Justin McGuirk guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 August 2011 13.48 BST

Trainers and mobile phones: the objects of our disaffection

The recent riots were a venting of consumer spleen – with sports shoes and mobiles the primary targets. But looters made the mistake of confusing wealth with status symbols

In 1968 Guy Debord defined the "spectacle" – his term for all the trappings of a consumer society – as "the moment when the commodity has reached the total occupation of social life". And that's what happened during last week's riots. Shopping is no longer just the chief preoccupation of our leisure time – it is also how we go about our civil unrest. In that sense, the riots have rightly been described as a means of participation in a consumer society that the looters are otherwise excluded from. These were acquisitive riots. Lacking any articulated aims or ideology, they manifested themselves as a venting of consumer spleen. And two objects were the primary targets of that urge: trainers and mobile phones.

Three brands kept coming up in the coverage of the riots: JD Sports and Footlocker – the two most targeted footwear shops – and BlackBerry, the smart phone the rioters were using to message each other. What do trainers and smart phones have in common? Rather a lot, not least as they are both tools that the rioters used to outmanoeuvre the police. One provided speed, so that when the police did actually give chase they were no match for their more nimble adversaries. The other, BlackBerry Messenger, provided access to the networked society that made the rioters too dynamic and mobile for anything as static and cumbersome as a police cordon to handle. These were certainly not conscious motives for stealing phones and trainers, just useful advantages of high-performance commodities.

The real motive was desire. Trainers and mobile phones are two of the most prized status symbols among the young and streetwise. And both products draw their lustre from a culture of extreme wealth. The irony of the rioters' use of BlackBerry smart phones was that these were once the ultimate executive toy, synonymous with jetset bankers keeping tabs on share prices – tools for executing a different kind of greedy impulse. Well, I say "irony", but perhaps it's not ironic at all. Bankers are role models of a sort, whether we like it or not; they represent a kind of wealth and unregulated freedom that the urban poor can only dream of. Politicians often refer to the "trickle-down effect" as the reason not to enforce higher taxation on the rich, but there is no sign of that trickle-down effect in real terms. What trickles down are the status symbols, not the liquidity.

The same is true of trainers. Brands employ sports stars with basic salaries of £250,000 a week to sell everything from tennis shoes to aftershave balm. Some of the allure of streetwear apparel – some of its glamour as a commodity – comes from its intimate proximity to extreme wealth. The fetish character of the trainer lies in its ability to embody so much more than a bundle of rubber and synthetic leather machine-stitched in a Vietnamese sweatshop.

Trainers as streetwear have a rather different provenance in the UK than in the US. Before hip-hop or skater culture made it to these shores, we had the casual subculture. Originally the preserve of football hooligans, "casual" style was born on the terraces in the late 1970s, and involved wearing Adidas or Gola trainers with designer-label clothing – preferable to football strips partly because it made it harder for the police to identify brawlers. By the mid-80s, this dress code was mainstream. And while many of those vintage trainer styles are still in fashion, trainer culture has morphed into something exponentially more sophisticated.

The trainer deploys the shape-shifting logic of the commodity at its most manipulative. Particularly in the last decade, brands have accelerated their novelty cycles with the promise of advanced performance. The visual language of the sports shoe has acquired the baroque manifestations of technological research. Trainers have developed an architecture of ribs and buttresses, air cushions and webbing. The marketing bumf blinds you with a pseudo-science of shock absorption. The logic is ineluctable: it leads to the nirvana of perfect support.

And just when you've completely bought into that logic, Nike will sideswipe you with a new concept: the Nike Free. This is the trainer that removes all that support malarkey to bring you the "Barefoot Running Shoe". No more architecture, just the pleasant sensation of running on your naked soles. Well, hang on: which is it Nike? Bareback or support? There is no right answer. There is only what will sell, only what you can make people want. That is the genius of the commodity.

Unfortunately for them, in targeting their favourite products, the rioters played right into the politicians' hands. Because the commodity makes criminality tangible. If the looters had been raiding stock options or ministerial expense accounts, they might have got away with it. But pilfering trainers – real things – is obviously "pure criminality". The mistake they made was to confuse wealth with the symbols of that wealth – a confusion of comfort with design.

In his essay on the 1965 Watts riots, Debord argued that the rioters in this black community in LA were in effect morally superior to the whites who recoiled at their behaviour. Yes, they looted TVs but, Debord argued, they were also demanding more than the whites, something they couldn't buy or steal: civil rights. "Comfort can never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market," he wrote. In Tottenham, Hackney, Peckham, Brixton, Birmingham and Manchester, the rioters went after what was already on the market. In settling for the commodity, they let the system off lightly by falling for its decoy.

FEEDBACK

Amadeus37

16 August 2011 2:28PM

I do not think that setting fire to a furniture store when there might have been people in it is anything to do with greed.
What followed on was opportunism and looking at MPs and bankers the young have been "taught by masters" - to quote Henry James in Washington Square.

