luxury new media: euphoria in unhappiness

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Luxury VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1PP 113–132

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Luxury New Media: Euphoria in Unhappiness

John Armitage and Joanne RobertsWinchester School of Art, University of Southampton

ABSTRACT In this article, we are concerned with how the contemporary cultural-theoretical concept of luxury, an idea of deep-seated importance for Christopher J. Berry (1994), can be considered as a good or service that is effortlessly substitutable since the desire for it lacks passion. Against Berry, we argue that, in the present period, any deliberation on luxury must entail a multifaceted engagement with the intensification of our sense of alienation intertwined with our fervent sense of an existence governed by outside powers, which apparently establish new modes of social control together with new modes of inauthenticity that disaffect “us” from “our” “selves.” To theorize these outside powers, and reintroducing the somewhat neglected critical theory of the Marxian philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1964), we identify the ongoing cultural form of what we conceptualize as “luxury new

John Armitage is Professor of Media Arts and Co-Director of

the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester School of Art,

University of Southampton, UK. He is the founder and co-editor, with Professor Ryan Bishop and

Professor Douglas Kellner, of the Duke University Press journal

Cultural Politics. He is currently co-editing Critical Luxury Studies:

Art, Design, Media with Joanne Roberts for Edinburgh University

Press and researching a single-authored book, provisionally

entitled Luxury and New [email protected]

Joanne Roberts is Professor in Arts and Cultural Management and

Director of the Winchester Luxury Research Group at Winchester

School of Art, University of Southampton, UK. She is the co-founder and co-editor of Critical

Perspectives on International Business, an editor of Prometheus:

Critical Studies in Innovation, and a member of the editorial advisory board of Luxury: History, Culture,

Consumption. She is currently co-editing Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media with John Armitage

for Edinburgh University Press and investigating knowledge and

ignorance in relation to [email protected]

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John Armitage and Joanne Roberts

media.” We argue that luxury new media is a novel type of luxury, one that is not interpersonally relative, as Berry proposes, but relationally dubious, which is creating innovative varieties of luxury new media goods and services. We subsequently investigate how the luxury new media of what we, extending Marcuse, call “euphoria in unhappiness” nurtures the contemporary development of “false social needs.” Lastly, we question the growth in importance of luxury new media as a form of managed choice today when such luxurious choice is, counter to Berry, not simple or lacking in intensity but in fact problematic and steeped in economic desire.

KEYWORDS: luxury, new media, euphoria, unhappiness

IntroductionWe live today in an environment inundated with luxury. The global luxury goods market, for example, was valued at more than $200 billion in 2012 and is expected to reach $250 billion by 2015 (Bain & Company 2013). Luxury is all about us, from sunup to sundown. We awaken to stories on our alarm clock radios concerning the luxurious economic goods and services that are apparently a part of the “everyday” lifestyles of the rich and famous from footballer David Beckham to Microsoft founder Bill Gates; we read “How to Spend It,” the monthly luxury supplement in the Financial Times, on Saturday mornings; we log on to the new media of the Internet at work, surreptitiously hunting for the latest luxury products promoted by our favorite celebrities such as film stars George Clooney and Cameron Diaz; and we watch television programs about luxurious Rolls-Royce cars, the Burj Al Arab Hotel in Dubai and luxury train ad-ventures on the Orient Express when we relax in the evenings. What does this mean for our everyday lives? In our view, as contemporary critical luxury theorists, the transformations are profound. Drawing on the writings of Herbert Marcuse (1964), we argue that the bound-aries between euphoria, between feelings of great happiness, and unhappiness, of sadness or sorrow, have become indistinct. We live in “euphoria in unhappiness,” in a world where unhappiness seems more euphoric than euphoria itself.

We will argue that our everyday life environments are altering significantly. Yet what we call “luxury new media” is used in real, local, places and actual global spaces, and rising numbers of people incorporate its use into everyday life practices. Hence, our concep-tion of luxury new media provides a focus for an examination of the relationship between euphoria and unhappiness in the contempo-rary era.

In this article, we will first examine how people from Christopher J. Berry (1994) to Tobias Smollett (2008 [1771]) and John Sekora

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(1977) understand and use the concept of luxury and we will investi-gate the different roles that luxury plays in contemporary cultural and critical theory. Second, we will introduce and consider how luxury, new media and interactive communication are presently merging in everyday life, prior to elaborating our alternative discussion of social classes, social needs and economic desire from a Marxian-Marcusian (1964) perspective derived from the Frankfurt School (Held 1989). Lastly, we will review the repercussions of living in euphoria in unhappiness.

