consumer culture and modernity

by Don Slater (Polity Press, 1997)

You can order inspection copies by emailing to inspcopy@blackwellpublishers.co.uk. Please indicate your course title and number of students (must be more than 12) when asking for inspection copies.

Introduction

This book is an introduction to the field of consumer culture. More specifically, it focuses on theories of consumer culture and on the issues through which people have organised their thoughts on consumption and culture in the modern world. The fundamental aim of the book is to situate and make sense of these theories and issues as part of the broad development of social thought over the modern period. The book is less concerned with asking, ‘What is consumer culture?’ and more with the question of how certain modern experiences and dilemmas have been formulated: the rise of commercial society, the relation between needs and social structures, the relation between freedom of choice and the power of commercial systems, the nature of selves and identities in a post-traditional world, the reproduction of social order, prosperity and progress, and of social status and division, the modern fate of individuals and of the intimate, private and everyday world.

The framework of this discussion is indeed modernity. The issues and concepts central to thinking about consumer culture are the same ones which have been central to modern intellectual life in general since the Enlightenment. Neither consumer culture as a social experience nor the issues through which that experience has been addressed are new or even recent: consumer culture is a motif threaded through the texture of modernity, a motif that recapitulates the preoccupations and characteristic styles of thought of the modern west.

This way of introducing the field of consumer culture is a response to an endemic problem with this ‘field’: consumer culture is rediscovered every few decades, or – to be uncharitable – it has been redesigned, repackaged and relaunched as a new academic or political product every generation since the sixteenth century. The latest relaunches – by postmodernism and neo-liberalism in the 1980s – have constituted a particularly profound ‘year zero’ of the consumer revolution. Postmodernism in particular has produced astonishing insights and productive disruptions. Because of its very nature however it has tended to define consumer culture in opposition to modernity, as itself constituting a disruption of modernity. A newcomer to the field, digging their way through the avalanche of new material, might well have difficulty connecting either consumer culture or postmodernism itself to the longer-term context of modern thought which alone can make sense of either of them.

This way of putting things (and of organising the book) is tendentious. It assumes that postmodern thought and experience can be ‘made sense of’ in terms of older, modern structures of thought and experience, that neither postmodernism nor postmodernity have blasted these into irrelevance. Hence this book is structured by another feature (which I was not aware of when I started it): a commitment to something very loosely called ‘sociology’. Consumer culture is probably less a ‘field’ (which evokes the steady tilling of a well-marked patch of productive land) and more a spaghetti junction of intersecting disciplines, methodologies, politics. The enduring issue which underlies all of them is the nature of ‘the social’. Where productive work has been carried out it has been on the assumption that the study of consumer culture is not simply the study of texts and textuality, of individual choice and consciousness, of wants and desires, but rather the study of such things in the context of social relations, structures, institutions, systems. It is the study of the social conditions under which personal and social wants and the organisation of social resources mutually define each other.

How can we relate consumer culture to this nebulous thing called ‘the social’? Underlying this book are several central themes through which this connection has been made throughout modern discourses on consumer culture and society. The most central theme is the concept of ‘needs’, which explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Ways of thinking about this relation can be further grouped around three central issues: commercialisation and the economy; cultural reproduction; and ‘ethics’ and identity.

Common-sensically, being a consumer is about knowing one’s needs and getting them satisfied: choosing, buying, using and enjoying – or failing in these. Need is often not seen as a particularly social concept: on the one hand, needs can be seen as natural and self-evident (for example, ‘basic needs’ for food, clothing and shelter); on the other hand, they are often seen as arbitrary and subjective – as ‘wants’, ‘whims’, ‘preferences’ or ‘desires’ that are entirely bound up with the peculiarities of individuals. Both of these approaches obscure the fundamentally social nature of ‘needs’. This must be very clear: ‘needs’ are not social in the simple sense that there are ‘social influences’ or ‘social pressures’ or processes of ‘socialisation’ through which ‘society’ ‘moulds’ ‘the individual’. The central point is a different one: When I say that ‘I need something’, I am making at least two profoundly social statements: Firstly, I am saying that I ‘need’ this thing in order to live a certain kind of life, have certain kinds of relations with others (for example, have this kind of family), be a certain kind of person, carry out certain actions or achieve certain aims. Statements of need are by their very nature profoundly bound up with assumptions about how people would, could or should live in their society: needs are not only social but also political in that they involve statements about social interests and projects. This connection is partially obscured when needs are treated as natural or ‘purely subjective’, but it is there nonetheless. (These formulations are particularly indebted to the work of Kate Soper 1981, 1990; see also Doyal and Gough 1991.)

