>And a sign of the growing colonization of the banks by the SUV class of
>people. Sad.
I sez:
This innocuous remark -- and the head-nodding it probably inspires on LB0-list -- raises at least two questions: 1) who are the "SUV class of people" ? and 2) why are they the "SUV class of people" ? Despite my reservations about employing a form of purist moralism which puts the "incorrectness" of individual consumption choices at the center of political analysis, when it comes to this particular issue it is hard to resist: I am daily astonished and disgusted by the sheer number of freshly minted SUV's on the road. Here in nominally "environmentally progressive" Santa Cruz I would estimate that every fourth (or perhaps even third) passenger vehicle on the road is an SUV, many of them luxury models, and many of them fresh from the dealer (including especially the "Auto Nation" franchises of Blockbuster/Waste Management/Florida Marlins CEO Wayne Huzienga, the postmodern sunbelt capitalist _par excellence_).
One of my sobering conclusions is that, far from being the antinome of the hegemonic U.S. "environmental ethic" (SUV's get lousy gas mileage, they spew high concentrations of emissions, they're huge and hence wasteful of materials, they epitomize crass conspicuous consumption, etc.), SUV's instead perfectly express this hegemonic ethic. As an empirical exercise, flip through the pages of any of the house organs of the Big Green organizations (NRDC's _Amicus Journal_, for example) -- these pages are studded with SUV ad after SUV ad. What makes these ads work -- vindicating the manufacturers' decision to target an upper middle-class liberal audience which forms the bedrock of Big Green's donor base -- is that they deeply resonate with this audience's highly ideological notion of what it means to be an environmentalist.
At the core of the average upper-middle class liberal's sense of cultural distinctiveness -- the all-important social identity that sets him/her apart from the teeming hordes of obnoxiously coarse average Amerrikuns (i.e. the working class with their professional wrestling, tabloid magazines, and monster trucks, and the country-club Republicans with their golf and their McMansions) is his/her enjoyment and appreciation of ostensibly "refined" experiences. Included among these identity-certifying experiences is getting away to remote and obscure physical landscapes (the Himalayan plateau, the Australian desert, the Amazonian rainforest) ideologically constructed as "pristine wilderness" segregated from the corruptions of (sub)urban civilization. For the upper middle-class liberal, environmentalism is consciously defined as the preservation of these physical landscapes from overconsuming sloths and primary sector capital, and its barely perceptible but absolutely central counterpart is the subtle yet intense status competition which revolves around visiting and (scientifically and/or spiritually) "experiencing" as many of these physical landscapes as possible, the more remote and obscure the better.
The SUV's very fungibility as use value and as sign value is what permits such an objectively eco-destructive consumer good to be paradoxically embraced with such zeal by upper middle-class liberal environmentalists. SUV's are affirmed by this sociological type (i.e., the upper-middle class liberal) b/c both the SUV's use-value (a vehicle purportedly necessary to deliver one to the pristine outback segregated from fallen civilization) and its sign-value (communicating one's much-revered social identify as someone who has visited, experienced, and cares about the pristine outback).
Now, whenever I see a convoy of sporty compact SUV's and behemoth luxury SUV's clogging the arteries of Marin County and Westside L.A., bastions of upper-middle class liberalism and mainstream environmentalism, I am no longer puzzled. I am no longer stunned when I see Ford Explorers and Cadillac Escalades and Honda SRV's graced by Wilderness Society and Sierra Club bumper stickers. (Hell, here in the global capital of narcissistic, pseudo- cosmopolitan, upper middle-class liberalism -- the Bay Area -- one of my colleagues spied an SUV tank with a "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm" bumper sticker). Far from lamenting the invasion of various socially-constructed "nature preserves" by the "SUV class of people," we should recognize this phenomenon as the logical outcome of what happens when the dominant U.S. ideology of "wilderness" (and what "wilderness" enjoyment signifies) is mixed with a regime of consumer capitalism, producing an odious form of eco-politics that red-greens should (most likely hopelessly) contest and fight.
My own admittedly individual and hence apolitical gesture involves downgrading forms of putatively "environmentally-sensitive" recreation -- backpacking, river-rafting, mountain biking, and other favorites of the granola crowd -- as being little other than species of alienated leisure that are intimately related to practices that upper middle-class liberals despise, practices such as oil drilling, chemical-intensive monocrop agriculture, and the auto-industrial complex. In other words, peel the skin off an Audobon Society eco-tourist, who travels thousands of miles to have an "authentic" educational and spiritual experience in a (socially-constructed) exotic and untrammeled location, and you'll discover Dick Cheney.
Here's some more stuff I've written along the same lines but for a different audience (which accounts for some of the oblique allusions) -- read especially the last paragraph:
In posing the question why people drive SUV's, I suppose you're wondering why consumers spend so much on a huge, fuel-guzzling vehicle that is ostensibly to be used "off-road" and then rarely, if ever, take it "off-road."
Like most commodities in contemporary society, SUV's have both a "use-value" (i.e. practical purpose for those who use it) and a "sign-value" (i.e. having and displaying the commodity "sends a message" about its owner to others and to the owner him/herself). Since few SUV owners use their SUV for practical "sport-utility" purposes, one could say that the SUV has an amplified "sign-value." What, then, is the "sign-value" of the SUV and why are so many consumers drawn to it ?