In the Realm of LuxuryLuxury is an essential but multi-accented idea with a multifaceted and still open conceptual history, which in itself conveys the difficulty of engaging with universal human history and of human historical investigation. At its limits, the idea of luxury is employed, on the one hand, as in its initial usage, to denote “negative” luxury, as of threat-ening social virtue, or following the classical philosophical paradigm constructed by Plato, the Romans and early Christianity and so by extension to individual human luxury, not as an achievement but as something pejorative. On the other hand, luxury can be employed to imply the ingenuous tricks undertaken by lavish real estate agents and niche consumption practitioners that, in their very market forms and economic meanings, delineate contemporary human society as socially “de-moralized” rather than moral. For Christopher J. Berry (1994: 101–25), for example, the classical and early Christian comprehension of luxury as an abnormal contravention was slowly superseded by its de-moralization that has ended in its extensive (mis)use in the sphere of contemporary media. Occasionally this additional meaning is then generalized to create triumphant descrip-tions of the mood or disposition of a typically economically defined social group (e.g. luxury property developers), era, entire society or country. Luxury can thus be used to express the depravity of a formerly virtuous manly life or personality, a phase of moral or intellectual development, the economic existence and customs of a socioeconomic group, a socio-historicization of values or a wide-ranging period. For instance, in the contemporary era we talk about: luxury food and drink, such as champagne truffles; luxurious celebrity homes, like Hollywood star John Travolta’s Florida mansion, “Jumbolair,” which has “parking facilities” for his Boeing 707 and Gulfstream jets; luxury fashion brands, such as Prada and Gucci; luxurious leisure activities, including sumptuous horse racing trips; and twenty-first-century opulent magazine advertising.

Perhaps one of the most useful ways of examining such a changeable concept is along the lines of Berry’s (1994) explanation of its European usage over the last 2,000 years. Berry proposes that in its most prevalent use the value attached to luxury is a vital constituent of any society’s self-interpretation, and he argues that luxury has altered across the centuries from being an effectively

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negative concept, inflaming social life (Adams 2012; Plato 2007), to a perception of “well-being” in terms of economic wealth (Smith 1982). Any investigative focus upon the concept of luxury, then, must engage with the interaction between the ideas of social need and economic desire and with classes of luxury, such as food, hous-ing, clothing and leisure. In a classical philosophical paradigm, luxury was seen by the Romans, for instance, as exemplified in political questions (entailing morality and legislation) and valued negatively (because it indicated the existence of the possibly disturbing power of human desire, a power that must be regulated) (Adams 2012; Berry 1994). Moreover, early Christianity considered luxury as a kind of desire, evil or wickedness and contrary to the virtues of absten-tion, sobriety and chastity (Adams 2012; Berry 1994).

Of fundamental conceptual and historical significance to these perceptions of luxury is the cultural attitude taken towards the transi-tion to modern mass or industrial luxury goods and services, or, in the twenty-first century, the advanced de-moralization of luxury goods and services and lack of debate concerning contemporary social needs in the consumer society (Baudrillard 1998). Yet cul-tural, political and philosophical debates about luxury products and services in this most recognizable sense have indeed taken place and been supplemented and stimulated by the socioeconomic development of social needs and economic desires of this present period. Luxury goods and services have consequently been defined regarding this historical-political form of society, yet again in classical terms that see social needs as opposed to economic desires. The subsequent defense of the concept of luxury as equal or essential to genuine ethical, religious or even civilizational values and social identity sets social needs—predominantly a discerning tradition of categories of essentials—against the economic desires of, first, the modern mechanical and materialist order of industrial society and, second, the postmodern digital and immaterialist order of postin-dustrial society.

So described, as in the novels of Tobias Smollett (1721–71), among others, luxury is rallied to serve a less than liberal and more of a radical conservative historical and political philosophy. According to John Sekora’s Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (1977), for example, Smollett was the final, most obstinate and most persuasive supporter of the classical philosophical stand-point, which insisted on clear moral differences between the social classes. Certainly, Smollett’s last work of 1771, Humphry Clinker (2008), considered by many to be his finest and wittiest novel, was an out-and-out condemnation of the “luxury” of the lower classes who, in Smollett’s view, desired for economic goods and services they could not and should not have.

In a contrary “democratic” assessment, the “accessible” or “mass” luxury of Starbucks coffee or BMW automobiles might be preferred to some of the luxury goods and services noted above.

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This encompasses a radical change of meaning and of the terms of appraisal of several contemporary luxury goods and services. Nevertheless, all these interpretations share the supposition that luxury markets can have an active, determining effect, particularly upon middle- or “aspiring”-class ideas, attitudes and experience. Intrinsically, they differ from the view that understands luxury as sub-ordinate to and as a reaction to other mass processes in the society and the economy, which are believed by some to be more basic and decisive than luxury itself. This latter stance has been related to the well-known Marxist model of an economic base and ideological/luxurious superstructure (Berry 1994).

However intricate, then, the meaning of luxury is, we argue, it is also increasingly critical to ideas of the objects of study (often high-priced goods or service categories), the methods of knowledge accumulation, and contemporary goals of academic research and disciplines (including philosophy and economics, along with the more understandable anthropology, sociology, literary, historical, new media and cultural studies). Its usage and meanings in these settings may be conflicting (does any high-priced good or service in any category count as a luxury?) and relatively explanatory of certain goods and services or evaluative (“uniqueness” springs to mind). Then again, the cultural investigation of luxury can never be free of experimental, highly speculative statements of value or, from an immersion in meaningful, value-making endeavors on the part of the investigator into intense pleasure, or the flattering of our senses or the social dimensions of luxury that evoke a sense of belonging to the elite actors being examined. Possibly the most important conception of luxury goods and services in traditional academic work, particularly in philosophy, historical and political studies, if not in economics, has been Berry’s (1994: 41; italics in original) defini-tion of “luxuries” as “those goods that admit of easy and painless substitution because the desire for them lacks fervency.”

