Basil Blackwell

Daniel Miller

Social Archaeology Material Cultureand Mass ConsumptionIGeneral Editor

Ian Hodder, University of Cambridge

Advisory EditorsMargaret Conkey, State University of New York

. at BinghamtonMark Leone, University of Maryland

Alain Schnapp, U .E.R. d'Art et d'Archaeology, ParisStephen Shennan, University of SouthamptonBruce Trigger, McGill University, Montreal

1319345068

8385109131133158178

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PrefacePart I Objectification1 "Introduction2 HegelandObjectification3 Marx:ObjectificationasRupture4 Munn:ObjectificationasCulture5 Simmel:ObjectificationasModernityPart II MaterialCulture6 TheHumilityofObjects7 Artefactsin theirContextsPart III MassConsumption8 TheStudyofConsumption9 ObjectDomains,IdeologyandInterests10 TowardsaTheoryofConsumptionReferencesIndex

Contents

,Typeset in 10Yzon 12pt Garamond

by OPUS. OxfordPrinted in Great Britain by T.J. Press (Padstow)Ltd

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication DataMiller,Daniel. 1954-Materialculture and mass consumption,

(Socialarchaeology)Bibliography:p.Includes index.1.Socialarchaeology-Philosophy. 2. Material

culture. 3. Consumption (Economics) 4. Object(Philosophy) I.Tide II.Series.CC72.4.M55 1907 900.1 07-14027

ISBN 0-631-15605-4

\\\I

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataMiller, DanielMaterialculture and mass consumption(Socialarchaeology)..1. EthnologyI.Tide II.Series306'.4 GN316

ISBN 0-631-15605-4

rI

Copyright ©DanielMiller 1987

First published 1987

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This book sets out to investigate the relationship between society andmaterial culture, and to assess the consequences of the enormousincrease in industrial production over the last century. It will beargued then academic study of the specific nature of the materialartefactproduced in society has been remarkably neglected, and thatcompared, for example, to the discipline of linguistics, ourunderstanding of material culture is rudimentary in the extrem~. Thislack of concern with the nature of the artefact appears to haveemerged simultaneously with the quantitativerise in the productionand mass distribution of material goods. The average inhabitant 'of acountry such as Britain uses, and is associated with, a range ofclothing, furnishing, technology, buildings, and other objects which isvast in extent, complexity and diversity compared to any previous era.In short; our culture has become to an increasing degree a materialculture based on an object form. It will be suggested in the course ofthis volume ~en the very physicality of the object which makes itappear so immediate, sensual and assimilable belies its actual nature,and that material culture is one of the most resistant forms of culturalexpression in terms of our attempts to comprehend it.The physicality of the material world is, however, only one of the

reasons for this neglect. Equally important is a series of academictrends which have led to an overwhelming concentration on the area?f production as the key generative arena for the emergence of thedominant social relations in contemporary societies, and' a compara­tive neglect of consumption, together with a concomitant failure toobserve the actual changes which have taken place over the lastcentury in the balance of influence between these two forms of,interactions with goods. A further major cause qf neglect has been thetendency on all sides of the political spectrum to subscribe to certainblanket assumptions concerning the negative consequences of thegrowth of material culture. This culture has been associated with anincreasingly 'materialistic' or 'fetishistic' attitude, which is held to

Introduction

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INTRODUCTION 5the relationship of people to their three-piece suites by reference totheorists such as Simmel or Piaget,Such a-strategy involves the rather perilous activity of taking objects

which are generally regarded as trivial, and holdin~ thert:t ~p foracademic scrutiny. Unless one is a Duchamp working within ~econfines of high art, or has the literary brilliance of Bar.th~) thisbreaking of disciplinary 'frames' and the. treatment of bay w.mdowsand melamine boards as linchpins of modern culture may rapidly 1aythe author open to charges of affectation. It .is evid~t, hO'Y'ever,thatthose same'people who shy away from ~onsldere~ ~1SCusslOno~su.chobjects readily part with a large proportion of their Income to acquirethem. Indeed, the relative ascription of 'importance' and 'trivialio/~,and the fixedness of these categories, is itself a matter whose exph~ltdiscussion may provide major clues as to ~he nature .of maten~lculture, and help to account for its comparative neglect In academicstudies. . , ..A further general aim of this work is to con~entrate on the pos~t1ve

elements "Ofthe model being constructed. Unlike many of the wnterswho have followed Hegel, I do not intend to strike a tragic pose,bewailing an oppressive fate which we cannot control, i? the name ofa utopia we have-either just left or are about to create. First, because Ibelieve, with the' modernists, and in the tradition of some post­Enlightenment theorists, that many of the changes that have t4enplace during 'recent centuries are themselves extremely poslt1~e,providing thebasis for new kinds of equality, knowledge and SOCialdevelopment' which wer~ prev:iou~lyunimaginable, !et alon~ achieva­ble, for anything but a t10Yminonty of the population. But secondlybecause, unlike many modernists, I do n~t regar~ ~~se as theexclusive achievement of planners, leaders, artists and individuals, butrather as the result of large-scale social movements which haveenabled ever expanding sectors of the ~ass population to appropriate