Secondly, to say that ‘I (or we – my social group, my community, my class) need something’ is to make a claim on social resources, to claim an entitlement. Needs are both social and political in this respect too: they are statements which question whether material and symbolic resources, labour, power are being allocated by contemporary social processes and institutions in such a way as to sustain the kinds of lives that people want to live. Throughout the modern period the assumption has been that social production should ultimately be accountable to social values. Different ideologies derive these values in different ways: liberalism treats the individual as a sovereign authority; conservatives have deified tradition, historicity and ‘culture’; Marxism has an ethical commitment to human creative powers. What they share is a sense that consumer culture stands judged by its ability to sustain desired ways of life – to meet needs. Moreover, and this has probably been the central issue in studying consumer culture, there is the question of whether social systems of resource allocation meet the needs defined autonomously by social groups and communities, and do so equitably, or whether these systems (market forces, private corporations, media and cultural institutions, modern ‘knowledges’, sciences and expertise) have the power to define people’s needs for them, or to so reduce some people’s access to resources that their ability to define and lead the life they believe to be a good one – i.e., to ‘satisfy their needs’ – is unjustly restricted.

Thus, there is nothing trivial about consumer culture – though arguments that it reduces social life to a trivial materialism have been common currency for several centuries. Rather, the great issue about consumer culture is the way in which it connects up central questions about how we should or want to live with questions about how society is organised – and does so at the level of everyday life: the material and symbolic structure of the places we live in and how we live in them; the food we eat and clothes we wear; the scarcities and inequities we suffer; the activities open to us in our ‘free time’; the unfree nature of much of our time. Even (especially?) the most trivial objects of consumption both make up the fabric of our meaningful life and connect this intimate and mundane world to great fields of social contestation. In the very process of helping to constitute ‘private life’, consumer culture has tied the intimate world inextricably to the public, the social, the macro and (as many of the charges against it recount) allowed these to invade the private to an considerable degree. Consumer culture is largely mundane, yet that mundanity is where we live and breathe, and increasingly so as we sense that the public sphere of life has become a consumable spectacle that is ever more remote as a sphere of direct action. ‘Consumer culture’ is therefore a story of struggles for the soul of everyday life, battles to control the texture of the quotidian.

We can talk of at least three great fields of social contestation, which are deeply interwoven: Firstly, the consumption of goods and services requires the mobilisation of social resources and this is always carried out under specific social arrangements of productive organisation, technological abilities, relations of labour, property and distribution. The specific arrangements arrived at, the way in which relations of production and relations of consumption mediate each other, places consumption at the heart of questions about what kind of society we are: how is access to objects of consumption regulated; what is the logic which determines the nature of the goods which are provided to the everyday world; how are our notions of needs, identity, ways of life defined or identified or mediated. In modern society, the objects of consumption are largely commodities (if sometimes only potentially or during part of their life cycle (Appadurai 1986)): the very ability to carry on everyday life – let alone the scale and quality of that life – is structured by money and market relations. Moreover, the consumption of commodities exposes the everyday to large-scale and rationalised intervention by economic forces and agencies. The great issues which arise from this way of organising consumption concern the commercialisation of everyday life, the extent to which its soul is structured in depth by the mediation of economically motivated agents and systems, and the inequities and iniquities of market-based distribution of wealth.

