“Everything must go!”: Consumerism and Reader Positioning in M. T. Anderson’s Feed

In preparation for the ARCYP round table “Participatory Ontologies and Youth Cultures,” Stuart Poyntz issued an outline of its conceptual framework: “Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the language of consumer media culture through a constant diet of screen images, audio messages, and text-based communication that compete with schools and families as primary storytellers and teachers in youths’ lives.” As Poyntz notes, young people’s engagement with media culture is scarcely a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, the rise of social networking and the ready availability of new technologies have significantly enhanced young people’s capacity to produce and to circulate texts and products. This paper focuses on a novel whose narrative is structured by exactly the processes of production and circulation to which Poyntz refers: M. T. Anderson’s 2002 novel Feed. I analyze the novel’s treatment of human agency in a dystopian future America, where young people are implanted with “the feed,” a computer chip which connects them with a global network of “images, audio messages, and text-based communication” that Poyntz referred to. Secondly, I consider how the novel itself positions readers to engage with Anderson as an author whose public identity has been carefully shaped through his media appearances and especially his website.

Consumerism and Its Discontents

In the future USA that is the setting of Feed, children are supplied with “the feed” by a powerful corporation, FeedTech Corp, which acts as a conduit for advertisements and infotainment. Through data mining, corporations monitor people’s thoughts and emotions, using such information to engineer desires for products and experiences that accord with consumers’ profiles. The novel both thematizes corporate power and consumerism, and also positions readers to engage with questions about human agency in a world where individuals are bombarded with information about products and services, but denied knowledge of political and ideological contexts. In his essay in this forum, Darin Barney points to the distinction between participation and politics, arguing that many of the claims made for the liberatory effects of participation fail to hold up under critical scrutiny. I would argue that texts that draw attention to the processes whereby societies enforce conformity to socio-political norms can situate readers as subjects who attain a degree of critical distance from narratives and characters, a critical distance that enables critique. In Feed, for instance, readers are situated outside the core group of main characters and are positioned to observe how these characters are formed as docile subjects. Denied an education, the young people of Feed are trained not as citizens but as consumers, while shadowy political forces seek to undermine the corrupt world of the novel. In effect, then, the dystopian setting of Feed is a state of emptiness where the young are offered consumerism as a substitute for participation in citizenship.

Readers and audiences bring to texts repertoires of knowledge and values and operate as subjects within a variety of discursive styles and modes. But as Norman Fairclough points out, the term “subject” refers both to the role of the person exercising agency in the world and to the situation of one who is subjected by others (39). Texts for children and young people are deeply implicated in processes and practices of socialization; likewise, their authors are implicated in the unequal power relations which characterize negotiations between adults and children. In many cases, authors announce their ideological positions in speeches and written commentary on their writing. But all writing for children carries ideological freight, whether explicit or implicit, and is informed by taken-for-granted and naturalized cultural norms that, as Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer note, “carry the greatest ‘potency’ with unreflective readers” (152). A key focus of scholarly investigation is precisely how subject positions are constructed, and the extent to which texts engage young readers and audiences as active participants in meaning-making.

The narrative of Feed hinges upon the relationship between two teenagers, Titus and Violet. Titus is the first-person narrator, identified through a style of language that combines Californian youth English with invented idioms:

We went to the...