'"these advantages. Furthermore, I beh~v~ that there are reaso?s ~orthinking that this trend may be susta1Oe~, though o~ly through

. continual struggle, in the ~uture. '!he matenal .s~rvered I? the latterstages' of this book provides evidence for grvmg credit for suchdevelopments back .where it is due -: to the mass ~opulace.- ~d forclaiming a perspicacity and subtlety 10mass behaviour which IS a farcry from the passivity, illusion and denigration implied in manyself-proclaimed radical perspectives.The development of such a positive stance regarding the possibili­

ties for mass consumption is intended as a critical perspective; that is,one that condemns the status quo by developing a model of societywhich could be attained and yet is rarely even aimed for at present. As

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have arisen through a focusing on relations to goods per se at theexpense of genuine social interaction. These assumptions are respon­sible for the emergence of a variety of generally nihilistic and globalcritiques of 'modern' life, which have tended to detract from theintensive analysis at the micro-level of the actual relationship betweenpeople and goods in industrial societies, and a remarkable paucity.ofpositive suggestions of a feasible nature as to how industrial soci~tymight appropriate its own culture. .I have approached these questions by starting from a discussion of

the subject-object relationship at the most abstract philosophical leveland progressing by stages to an analysis of certain highly specificaspects of everyday life. A further understanding of the place of goodsin society requires a general perspective on the relationship betweenpeople and things. Such a perspective belongs, however, to a larger setof ideas about the nature of society and the processes generally fallinginto the category of 'culture', and therefore entails wider philosophi­cal questions. In view of this, I have begun by considering a keymoment in the development of Western philosophy and its constantstruggle with the problem of the subject-object duality: that is, thepublication of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. I 'have abstractedfrom this work a set of processes which are then, .extended andcompared to parallel ideas in a number of other academic disciplines;together, these ideas lead to a general grounding of fhe origi?al ~et ofarguments in the mundane world. From philosophical studies ~f thesubject-object duality .and its resolution in a dynamic procers ofbecoming is derived a tentative theory of culture concerned witq. therelationship between the human subject and the external world. As asub-set of this theory of culture, is derived an approach to materialculture as a particular. form of such externalization. From Suchabstractions the approach moves on to consider the specific m~~~rialculture of contemporary Britain, and finally to prop,ose a tentativetheory of the nature of modern mass consumption as the dominantcontext through which we relate to goods. '; .This sequence results in some unusual juxtapositions. The te.npJncy

in modern, highly specialized academic research is for philosophicaldiscussions to take place within the relatively abstract terms,,set bythat discipline, while micro-ethnographic studies of specific asp,ectsofsocial organization tend to be bound by the relativism of .~!teparticular, and lend themselves to philosophical analysis mainly ascritiques of philosophy's pretensions to generality. In the presentvolume, by contrast, the intention is to attempt a better understandingof philosophical. concepts by grounding them in the everyday worldof the high-street shopping centres, and in turn to understand better

OBJECTIFICATION

nnRODUCTION 7

rhetoric or academic debate, and the experiences of everyday life.There seems to be a particular discrepancy between an enormouspublic interest in the levels of people's wages, the dole, and publicservices, and the lack of any comparable interest, outside thecommercial sector, in exactly. what people do with the money orservices received; that is, how they transfer them back into theconstruction of worlds. This suggests that we respect in analysis thesame public/private duality that we ourselves practise. It is worthnoting that. the market researcher has shown much less trepidationthan the academic in crossing this boundary.Some of the interests which appear to dominate people's private

lives have been reflected in a new literature. For example, thewidespread fascination for television soap operas, exploited by largenumbers of newspaper articles about the private lives of the actors andactresses involved, is reflected in the rise of 'media studies' (e.g.Collins et al. 1986).There is, as yet, however, no comparable concernwith similarly 'important domains, such as home furnishing andsupermarket shopping. In particular, outside of the specific interest ingender roles and domesticity found in feminist studies, there is acomparative lack of literature on the increase in "home-centredactivities, developing local institutions such as babysitting circles orhobbies from which new social networks are emerging (see, however,Young and Willmott 1973; Gershuny 1978; Pahl 1984~Wallman1982).While television provides the illusion of a hitherto unrivalledvoyeurism, leaving nightly the impression of having witnessed thevery private affairs of a wide range of households, its impact on thebehaviour of actual neighbourhoods is much less understood.As an example, imagine walking along one of the streets or

