacted 
in cultural practices may contain within them a utopic vision of tomorrow, 
and hence a critique of today, but by packaging these alternative 
wish-fulfillments within the discourse of shopping, the potential for broad
social, political and economic change is negated.  Envisioning a future 
where gender, sexual orientation, class and race do not adversely affect 
a person's position in the social order is an extremely worthwhile vision 
to have, and vicariously enacting such a utopic vision through shared 
consumer habits is understandable, but to imagine that such acts of 
consumerism can also transform the social and economic fabric of capitalism 
seems to me unrealistic.  As Frederic Jameson has argued, it is tempting 
is to assume that the mere discovery of utopia in mass culture somehow 
constitutes the transformation of daily life.  However, the real struggle 
is to use the recognition of utopia as impetus for fundamental social 
change.  Consumption may help us cope with capitalism, but who wants to 
merely cope?  Coping is just a version of avoidance.  All that consumer 
identity enclaves can ever do is make (what should be) the unbearable 
conditions of existence within capitalism bearable.  Perhaps we need to be 
reminded of these unbearable conditions a bit more often and, instead of 
avoiding and denying them through shopping, channel some of that energy 
into transforming the social, political and economic basis of society.
_______________
Jillian Sandell is a member of the Bad Subjects collective.  She is a 
graduate of the Australian National University and is currently employed 
as a reader in the film studies program at UC-Berkeley.  She can be 
reached at the following Internet address:   jillians@violet.berkeley.edu.