Work on luxury goods and services like this is developing from the liberal-conservative and Marxist traditions through critical engage-ments with each. Writing in 1994, Berry (1994: 41) comments that “luxury goods” are “not a separate category superadded to a fixed determinate set of basic necessities” and that this “fact also explains why it is intelligible that one person’s luxury can be another’s (instru-mental) necessity.” What connects these emphases, Berry argues, is the idea of luxury goods and services as interpersonally relative conceptions, even if luxury goods and services are frequently seen as synonymous with “superior” goods and services, and through which, unavoidably, a social order is defined and maintained, de-veloped, experienced and explored (1994: 41). This philosophy is motivating a contemporary notion of luxury goods, services and practices as establishing rather than merely communicating a par-ticular social order wherein our social needs and economic desires appear countless.

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Still, it would be untrue to imply that there is an agreed definition of luxury goods and services in the current period. Indeed, we do not accept Berry’s definition of luxury goods and services as “admit-ting of easy and painless substitution because the desire for them lacks fervency.” In our contemporary reaction to Berry, we offer an alternative definition of luxury goods and services not as painless substitutes lacking fervent desire but as alienating surrogates satu-rated with the urgent sense of a life determined by external forces, and consequent lack of control or authenticity and oneness with ourselves. In the contemporary stage, we must re-acknowledge the power of Marcuse’s (1964) critical theory, which leads us to restate his earlier critique of the minority of the elite classes, who irresponsibly follow their economic desires or “false” social needs, that is, those social needs that are repressive through being forced upon us by certain social groups, through the acquisition of luxury urban mansions, perfume and haute couture clothing. But we must do so in terms now of this minority’s globalized, increasingly non-white elite, non-Western class formations and female-centered bias towards the wild quest of satiating its economic desires or false social needs through the procurement of luggage accessories, wine and chocolate in China, the Middle East, Russia and Southeast Asia (Kapferer and Bastien 2012). Furthermore, we present misgivings regarding Berry’s conception of “easy substitution” and trouble-free replacement, or the desire for this, in the realm of luxury goods and services. The irregular meanings of luxury goods and services are now more willingly comprehended as the necessary perception and manifestation of a diverse range of interpersonal yet relative concep-tions of human existence across different worlds and spheres from bottled water and high-fidelity music to live-in domestic servants and personal financial brokers. We are brought consequently to a many-sided and discursive model of luxury as unnecessary, conducive to enjoyment and ease, costly, difficult to acquire, extravagant, and to the debates this in turn inexorably produces.

Luxury New MediaWhat, then, is the relationship between the realm of luxury goods and services and new media? Why is it important to associate the con-ceptual history of luxury with on-demand access to content anytime, anywhere, on any digital device? What is the connection between the complex human history of luxury and, for example, interactive user feedback? Our studies lead us to argue that, extreme though it may initially appear, luxury can be used today to examine people’s creative use of and participation in new media. No longer concerned with the early usage of luxury but with its contemporary usage in the era of new media, we must relate luxury to the age of the real-time generation of new and practically unregulated content. Here, luxury is less “negative” than “positively” technologized, that is, it is character-ized by and displays certainty, acceptance or affirmation concerning

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its high-tech future. This last does not so much endanger social virtue as the social virtues of “old” or pre-digital media (one thinks of the BBC’s social virtues encompassing “information, education and entertainment,” and in that order). In this contemporary philosophical model, built not by classical philosophers but by digital technologies, people manipulate, network, compress, expand and interact with their own and with each other’s increasingly dense data sets and also with their notions of luxury.

Should we disapprove of luxury websites? Are luxury computer owners or users with costly and expertly staffed multimedia studios in one way or another immoral? What of luxury within video games? Is this a form of creative deception assumed by extravagant video games corporations? What is the economic meaning of luxury new media? Of course, contemporary definitions of luxury new media do not include luxury old media television programs, feature films, magazines, books or paper-based publications unless they contain technologies that enable digital interactivity. But do such definitions of luxury new media include the social de-moralization of online tech-nologies like the Internet? Does the Internet have a moral dimension? Certainly, the general meaning of, for instance, accessible digital text, is that its productions are “positive.” This is because digital text can not only describe but also, when combined with digital images and video, show the tone or outlook of characteristically Web-linked socioeconomic groups, such as Stuart Hughes luxury mobile phone users, or the techno-social and temporal participation of any number of other contemporary contributors across the world (Figure 1).

We do not use the concept of luxury new media as a result to signify the immorality of the interactive feedback of once virtuous users or participants in the virile existence of a luxurious person or virtual community of which we now disapprove. Rather, we use the term to indicate the meanings of the current character and stage of moral, intellectual and technological development along with the contemporary economic life and traditions of luxury socioeconomic community groups. Our conception of luxury new media, conse-quently, is concerned with the ongoing social-mediatization of values (one thinks of Facebook) in the present epoch where, for example, luxury new media users examine their offline and online luxury goods and services from the perspective of a participant rather than merely from the viewpoint of a producer, distributor or consumer. In the con-temporary epoch we can talk about luxury brand digital campaigns like spirits conglomerate Diageo offering brands such as Grand Marnier on a new British ecommerce and “lifestyle platform” called Alexander and James; about luxury hotels, like the Leading Hotels of the World group reviving its digital strategy with a new website that offers content to assist consumers arrange their journey ac-companied by a streamlined booking platform; about luxury fashion such as footwear label Brian Atwood giving fifty consumers access to exclusive content on a section of its website called The Vault;

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about luxurious leisure pursuits like carmaker Audi of America raising awareness for its product placement in the Iron Man 3 feature film by creating a digital comic book in collaboration with Walt Disney Co.’s Marvel; and about twenty-first-century ecstatic advertising in online retailer Net-A-Porter’s new weekly online magazine called The Edit (Shea 2013: 1–8).

