a spectre is haunting my apartment: the spectre of irrational consumerism.

Sept 21/07 - The Diderot Effect and Diderot Unities are fascinating concepts to me. As described by McCracken, they refer to habits of consumption that complement more abstract personal desires and systems of objects working as systems of self-identification, respectively. Diderot uses the example of receiving a new dressing gown as a gift, which is pleasant at first but quickly becomes troublesome as the luxurious article of clothing seems to stick out, implicitly demanding that the subject replace all of his other old possessions to match the new gown's au courant allure.

I recently experienced such a mind glitch, when my roommate and I were asked by his parents if we wanted their massive 5.1 surround sound entertainment system, as they were replacing theirs to go with their new home (!). Their new place called for new, higher-definition imagery and new, more-enhanced Dolby sound, and we were fortunate enough to intercept their (relatively) 'old' hardware on its way to the dump. After a few hours of laboured moving (our apartment building doesn't have an elevator, and we inhabit the top floor), we sat down to enjoy the fruits of my roommate's parents' electronic modernization. Our Playstation 2 had never looked or sounded so good.

Before long, though, the handsome sheen of the solid black speaker towers and entertainment centre began to look out of place next to the cinder-block-and-2x8 bookshelves of our humble 1.5-bedroom apartment. Sure, it didn't 'match' in a conventional interior design sense, but that wasn't what bothered me.

Perhaps I should rephrase: the cinder-block-and-2x8 bookshelves of our humble 1.5-bedroom apartment began to look out of place next to the handsome sheen of the solid black speaker towers and entertainment centre; I somehow got the feeling that we needed to update our living room furniture out of respect for our new possessions. Suddenly, the trusty solid oak coffee table that I bought for $5 at Value Village wasn't smooth or shiny enough; its space would look much better with a structurally unsound but polished MDF table from Ikea. Same deal with our humdrum bookshelves. Before I fortunately snapped out of this completely irrational train of thought, for a minute it made sense to me.

Regardless of our awareness of it, we are all guilty of conducting Diderot-ical (?) experiments on ourselves. A girl buys new glasses because she thinks they make her look (and feel!) smart for the back-to-school season. My friend buys a smoking jacket in order to present a more sophisticated front to people who don't already know he's a total goofball. I myself try to limit my wardrobe to items used and inexpensive in an effort to reduce my materialistic tendencies. It happens to everyone. If I hadn't stopped myself, though, I may have inadvertently let myself go and buy a new black table to go with our newly imposed black motif.

As students in an ever-precarious housing situation, there are countless reasons why it is completely impractical for us to spend hours moving this ridiculously heavy and expensive equipment into a tiny East Vancouver apartment with walls the width of Bible paper. We'll never crank the sound up past level 2. We're just going to have to move it all again in a couple of months. The no-name Superstore TV we had before worked just fine. But damn, the picture on this thing is so clear. And the entertainment centre's wood is so smooth and lustrous. The Diderot Effect is the perfect articulation of the irrational consumerism that fashion and, on a larger scale, image culture, bring about. So yeah, I admit it, there are huge contradictions between my philosophically ideal ambitions and my anemically justified willingness to consume free things. In writing this, as I drool over the soundsystem waiting for me at home, I can feel myself taking two steps back in my personal struggle towards anti-materialism. This may be anticlimactic but I'm going to stop writing now while I still feel I can salvage my good mood for today.