The thing is, the insight that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” applies equally to media and culture only insofar as we treat media as products to be consumed.
Most people, in most places, at most times throughout history have not approached art or culture in this way. Culture only really becomes a product of consumption – something to be consumed, passively digested, and unceremoniously discarded once used – under capitalism and modernity. Previously, people did not relate to art and culture as products of consumption; rather, they approached art and culture as a relation of cultivation (the original meanings of the word “culture” are, in fact, about both cultivating the soil and developing one’s mind, faculties, manners, etc.). It was a relationship of care, through which one cultivated a relationship with the world, with other human beings, with oneself. Beyond simply passively consuming or using a cultural object, one engaged with it through judgment and evaluation: a process that is intimately related to the immediate pleasure or displeasure of taste, but which has little to do with consumption, as the purpose of judgment and evaluation is not to simply have done with a thing by assigning it to its proper category (good/bad, problematic/unproblematic, etc.) but rather to decide for yourself what the thing means, what its value is to you, what you can learn from it, and what kind of relation you want to take to its contents or message or form.
This doesn’t mean that entertainment ceases to exist in the relation of cultivation, but that one ceases to approach art and culture (even cultural objects that were meant to be entertaining) as consumable products that are used up in the process of consumption, and instead approaches media as something that has a certain durability and lasting existence outside of and beyond our capacity to consume it.
To me, trying to decide if it is “ethical” or “morally justifiable” to consume media based on whether or not it has a problematic message/theme/character/creator etc. is beside the point. You can always approach media – even “problematic” media – from an attitude and relationship of cultivation, judgment, and evaluation that has nothing to do with consumption, and that doesn’t try to assign it a simplistic moral value.
I think that the attitude towards media that treats it as products to be consumed is actually what accounts for the unbelievably stupid trend of thinking that “liking” an “evil” (or problematic or complicated or villainous or whatever) character in a piece of media amounts to endorsing their actions (e.g., liking Hannibal or finding it entertaining, interesting, etc. amounts to endorsing cannibalism). Similarly, the idea that simply engaging with, or even liking, media made by shitty people makes the person engaging with that media shitty, too. It goes back to consumption in that, when we consume something, we make it a part of ourselves through a process that is largely passive and automatic (like digestion). But this isn’t how our relation to media works (or, at least, its not how it should work). People (well…some people) don’t just passively and automatically absorb the ideas, values, themes, etc. of whatever they watch/listen to/read/play. There is always the possibility of some level of mediation there: judgment, evaluation, etc.
I don’t know. I just think the whole idea of not engaging with media because it or its creators are “problematic” is bogus.
