Consumption for the Common Good? Commodity Biography in an Era of Postconsumerism

Abstract

This chapter considers the limits of disseminating knowledge about the harms of neoliberal globalization as a strategy for creating change. It examines three documentary films (Life and Debt, Darwin’s Nightmare, and Black Gold) as commodity biographies. Offering an alternative to complicitous consumption (where one’s life is subsidized by others’ suffering), these films urge a shift from overconsumption to postconsumerism, which privileges products that dare to tell their own stories. Such value-adding narratives function less as defetishization than as new objects of consumerist desire. Nevertheless, moments of reflexivity, in which documentary subjects appear as consumers of commodities or film, disrupt too-easy binaries of First World consumption versus Third World production. The chapter situates these films about fair trade within longer histories of consumerism and its ethical conundrums, including the nexus of commodity knowledge and desire in Moby-Dick, and lessons in ethical consumption and viewership in Dziga Vertov’s experimental films.