For us, the most profitable method of illustrating such a mutable concept as luxury new media is contained in our account below of how we might use it today. We suggest that we use the value increasingly ascribed to luxury new media as a crucial component in our socioeconomic understanding of, for example, Grand Marnier’s “lifestyle platform.” Indeed, we argue that luxury new media is changing the very terms of contemporary debate in an age in which luxury digital and social media strategies are still seen as negative or conceptions to be afraid of by luxury brands. For opening up information about brands on Facebook to a much broader audience flies in the face of the restricted nature of luxury brands (Baker and Bacon 2013: 1). In a world of ever expanding new websites, how, then, are we to understand the current and future social life, percep-tion and well-being of, for instance, the Leading Hotels of the World group? Moreover, in Smithian terms of future economic prosperity, how does offering “content” to “consumers” help the luxury sector? Our analytic concentration upon the domain of luxury new media thus engages with the interplay between the notions of digital social

Figure 1 British designer Stuart Hughes’s Black Diamond iPhone 5: at £10 million, it is

the most expensive smartphone in the world. The phone is covered in over 100 grams of solid gold, 600 white diamonds and a 26-carat black diamond

replacing the “home” button, the touch screen is made of Sapphire Glass. Credit: Stuart Hughes/REX.

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need and digital economic desire and with categories of luxury new media. Why did Grand Marnier become “e-commerce,” Leading Hotels of the World become a “booking platform,” Brian Atwood shoes become “exclusive” website “content,” and Audi cars become a digital comic book? For us, the term luxury new media must be understood and valued in such a way that, from a contemporary critical philosophical standpoint, it can, for example, take account of today’s online magazines committed to advertising, say, American “gentleman’s outfitter” Phineas Cole and other luxury new media goods and services such as Billionaire.com. In our contemporary philosophical hypothesis, luxury new media is seen as embodied and embroiled in overtly cultural and political issues, including the ethics of computing or lawmaking concerning the luxury industries. Certainly, it is not unreasonable to imagine these industries being valued negatively because they show the presence of the potentially troublesome power of human desire coupled to a personal com-puter, mobile phone, laptop or tablet, a power that, much like that of pornography, may well lead to the control of individuals and large organizations alike. Beijing police, for instance, recently detained the Chinese whistle-blower “Huazong,” because he has been blogging about luxury watches worn by government officials since 2011. “Drawing on his knowledge of luxury goods,” a staff reporter on the South China Morning Post wrote (2013: 1–2), Huazong “found published pictures of many government officials online and identified luxury watches on their wrists, down to every accurate detail, such as brand, model, year, and market value.” Today, then, at least one person uses new media to attack the wearing of luxury watches by government officials because such luxury goods are desired brands, models of immorality or self-indulgent because of their high market value and thus at odds with the expected virtues of government officials, their legal income and lack of susceptibility to corruption.

Of underlying conceptual and contemporary importance to our view of luxury new media is our cultural attitude towards the ongo-ing transition to existing individualized or postindustrial luxury new media and the absence of debate about present digital social needs, of conditions and situations in which luxury new media goods and services are required in societies driven by consumption (Bauman 2000). In fact, our contribution to the political and philosophical discussions regarding luxury new media goods and services is accompanied and prompted by the socioeconomic development of digitized social needs, requirements, requisites and, crucially, digitized human economic desire today. Luxury new media should then be explained with respect to the historical-political form of the advanced societies, in terms that understand digital social needs, necessities and obligations as debatably increasingly always already fulfilled or as optional and digital economic desires, as key activities in the making of today’s subjectivities, as never-to-be-fulfilled. Our resulting critical appreciation of the concept and practices of luxury

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new media accordingly see it not as identical or crucial to authentic moral, spiritual or even civilizational values and social identity, but as identical or critical to inauthentic ethical, transcendent or even post-civilizational values and increasingly individualized social identities. Social conditions of poverty and most traditions and classes of basic and social needs being alleviated, we are truly now moving beyond the misfortunes of the modern mechanical and materialist order of industrial society and into the progressively postmodern, digital and immaterialist order of the never-to-be-fulfilled and often unconscious subjective economic desires of postindustrial society.

So described, we may be persuaded to use the writings of Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Félix Guattari (1930–92) amongst other “Deleuzians,” where luxury new media might be mobilized to serve a radically new Nietzschean-Marxist and immaterialist political per-spective. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari’s first major joint philosophi-cal treatise, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2013), is a complete attack upon anything and anyone that does not see desire as an affirmative and revolutionary force. It would then be possible to conceive of luxury new media from the standpoint of socioeconomic and other desires, as flows of energy racing through and beyond all social classes, all the while seeking out luxury new media economic goods and services whilst establishing free connections and synthe-ses between people who thereby aggravate the efforts of rational society whose function is to repress all desires within the family.

