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

anile Navy and the Infantilization of the American ConsumerIt is certain that the centenarian Navy store is sound of clothes and accessories for all shapes, sizes and genders. Its presupposition, however, is that all shapes, sizes and genders will be of one indigenous inclination that of the infant. In front of me as I peruse the Old Navy is a pink purse with metallic flecks infused into its plasticine construction. I honour this purse in the Womans section, next to the display rack full of puffy-sleeved t-shirts, fancifully cut blouses, fl ar pants and lo-rider blue-jeans embroidered with alarmingly cute curlicues. All this is, bursttingly enough for a consumer juggernaut 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 senile Capitalism. Althusser asks it this wayWhy do people need this imaginary transposition oftheir satisfying frames of ex istence in order to represent to themselves their real conditions of existence? (241)In the case of Old Navy, the answer lies in the combined natures of Capitalism and the infantilist infantile fixation it engenders.Capitalist objectification of the self, the subjectification of Althusser, begins with the Old Navy ad. Here, kindly old mother-figures or impassioned and attractive young women assure 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 boob tube 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 instrument of the communication and creation of Capitalist ideology, the television screenHis ideas are his somatic actions inserted into material rituals which are themselves defined by material ideological setup from which derive the ideas of that subject, (Althusser 243)that subject of ideology, that objectified self. Thus the consumer is removed from the self by the ideological system of the Old Navy ad.