Justthefactsman

16 August 2011 2:49PM

Justin's analysis does give some answers, but not all of them.
The riots are a manifestation of many of the social problems that exist in not only with the U.K but in other industrialised societies.
I think that you scribblers and readers should read "The Theory of The Leisure Class" by Thorstein Veblein.
Conspicuous consumption is not new, neither is the desire to consume conspicuously.
The situation as it exists today is the proles are exorted to consume conspicuously but they have not the means (dosh) to do so.
Thwarted desires when built up to a certain point without the hope of any satisfaction will ultimately result in violence.
Commodity capitalsim as it exists today has created for itself an unsolvable problem.
How to sell the commodities that it produces to those who really do not have the means to buy them.
The answer is seems is to create desire via advertising and then get the proles to mortgage their feir future via credit purchasing.
Now we have arrived at the situation where credit is not available and desire is still being created.
An explosive situation indeed.
Maybe we will see in the near future cries of "aux tumbrils", or "debout les dmnes de la terre".

finnhooligan

16 August 2011 3:17PM

Chalk one up for those highly skilled marketing geniuses that help define our lives for us. Although, in this case perhaps their ads were a little too effective. Gives new meaning to the term must-have item.

sojtruth

16 August 2011 3:18PM

I think that you scribblers and readers should read "The Theory of The Leisure Class" by Thorstein Veblein. @Justthefactsman

Veblen was indeed prophetic, he was a perceptive observer of societal change. But what is equally as important is the degree to which politics has been commodified. Political advertisements for all sorts of things saturate the airwaves and virtual networks. Here in the States Roger Ailes and Fox News (excellent Guardian piece btw) mastered the 24-7 cable cycle by recognizing that political coverage was now entertainment. And Fox has been expanding their factory of pundits whose toxic sludge of lies influences American public opinion. To the degree that when people see factual legal documents like President Obama's birth certificate, they still believe the myth's widely circulated in the media that he's not American. For god sake I just bought from the Obama 2012 campaign a birth certificate coffee mug for the kitsch factor of it all! People right now are really dissatisfied with Brand Obama, even though many didn't vote in the midterm elections to maintain a congress that could back his policies. We get the government we don't vote for!

We are no longer what we produce in the Marxian sense, but we are what we consume - Mac people vs PC people. So political protest through consumption is nothing new - this is the basic logic of the consumer boycott - the bus boycotts of the American South turned precisely on consumers refusing to buy a service. The problem is that capitalism not only alienates people from what they make as Marx observed in the industrial age, but under global capitalism its even more alienating with what they consume. Why do you think people so easily deny climate change? They're unable to see how their consumption patterns impact the sources of what we use. I always ask my design students do they know anyone who has made anything in the room we are sitting in--even on their person? At best I get "my friend made my earrings." One can only hope that consistent reporting by probing news services like the Guardian can continue to bring this to light.

ReadingTim

16 August 2011 3:24PM

Rubbish - these people rioted, looted and stole for the same reason many of them are also lounging around on benefits; namely they want something for nothing, and don't want to work for it. Now they think that if the state won't give it to them, they're perfectly entitled to nick it

GizmoGizmo

16 August 2011 3:24PM

"These were acquisitive riots. Lacking any articulated aims or ideology, they manifested themselves as a venting of consumer spleen."

The acquisitive nature of the riots was ideology at its purest - the same ideology that has been fed to us through our telescreens, billboards, and political discourse for many decades. While people in Syntagma Square, Spain, and across the Arab world have been campaigning peacefully for proper democratic process and social justice, our rioters, too, have had a unified aim: I want stuff. I deserve stuff. I am the centre of the world and screw everyone else. ("because you're worth it...")

You reap what you sow. A society gets the rioters it deserves.

francoisP

16 August 2011 3:24PM
I just find it hilarious that global brands like Adidas (who flirt with gang culture) now have to start to back-peddle furiously as their product becomes associated with violence and general chaviness
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Loserdad

16 August 2011 3:30PM
People are so High on the sugary sweet diet of consumerism that thinking anything could be boycoted is like asking a crackhead to ignore calls from his/her dealer, had the N.O.T.W not closed it would probably still be selling millions every sunday. We the consumer have more of a say than we realise we just need to excersise it more
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booker

16 August 2011 3:32PM
Rioting, Just do it.
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SBUK

16 August 2011 3:36PM
Great article.
Here's a second newspaper article which brings up Debord with reference to the riots.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boff-whalley-in-defence-of-anarchy-2336159.html
- lopdarius
  
  16 August 2011 3:47PM
  This is the article i wanted to write! Or read. So thank you, Justin McGuirk. You hit the nail on the head. I had read Debord's 'Spectacle of the Society' in relation to the 1965 Watts Riots. This made so much sense!
  I instinctively knew right away that these rioters had 'shot themselves in the foot'. What i REALLY wanted to see was these kids gaining support by targetting their real enemies, not by killing, burning, raping or maiming either. Property damage maybe, since the well policed peaceful protest wouldn't make any difference. It almost seems like a wasted opportunity.
  Like you said, Justin,"In settling for the commodity, they let the system off lightly by falling for its decoy".
  They let themselves down. And made a lot of enemies in the process. So sad...
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- doctorzoidberg
  
  16 August 2011 4:01PM
  I like the idea that it wasn't so much rioting as extreme shopping.
  I also like the observation "If the looters had been raiding stock options or ministerial expense accounts, they might have got away with it."
  That's the issue that seems to have been missed, at least in the responses of the mainstream politicians. Our entire system, it appears, is an exercise in smash & grab. Whether you are ennobled or arrested is a matter of pure chance.
- offered up in the hope that a second perspective on Debord, anarchy, libertarian socialism and autonomism will help people to see the very great sense which these authors (McGuirk and Whalley) make.
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Loserdad

16 August 2011 3:37PM
Peckham......the London look

CeridwenT
16 August 2011 4:06PM
There's a point to what McGuirk tells here, which is that consumerism affects people's behavior. If that weren't so old PR Edward Bernays, Freud's nephew, wouldn't have used his uncle's theories on marketing products, this way being partly responsible for the most pernicious aspects of present capitalism.
As for the rioters, they weren't justified, despite the oppression some of them (or all of them) suffer. It's a complex problem, which I'm afraid the authorities will deal with in a very shallow way, thinking that punishment will solve the matter, instead of focusing on deeper and more uncomfortable issues, which are the only way such problems could be solved.
Thanks for the article!