The Consumer Society Critique
Table of Contents Title Page Acknowledgments Introduction PART ONE – The Consumer Society Critique I – “THE CULTURE INDUSTRY: ENLIGHTENMENT AS MASS DECEPTION” (1944) ENDNOTES Chapter 2 – “THE DEPENDENCE EFFECT” (1958) II III IV ENDNOTES Chapter 3 – “THE SEXUAL SELL” (1963) ENDNOTES Chapter 4 – “. . . IMAGES WITHOUT BOTTOM . . .” (1988) ENDNOTES PART TWO – The Social Organization of Symbols Chapter 5 – THE IDEOLOGICAL GENESIS OF NEEDS” (1969) 1. CONSUMPTION AS A LOGIC OF SIGNIFICATIONS 2. CONSUMPTION AS A STRUCTURE OF EXCHANGE AND DIFFERENTIATION 3. THE SYSTEM OF NEEDS AND OF CONSUMPTION AS A SYSTEM OF PRODUCTIVE FORCES ENDNOTES 6 Chapter 6 – “ADVERTISING IN THE AGE OF ACCELERATED MEANING” (1996) SIGN WARS: CONSTRUCTING SIGN VALUES THE LOGIC OF APPROPRIATION VALUE ADDED FLOATING SIGNIFIERS AND THE IMAGE BANK SPIRALS OF REFERENTIALITY, SPEED, AND REFLEXIVITY CULTURAL CRISIS AND CONTRADICTION ENDNOTES Chapter 7 – “HUNGER AS IDEOLOGY” (1993) THE WOMAN WHO DOESN’T EAT MUCH PSYCHING OUT THE FEMALE CONSUMER FOOD, SEXUALITY, AND DESIRE AUTHOR’S NOTE ENDNOTES PART THREE – Consumption and Lived Experience Chapter 8 – “OBJECT AS IMAGE: THE ITALIAN SCOOTER CYCLE” (1988) THREE “MOMENTS” THE GENDER OF MACHINERY MEDIATION THE SCOOTER IN USE CONCLUSION ENDNOTES Chapter 9 – “TOUCHING GREATNESS: THE CENTRAL MIDWEST BARRY MANILOW FAN CLUB” (1991) MODERN CELEBRITY TOUCHING GREATNESS CENTRAL MIDWEST BARRY MANILOW FAN CLUB THEMATIC FINDINGS DISCUSSION ENDNOTES REFERENCES 7 Chapter 10 – “THE ACT OF READING THE ROMANCE: ESCAPE AND INSTRUCTION” (1984) ENDNOTES PART FOUR – Consumption and Social Inequality II – “CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION” (1899) Chapter 12 – “THE AESTHETIC SENSE AS THE SENSE OF DISTINCTION” (1979; … ENDNOTES Chapter 13 – “DOES CULTURAL CAPITAL STRUCTURE AMERICAN CONSUMPTION?” (1998) DISTINGUISHING BOURDIEU METHODS MATERIALITY AND TASTE WORK AND TASTE DISCUSSION REFERENCES ENDNOTES Chapter 14 – “FALSE CONNECTIONS” (1999) ENDNOTES Chapter 15 – “Toy THEORY: BLACK BARBIE AND THE DEEP PLAY OF DIFFERENCE” (1996) BASIC TRAINING TO MARKET, TO MARKET SHANI AND THE POLITICS OF PLASTIC FROM BELL JAR TO BELL CURVE ENDNOTES PART FIVE – The Liberatory Dimensions of Consumer Society Chapter 16 – “Two CHEERS FOR MATERIALISM” (1999) Chapter 17 – “FEMINISM AND FASHION” (1985) 8 ENDNOTES Chapter 18 – “SHOPPING FOR PLEASURE: MALLS, POWER, AND RESISTANCE” (1989) CONSUMING WOMEN COMMODITIES AND WOMEN CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION PROGRESS AND THE NEW PART SIX – The Tendency of Capitalism to Commodify Chapter 19 – “THE FETISHISM OF THE COMMODITY AND ITS SECRET” (1867) THE FETISHISM OF THE COMMODITY AND ITS SECRET ENDNOTES Chapter 20 – “EATING THE OTHER: DESIRE AND RESISTANCE” (1992) Chapter 21 – “THE COOLHUNT” (1997) Chapter 22 – “ADVERTISING AS CULTURAL CRITICISM: BILL BERNBACH VERSUS THE MASS … HOW TO DO IT DIFFERENT ALIENATED BY THE CONFORMITY AND HYPOCRISY OF MASS SOCIETY? HAVE WE GOT A CAR … FROM NAZI CAR TO LOVE BUG ENDNOTES PART SEVEN – New Critiques of Consumer Society Chapter 23 – “VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY AND THE NEW GLOBAL CHALLENGE” (1993) MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE SIMPLE LIFE COMMON EXPRESSIONS OF ECOLOGICAL WAYS OF LIVING 9 MAINTAINING OURSELVES AND SURPASSING OURSELVES THE PUSH OF NECESSITY AND THE PULL OF OPPORTUNITY HISTORICAL ROOTS OF SIMPLICITY THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR CHANGE ENDNOTES Chapter 24 – “CULTURE JAMMING” (1999) THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE DEMARKETING LOOPS Chapter 25 – “A NEW KIND OF RAG TRADE?” (1997) GARMENT MANUFACTURE AND PRODUCTION ENDNOTES Chapter 26 – “TOWARDS A NEW POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION” (1999) THE NEW CONSUMERISM CONSUMER KNOWS BEST A POLITICS OF CONSUMPTION Chapter 27 – “WHY CONSUMPTION MATTERS” (2000) I. CONSUMER SOCIETY II. POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION III. CHASING THE DREAM IV: SPENDING THE CAPITAL V. HIDDEN CONSUMPTION VI. RENEWABLES VII. ENERGY USE CONCLUSION: OUR ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT ENDNOTES Chapter 28 – “ECOLOGY AND NEW WORK: EXCESS CONSUMPTION AND THE JOB SYSTEM” (2000) PERMISSIONS ABOUT THE EDITORS Copyright Page 10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank a number of people who helped us along the way: Diane Wachtell, who originally suggested the idea of an anthology; Gerry McCauley, our wonderful agent; Matt Weiland, our editor, and Tim Roberts, our production editor, both at The New Press; Susan Bordo, Robert Goldman, and Tom O’Guinn, who provided photos for us; Elisheva Lambert and Jim McNeill, who provided dedicated research assistance; Eric Hall, who secured permissions; and Prosannun Parthas-arathi and Tuba Üstüner. We are especially grateful to those publishers and authors who allowed us to reprint their work free of charge or at reduced rates. 