To start, the SUV is not a homogenous commodity. There are "down-market" SUV's (Honda, Isuzu) and "up-market" SUV's (Lincoln, Lexxus). There are relatively compact SUV's (so far as it goes) and monstrous SUV's. Keeping in mind that there are different SUV's for different niches of the market, what general claims can be made about the "sign-value" of SUV's ?
-- Because SUV's are big and consume a lot of gas, and hence are obviously expensive to purchase and maintain, for their owners SUV's signify "conspicuous consumption." In this era of Internet IPO's and dot-com millionaires and so on, having and displaying an SUV is about ostentatiously demonstrating the possession of wealth -- so much wealth that it doesn't actually matter if you use the SUV for "off-road" purposes or just to buy groceries, to drive to work, or to take for a Sunday cruise. This obviously would be especially true for the luxury models. (Note, however, that this "sign-value" of the SUV is not terribly different than the "sign-value" of a Jaguar coupe or a Mercedes sedan -- except that the sheer size of the SUV graphically illustrates wastefulness. In this sense the big luxury SUV's are perhaps possessed and displayed by the less refined "new money" set who have seen their stock portfolios appreciate dazzlingly in recent years). (Also note that a lot of the SUV ad campaigns refer tongue-in-cheek to SUV owners who just use their SUV's to go to the mall or the theme park -- sort of a cynical "nod, nod, wink, wink" acknowledgment that the bottom line of SUV ownership is to possess and display a colossal, shiny commodity).
-- Because of runaway urban growth, spatial imbalance between jobs-housing, insufficient investment in public transport, U.S. consumer preference for private transport, and so on, the roads and highways are gridlocked like never before. The SUV is like an armed transport carrier or a tank maneuvering through this gridlock (returning to the realm of "use-value" once again). It's the classic U.S. phenomenon of an illusory individual "solution" to a collective problem which only aggravates the collective problem, hence leading to the implementation of more and more illusory individual "solutions," and so on. SUV's are a privatized response to congestion which make congestion worse (because of their size and the aggressive driving they facilitate), thus increasing the "need" for an SUV, and so on and so on. Also, because motorists are perpetually trapped in frustrating, time-consuming gridlock, the SUV driver at least gets to pretend that he/she is treacherously navigating the outback (returning back to realm of "sign-value" or even "fantasy-value" of the commodity).
-- I don't doubt that a good number of SUV owners actually use their SUV's for "sport utility" purposes -- hauling moutain bikes and camping equipment, traversing dirt roads in the forests and deserts, and so on. Marketing and advertising types have done a good job of convincing kayakers and hikers and so on that only an SUV has the necessary attributes to take on tough terrain (never underestimate the gullibility and the "copycat" behavior of the U.S. consuming public). And there's yet another nasty synergetic process here at work. Urban areas degenerate into hideous landscapes of malls, subdivisions, and office parks clotted w/SUV's. People wishing to escape this hideous landscape take their SUV's to the countryside, mountains, and deserts. Rural and wild areas begin to mimick the degraded cities. So SUV owners push out even farther into more remote countryside, mountains, and deserts. Greasing this process is the "sign-value" of the SUV as the commodity that will allow you to "get away from it all" and have some exotic, adventurous experience not possible in the hyper-rationalized and denuded cities. But drive a couple hundred miles away from "civilization" in your SUV, and you find that a thousand other SUV drivers are having the same rugged, raw adventure as you, ruining your own experience. So you've got to take your SUV to even more far-flung territory. In this sense, SUV's "create their own demand."
Finally, another related thread:
The Clinton Administration has made a concerted effort (some of it rhetorical, some of it actual) to forge a constituency around the theme of ending government subsidies to loggers, ranchers, agribusiness, miners, etc. It has consciously advanced an ecological politics based on making nature a pretty and nice place for urban upper middle-class tourism and recreation. California no longer needs a primary sector periphery since its major export industries are high-tech and Hollywood. People making megabucks in internet commerce and multimedia (and those who gather the crumbs of the superprofits) want to take their top-dollar BMW motorcycles and Patagonia camping gear into an un-denuded countryside w/beds & breakfasts and a pristine wilderness w/o dams and clear-cuts. Affluent urban households can get their timber and food from unseen extractive peripheries elsewhere in the world.
The big green groups promote this development as a great thing, pointing out that, for example, agribusiness uses more water and provides less revenues than does low-input high-value urban high-tech services and so on. Apart from the way in which ending gov't subsidies to primary sector functions just pushes these activities to winter fruit-and-veggie growing in Sinaloa and tropical hardwood harvesting in Indonesia and so on, there are more insidious ramifications of the gentrification of the countryside/rural areas for "tread softly" consumption by affluent urbanites. The precarious balance between city and hinterland is destroyed all the more. Why bother agitating for urban parks and greenbelts and so on when you can load up your 4-wheel drive for a hip postmodern snowboard vacation in the Sierras ? Rural areas and wilderness becomes conceived and used as a playground for jaded affluent urbanites "disconnected" from their environment. Liberal urban ecologists smugly conceive of themselves as so much more enlightened than "backward" rural hicks with their dune buggies, shotguns, and right-wing nativist politics. The main enemy of environmental consciousness in today's U.S. is not the small and dwindling extractive sector but is instead is the mindless hordes of "post-industrial" urban consumer society.
John G.