Secondly, the truism that all objects of consumption are meaningful implicates them in a wider field of cultural reproduction. The most private act of consumption animates public and social systems of signs, not necessarily in the sense of public display (as in ideas of ‘emulation’, ‘conspicuous consumption’ or ‘status competition’) but more fundamentally through the process of cultural reproduction: in consuming we do not – ever – simply reproduce our physical existence but also ‘reproduce’ – sustain, evolve, defend, contest, imagine, reject – culturally specific, meaningful ways of life. In mundane consumption we construct social identities and relations out of social resources with which we engage as skilled social agents. As consumption has become an ever more central means of enacting our citizenship of the social world, struggles over the power to dispose of material, financial and symbolic power and resources have become central to the cultural reproduction of the everyday world.

Finally, there is a more nebulous field of contestation in which the character of the quotidian is bound up with questions of identity and ethics: what kind of social actors are we? Many of our questions about what form we take as modern subjects, about how to understand the very relation between the everyday world and the public space, about our moral and social value, about our privacy and power of disposal over our lives, about ‘who we are’ – many of these questions are taken up in relation to consumption and our social status as a rather new thing called a ‘consumer’: we see ourselves as people who ‘choose’, who are inescapably ‘free’ and self-managing, who make decisions about who we are or want to be and use purchased goods, services and experiences to carry out these identity projects. In a word, consumer culture is a story of struggle over the everyday partly because it connects up with the social field of ‘ethics’ (in Foucault’s sense), identity and the nature of the self.

In their most general sense, none of these fields of contestation is new. Although commercialisation has been a marginal feature outside Western modernity, consumption always depends on social arrangements, which we now denote as ‘economic’, for managing material resources. Objects of consumption are always culturally meaningful and have been used at all times to culturally reproduce social identities. Finally, ethical questions about the scale, nature and social ordering of consumption seem to be universally considered fair game for social, moral or religious regulation of the self. In a word, the profoundly social nature of consumption is about as close to a universal presupposition as any responsible social theorist ever gets.

However, this book will not be concerned with the general. The particular struggles around everyday life which we have come to call consumer culture, the particular arrangements through which the material basis, cultural forms and ethical status of everyday life in the modern world are structured and contested – these are a very particular ‘achievement’ of western modernity, one which arose in recognisable form in the eighteenth century and which came to world historical importance through the globalising character which has been intrinsic to that modernity. It is the way in which people have thought about this experience that forms the subject of the book. Chapter 1, therefore, sets out to give a very general characterisation of consumer culture as a long-term feature of modernity, including a list of the kinds of attributes by which we can recognise it as a modern, as opposed to recent, phenomenon.

Chapter 2 is about the consumer and consumer sovereignty: we will look at how the idea of the consumer has been related to the core modern values of reason, freedom and social progress from the Enlightenment through liberal political and economic thought and onwards to contemporary ideas of ‘enterprise culture’. In Chapter 3, the focus is on culture: for many modern critics of modernity, the very phrase ‘consumer culture’ is a contradiction in terms. This is because it represents the destruction of a stable traditional social order by industrial and capitalist relations that debase real ‘culture’, undermine the social values that are necessary for social solidarity, and render people’s social identities unstable, fluid and a matter for obsessive concern. Chapter 4 takes up the issue of alienation: consumer culture is often experienced as an explosive output of things, of a wealth and prosperity which promises satisfaction but seems only to deliver poverty, boredom and a sense of estrangement. Chapter 5 is about the meaning of all these consumer things and about the place of things and their meanings within social practice. The question of meaning raises numerous questions – largely presented through a discussion of semiotics – about the relations between needs and objects, nature and culture, meaning and social practice. These are pursued in Chapter 6 in terms of the long-standing social theoretical attempt to understand how the meaningful character of goods enters into the cultural reproduction of social identity, membership, status and ideology. Finally, Chapter 7 is about the most pressing contemporary theme in consumer culture, the claim that there have been epochal changes in economic and cultural relations over the past few decades which have made both consumption and culture more central to social life, which have altered the way in which consumer culture is carried out and the role it plays in social reproduction as a whole, and which have shifted us out of the modern period into ‘new times’: an era of postmodernity, and of post-Fordist or ‘disorganised’ capitalism.

about
books
courses
notices
email

consumer culture and modernity

by Don Slater (Polity Press, 1997)

Contents:

Introduction