Hate is All Around: The Politics of Enthusiasm (and its Discontents)

But there’s another problem with the politics of enthusiasm, at their most indiscriminately celebratory: the presumption that we’re defined by what we like–our Favorites, so to speak. But liking things, in a consumer culture, is so closely allied to wanting things, buying things, having things; doesn’t that definition of ourselves as capitalist desiring machines endorse the worldview of the advertiser, the marketer, the brander, who see us not as idiosyncratic individuals but as walking bodies of demographic purchasing patterns? Am I who I am, or what I like, which is to say, what I own and want to own? “He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with,” Patricia Highsmith writes, of the charismatic killer Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. “Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that.”

Obviously, we are what we own, in a sense; our dearest possessions—fond objects, let’s call them—reify our images of ourselves as aesthetic creatures, defined by a suite of tastes we like to believe is as unique as a thumbprint. (Of course, in an age of niche marketing and over a lifetime of brand loyalty, we aren’t, but it’s how we imagine we’re defining ourselves by choosing from among the available options in the marketplace that matters.) Not for nothing did Marx call it commodity fetishism.