Performing Consumers: Global Capital and its Theatrical Seductions (review)

Maurya Wickstrom's Performing Consumers is an ambitious book that compellingly illustrates how theatre and performance studies discourse can provide vital and sophisticated strategies for understanding the reach and effects of global corporate capital. Its premise, that "corporations produce subjectivity as aspects of their brands through mimetic and identificatory processes akin to those of performance, somatic and embodied" (2), is explored through four case studies examining the experiential environments (or "brandscapes") of contemporary consumer culture. Wickstrom provides a timely interrogation of corporate performances and does so with a distinctively direct voice—one that enables both the detail of her political argument and the texture of her more personal responses.

The introduction to Performing Consumers lays out the author's contextual theory, ranging from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's idea of immaterial labor to Walter Benjamin's exploration of the exchange value of the commodity, as well as her own project objectives:

I hope I can contribute . . . a sense of what is lost to us by our bodily circulation in the market, against which we seem to put up less and less resistance. The shopping experience is an aspect of conjoined effects of a corporate culture, a society of control, which all together have resulted in the decline of democracy, of political dissent, and in public helplessness in the face of the rise to power of men who are in flagrant violation of democratic processes, and the human right to well-being. (12)

The first chapter, then, looks at the emergence of the flagship store where consumers are transformed into brand performers—specifically, New York City's Niketown on 57^th Street and Ralph Lauren on Madison Avenue. Wickstrom describes the Niketown experience as a nexus of mimesis and affect, hailing the consumer's body as the site of sensation with possibility for change: "I'm unsettled into a delicious indeterminancy, simultaneously bodily and immaterial, vaguely associated with futural and technological possibility, and shimmering with the rich potential of the chance to be other than myself" (20). By contrast to Niketown's technological dramas, Ralph Lauren's store, in an 1895 Manhattan mansion, resembles the realist stage set in its minutely detailed representation of aesthetic taste and economic privilege. And it is the experience of pleasure that both, albeit with very different scripts, provoke in the consumer-actor so that we desire to participate on the market stage.

Las Vegas provides the setting for the second case study as Wickstrom examines the Forum Shops, part of the enormous Caesars Palace casino complex. In this chapter, she tackles "the tensions raised by the theatrical relation between the real and the fake in Las Vegas, and how fantasy here is not so harmless but unravels into the social consequences of the embodied imagination" (45).

From Las Vegas she returns to New York and Disney's extraordinarily successful stage show, The Lion King. Within a carefully crafted account of the history of the Disney Corporation from the Mickey Mouse clubs of the 1930s to its present-day global enterprise, Wickstrom understands The Lion King as anchored to a modernist high-art tradition, something that "makes it possible to conjure the 'primitiveness' of the African body and its mimetic powers while simultaneously dominating the primitive by moving it into circulation on the market as a commodity" (88).

The last of the case studies examines a more recent brandscape phenomenon, American Girl Place. Here, Wickstrom employs a close reading of Jon McKenzie's Perform or Else so as to identify the plethora of practices American Girl Place uses to ensure its consumer-actors "show a readiness to be performance driven; it's as if they've gotten insider information alerting them to the fact that to be situated on the side of power is to perform, and to perform right" (128). This is the bleakest chapter in Wickstrom's critique. The obvious sense of pleasure that runs, sometimes with necessary reluctance and ambivalence, throughout analyses of...