However, as we will now explain, our alternative examination of digitized social classes, needs and digital economic desires is in-formed by the critique of the once mass but now individualized soci-ety developed from the Marxism of the Frankfurt School in Marcuse’s (1964) One Dimensional Man. In our account of the consumption of luxury new media, unlike Deleuze and Guattari (2013: 112, 118, 173), who readily acknowledge the importance of Marcuse’s work, we consider digital economic desire using Marcuse’s (1964: 15–16) distinction between “true” and “false” social needs. True social needs, the “only needs that have an unqualified claim for satisfaction,” ac-cording to Marcuse (1964: 16), “are the vital ones—nourishment, clothing, lodging at the attainable level of culture.” “The satisfaction of these needs,” he (1964: 16) argues, is “the prerequisite for the realization of all needs, of the unsubliminated as well as the sub-liminated ones.” “False” social needs, conversely, are those social needs, which are:

superimposed upon the individual by particular social inter-ests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of

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curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. (Marcuse 1964: 15)

For Marcuse, and for us, discriminating between true and false social needs is important because, in the advanced societies, where most social needs for sustenance, apparel and accommodation have been gratified, the satisfaction of false social needs has taken command. Yet the longed-for but forever deferred fulfillment of false social needs is both subliminated and inflicted upon us by specific social interests by way of our repression. We incorporate in this cate-gory those false social needs which perpetuate the “toil” of obtaining Grand Marnier on an e-commerce lifestyle platform; the “aggres-siveness” required to secure a luxury room on the Leading Hotels of the Worlds’ revamped website; the “misery” of Brian Atwood shoes giving other customers—but not you—access to exclusive website content; and the “injustice” of not being “invited” to consume Audi’s Iron Man 3 digital comic book. What is significant here, perhaps fol-lowing Lev Manovich’s (2002) classic text, is the language of luxury new media: the language of “satisfaction,” “gratification,” “individual-ization” and, above all, “happiness.”

However, the important question is to what extent luxury new media is a key component of our contemporary condition of unhap-piness? How does luxury new media seek to uphold and defend itself while simultaneously halting the development of our aptitudes to identify the illness of the whole and seize the opportunities of curing the disease? Surely, it is hard to envisage a finer descrip-tion of luxury new media goods and services than as “euphoria in unhappiness.” Bombarded with drinks and hotel websites extolling the false social need to “relax” (presumably from the neurasthenic impact of advanced capitalism), to have online “fun” with our shoes (“exclusive content!”), we are urged to act and consume compliant with luxury new media consumer-as-participant advertising strate-gies, like making a possibly prize-winning Audi Iron Man 3 comic strip panel. Loving the “necessities” and the ambition to enter the elite classes and hating the “luxury” and forms of moral corruption displayed by the lower classes (“welfare cheats” etc.), we come to love a whole array of digitized false social needs. Nevertheless, for us, it is not the majority of the lower classes that we come to ques-tion for its moral corruption. Rather, it is the societal substance and structural purpose of the minority of the elite classes, whose now digitized economic desires and false social needs, like those of the rest of us, are governed by the mysterious exterior powers of Aston Martin luxury cars or TAG Heuer luxury watches. Thus, it is not that the minority of the elite classes irresponsibly follows its digitized economic desires or false social needs by buying luxury new media

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goods and services such as Burberry trench coats that is the issue. Instead, the issue is that the growth and gratification of these digital false social needs is “heteronomous”:

No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he identifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction, they continue to be what they were from the beginning—products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression. (Marcuse 1964: 15)

In our Marcusian political evaluation, it follows that the accessible or mass luxury new media of, for example, Burberry’s “smart per-sonalization technology,” which “unlocks immersive video footage,” that retraces the “creation journey” of its products (Shea 2013: 1–2), is predictable as the expansion and consummation of digitized false social needs that are subject to external domination. Yet, however much we might prefer to radically redefine or re-evaluate today’s luxury new media goods and services, we inevitably find ourselves faced with opinions and statements like the following: that luxury new media is individualized; that luxury new media markets attempt to both replicate and exhilarate the state of our existence; that we must vigorously identify ourselves with luxury new media; and that we must shape and thereby satiate only ourselves according to the log-ics of luxury new media. Influencing our stereotypically class-based “aspirational” notions about luxury new media goods and services, such interpretations and postulations inflect both our social outlook and dominant experiences as ones that require repression. Our position is not that luxury new media is secondary or a response to additional mass socioeconomic processes but that one of the more important and decisive components of luxury new media goods and services is the dominance of repressive digital social needs. Our perspective is then less associated with economistic Marxism than with Marcuse’s cultural theorization of repressive and now digitized social needs. Consequently, we consider that the predominance of repressive digital social needs “must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction” (Marcuse 1964: 16). In the spirit of Marx but thinking with Marcuse, we contest the digital satisfactions of digital social needs. For luxury new media is one of the preconditions for the fulfillment of all digital privation not true or false digital social needs. Indeed, as Marx and Marcuse might have noted, luxury new media and digital privation are the results of the same underlying source: the system of unsubliminated and subliminated private property.