11 INTRODUCTION DO AMERICANS CONSUME TOO MUCH? Douglas B. Holt and Juliet B. Schor Global warming, the conspicuous spending of the newly wealthy, excessive advertising, and, most recently, the “Battle of Seattle” have all conspired to put the question of our consumer lives back into public view. Consumer society— the “air we breathe,” as George Orwell has described it— disappears during economic downturns and political crises. It becomes visible again when prosperity seems secure, cultural transformation is too rapid, or environmental disasters occur. Such is the time in which we now find ourselves. As the roads clog with gas-guzzling SUVs and McMansions proliferate in the suburbs, the nation is once again asking fundamental questions about lifestyle. Has “luxury fever,” to use Robert Frank’s phrase, gotten out of hand? Are we really comfortable with the “Brand Is Me” mentality? Have we gone too far in pursuit of the almighty dollar, to the detriment of our families, communities, and natural environment? Even politicians, ordinarily impermeable to questions about consumerism, are voicing doubts. A year ago, Hillary Clinton got the attention of the world by worrying that the export of American entertainment and consumer products was destroying indigenous cultures; and recently, Vice President Al Gore suggested that Americans should focus less on earning money and spend more time with their families. Polls suggest majorities of Americans feel the country has become too materialistic, too focused on getting and spending, and increasingly removed 12 from long-standing nonmaterialist values. Why are doubts about consumer society reemerging at the end of the twentieth century? Three factors have combined to create the current disquiet. Perhaps most obvious is the new inequality—the top 1 percent of households now own about 40 percent of all wealth, and the top 20 percent are responsible for half the country’s consumer spending. The long boom of the 1990s has resulted in a dazzling display among the nation’s newly rich to outdo one another in ostentatious spending. Each twist and turn of this Veblen- esque competition is duly reported on by the national media, whether it’s thousand-dollar bedsheets, ten-thousand-square- foot homes, or hundred thousand dollar vehicles. The entire nation becomes privy to the ins and outs of hiring butlers and erecting stone walls. The onlookers are alternately attracted and repelled, disliking the values driving the conspicuous consumption but at the same time fearful of falling too far behind in this accelerated race. Households of ordinary means console themselves with affordable luxuries, but all is not well in the kingdom of plastics. On the one hand, the sheer disparities of wealth, income, and situation grow harder to justify, particularly as prosperity feels more assured. Homelessness, hunger, and child poverty continue to nag at Americans’ consciences. Furthermore, the upscaling of the wealthy puts pressure on others to follow suit. Many households find themselves stretched thin, as incomes for the majority have not kept pace with rising consumer standards. Savings rates have fallen, while credit card debt and bankruptcies have skyrocketed. Not only money but also time is in short supply. As lifestyle norms require two earners, and jobs become increasingly demanding, time for family and community is squeezed. The acceleration of daily life, often for purposes of consuming, contributes to a feeling that things are out of control. People look back to an earlier era when there was time enough, even if living standards were less opulent. Many long for a simpler, more authentic, less materialist past. “Balance” has become a defining mantra. The second trend is the relentless commodification of all 13 areas of social life, and the rise of market values. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this trend is the marketization of a wide variety of goods and services that had hitherto been outside the profit nexus. Most prominent among these are the services produced in the household economy, where self- provision had been the norm. Today, as married women are more devoted to paid employment, they begin “outsourcing”—hiring baby-sitters, accountants, gardeners, grocery delivery, and personal shoppers. Households that can afford it substitute time for money. Less and less of daily life is produced at home; more and more of what we consume is commodified, i.e., produced for sale on the market. This commodification of daily life is also occurring in other areas. Health care and education, which were previously provided as public goods to citizens, are given over to private corporations who produce them for profit, as if they were ordinary consumer goods. Public services such as welfare and prisons are run by corporations for the purpose of making money. The production of news, culture, sports, and entertainment is also increasingly commodified. Twenty-five years ago, the public good aspect of book and newspaper publishing coexisted with the need to make money. Now, a handful of megaconglomerates have taken over all the major media. Profitability and reproducing the political legitimacy of the system have become the dominant criteria for cultural production. The mouse is truly eating the world. Indeed, virtually no aspect of social life appears to be immune from these trends. “Personal style” is now a hot market commodity. Trend spotters scour the nation’s inner cities, searching for the successors to the hip-hop innovators of the 1980s. They scrutinize the walk, the talk, the way one’s pants are worn. At lightning