Logic of Addiction, Market and Total Subsumption

Subject: Sociology
Pages: 5
Words: 1147
Reading time:
4 min

Logic of Addiction

On the road to the transition to adulthood, adolescents are structured depending on the stability and coherence of the given culture. It would not be wrong to say that culture is responsible for addicting adolescents with many ‘false’ habits. Such ‘habits’ when are frequently experienced by adolescents are often called the logic of addiction where such ‘false’ habits are no longer inappropriate for the adults and are instead logical to act upon them. On the other hand, as Cote and Allahar points out that societies are often in a continuous state of ‘crisis’ or ‘instability’ and in order to make their economy work, they take false measures which have consequences on youth culture. However, despite knowing the consequences, society endeavors economic growth through hook or by crook. This way, society, for the sake of its own stability, promotes inappropriate habits among adolescents, which later become a part of a culture.

Such a view of cultural authenticity, and especially of authenticity, which depends on impurity and closure, is now increasingly argued to be inappropriate because, in the name of freedom, it restricts and addicts the youth to choose certain economic markets. For ‘culture’ did not somehow grow out of the soil but rather is a complex product of all the adolescents who over the centuries in addiction to this economic pattern. An example is that of the cup of tea or coffee that could not be sipped without plantations in India, Opium Wars in China, and if you take sugar-a history of slavery in the Caribbean. Appreciating this culture is actually the appreciation of our youth that means reimagining the geographical constitution of cultures where they are not closed but open, not ‘pure’ products of relative isolation but the outcome of incessant processes of social interaction. Another example is that of the fast-food chain ‘McDonalds,’ which has paralyzed our youth towards obesity and our youth is so much used to it that it cannot differentiate between what is addiction and what is a benefit. Therefore, apart from distinguishing the local from the global, it is necessary to rework the geographical imagination of culture, which has been well captured in the formulation, from ‘roots’ to ‘routes.’

Logic of Market

The crisis is overcome by economic stability maintained in the form of a market. On the one hand, freedom provides free thinking of choosing. On the other hand, it helps the market sector to make the most of advertisement campaigns and provides various social classes the logic to ‘choose’ from among several markets irrespective of what consequences the advertising industry plays in transforming adulthood towards ‘market hood.’

The consumer or youth market is run by class inequalities which are governed through subcultures, and the degree of oppression involved is not just simply a matter of life chances, the possession of goods, and opportunity systems. It is easier to separate youth into cultures, subcultures but what is needed is to observe their class location and their social relations to production. For example, students, materialistically, can be separated from other groups of young people. However, numerically, they are relatively small. Though their income is hard to assess, to mold them to use a particular product is relatively easy because it is based on grants, loans, and parental assistance, but it seems much less than the average wage for a comparative working age group. Youth cultural capital is an asset to multinational corporations like fast-food chains, and high lifestyles necessities which are considerably higher, and their opportunity to experiment with ideas and lifestyles, their moratorium from wage labor all place them in a unique and privileged position.

Total Subsumption

Total subsumption refers to the relationship that exists between youth culture, freedom of choice, and how the market influences youth to decide. The location of youth cultures in Canada is a more complex question than the situation in either Britain or the United States because of reason that the so-called freedom witnessed in Canada is never meant to see in any other country. In Britain, the youth is persuaded by the presence of a clearcut market economy where the class situation is not that embedded within the minds of youth, with its accompanying culture of class resistance, as it seems to be in Canada. Since youth cultures are embedded into class since childhood, it is obvious to hold and experience a clear kinship to class by linking to traditional class problems, and are also clearly visible stylistically so as to attract adolescents.

While youth experiences a general yet locally specific high school culture, the complexities of ethnic, working-class, and minority group subcultures have a strong presence with the proper signs for identity are clearly there, and whilst one may, for example, differentiate West Coast punks from British punks, the former being more attracted to the style and more aggressive than the latter, both styles are native to their immediate context and reinterpret the artifice of fashion into a subculture which makes sense in the local environment.

Total subsumption focuses on youth culture by highlighting the lusts of the youth, which gives benefit to multinational corporations by informal status systems not open to all, and a student’s position in them depends not on individual achievement but class. Instead, for an adolescent, school students are cut off from adult society, a feature further segregating them from the growing youth market, which escorts them to youth culture, which is then some separate homogeneous culture dissolving traditional divisions. Youth is linked to adult society only tentatively, and to the market economy by consumerism and total subsumption is all about how to emphasize consumerism among youth by making attempts to make to link youth to wider political and social issues.

Youth has been considered to be the main labor force as well. Therefore, all multinationals target the youth culture to be beneficial for them so that it historically has advanced capitalism that has prolonged youth’s dependent status, and thus its marginality. Such a theory of youth that promotes freedom encourages and poses suggestions both for youth culture and market as historically, they have linked different forms of ‘habits’ at different historical ‘moments,’ traceable to the changes in the mode of production. By experiencing a long-term decline in the accretion of profit and the use of mechanization, markets have made youth redundant in the workforce, which in other words, has made youth dependent upon the consumer market and has combined with the growth of institutions like the school, all contributed to marginality. Contemporary marginalization affects the youth through many ways, i.e., through the allocation of scarce educational resources, which favors youth who are already the recipients of other advantages because of their class and ethnic location.