Consequently, it is a question of offering a compound character-ization of the meaning of luxury new media. Essential to any such characterization and to its objects of study is the incorporation of

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conceptions of consciousness and conscience regarding costly new media goods and services. What are required are methods of knowledge gathering that can include experiences that question the dominant societal interests. In the present period, such methods must aim towards modes of academic investigation that do not involve predetermined laws of thought or previously recognized and rigid disciplinary spaces. It is a question of drawing on continental philosophy, radical political economy and, in our case, critical new media and cultural studies to appraise digital social needs and digital satisfactions as concepts to be probed in the perhaps now unfashionable terms of digital truths and digital falsehoods (Lister et al. 2008; Tabb 1999; West 2010). The usage and meanings of luxury new media in these contexts takes us beyond Berry and Sekora—whose purposes are different from ours—and towards the historicization of digital social needs and their digital satisfaction under the given contemporary conditions of luxury new media goods and services.

What classifications, values and priorities can we utilize to explain or assess the “uniqueness” or otherwise of luxury new media? How can the study of luxury new media address such values and priori-ties? Is the investigation of luxury new media a problem of trial and conjecture, worth, meaning and action, or a matter of establishing and/or questioning the ideal development of the human being? Here, researchers into increasingly individualized yet penetrating digital economic desires, the blandishments of feeling and the social aspects of luxury new media must be acutely aware both of the sense of belonging shown by the elite classes and of the ballpark or “ideal” uses of the material, immaterial and intellectual resources accessible to them. It is a problem of influencing or redirecting extant and central ideas of luxury new media goods and services in a hitherto non-traditional academic fashion, of working on digital social needs, digital satisfaction, digital standards, digitized individuals and digital resources. For us, the philosophy of history and political economy both come into play when attempting to explain luxury new media goods and services. For luxury new media goods and services, we argue, can be computed in terms of digital truths, digital falsehoods, digital social needs and digital satisfactions, along with their contribution or not to the gradual mitigation of drudgery and poverty historically, geographically and developmentally.

Marcuse (1964: 16) remarks that, in “the last analysis, the “ques-tion of what are true and false needs must be answered by the individuals themselves, but only in the last analysis.” From this per-spective, luxury new media goods and services do not need to be seen as a discrete group additional to a rigid or determinate collec-tion of rudimentary needs but can be viewed instead as belonging to the inseparable category and question of human freedom. The issue is not that, as Berry (1994: 41) has it, we perceive as “intel-ligible” that “one person’s” luxury new media goods and services

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“can be another’s (instrumental) necessity” but whether the “one person” in question is truly free to give their own response concern-ing luxury new media goods and services. What we must ask is who is equipped to be autonomous regarding the ideas associated with luxury new media goods and services, and to the question of their instrumental necessity or otherwise?

Our alternative position on Berry’s assertion that luxury goods and services are interpersonally relative conceptions is therefore one that suggests that such assertions and conceptions are, in part at least, the result of interpersonal advertising propaganda and the relative falsification of our very nature, drives, feelings and talents. It is not a question of luxury new media goods and services being identical with high-class goods and services. Instead, it is a question of social order, of how we are always already uncertain that any description and continuation, growth, knowledge and examination of luxury new media goods and services, let alone any contestation of them, is actually our own. Our reasoning thus leads to a reworked idea of luxury and luxury new media goods, services and practices that, on the one hand, makes no claim as to deciding which digital needs should be developed and, on the other, which digital economic de-sires must be satisfied. Yet, in the current social order, where luxury new media goods and services progressively constitute rather than express digital social needs and digital economic desires, one ques-tion persists. How can we, as the present-day bearers of ostensibly limitless digital economic desires, free ourselves from being the targets of broadly successful and extremely creative domination by luxury new media goods and services? In seeking to develop a new philosophical path in what we call “critical luxury studies,” though, it is not enough to simply reconsider Berry’s elucidation of luxury. For what is required is that critical luxury researchers create new condi-tions for the study of luxury new media goods and services. One way to do this is to seek to gain, as Marcuse’s Ph.D. supervisor, Martin Heidegger (1978: 311), once put it, a “free relationship” to the now new media technologies linked with luxury goods and services that opens our eyes and being to the spirit and experience of new media technologies inside their own limits.

Accordingly, our redesignation of luxury and luxury new media goods and services in the present era questions their “rationality,” their “productivity,” their technologization, their increasingly dictato-rial nature and their repressive contribution to the management of today’s individualized society. Hence, we are involved with imagining the difficult and perhaps painful means and different ways by which people, the managed, might disrupt their developing subjection to the digital economic desires signified by luxury new media goods and services and fervently grasp their own deliverance from them. Thus, as critical luxury theorists, we propose another account of luxury and luxury new media goods and services to that offered by Berry. Indeed, our account of luxury and luxury new media goods

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and services focuses upon the painful infliction of “reason” upon our whole society such that, more and more, there are no substi-tute ideas and entire populations are inundated with fervent social fantasies that amount to turning people into objects of desire for the managers of the individualized society. People’s freedom from their increasing dependence upon luxury new media goods and services thus depends upon their consciousness of their alienated subjuga-tion to them. Luxury new media goods and services are not just substitutes for an existence unregulated by outside powers but also impediments to the appearance of a consciousness that can recover a sense of control, authenticity and oneness with and for ourselves.

