Archive forward> Back<

ISSUE 5- Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
The Desire Edition

Welocme to a life outside Work
by Rosemary Shirley

A yearning for a leisured lifestyle

I have the blue IKEA Kitchen it has a splash back made of tiny blue tiles which twinkle like the Mediterranean sea. I like to leaf through second hand books on the South bank with my beautiful significant other.

I have the red IKEA kitchen it has a single curved tap and silver door handles. I take woodland strolls with my ginger haired child.

Live your life. Love your home IKEA
If your kitchen costs less you can work less

You may have seen these billboards at stations and on board tube trains, catching people as they commute, getting them when they are at their weakest, hating their jobs (work less) trying to get home (love your home), feeling hungry (advertising kitchens).

Or you may have seen the TV ad; a sweaty office full of white, white collar workers chant and whoop as one of their number dares to leave the office at early. The street outside is empty except for his floral clad lady friend (obviously with no job herself to worry about), who throws her arms around his grubby neck.

There are so many things wrong with this advertising
campaign that I feel breathless.

From a Marxist perspective it is of course outrageous:
"[it] breaks a tacit taboo in advertising discourse against explicitly referencing the source of all wealth. Rather than flatter us by pretending we're bourgeois consumers, it rubs our noses in our grubby proletarian status."*

In addition, the advert sjows only one worker leaving the office, this is not collective action, the other workers look on in astonished admiration, they don't pack their bags. It teams an action against the capitalist economy (withdrawing labour) with the supporting action of consuming.

It is full of false oppositions and equations that really don't add up:
If
new kitchen = less work
then
old kitchen = more work?

As with most adverts it connects an object with a lifestyle, in this case freedom from work. Even if this were the case and somehow through the purchase of a new kitchen you were able to convince your boss to let you leave two hours early (even though this is a problem for most women with school age children with or without IKEA kitchens) what would we do with this life outside work? The adverts suggest rolling on grass with some children or taking a nature walk. But when you think about popular bank holiday leisure activities, a visit to IKEA (“I only go for the meatballs while the wife looks around”) is not unheard off.

Rosemary Shirley
*Three Studies in Consumer Desire, http://leninology.blogspot.com