speed, style moves from inner city to suburb and back again, a marketed commodity. But it’s not just youth culture that is being replicated and sold. Business gurus urge everyone to perfect their personal style. Brand and market yourself, whomever you are. The relentless drive to commodify is also evident in the commercialization of public space and culture. Advertising 14 and marketing appear almost everywhere—in museums, on public television and radio, in doctor’s offices, on subway platforms, and on restaurant menus. Sports arenas, previously named for communities, now sport corporate logos. Movies are replete with product placements. Public schools, once relatively isolated from corporate advertisers, became their new frontier during the 1990s, as marketers strived for “share of mind” among six-year-olds. Many of the nation’s children now watch commercials in their classrooms (via Channel One), learn from corporate-written curricula, look at advertising on the Internet, or drink the official school soft drink (Coke or Pepsi). Indeed, our deepest personal connections are increasingly dominated by market transactions, whether it’s through surrogate motherhood, the sale of one’s DNA, the booming trade in sex for hire, or the commercialization of religion and spirituality. Little remains sacred, and separate from the world of the commodity. As a result people become ever more desperate to sacralize the profane consumer world around them, worshiping celebrities, collections, and brand logos. The third major development that is reigniting criticism of consumer society is the rapid globalization of the world economy. Beginning with the French general strike of December 1995, grassroots opposition to globalization has begun to intensify. The most dramatic example has been the Battle of Seattle, a mesmerizing confrontation between the agents of corporate globalization (represented by the World Trade Organization) and a coalition of labor, environmental, church, student, and anticonsumerist activists. Protesters in Seattle attacked not only, or even mainly, the export of American jobs, but rather the corporate vision of global consumerism. They questioned the very desirability of the WTO’s stated purpose of increasing incomes through global trade. Rejecting the current system of cheap commodities based on exploiting labor and natural resources, they offered alternative visions of local economies built on sustainable agriculture, locally controlled manufacturing and retailing, and limited material desires. It is significant that 15 the protesters went after Nike, Starbucks, and other mega- brands. They stood against corporate consumerism, in favor of locally owned small businesses; they rejected the idea that one’s personhood is defined by the logo on the shoe; and they argued against the impoverishment of small farmers and producers that globalization has wrought. Perhaps most important has been the link between the spread of consumerism and the ongoing devastation of the natural environment—the connections between air travel and carbon accumulation; the demand for exotic hardwoods and species extinction; meat consumption and soil erosion; toxics and human health hazards. Recent years have been the warmest of the century. Weather patterns have turned extreme, and crocuses are appearing in December. As the planet warms up, so too must the debate about our consumption, the ultimate cause of climate change. Within the academy, a parallel discussion is taking place. Scholars are becoming more attentive to questions about the nature and desirability of consumer society, engaging in an ongoing academic conversation. As they have always been, the public and academic debates are dialectically connected. Sometimes scholars anticipate broader cultural changes; in other moments, such as the current one, political movements have set the agenda for the academic dialogue. In the pages that follow, we’ve selected essays that provide an entry point into these discussions. THE ECONOMIC CRITIQUES: CAPITALISM NEEDS CONSUMERS What drives consumer society? Is it corporations, who by their marketing and advertising campaigns ultimately determine what consumers want? Or is it consumers, whom producers must satisfy in order to stay in business? This deceptively simple question has been at the heart of much of the scholarly literature, and continues to preoccupy both supporters and detractors of consumer society. 16 Throughout the middle decades of the century, from the 1940s until the 1980s, the theme of corporate influence was dominant in the scholarly literature. One of the most influential contributions was the 1944 classic essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, prominent members of the Frankfurt School. Drawing on Marx’s theory of alienation in the workplace, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that employers’ needs for objectified and submissive workers created a parallel need for dominated, passive consumers. Creativity and subjectivity, the hallmarks of the artisanal economy, are simply incompatible with the de-skilling and repetitiveness of mass-production industry. Culture, once brilliant, demanding, and intellectually challenging, becomes soothing, banal, familiar, and entertaining. With astonishing prescience, Adorno and Horkheimer predicted the “dumbing down” of art and culture, the concentration of cultural producers, and the spread of an entertainment society. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the objectification of labor requires the objectification of the consumer. This “paramount position of production” was to assume a central role in other influential critiques of consumer society, such as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society. Galbraith was also posing the question of compatability between production and consumption, but in ways more Keynesian than Marxian. In particular, the phenomenal increases in productivity that fueled mass production had to be accompanied by similarly phenomenal increases in consumer demand. But how to ensure that the endless stream of cars, appliances, and other products would actually be sold? Galbraith’s answer—the dependence effect—is that “the institutions of advertising and salesmanship. . . create desires.” The corporation both creates the want, and satisfies it. Compatibility is ensured because the same institution controls both sides of the market. This was to prove a potent theme in the fifties and early sixties, as the ascendance of Madison Avenue and its turn to ever more sophisticated psychological approaches alarmed many. Books such as Vance Packard’s The Hidden 17 Persuaders and Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man stressed the seamlessness of the system. In 1963 Betty Friedan produced a brilliant gynocentric companion piece to Adorno and Horkheimer’s androcentric analysis. For the latter, production means factories and male workers; for Friedan, the relevant labor process is the household economy and occupation: housewife. But in both, work is boring, repetitive, unskilled, mundane. Friedan argues that the feminine mystique, and its attendant confinement of women to the home, was driven mainly by the need to sell products. Combing through the motivation research of Ernest Dichter, Friedan reconstructs the marketers’ view of women. They were the backbone of the consumer economy, but career women did not care to spend their lives doing something as trivial and unsatisfying as shopping. Capitalism needed housewives, stunted in their careers, driven to purchase discerningly, manipulated into channeling their considerable creative potential into cake mixes, washing powders, and the choice of breakfast cereal rather than more significant accomplishments in the world of work. Of course marketers promise more than the mundane world of the kitchen. As Stuart Ewen argues in his piece on style, Madison Avenue also offers commodities as the route to pleasure and sexuality, through their ability to create identity, freedom, “fascination and enchantment,” beauty, and style. Consumers are seduced by sophisticated advertising to adopt a host of superfluous preferences for products, which are at heart advertisers’ fictions: Buy style in the marketplace and you can be whoever you want to be. While they differed in many ways, these critical accounts shared certain themes—they described false and true needs, a superficial, surface world of commodities versus an underlying realm of authentic life. Furthermore, in these accounts, the standard defense of the system became illegitimate, for if corporations created needs, particularly in insidious ways, they could hardly be credited for meeting them. There was a better, more authentic, and less consumerist way to live. But it was blocked by corporate power. 18 A second critique was aesthetic. Mass production was derided as lacking quality, taste, and creativity. Thus, consumer society produced neither the good, the true, nor the beautiful. It was a great con game. THE CULTURAL CRITIQUES: MANUFACTURING MEANINGS The economic critiques explain how the profit motive leads to the organization of consumption. They are less compelling in their descriptions of why consumers go along with corporate designs. One answer is that advertisers have been successful because they have been able to embed valued meanings in products. If correct, this argument leads to the important conclusion that meaning does not necessarily emanate from the material or functional aspects of products. As anthropology has been particularly good at showing, human understandings and experiences of what are seemingly objective properties are actually cultural constructions. Goods have symbolic meanings in all societies. However, capitalism poses a new problem—imbuing functionally and materially similar products with different symbolic meanings. The marketer needs to induce the consumer to pay a premium for products that are mere commodities (i.e., mass-produced, identical goods). Despite their emphasis on manipulation, Adorno and Horkheimer understood the importance of symbolic meanings with their recognition that consumers could use consumer goods and marketed imagery to create categories of social difference. It is with Jean Baudrillard, however, that we begin to find a fully articulated theory of the production of social meaning through commodities. The primary target of his damning essays is the argument of most defenders of consumer society—the idea that commodities are produced to respond to individual needs and wants. Such tautological formulations beg the question: How are these needs and wants produced? 