corridors on a London council estate. The variety of attitudes peoplemay have to the estate itself has only occasionally been documented(Andrews 1979; Parker 1983). It soon becomes clear that any attemptto use normative models to describe the individual household isideologically charged. Whether one refers to the traditional 'norm' ofthe nuclear family or to some alternative, all such models appear tohide the actual experience, which seems to be perversely opposed toany ordered characterization. This contradiction is most evident in theradical difference between the modernist fa~adeof the high-rise flats,with doors painted identical colours by the council, and what liesbehind, where each householder has played bricoleur with thefacilities provided, supplemented by goods purchased on the market.Moving along the corridor, if flat one may be imagined to hold a

single Cypriot divorcee with her children, then flat two may house amarried couple who have moved from Blackpool with the kids and

II

\A large proportion of the classic texts on social theory, including, indifferent ways, those by Marx, Freud, Durkheim, Weber an~ theFrankfurt School writers, focus on the possibilities for resolving thecontradictions of modernity. Over the last century, however, therehas been a radical change in our perception of what it is !.hatconstitutes the 'modem', and any fresh consideration of these familiarthemes must involve some degree of detachment from the trajectoriesof social theory, and a re-immersion in, and a re-examination of, thenature of the problem itself. . I

Many of the concerns of this work are based on observations of·trends in contemporary British society. At the time of writing I 'amundertaking fieldwork in London which differs from my 'previousexperience in ethnographic research in a South Asian village or theSouth Pacific in that most of the discussions and observations have totake place outside the public domain, in the context of people'shomes. This experience of entering a series of very private domains,selected not because the occupants share common interests as 'friends'or a common origin as 'relatives', but solely because of their residenceon a particular housing estate, givesme the impression that there is anincreasing disparity between the subjects of public concern, political

The Shape of Things to Come

such, this Viewcontrasts with the perspective currently predominantin the academically oriented social sciences. For example, themovements and authors loosely grouped under the 'meta-label' ofpost-structuralism, the various strands of which claim to be radical onthe basis'of a similar condemnatory attitude, may actually be found toprovide only conservative and nihilistic assessments of-the ubiquijyand thus the inevitability of oppression. This, along with the massiVeimpact on the social sciences over the last two decades of Marxisttheory concentrating on a wide variety of exploitative and oppressiveinstitutions, may suggest that in the late 1980s the principal 'criticalchallenge is to produce alternative perspectives directly relevant to therecent transformations and developments in both socialist and .non-socialist societies.My present aim is to examine any such tendencies already evident in

·industrial societies, and to indicate in what way they offer a model forfeasible social change. More specifically with respect to materialculture, the book concludes with the argument that these positivepossibilities are clearly immanent within the consumption activities of·mass populations today.

OBJECTIFICATION6

structured conventions of a mythology; as amongst the classic'peoples' o! social anthropc;>logy,its fou~~ations are compar~tivelyweak in this respect. Even Image~of stability, SUC?as nos~al~I~,arecontinually restructured and reinvented according to individualdomestic situations and expectations. While not denying the impact ofthe larger social and economic forces .which help .to construct suc?relationships, what has been neglected 10 the analy.slsof such .forces ISthe mass response which may often be echoed 10 these micro andhome-centered activities. Despite the high degree of our actualinvolvement in these cultural activities, they tend barely to beacknowledged, and their pivotal position in modern culture certainlyremains quite unappreciated.The trend towards diversity as such is hardly new; Many of the

major theorists who have examined the nature of modern society havealso attempted to represent the aura evoked by the sc~leand d,i,:"ersityof the goods on the marketplace. '!?ose who we:e In a posinon toobserve the birth of mass consumption, such as Simmel, Veblen andlater Benjamin, have provided perhaps the most acute accounts. T?einterest in consumption as the key to the problem of SOCialdevelopment, current at the time of Durkheim (Williams 1982) hassince markedly declined. In recent years, only one sustained attempthas been made to encompass -this diversity within a totalizingperspective which might. pro~i~e ~n orde~ for ~ts elucidat~on, whilesimultaneously confronting It In Its particularity (~ou,rdleu 198~).Bourdieu's emphasis is on artefacts as a consumer aid 10 the majorstruggle for social positioning, this. relational activity takingprecedence as a practice over the abstraction of class (Bourdieu 1985).Judgements are made according to the brand names used, theup-to-dateness of goods, and their arrangement. Increasingly,however, other activities are placed within the -same framework.Political opinions or views on controversial issues may be canvassedless because of concern with the apparent subject of debate than as ameans of placing the indiyid~al socially; that is. of rel~~in~ th~irattitude to eND or immigration to our own. SOCialposinomng IS,however, only one element in the construction of identity, andBourdieu's account is usefully complemented ?y the study ?f good~ascategories (Douglas and Isherwo~d 1979).,the impact of a single ,obJectform in a variety of cultural setnngs (King 1984) ~r the a!1alyslsof agiven domain within the mass market, such as fashion (Wilson 1985).At one level, these features must be connected to the nature of

capitalist production. It is clear that br.~ding policies, design,targeting of goods; and com~any compeunon .are all part of t}teprocess of developing close Iinks between SOCialand commodity

9INTRODUCTION.

