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c h ap t e r 4 How the Inequality Connection Was Timed Out You need a good camcorder to shoot inequality in consumption. Not only do mobilities of desire keep everything in motion, but also—and equally important—the superimposition of image acceleration over taste fills the screen to the point of overflowing. I love Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, but, after all, its primary target is the distanced still life cherished by academics . That critique will not help much in understanding most sectors of consumption most of the time. I think a better beginning involves a slight modification of Marx’s famous formula about things seeming to take on a life of their own as commodities. Here, taste operates in consumption to enable desire to take on a life of its own as a thing—which is not quite the same as investing one’s desires in an object of consumption. Commodities , one remembers, assume a life of their own in a way that obscures the complex of social relations involved in the process of production. Desire does not so much obscure social relations as digitalize them, in a way that then permits a constant acceleration, compression, elaboration, and so forth on every click. Tastes change, and everything else is swept right along. Everyone knows, of course, that not much really changes in the world of consumption. There is no mistaking an upscale wannabe’s Ford-made Jaguar for a ‘‘real’’ prestige car, and meanwhile there are lots of places that Cavaliers live on out of necessity. It is not at all the case that people are duped into thinking material inequalities of consumption no longer exist. The media is filled with stories every day about how the gap is widening. The operation works like the ‘‘you’re already a winner’’ of current againstall -odds plots. ‘‘Already a winner’’ doesn’t mean that now, at this point in time, you are the sole winning person with everyone else subordinated to you having conquered the impossible challenge. You still have to do the 60 The Inequality Connection 61 film, and of course sequel after sequel, competing every which way all the while with everyone else around. You just know stuff along the way, including how all this is far from being anything like what ‘‘already a winner ’’ means. Likewise, everyone knows that there are inequalities in consumption, that material realities change slowly if much at all, that taste may be hiding something—that you aren’t really the sole winning person with everyone else subordinated. Lifting the veil of ignorance becomes just yesterday’s porn, because the process does not function invisibly, any more than futures markets or iPods do, though tastes will of course have changed by the time this book is published. This is a book about education for work and not about consumption, but it is useful to get at least a quick sketch of how consumption works in order to grasp what is at stake as work becomes consumable. A number of educators, often university professors in the humanities, despise the idea of the student as client or customer because, among other things, it equates school with shopping and, not incidentally, professors with salespeople . Nevertheless, the terminology is everywhere, and it suggests the extent to which consumption has become a normal frame in which to consider educational policy direction and issues. That is not yet the case with work and the world of production, though conceptualizing the search for work already functions as if directed toward a consumer client and has for some time. But the school-to-work linkage emphasized everywhere in discourses about the reform of vocational training suggests that one clear avenue of carryover to be explored should involve the imaging of student as consumer, the centrality of choice, and a whole host of other elements involved in consumption generally. ‘‘The student,’’ Albert Pautler reminds vocational training reformers, ‘‘is the client, the customer, the reason for the educational system’’ (1999, 294). And students in vocational training must learn the consumer responsibilities that go with choices: ‘‘Educators must somehow try to encourage students to be more responsible for their own educational program and their future careers’’ (ibid.). Vocational education had a special status in relation to systemic economic inequalities as one of the primary brakes on continually rising social expectations. As far more directly in contact with the world of work than other sectors of education, let alone consumer culture, vocational-education...

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