The Thin Line of the Lemming.

‘‘Even if you try, you can’t escape it.’’ (Fisher).

On Choice & Makeup:

Makeup suggests the borderline between modernity’s promise of being understood through the marketing of selected identities and being a lemming, for me, in that I know when I choose to wear makeup I’m buying into consumerist culture’s thought that wearing it will allow me to - and facilitate me in - expressing my inner self: how I want to be seen in and by the world around me. Photoshopped models selling that flawless female possibility tell me: you’ll be successful and confident when you look your best, and that best is wearing makeup. It’s at the borderline because, while I’m buying into makeup as self-expression, knowing it’s a modern marketing ploy (how can I be showing my best self when I’m covering myself up?), in truth, it actually does aid - in some ways - self-expression: I can change my makeup based on my mood or how I want to be perceived day to day, and I have a sense that I’m portraying my most-refined self: a lemming, I am. I feel like I’m playing myself up, but at the same time like I just hopped on the makeup train with everybody else and their disguise of a social identity.

On Choice & Clothing:

When it comes to clothing, it’s often necessary to succumb to the ‘new’, due to the nature of manufacturing, itself: I often don’t have a choice when I try to choose otherwise. While clothing collections are released each season, I oppose and choose to look elsewhere for clothes: scouring thrift shops for things that are my style, in good shape, and have been saved from landfills - but it can feel like an unviable alternative: the planned obsolescence of clothing manufacturers - that is, the shortened cycle of consumption through its emphasis on the fashionability and ephemerality of everyday goods (Woodham 67) - means that the need to keep clothing desirable (Sparke 21) results in used items that were too trendy or fashionable in their time to be useful, today - they truly are produced with throwaway consumption in mind. For example, the shape and style of jeans from the eighties or nineties literally do not fit me - it could be my body type, but most often it’s the fact that these were designed fleetingly and with one time, style, and silhouette in mind - not lasting, flattering, comfort - so that companies can then produce another trend - meaning, if I’d like a pair of jeans that fit, I’ll most likely have to buy new ones with a modern shape,  despite trying to choose otherwise. Clothing’s on the borderline between modernity’s promise of choice through delivery and being a lemming because I feel like I’m able to choose: but at the same time, I’m not.

On Choice & The Reusable Coffee Cup:

My reusable coffee cup, to me, suggests the borderline between modernity’s promise of choice through delivery of a selected identity and being a lemming because, with it, I’m choosing to do the environmentally, socially responsible thing by using one, but the choice has become a rather lemming thing to do, these days: everybody’s doing it, so it’s trendy. We’re at this time in society where the right behavior - using earth-friendly consumer alternatives - means becoming a lemming that does so. In this case, choosing to follow the masses in this regard is actually beneficial to the earth, making most of us with reusable cups not lemmings. I think you’d be a lemming if you bought many reusable cups because they were pretty, or if you bought a reusable cup every time you got a coffee - thus defeating the whole purpose of limiting harmful consumption, and demonstrating how that lemming isn’t fully aware of what’s going on or what the purpose of the reusable cup actually is. But if you buy one reusable cup knowing full well the impact you’re saving the environment because you’re not using plastic-coated, non-recyclable cups every time you consume a hot beverage, as I have: a lemming you are not. It’s not chosen for me to use one - though I think shops should ban the use, already, of these petulant paper cups for good and force people to go reusable - I choose to use my cup for the right reasons. Bonus points in that I chose to buy an old, used thermos instead of a new plastic cup.

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It’s a self-deprecating question, choice or chosen: the fact of the matter is, I can choose to go against society by not having a cell phone, cable, a microwave, or not changing my name when I marry: but I’m still just choosing from options A or B that are already chosen for me to choose from. In that case, doesn’t anything we choose make us a lemming?

Photo Sources: 1/2/3  

Works Cited:

Fisher, Maxe. Class Notes. DHIS 201: Design Culture II. Emily Carr University. Vancouver. 31 October, 2012.

Sparke, Penny. ‘‘Consuming Modernity.’’ An Introduction to Design and Culture: 1900 to the Present. London, Routledge.

Woodham, Jonathan M. ‘‘Commerce, Consumerism, and Design.’’ Twentieth Century Design. Oxford University Press, 1997.