19 Baudrillard’s answer is that individual desires are disguised expressions of social differences in a system of cultural meanings that is produced through commodities. This “fashion system” is a code—an infinitely variable set of social differences—that people access through consumption. It is not meaningful to talk about authentic versus false needs in Baudrillard’s model, only the extent to which people have been absorbed into the fashion logic. One of the most important implications of this view is that if consumer society is premised upon the production of difference through commodities, then the system is extremely resilient. How can a social movement challenge consumer society without falling prey to the further expansion of fashionable difference through its opposition? Building upon Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, and Judith Williamson’s pioneering discourse analyses of advertisements as mythological systems, Robert Goldman and his coauthor Stephen Papson explicate the ways in which cultural meanings are sold. By positing a set of equivalences, ads reframe public meanings in order to enhance the meanings of “commodity-signs.” From this approach, which is based on detailed analyses of the semiotic mechanics of ads, a new critique emerges. Rather than wants and needs, the conceptual building blocks are meaning and identity. The critic now has ammunition for challenging the meanings of commodities. Susan Bordo uses this method to powerful effect in her analyses of how advertisements work as “gender ideology.” Gendered advertisements represent the idealized woman as thin without having to struggle to be so, and frequently exploit many women’s struggles to take control of their appetites and hunger. Advertising, in Bordo’s argument, is a compelling symbolic arena in which patriarchal ideology, which seeks to maintain control over women’s bodies and sexuality, is continually reproduced as an unintended consequence of advertisers’ seeking out meanings that will sell product. 20 CONSUMERS’ LIVED EXPERIENCES The economic and cultural critiques are functionalist arguments in which consumers are imbricated into systems of superfluous benefits and commodified meanings, respectively. But how is it that people—whom we presume to be reasonably smart, industrious, diverse, and increasingly reflexive and cynical about marketing—allow this to happen? How do their actions as consumers work in concert with marketers’ efforts to reproduce the system? The foregoing approaches do not provide fully satisfactory accounts of that process. A tradition of research initiated by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham (known as the “Birmingham School” or, more broadly, “British Cultural Studies”), pursued the question of how such structures play out in everyday life. Using detailed historical and ethnographic case studies this work links structuralist theories (such as Baudrillard’s) with anthropological accounts of the production of meaning. The Birmingham School’s most influential studies (including those by Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, and others) examine how the everyday cultural practices found in British youth subcultures serve to reproduce class boundaries. This style of analysis is readily extended to broader questions about the organization of consumption in advanced capitalist societies. The essays in this volume offer vivid and nuanced depictions of the ways in which people use commodities to experience, challenge, and transform dominant cultural meanings. Hebdige’s chapter on Italian motor scooters is the most explicit examination of the ways in which commodities are used in everyday life while simultaneously locating these practices within “larger networks of relationships.” His chronicle of the meanings of motor scooters begins with their introduction in Italy as a gendered (for the “new Italian woman”), cosmopolitan, and youthful mode of transportation. Migrating to Great Britain after World War II, the scooters’ design elements, combined with their “Italianness,” make them read as very feminine. These meanings were taken up 21 by the emerging scooter clubs as well as movies (one of the early product-placement successes). This rearticulation produced the scooter as the perfect raw semiotic material for yet another movement, the Mods. The Mods were a highly stylized male youth subculture that fancied accouterments that screamed modern and (slightly) effeminate (in opposition to the vulgarities of the “rockers”). Hebdige continues the structuralist emphasis on meaning embedded in relational oppositions but, in the poststructuralist spirit, demonstrates how these meanings shift dramatically across place and time. Janice Radway’s famous ethnographic study shows how women use romance reading to manage their pleasures and identities within pa-triarchical relations. Digging beneath the common observation that women read romances “to escape,” she describes the ways in which women bracket their demanding family and household care responsibilities— patriarchal constructs naturalized as what women are born to do—in order to gain emotional respite. By entering a fantasy world