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grandparents, flat three a nuclear family born in the area, flat four anelderly retired single male born in Ireland, and flat five a locally bornteenager whose parents emigrated from the West Indies. Ethnic andfamily type are, ,however, only the most evident dimensions of thisdiversity, the full extent of which becomes apparent as one begins toexamine degrees of affluence, self-esteem, political viewpoint, holi­days taken, social networks, allocation of leisure time, or a hundledother variables. This diversity is echoed in the furnishing and style ofthe interior: in one flat, the facilities provided by the council mayhardly have been changed; in the next, a mass of jumbled gifts,redundant furnishings which could not quite be thrown away, anditems retained for possible future use may be stored without apparentorder and filling the space to its limits; in the third, a striking anddominant style may have been imposed: a series of coordinatedcolours, textures and shapes creating a systematic and deliberateimpression of 'modernity'. One flat seems focused on the television,the next on the dining table, the third on the children's toys. Thesymbolism of the objects runs the gamut from futuristic hi-techmodernity through to pastiches of Victorian or even medieval styles,often within the same household and even within the same room.An extraordinary feature of modern British life is the number and

diversity of interests held behind these doors: a fanatic supporter of afootball club lives next to a family that keeps an exotic range of Bets; afollower of a pop group lives next to a political radical. Any dpe ofthese different cultural foci may become a central point of concernand identity. Television and the media continue to uncover the worldchampion hairdresser and the fancy-pigeon breeder, the bibliophileand the expert on coalholes, In this respect, the division of laBourfrom civil servant to store detective, secretary, windowdresser,unemployed person, teacher ~r machine operator becomes onlyanother dimension of difference. . IAn inescapable conclusion from such observation is that the culture

of most people is of a very particular kind. The average person'srelatively passive and infrequent interaction with the performed artsor entertainments appears largely inconsequential, while for thosewho live on a council estate or suburb in London, social activitiesbased on the neighbourhood or community may be extraordinarilysparse. More striking are the very active, fluid and diverse strategiesby means of which people transform resources both purchasedthrough the market and allocated by the council into expressiveenvironments, daily routines and often cosmological ideals: that is,ideas about order, morality and family, and their relationships withthe wider society. The bricolage of the streets is no longer aided by the

INTRODUCTION 11

Although on the surface such definitions appear to be evaluations oftaste and style, they are always in effect denigrations of those peoplewho are associated with the 'other' material and expressive forms.One social group condemns kitsch and soap opera, a!0ng with themass interest in Benidorm or supermarkets; the other IS appalled bythe mass middle-class culture devoid of any true sense of 'history' oreven of the present. In effect, only small minorities may be equatedwith the 'genuine' cultures of leisure or poverty. This antipathy tomiddle-class or inauthentic working-class culture may, however,extend to around three-quarters of Britons today. The alternative is ~oconcentrate upon precisely this 'unpopular' culture: the do-It­yourself warehouses, the bing? hall~, th~ .fitted .kitchens and the'inauthentic' rag-bag and plurality of Identities which make up mostpeople's lives. A similar set of problems would arise if these weretreated as positive and authentic simply because they represent massor popular culture; but it is nevertheless es~ntial. to recognize that,however we perceive them, they constitute the major forms taken bycontemporary industrial culture. As such, they need 'to be. analysed asspecific forms, and not merely dismissed as a fragmented descent fromsome primitive authenticity of the 'subjects' of classic anthropology;nor as merely the symbol of capitalist oppression, nor yet as the meresurface of a superficial era.

Perhaps the major shortcoming of many theories of the concept ofculture is that they identify culture with a set of objects, such as thearts in themselves, rather than seeing it as an evaluation of therelationship through which objects are constituted as social forms.For such theories mass populations may be regarded ~ thems~lvesinauthentic because of the supposed status of their associatedenvironment as, for example, a capitalist or post-modernist culture.Culture, as this book will attempt to demonstrate, is always a processand is never reducible to either its object or its subject form. For thisreason, evaluation should always be of a dynamic relationship, never~~~.. .

