Visual Access and Excess

This chapter conceptualizes several aspects of digital remediations in an era of restless digital navigation. The instantaneous creation and sharing of content altering the relationship between bodies, spaces, and devices is demonstrated here. The first section of the chapter addresses various aspects of digital remediations such as screen-mediated navigations and the multifarious role of networked devices, social consequences of the intimacy between body and device, and instantaneous modes of sharing and their implications. The second segment reflects on dimensions of the post-photographic condition such as unlimited storage, ease and excess of auto-voyeuristic tendencies, publicizing the private self, death of the photographic ‘lack’, ‘fixity’, ‘nostalgia’, the witlessness/weightlessness of the visual excess, the ease of visual manipulation and the democratization of the medium, and the death of the photographer. It also briefly discusses the control and manipulation of the self-generated data.

The Visuality of Materials and the Materiality of Visuals

This chapter explores an abandoned industrial site—a jute mill— and its material decadence. It argues how an industrial ruin subverts several normative modes of movement, vision, and arrangement. It draws attention towards how things lose their ‘material sovereignty’ as they degenerate. It makes sense of how technological shifts and restructuration of capital lead to the abandonment of productive space. It also argues that the ruining materials that are endowed with visuality of decay and the visuals that convey the transient nature of deterioration overlap each other conceptually and physically. ‘Visuality of materials’ and ‘materiality of visuals’ intersect and interact to create a unique visual and material identity of ruins.

After the Tourists Depart

This chapter explores multiple aspects of image–space relationship in Ladakh in particular. It analyzes the role of photographic practices behind branding of an aspired tourist destination. It makes a case for image–destination inseparability and argues that it is the constructed image of the destination which attracts collective tourist gaze. It focuses on the evolution of Ladakh as a hyper tourist destination in the last two decades. It asserts that the consumerist trajectory or tragedy of Ladakh in the post-liberalization period as a destination for adventure and exotica is visually negotiated through imageries. It also highlights some of the material leftovers of the tourists. Through a visual exploration of material remains, it documents reckless consumerist obsession with packaged tourism.

Till It Lasts the Wash

This chapter explores T-shirt as a commodity, along with images and texts imprinted on it. It discusses the casual, flexible, and androgynous properties of T-shirt, devoid of symbolic depth. It argues that the T-shirt can host a range of texts and images because it is a vacant surface, waiting to be populated with random images and messages. It is so empty and trifling by itself that it requires textual and graphic support in order to communicate. Textual and visual contents of T-shirts are also observed and interpreted to argue that they do not necessarily translate into an obedient subscription of these messages. The mix of wit, sarcasm, and clichés is so ‘casual’ that it does not demand adherence to, involvement with, or even awareness of surface-level meaning. Simultaneously, it also asserts that the popularity of the T-shirt announces an advent and acceptance of the ephemeral, indicating a detached and dispensable relationship with commodities.

Peer-Reviewed Images

This chapter concerns itself with the body and the circulation of its image in the consumerist landscape of contemporary India. It argues how the body is constantly under the influence of the ideal body type, which inspires consumers to reconfigure their bodies to emulate the ideal body type. This requires sufficient attention, visibility, disciplining, and display. It also explains how this emulative process reproduces similar body types through work on and care of the body, thus transforming bodies into images for visual consumption. It advances a conceptual model of image–body inseparability and situates such emulative practices within the larger context of erosion of the stigma against the eroticized body in recent times across various platforms of contemporary visual and popular media. The author argues that such stigma has significantly diminished.

Obsessive Compulsive (Dis)Order

GIVEN THE WIDE RANGE OF COMMODITIES and their representations dealt with in this book, there cannot be a common conclusion. In the concluding chapter, I have made a claim on the broader cultural logic of consumption. I have reiterated the manic obsession with the ‘new’ (ephemeral), the ‘now’ (instantaneous), and the ‘multiple’ (promiscuous), and examined the dis(order) of/in desiring, consuming, and exhausting. Finally, I have rested my claim by stating that the frivolity that governs our relationship with commodities is not confined to them alone. The excess of the new and the promiscuity of the multiple choices spill over to the personal and professional lives as well. Desiring to dispose of things, bodies, spaces, professions, and practices is an underlining consumerist philosophy....

The Afterlife of Things

This chapter studies the afterlife of the discarded lot more closely in a metal junkyard located in Mayapuri, Delhi. It elaborates why the consumerist landscape needs to fetishize the ‘new’ and encourage compulsive discarding. It maps the trajectory of the discarded and simultaneously analyze the consumers’ changing relationship with the obsolete. It claims that junkyard is a liminal space between usefulness and the lack of it, or use and reuse, where things constantly move and change hands. It also observes how life is induced into the apparently lifeless and value is extracted from waste in ‘operation theatres of inorganic transplants’ by migrant labourers in the margins of the city. It asserts that these operations are directly in conflict with mainstream global models of consumption that rest on doctrines of ephemerality. It also argues how imposed norms on obsolescence produce more discards and reduce the demand for waste, making obsolescence intrinsic to consumer culture.

‘If Your Jeans Are Original, How Come Everyone Else Has One?’

This chapter deals with exclusionary strategies and their representations in colonial, postcolonial, and post-liberalization phases in India. Citing a wide range of secondary sources, it establishes how exclusionary strategies and conscious social distancing were central to the formation of middle-class identity in the colonial and postcolonial India. The author argues that middle-class attitudes towards consumption were characterized by a certain degree of restraint and thrift. However, in the post-liberalization phase, there is an erosion of that miserly attitude towards a guilt-free consumption, leading to unapologetic material indulgences. This chapter looks at popular visual registers such as advertisements to argue how the exclusionary zeal increasingly is visually mediated and manifested through portrayals of exclusivity. It particularly focuses on apparel advertisements that emphasize the ideas of class, exclusivity, and difference. It asserts that the visual aspects of commodity have become exterior markers of difference, as the desire for distinction is more visceral than before.

Material Callings in an Outsourced Outpost

The author addresses how business process outsourcing (BPO) enabled a generation of urban educated youth to participate in consumption by offering new income opportunities, and instigating new consumerist aspirations. Along with observing operational procedures, appointment processes, spatial dimensions, nature of work, and relations at work in BPOs, this chapter also observes its social impacts. A generation of college-goers flirted with this newfound earning opportunity since the late 1990s to have fun, make friends, or earn quickly. It explores how the consumerist desire gripped a generation that was earlier ineligible to participate in consumption. Narrating his cultural experiences of working in a BPO, the author documents a transition from abstinence to indulgence—a transition that offered freedom to eventuate material aspirations.

Discovering Lineage amidst Urban Anonymity

Images of commodities and what they communicate continue to be the preoccupations of the second chapter as well. However, here it moves away from the class dimensions and focuses on other aspects such as representation of the urban space, anonymity, multiple identities, and niche clientele. Such commodity representations provide an interesting and alternative reading of social and spatial transformations post 1990s. It captures a shift from utility and function to experiences and aspirations in the material culture of a globalized world. It argues that there is a conscious effort to seduce the consumer by emphasizing on the desirability and the personality of the commodity by constantly connecting it to imagined ideal selves. That is how mundane is transformed into exotic, and commodities become more personal, intimate, and identifiable. These persuasive images are central to the project of comprehending the changing consumerist landscape.