in which a heroine with burdens similar to her own gets her emotional and identity needs met, the romance reader is able to experience vicariously the pleasures of receiving the care that often goes unreciprocated in her own family. Romances are “exercises in extrapolation. . . experiments [that] explore the meaning and consequences of behavior accepted by contemporary society as characteristically masculine.” In other words, the romances act as little mythologies, providing miraculous resolutions to the contradictory and often emotionally punishing nature of living in a culture dominated by men’s interests. Radway’s analysis, often considered only within the context of gender studies, offers an excellent treatment of the ways in which commodity logic works to capture powerful ideologies and pleasures. In a manner rather opposite that suggested by Galbraith and Ewen, the book market has evolved a carefully tailored formula to provide novels that will deliver the emotional safety valve demanded by women. This analysis entails a critique of consumer culture that addresses how the contradictions produced by patriarchy get channeled into the 22 commodification process rather than generating political, legal, and cultural efforts to push for an egalitarian family structure. Tom O‘Guinn’s study of the Central Midwest Barry Manilow Fan Club delves into a central phenomenon of consumer society: the consumption of celebrity. Informed primarily by cultural anthropology, O’Guinn views celebrity fandom as a modern-day religion. Barry Manilow fans go to great lengths to “touch greatness,” that is, to develop a relationship with the star. While O‘Guinn does not explicitly develop the societal implications of this pervasive and intensive type of activity, we think it provides an illuminating example of consumer society at work. As sociologists have long argued, modern social relations tend to drain absolutist faith. However, the need for the metaphysical moorings that religion provides does not disappear. Consumer society, as perhaps the most powerful locus of cultural meanings now available (along with the nation-state), has become a prime site for the rearticulation of religiosity. Thus, as O’Guinn documents, people from all walks of life engage in a new form of religious practice via famous actors, sports stars and teams, and other media-anointed icons. As a group, these essays push for a more complicated critique of consumer society. If commodities are an important site through which the most consequential discourses of our time move, then they surely cannot be dismissed as superfluous needs, or even as mere constellations of social difference. A compelling critique must focus not on only on the quantity of consumption, but also on what happens when the primary structures of social difference and inequality (gender, nation, race, and class) are channeled through commodities. It is to those questions that we now turn. THE REPRODUCTION OF SOCIAL INEQUALITY 23 Perhaps the most influential statement of the view that consumption structures social difference is Thorstein Veblen’s 1899 Theory of the Leisure Class. With trenchant wit, Veblen argued that in modern society, wealth (rather than military prowess) had become the basis of social esteem. However, wealth is difficult to measure. Therefore, visible expenditure and the display of idleness become the primary means to communicate the possession of riches. The wealthiest display most ostentatiously, and new consumer trends appear first at the top. Then they trickle down the hierarchy. Of course, social hierarchies are not static. Veblen was writing in a time like our own—great fortunes were being made, and the nouveaux riches used luxury consumption (carriages, elaborately dressed servants, fancy dinner parties) to raise their social position. Central to Veblen’s analyses were the ideas that consuming is a means of social communication; that it communicates class and income differences; and that within a society the valuations of goods are widely shared. These premises also underlie Pierre Bourdieu’s monumental work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Bourdieu, using French consumer surveys, went beyond showing the class patterning of consumption to argue that the very notion of taste is an important aspect of reproducing class differences. For Veblen, it was the cost of an item that was the crucial differentiator. Bourdieu showed that differentiation extended to areas where cost was hardly a factor, as in styles of art, music, decor, and film, and to how, rather than simply what, one consumed. Consumer tastes varied in predictable ways, and depended on “cultural capital”—family upbringing and formal education as well as economic resources. At each place in the social hierarchy, individuals were inculcated into specific taste groups. Bourdieu showed that the class patterning of consumption had become far more sophisticated and complex. Those in the higher reaches of the hierarchy used their superior taste to create “distinction” for themselves, and to distance themselves from those of inferior tastes. Thus, the possession of “good” taste became a 24 mechanism whereby individuals assured their social and economic position; consumption, then, was an integral part of the