Today, we should re-acknowledge the potency of Marcuse’s criti-cal theory of needs and satisfactions and reaffirm his critique of the minority of the elite classes. Spellbound, like almost everyone else, by the technological products and processes of luxury new media goods and services, the elite classes are not so much heedless as trained, acclimatized and pre-prepared. The elite classes, then, do not actually obey their digital economic desires but rather their digital false social needs through the possession of, for instance, French jeweler Cartier’s Nouvelle Vague video series, which seeks to “raise consumer emotion” for its recently refurbished collection through a “series of short films that give a different sensation for each product” (Shea 2013: 1–2). Now that this minorities’ “raised consumer emotion” has gone global, whatever digital true social needs may or may not turn out to be, are ever more overcome by digital false social needs presented as “different sensations” or forms of repressive satisfaction. The unique characteristic of advanced postindustrial society for Marcuse (1964: 16) is the effective block-age of those true social needs that demand release, as when true social needs are mysteriously transformed into a Hermès Rallye 24 online game for the global elite French leather goods and scarves-buying classes and unisex focused “race-track inspired porcelain tableware” lines (Shea 2013: 5). The excited pursuit of quenching elite digital economic desires and digitized false social needs accord-ingly and literally races on around the world through the obtaining of online games named for new tableware. For us, Berry’s idea of luxury as “easy” or “painless” “substitution,” or the longing for this, is too one-dimensional, because, in the dominion of luxury and luxury new media goods and services, it is this easy or painless substitution of nearly everything today that is precisely what we must be liberated from. The contemporary meaning of luxury and luxury new media goods and services can henceforward be more accurately under-stood as the needless understanding and expression of a varied assortment of interpersonal “rewards” and relative “comforts.” It is an idea of human survival that maintains the diverse provinces of luxury while excusing the devastating power and repressive purposes of the well-heeled spaces of luxury new media goods and services like “race-track inspired porcelain tableware.” We are transported

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therefore to a gradually more homogenized spatiotemporal notion of luxury new media goods and services as forms of control, excess, confusion or even “relaxation,” and to the “need for maintaining such deceptive liberties” (Marcuse 1964: 17) these in turn predictably create.

Conclusion: An Era of Euphoria in UnhappinessIn contemporary advanced societies, luxury has grown in impor-tance, and so has new media. This has led us, as contemporary critical luxury theorists, to argue that we live in an era of administered euphoria in unhappiness, of censorious well-being tinged with the endless dissatisfactions of “free competition” and “free choice” be-tween luxury brands and digital gadgets. As William Merrin (2014) argues, the assimilation of new media into luxury and other gadgets is enormously successful in the present period. More significantly, the success of the luxury digital gadget, such as a Stuart Hughes luxury mobile phone, lies not only in its hyper-functionality, ludic experience and its relationship with what Merrin calls “me-dia” but also in its capacity to integrate our individualized lives, actions and routines with the systematic alienation of our bodies and the narco-tization of our awareness. By an era of euphoria in unhappiness, we mean that new media and luxury together increasingly frame, even rule, our repressive experience by producing “libertarian”displeasure and powerful feelings of great elation as channels of power. Luxury new media’s boundless “choices” and emphasis on individualization thus more and more displace genuine euphoria as the measurement of what exaggerated feelings are. How do we know, decisively, what factors are euphoric? We dutifully watch online luxury television and we obediently read on-screen luxury newspapers and e-books, and the externally determined feelings of euphoria staged in these luxury new media are the ones we use to acquire not only consciousness of our strong feelings of happiness, confidence and well-being, but also to gain an impression of the degree of our freedom. We live in euphoria in unhappiness, a world wherein the difference between our “chosen” states of well-being and our “individual” feelings of discontentment within the context of an all-encompassing “free choice” have become distorted, and where such feelings create, if not absolutely, then relatively, our definition of euphoria.

We consider ours a reasonable account of contemporary ad-vanced societies, and of our “freely chosen” dreams of a wide di-versity of luxurious or euphoric new media goods and services. A valuable feature of our description is that it takes a surrounding luxury culture that palpably has altered under conditions of new media as a sign that our sense of freedom has also altered in a comparable way. Namely, if, in part, luxury culture has “become” new media, then, in some measure, we have also “become” new media. If we accept such reasoning, it follows that, increasingly, luxury new media goods and services help to maintain social control over our otherwise

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conceivably socially self-governing lives. It is a similar analysis to that presented by Marcuse (1964: 17), which asserts that, by examining our lives of “toil and fear,” it is reasonable to infer that luxury new media goods and services uphold forms of alienation.

We are captivated by the contemporary advanced societies, by their luxury new media environments, by the almost spontaneous multiplication of superimposed digital “needs.” For us, as British critical luxury theorists, these luxury new media environments seem individually euphoric, collectively unhappy and lacking in true au-tonomy. Such luxury new media environments are one piece of evidence for the effectiveness of social control, not social control in the sense of being hidden and covert, but in the sense of having become “flaunted” and “open.” They are such a part of our everyday environment that it would feel socially restraining if, like the inculcat-ing power of new media generally, they were not just “there.” This is how most social media such as Facebook finds its way into our everyday lives, feelings and the attempted but ultimately always failed satisfaction of false digital social needs (Armitage 2013).