The mirror image' of an analysis of objects in themselves IS theassumption tnat society and social relations exist in themselves. Thefoundation of this defence of the 'seriousness' of modem mass cultureis, then, the refusal to isolate it as a symbol or a derivative of someprior set of social relations. Most critics of mass culture tend toassume that the relation of persons to objects is in some way vicarious,fetishistic or wrong; that primary concern should lie with direct socialrelations and 'real' people. The belief underlying this attitude is oftenthat members of pre-industrial societies, free of the burden ofartefacts, lived in more immediate natural relationship with each

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difference (Forty 1986; Haug 1986), but the relationship is not simple.The predictions of academics such as Galbraith (1979) and severalvarieties of Marxist critic (e.g. Ewen and Ewen 1982), who empha­sized the corporate control of capitalism, may not have been fulfilled.From the 1920s through to the 1960s, commerce, influenced byfactors such as economies of scale, attempted to construct a highlypredictable, homogenized and consistent market, which would al~6wfor longer factory runs and high profitability. This is clearly reflectedin the advertising of the period which was designed to break downlocal, ethnic and other customary sub-divisions in the population(Leiss 1983: 19). Commerce was thereby attempting to create a worldmirrored in modernist imagery of science-fiction, a future in which allforms of ethnic or regional particularity have been suppressed andreplaced by a homogeneous, 'designed' population. Observers wholived through the fifties may have seen it as representing the triumphof the logic of technocracy. •

In recent years, however, the expected continuity of this trajectoryhas been called into question. The rise of a new diversity in the markethas produced a curious shift in production, Factories have had tomove from long runs of identical goods ·to much shorter runsproviding specific forms for increasingly fluid target populations.Given the new ethnicity (e.g. Smith 1981), andthe dissolution of themajor accepted gender-based models, this diversity seems set toincrease. This has led to a less predictable, and for a.dvertisirig~ftenless 'addressable', population. Naturally, commerce has adaptrd tosuch changes. The microchip embedded in industrial machinerylnowallows for much smaller runs and maintains profits (Murray 1?85),but this ability to adapt does not reduce the degree to which. industrialproduction appears to have had to follow rather than dictate theseelements of social change. I

Academic approaches to modern diversity are almost alwayscondemnatory. Diversity is taken to represent a new superficiality'andan alienated form of existence, lacking both authenticity and depth. Anumber of versions of this critique have recently come togetherthrough the development of the term 'post-modernism', which-hasbecome a means of both defining and condemning this feature ofmodernity (e.g. Jameson 1984). The history of academic analysissuggests that such approaches, evident, for example, in many of theFrankfurt School writings, seem destined to end in nihilism andelitism. Most common among them is an evaluative or aesthetic stancebased on a view of authenticity found in some narrower definitions ofculture which assign the label 'authentic' to the fine arts, opera andliterature on the one hand, and to the music .hall or a particular formof labour on the other. .

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INTRODUCTION 13modern parlance' of that t~rm v.:itha s~ecific form of M~rxist analysisemphasizing the rupture 1~ SOCialrelat1~)Ust~rough ,!hlch people areeffectively reduced to objects, and objects 10 turn interpose them­selves in relationships between people. Thi~ interpretat~on of Hegel'swork will be rejected, and the processes which are descnbed under theterm objectification will be retained as a positive. mod.e! of thesubject'S potential development, rather than as a neg~t1ve~nt19ueof.arupture in any such development. However, while reJectmg. thispanicular form of Marxist analysis as an approach to these questions,many other aspects QfMarx's grou~ding of th~ philosphical ab~trac­tions of Hegel in the actual pracnces of ordinary peoples will beadopted.Chapter four moves on to consider the discipline of social

anthropology, and establishes the concept of objectification as culturein a non-industrial context. It examines Munn's work on theiconography of a group of Australian abo~gines a~d on. ~eMelanesian kula exchange system. Once agam, certain strikingparallels may be found: not only is the concept of cultural formdeveloped by the anthropologist reflected in the model of culture asobjectification, but there is also evidence that a similar model of su~hprocesses is held by the peoples am?i1g~t~hom the anthropologisthas lived and worked. The matenal 1S Important not only foridentifying these parallels at an abstract level, but also because it canbe applied to the analysis of the construction and use of the ex.ternalworld of 'Objects, and because it asserts the absolute necessrty ofculture for the establishment of all human relations, and discredits theidea that the relationship between people and the t~ings theyconstruct in the physical world is separable from some pnor form ofsocial relation.The final chapter in the first section moves back to a mo.r~~irect

encounter with Hegel's ideas since the Phenomenology of Spmt ISthemodel behind the core text for discussion within this chapter: ThePhilosophy of Money by the sociologist Georg Simmel, Since Simmelremains one of the very few authors who have specifically address~dthe question of the quantitative rise of material culture and. ItSconsequences, he provides an important brid~e between the firstsection of the present work and the remainder C?f the book.Furthermore, his ideas have influenced one of my mam arguments:that is an assertion of the intrinsically contradictory nature ofindustrial society and the impossibility of resolving the conflictinherent in that culture. This will, however, be used to construct apositive.: rather than, as with Simmel, a tragic, reading of thepossibilities of social development.

