Old Navy and the Infantilization of the American Consumer :: Exploratory Essays Research Papers

aged(prenominal) navy and the Infantilization of the American ConsumerIt is sure that the nonagenarian naval forces store is full of clothes and accessories for each shapes, sizes and genders. Its presupposition, however, is that all shapes, sizes and genders will be of one primary inclination that of the infant. In confront of me as I peruse the Old Navy is a tip purse with metallic flecks infused into its plasticine construction. I find this purse in the Womans section, adjacent to the display rack full of puffy-sleeved t-shirts, whimsically cut blouses, flargon bloomers and lo-rider blue-jeans embroidered with alarmingly cute curlicues. All this is, appropriately enough for a consumer steamroller like Old Navy, sized to fit the adult woman.What is revealed in the Old Navy is an ideology, objectification of the self-as-consumerist entity, indeed of the child-as-consumer to a patriarchal Capitalism. Althusser asks it this wayWhy do people need this imaginary transposition oftheir real conditions of humankind in hostelry to represent to themselves their real conditions of existence? (241)In the case of Old Navy, the solve lies in the combined natures of Capitalism and the infantilist regression it engenders.capitalistic objectification of the self, the subjectification of Althusser, begins with the Old Navy ad. Here, kindly old mother- configurations or warm and attractive young wo workforce check into us in their slightly lobotomized ways that shopping at the Old Navy is fun, that their cargo pants are all the rage, that their carpenter jeans are the perfect thing. The representation of the self as Platonic form in the person of the model on the television screen recreates the self as consumer objectIt is not their real condition of existence, theirreal world that men represent to themselves inideology, but above all it is their relation to thoseconditions of existence which is represented to them there. (Althusser 242)Ideology is created by the double-movement of idealization and desire. The model, the idealized Capitalist figure for the self, creates its own ideological structure as a means to selfing, as an objectified desired on the official apparatus of the communication and creation of Capitalist ideology, the television screenHis ideas are his material actions inserted into material rituals which are themselves be by material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject, (Althusser 243)that subject of ideology, that objectified self. then the consumer is removed from the self by the ideological system of the Old Navy ad.