For people today, it seems completely “acceptable” to spend a sizeable amount of their daily existence with luxury new media’s impositions. Yet, as we saw earlier with the example of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, we do not have to go that far back in history to discover a very different state of affairs and various “unacceptable” or negative conceptions of luxury. Obviously, luxury has played an essential role in Western societies at least since the creation of democracy in ancient Greece. However, the inauguration of luxury as new media indisputably means a qualitative alteration in the way that luxury influences, even preconditions, everyday life. Through the launch of first on demand Internet access and afterward mobile digital devices and gadgets, luxury new media, like all new media, is seizing what we might call “given time” and “spaces of political pos-sibility” in everyday life. Spaces of political possibility in the sense that luxury new media, as new media, inhabits and shares immaterial or virtual spaces beyond the once private home. Such spaces of politi-cal possibility are, needless to say, now gradually subject to the cen-tralizing control of the state. One thinks, for example, of the American whistle-blower Edward Snowdon’s recent revelations concerning the wiretapping of millions of telephone calls by America’s National Security Agency (Armitage 2014). And given time in the sense that we more and more spend our time in our homes as preconditioned containers listening online to, for instance, BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, which ends with the “castaway” being offered the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare and, of course, a “luxury.” This, then, is less about listening to luxury online radio than about listen-ing, luxuriously, to the technological disappearance of the difference between given time and spaces of political possibility.

Processes of social control that are “flaunted” and “open” mean that people in everyday life today take the phenomena of the

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elimination of the difference between their satisfied and unsatisfied digital needs for granted. The phenomena of luxury new media as a kind of facade for social inequality, for the preservation of existing class differences, are now a part of the daily environment as the existence of the online Luxury Daily: The News Leader in Luxury Marketing (http://www.luxurydaily.com/) confirms. Furthermore, be-cause of luxury new media’s ideological purpose, it does not usually demand any especial consideration on the part of people when watching online television programs or accessing Leading Hotels of the World, Brian Atwood, Audi or any number of other online newspaper websites. But the phenomena of luxury new media is not simply “there”: it has to be assimilated by people, along with the idea that the digital needs and satisfactions that serve the maintenance of the elite classes can also be shared by “you.” For us, this means that people in the most highly developed areas of contemporary society are losing any sense of the critical distinction between social and individual needs, between luxury new media as a vehicle of information or entertainment and as a mediator of “flaunted” manipu-lation and “open” propaganda. As we have shown in our Marcusian analysis, people are apparently and increasingly unable to distin-guish between an Audi as an actual car and as a digital comic book or deliberate and think over why they use luxury new media the way they do when, for example, purchasing the comforts of luxury hotels.

Thus, the idea of euphoria in unhappiness is, as we understand it, not so much overstated as troubling. This does not mean that luxury new media in advanced postindustrial civilization is “rational” when it comes to sociocultural change or to people’s dreams of either eu-phoria or unhappiness. We argue that at least part of the important role of luxury new media is to intensify the “rational” character of our irrationality. It is not a matter of debating in all-encompassing terms of euphoria in unhappiness. Rather, it is more significant to concen-trate upon more immaterial yet somehow “productive” processes of, for instance, social media and on their results for our actions in a world of rising technological “efficiency.”

We argued in the preceding section that the roles luxury new media plays are tied to people’s individual creative use of and social participation in the “comforts” of new media. They assist in both “positively” technologizing our technological future identities and “needs” and imperiling the social virtues of old or pre-digital media. Additionally, we argued that people use those parts of luxury new media that appear pertinent to their ideas of luxury goods and ser-vices, and they use them in a way that makes “moral” sense to them.

In contemporary advanced societies, as we have argued through-out this article, luxury new media has grown immensely. This means that the possibilities are rising to use luxury new media in decidedly extensive yet particular, individual and integrated corporeal ways that, as Marcuse (1964: 17–18) (and Merrin) argues, make the very idea of alienation problematic. If “you” want to watch luxurious commodities

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on online television, this is now incredibly simple. Moreover, if “you” only want to visit luxury kitchen equipment, luxury couture and luxury hotel websites, “you” can do that. We understand all this as part of the individualization of society, where people progressively “choose” the socially controlled existence “they” want to live, regardless of customary conceptions of social needs and economic desires. Understanding these “productive” processes like this allows us to emphasize the fact that the prevailing forms of social control are techno-mediated in a new, luxurious, sense. For it is surely accurate that, currently, people not only make personal choices regarding luxury new media use, and use it in ways that “make sense” to them but also make those personal choices regarding luxury new media within an overall framework of increasing techno-social control. Thus, it is important to recall that luxury new media use, as one incarna-tion of techno-social reason, just like various sociocultural groups, interests and practices, is largely determined by outwardly “sensible” yet inwardly contradictory habits and irrational capabilities, and by a contemporary sociocultural backdrop that perceives any refusal of techno-social control as ridiculous and unfeasible. Accordingly, unless “you” develop in a society and a culture wherein it is “ac-ceptable” to question the most luxurious areas of our advanced civilization, “you” will never learn to question them. For questioning luxury new media appears inappropriate under conditions where techno-social control has been integrated to the degree where even the mild refusal to “accept” the technological “raising of our consumer emotions” in the name of “race-track inspired porcelain tableware” seems irrational.

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