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This book is divided into three sections: the first, comprising chapterstwo to five, sets out the general approach through an examination ofthe concept of 'objectification'; the second, comprising chapters sixand seven, is devoted to the specific nature of the object as artefact;and the third, comprising chapters eight to ten, develops an approachto modern mass consumption. Each section utilizes a particular styleand methodology, which it may be helpful to have introduced here,together with a summary of the contents.The key term in the first section is 'objectification', which will be

developed as an initial model to which a series of analyses will becompared. The term is used to describe a series of processes consistingof externalization (self-alienation) and sublation (reabso~tion)through which the subject of such a process is created and developed.These processes are first abstracted from Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, and are then used as the basis for a theory of culture. Since;thisabstraction proceeds by isolating certain elements of Hegel's ~orkwhile ignoring the surrounding context within which these..ideasweredeveloped, the approach, although taken from a specific source, equIdnot be termed Hegelian. As with all of the authors subsequently/discussed, the abstraction of a set of particular ideas will be a,{omewhat violent one, which may involve the rejection of much ofitheauthor's contextual argument, terminology and exemplification. Thisprocedure is justified by the contention that both Hegel and the laterauthorities have captured something in their use of these central ideaswhich is not dependent' upon the particular manner in which theyhave developed them, but which may be used to construct anothermeaning through the accretative insights of diverse usages in variousdomains.The third. chapter is devoted to what might otherwise be a severe

problem for any contemporary attempt to use the term objectifieationas a tool of analysis. This arises because of the strong association in

Summary of the Argument

other. This kind of academic criticism extends the distaste evident incolloquial discourse for materialism as an apparent devaluation ofpeople against commodities. I shall question the implication thatseparable real selvesand authentic classesare to be found. I shall arguethat people cannot be reified under the concept of 'society' outside oftheir own cultural milieu. Indeed, much of the first hal£,of this bookwill be devoted to an attempt. to transcend the dualism implied in thevery concept of 'society'. I

OBJECTIFICATION12

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to the problem of the artefact as a single example 01cultural-form. Inchapter 6, an attempt is made to address directly the implications ofthe materiality of the artefact. First, psychological and psychoanalyticstudies are examined which suggest a particular place for the object inthe development of the subject, underlining certain implications of thediscussions of play in order to suggest affinities between language andconsciousness as against the artefact and the unconscious.There follows a more general discussion of the differences between

words and things, and an examination of the close relationshipbetween the object, its context and its place in social reproduction asrepresented by the arguments of the French social anthropologistPierre Bourdieu. A number of the points raised suggest reasons for thecomparative neglect of artefactual studies in academia; providing thebackground to chapter 7 in which, following a general survey ofmaterial culture studies, a somewhat:elliptical approach is taken to theartefact in its context. The importance of considering the artefact assuch is argued mainly, not in the abstract, but through examination ofa number of more familiar fields of enquiry such as function,exchange, space and style. Case studies are shown to offer illustrationsof the specific consequences of the physicality of material culture forinvestigations which would otherwise have tended to ignore thisparticular aspect of their own evidence. .The,Y.!~wof the object as embedded in specific cultural contexts is

fundamental to the third section, which is concerned with massconsumption as the major constitutive arena in which the relationshipof people to artefacts is determined in contemporary industrialsocieties. It is argued that consumption Hassuffered a neglect in ourassessment of history (for example that of Britain over the last threecenturies) comparable in some ways to the neglect of the artefactitself, and not unrelated in cause. Disciplines such asmarketing whichare concerned with present-day consumption are found to provide forvery specific interests mainly devoted to the point of sale; by contrast,there has recently developed in social anthropology a degree ofconcern with consumption as a larger and less transient social process,a dominant influence within which has been a form of analysis inwhich differences in artefacts become grounded in social distinctions.Particular consideration is given to the book Distinction (Bourdieu1984).Chapter 9 continues the trend towards particularity of analysis by

summarizing a series of studies of the objects of modem consumptionranging from children's sweets to semi-detached houses. Suchmicro-studies are contrasted to a trend in modern social theory arisingin particular from post-structuralism and from the critique of