reproduction of inequality. In Bourdieu’s account, one gained the authority to be a manager, or a professional, not merely by specific skills but also by one’s style of life. Consumption was no longer innocent, trivial, personal, or apolitical, but was directly linked to inequalities in production. Changing how people consume would be a necessary part of any egalitarian social transformation. The contributions by Douglas Holt and Alex Kotlowitz build on these ideas. Holt’s article is the first general application of Bourdieu’s theories to the United States; previous research (e.g., David Halle) had looked at individual cultural forms, such as painting, and concluded that Bourdieu was wrong. By contrast, Holt finds clear class differences among his informants, which are expressed in the ways in which they consume (even more than what they choose). Those high in cultural capital apply a formal aesthetic sensibility to their consumption of food, decor, and mass media, in contrast to the functional aesthetic (emphasis on qualities such as durability) of low cultural capital consumers. Cultural elites also display more cosmopolitanism and connoisseurship in their choice of foods, travel, reading material, and decor. They seek out idiosyncratic consumer opportunities because they are much more sensitive about constructing a distinctive individual style. Those low in cultural capital remain willing participants in mass culture and mass taste. Kotlowitz, writing from a more Veblenian tradition, describes how the same labels and styles are now coveted by very different people—the impoverished African-American youth of inner-city Chicago and middle-class suburban kids both demand Hilfiger, Coach, Nike, and Hush Puppies. Veblen’s simple trickle down from rich to poor has been inverted, even exploded, but visible symbols of status are alive and well. Returning to the theme of the earlier critiques, Kotlowitz argues that the fashion bond between the ghetto and suburban youth is a false one, as the economic deprivation, racism, and social isolation of the urban poor leaves them substantively miles away from the middle-class kids. 25 Ann duCille’s penetrating piece also takes up the theme of racial differences. Looking at the history of how the Mattel corporation has introduced “multicultural” Barbies, duCille makes a sophisticated argument about the ways in which consumer society constructs categories of race. A “black” Barbie can have certain features (“pearly white teeth”), but not others (short or uncombable hair). As Mattel has moved into the lucrative “ethnic” market, it has done so in highly constrained and stereotypical ways, permitting only the “discursively familiar.” Ethnic Barbies retain the bodies and class status of the normative (white) Barbie. The currently trendy commodification of “difference,” duCille reminds us, is both an “impossible space,” and an “anti-matter.” Barbies remain mired in a relational hierarchy—as little girls put it, the white Barbie is the real one. CONSUMING AS LIBERATION Nearly all the premises of critics of consumer society were challenged in the academic debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Veblen, whose influence in the American literature had been profound, was a ritual target of attack. Academics argued that consumption was not a form of social communication, that people were unable to read the “code” of consumer meanings, that advertisers had little control over how consumers constructed meaning. The old social hierarchies were dead; consumption had become a democratic exercise in which anybody could be anything merely by donning the right outfit or car or style. These accounts challenged the Veblenian idea that consumer innovation flowed from top to bottom, they argued against the view that group identities were formed through consumer patterns, and they emphasized the use of commodities to construct individual, creative selves. Instead of being a passive form of mass conformity, consuming was seen as a resistant, liberatory, and creative act. Scholars wrote about the pleasure, enjoyment, escape, and fantasy of consuming. Bourdieu’s hierarchies of taste were seen to have broken down, as high 26 art collapsed into mass culture. It was an anything-goes, chaotic world. Some argued that production and consumption were no longer part of a unified structure; consumption had eclipsed production as the driving force, with production relegated to a relatively minor and adaptive role. The classic critiques were denounced as elitist, moralistic, ascetic, puritanical, mechanical, and out of touch with the consumer experience. (This is the position represented by James Twitchell.) In a related, but more critical vein, a wide variety of work in mass communication and cultural studies has advocated a liberatory view, suggesting that many progressive political possibilities germinate in popular consumption. Elizabeth Wilson and John Fiske represent this view. One of the most common arguments against consumer critics is that they are ascetic (often academic) elites whose status is constructed in opposition to hedonic pleasures. Therefore they aim to deny the bounty of capitalism to the hoi polloi. James Twitchell has become a witty, if not always persuasive, debunker of this