Intoxicating consumption: capitalism and the commodification of pleasure

This paper explores the idea of intoxication by focusing on a key contradiction of capitalism. Namely, it is concerned with the way that the political economy of neoliberal consumerism generates increasingly intensified – or ‘intoxicating’ – products and experiences, and yet insists that the responsibility for their management rests with the individual. As a result, the collateral damage of the ‘intoxication industries’ – for example, the global giants of ‘Big Food’ and ‘Big Gambling’, the tech industries and fast fashion – tends to be discussed in terms of the flaws of individual consumers: as aspects of psychological weakness, poor choices, deficient willpower or even genetic makeup. The chapter will draw on three case studies of different types of intoxicating consumption, drugs (broadly defined), food and gambling, and use these to explore wider themes around the production of excess and the tropes of responsibility. More broadly, the argument is that this approach might begin to illuminate some of the ways in which discourses around intoxicating consumption articulate something more general about problems of control – whether in terms of commodities, individuals, markets or states – in late capitalist societies