15INTRODUCTION

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The idea of intrinsic and irresolvable contradiction will be used tolegitimize a consistent rejection of that Romanticism which stemsfrom a belief that the goal of academic study is the development of amodel <;>f.society a~ a coherent totality. In different ways thisRomanticism underlies Hegel's absolute knowledge, Marx's Com­munism, and ~immel's appeal ~o aesthetics, as well as many 1~5erdevelopments In European SOCIaltheory Gay 1984). Rather t-?anattemptmg to propose some utopian end to history, the emphasis willbe on the means of living with an inevitable contradictiori.The rather unusual style of analysis of the first section .may be

accounted for by the dearth of writings sharing a similar perspectiveto the present study. The method employed is to examine a series of~exts by authors w~o saw themselv~s as working on quite differentIssues, but whose Ideas are here reinterpreted in order to considertheir implications for the concerns outlined above. It is suggested that,althou_ghthe a~thors were working in different disciplines on a varietyof tOPICS,a senes of parallels underlies their texts (as with Piaget andKlein, discussed in chapter 6), which suggests that they were drawntowards. a common perspective which may be argued throughabstraction to be addressed to the nature of culture.This attempt to show that texts on one topic may offer insights into

a quite different subject results in what may be considered anextremely cavalier treatment of the authors concerned. Such a view isjustified in' so far as my intention is not to present a bal:ipcedrepresentation of the authors' position which would satisfy boththemselves and th~ field within which they worked, but rath~r toabstract. very p~cular eJeme~ts of their ~rguments" distributingemphasis quite dIfferently than ISusual, and In a sense rewriting-theargument in the light of another goal. I am not concerned, then; toconsider or assess the authors in the light oftheir own history, or 'thedevelopment of their discipline at the time, My overall aim is to gain abetter understanding of material culture, not of Hegel or Munnthemselves. What all these texts have in common, however, is a verygreat profundity in their analysis of their respective problems, withwhich little can compare in the specific area of material culturestudies. As a result of this profundity, these texts offer ideas and!ll0~elsw?ich transce~d their specific dilemmas and may be employedIn discussion of quesnons the authors themselves may never directlyhave considered.The second sec~ion,consisting of two chapters, turns from analysis

of such academic texts to consideration of the more specificconsequen~es of the materiality of the object as artefact. The approachto culture In general developed in the first section is thereby narrowed

It is suggested that this contradiction may be partially resolvedthrough the use of these very products, that is the vast quantity ofgoods and services created by industrial culture. There may bemechanisms which permit the positive' appropriation of these goodsby, and at the level of, the inevitably pluralistic, small-scalecommunities which make up the population. This appropriation takesplace through an expanded process of consumption by means ofwhich goods and services are distanced from the abstracted and alien,but necessary, institutions in which they originate, and are recast asinalienable cultural material. It is argued that this process ofconsumption is equivalent to the Hegelian concept of sublation as themovement by which society reappropriates its own external form ..:.that is, assimilates its own culture and uses it to develop itself as asocial subject. So, far from being merely an extension of those socialconditions and relations generated by the organization of production,consumption is, at least potentially, their negation. I also show to beunfounded the assumption that an increasing orientation towardsgoods is itself inevitably inimical to the development of communaland egalitarian social relations of a positive nature. Such a perspectivemust complement the proper concerns with macro-political forces iflarge-scale political changes are to be understood in relation to theireffect on social practices, and not just as academic abstractions. It isnot argued that this is a description of all contemporary consumptionpractices, many of which.are very far from expressing any such goals,but rather that these are immanent in the nature of mass consumption,and that, depending upon the outcome of particular social strategies,they may be identified and learnt from even within existing society.This depends, however, upon aViewof consumption quite different

from that which is current and colloquial. Consumption is consideredhere as a process having the potential to produce an inalienableculture. This assumes a recognition that our culture is increasingly amaterial culture which must in some way be made an instrument ofsocial progression. It is further argued that, while consumption isgenerally considered to be of greatest consequence and at the sametime most oppressive under the conditions of capitalism, it is also thesingle major means of living with the societal contradictions whichwould pertain under the conditions of either existing or possiblesocialism (given that this is taken to be a social order associated withthe equitable distribution of goods and services and dominated by asocially concerned planning system, as opposed to the relativelyunconstrained operation of the market). Under such conditions ofsocialism, the role of consumption as outlined above would becomeeven more crucial to possibilities for positive social reproduction.

17INTRODUCTION

I

iiIII 'IIi

16 OBJECTIFICATION

post-modernism, both of which tend towards a global critique of'modem' society, usually under a general term such as 'capitalism' orthe 'sign'. It is argued that these global approaches almost alwaysmove from an attack on contemporary material culture as trivial .orinauthentic to an implied (though rarely explicit) denigration of themass of the population whose culture this is. By contrast, the analysisof particular domains of consumption provided in this chapter a119'vsfor a more sensitive discrimination between those elements ofconsumption which appear to generate close social relations and socialgroupings (such as those among children or neighbourhoods) andthose which, by analogy with the critique of ideology, appear to act toprevent sections of the population from representing their interests,and to suppress any expression of those perspectives which might helpto develop such interests.It will be clear that the 'overall argument progresses through highly