anti-hedonist bias among consumer critics. In some ways, his argument is similar to that found in influential anthropological accounts, such as those of Mary Douglas and Douglas Isherwood or Grant McCracken, which take the view that material goods are the primary vehicle for experiencing meaning. What Twitchell adds is a positive spin on this manufactured meaning system, a pure consumer attitude: we love to spend, stuff is our new religion, it makes us happy, it gives us purpose, and, besides, it’s our nature to be materially acquisitive. Forget the dour, puritanical attitudes to spending. The consumer is king and virtually anything goes. Relax and enjoy the ride. Elizabeth Wilson stakes out a feminist politics of fashion that can be readily generalized to a politics of consumption. Wilson argues against an unproductive division between a puritanical moralism that labels as oppressive any normative pressures to be fashionable and a liberal populism that welcomes all forms of pleasure (à la Twitchell). She demonstrates, in arguments that are closely aligned to those of Baudrillard and Barthes, the impossibility of escaping the 27 fashion system either through “feminist style” or through expressing “personal preferences.” Like Bourdieu, she locates feminist style in its appropriate milieu as the dress of cultural elites. Her arguments—that fashion is always impregnated with social meanings and aesthetic considerations, and that it can be played for pleasure as much as for social position—make fashion a form of aesthetic agency that allows for sociopolitical critique as well as a search for alternative ways of living. The pointlessness of fashion, which Veblen hated, is precisely what makes it valuable. It is in this marginalized area of the contingent, the decorative, and the futile, that not simply a new aesthetic but a new cultural order may seed itself. Out of the “cracks in the pavement of cities grow the weeds that begin to rot the fabric, i.e., aesthetic creativity.” John Fiske is frequently cited as offering the most celebratory view of the ways in which structures of social domination can be resisted through consumption. Drawing upon Antonio Gramsci and Michel de Certeau, Fiske analyzes a variety of consumer activities—shopping, watching television, fashion, listening to rock music—to view “tactical raids” on patriarchal capitalism. Fiske finds that subordinated groups (women, people of color, the working class) use commodities to pursue their own socio-cultural interests, albeit in ways that will never threaten the political- economic underpinnings of the system. In the analysis of mall shopping we excerpt, a careful reading will reveal that Fiske’s arguments are more subtle than he is often given credit for. Fiske is concerned with redressing the structuralist emphasis on consumer society as an oppressive system that tends to avoid any consideration of how the oppressed are actually managing their lives within this oppression. To his credit, Fiske demands that elite critics recognize that the oppressed use cultural strategies to compensate for what they are denied economically and politically. What Fiske does not address, however, is the political and economic effects of the pursuit of interest through sociocultural identity. 28 EVERYTHING A COMMODITY? THE POSTMODERN MARKET Much of the debate about consumer society has centered on questions of quantity—excessive consumption, proliferation of new needs. But a second theme, stemming from Marx and Georg Lukacs, emphasizes that at the center of consumer society is a process—goods become commodities, moving through a “circuit” specific to capitalist economies. While this process has occurred since the beginnings of capitalism, vast new arenas are now being commodined—from education and health care to culture itself. The papers in this section reveal the ways in which culture, embodied in concepts such as personal identity, alterity, dissent, and style, have all become grist for the marketer’s mill. These are the new commodities that the market is capitalizing on. In a prescient and sophisticated contribution on this theme, bell hooks analyzes the ways in which racial and cultural differences are sold in contemporary America, through a “consumer cannibalism” in which white middle- class consumers want to “eat” the commodified other: white college boys aspire to be transformed by erotic sexual encounters with black women’s bodies; bored suburbanites crave the exotic primitive sold in apparel catalogues. Blackness and primitiveness stand in for true pleasure, which consumer culture, despite its hedonistic tendencies, is now unable to deliver. While hooks acknowledges that these trends represent an opening that does challenge white supremacy and gender structures, she also warns that they often contain new, subtle messages of racism and sexism. Malcolm Gladwell’s essay describes how the consumption of otherness is now occurring through the search for the newest, coolest trends, a search carried out largely in the inner cities and in youth subcultures. This account of contemporary marketing practices reveals how much the market has changed in the last forty years. In a forthcoming paper, one of us (Holt) has argued that this postmodern marketplace differs in fundamental ways