diverse material and foci. The justification for such an eclecticapproach is provided in chapter ten, in which the original theoreticaland philosophical model is reanalysed in terms of the artefact as theobject of mass consumption. It is argued that contemporary societyconsists ofa series of extremely abstract arenas of social and materialorder, including commerce, academia, the state and other majorinstitutions. These have arisen in part as the means of producing vastquantities of artefacts, which are in tum distributed throughmechanisms such as the market or government services. The scale ofcontemporary productive and distributive institutions is such\ thatthey are commonly the target of that general analysis of modernitywhich defines the growth 'Ofsocial complexity in terms of 'fragmen­tation', 'abstraction' or 'inauthenticity', all of which are posea asmajor dilemmas and threats to modem life. Here, however, It isasserted that such institutions are essential to a number of devel­opments which are the foundation for all progressive tendencies inmodem society, and that although they are never assimilable inthemselves they must be preserved. Propositions for a future societyinvolving the elimination or fading away of massive and abstractedinstitutions such as industrial production or the state are rejected.Since, however, these remain by definition abstract, and since they allinclude tendencies towards an autonomy in which as separate interests(for example, as capitalism or state power) they may emerge as forcesalmost entirely deleterious to the interests of the mass population, theargument highlights a central contradiction intrinsic to modemsociety: namely, how to retain the advantages offered by the existenceof such institutions while avoiding their potential dangers.

.fI

The sources for the ideas used in this volume to construct a theory ofmaterial culture-are various. Several of them are, however, united inthat although they appear to relate to quite discrete bodies of materialand to provide different theoretical emphases and conclusions, theyderive at least in part from a common inspiration. This is thePhenomenology of Spirit '(or 'Mind' in some translations) by G. W.Hegel, 'first published in 1807 (here 1977). This is perhaps the singlemost influential work in modern philosophy and social theory, and alarge number of major studies including works by the early Marx,Simmel, Lukacs and Sartre, have been modelled more or less directlyupon it. Some of these texts will be discussed below. Many of Hegel'sideas have been further elaborated in the phenomenological traditionwithin philosophy, while a larger number of studies may have takenovet the basic structure of Hegel's work without perhaps realizingthis, or without being acquainted with their source, so pervasive haveHegel's' ideas become.Defining Hegel as a starting point is in one sense false. Hegel was

not himself t4e orginator of many of the ideas commonly ascribed tohim. Many were developed in their modern form by earlier andcontemporary philosophers such as Fichte. The work of many ofthese philosophers in turn may be more easily understood whenanalysed in the light of ideas which had previously been developed intheological seminaries. In fact, Hegel's work forms part of animportant movement which effectively secularized theologicalarguments concerning the relationship between God and humankind.Religious ideals and methods are strongly present in Hegel and,through him, in many' of those who were deeply influenced by thePhenomenology (Kolakowski 1978: 11-39).The intention of the present discussion is to abstract relatively few

elements from the Phenomenology, rather than to follow previous

Hegel's Phenomenolost of Spirit

Hegel and Objectification

2

Ii, I

Il

18 OBJECTIFICATION

This argument contains within itself certain limits as a theoreticalanalysis. Theory itself is identified with those series of abstractionsassociated with the modern institution, while consumption bycontrast is identified with a series of practices which are by their verynature embedded and particularistic. The conclusion therefore pointstowards an anthropology of consumption. Everi under contemporarypolitical and economic conditions, the ideal of consumption outlijiedhere may be found to be practised by at least certain sections of thepopulation in particular contexts, although this ideal coexists with aform of consumption expressive only of individual greed, classoppression and mass alienation. An anthropology would thereforeseek to identify those conditions which appear to promote, asopposed to those which appear to prevent, the development of thepositive forms of consumption as a process. Yet although researchmay be instrumental in identif.ying and encouraging these conditions,they must always in the final instance depend upon the developmentof mass movements.In conclusion, an approach to modern society which focuses onthe

material object always invites the risk of appearing fetishistic, that isof ignoring or masking actual social relations through its concern withthe objectper se. In this book, an attempt is made to develop anon-dualistic model of the relations between people and things. Thisis achieved by approaching objectification as a process of deVeIO$m'entin which neither society nor cultural form is privileged as prio· butrather seen as mutually constitutive. When cast in terms 0 thecontemporary political economy, such an approach sheds new lighton the place of the artefact within the process of mass consumption asan ~ss~ntialelement i~ the construction of both present and possibleSOCl~tl~~. By un~~venng a model. for consu~ption as a progressivepossibility, a critical understanding of society may be achieved,founded upon an image based less upon what industrial culture !hasforced us to become than upon what it might allow us to be.

will be made as to how: we might progress from this period ofunhappy consciousness and regain the possibilities immanent in thedevelopment. of the subject, that is, society.The return to Hegel is based on the premise that perspectives he

developed may still be enlightening today. His work provides thefoundation for an. examination of subject-object relations whichavoids reductionism to either of these two, and at the same timecaptures the dynamic nature of the historical context in which theserelations operate. Hegel subsumed the Kantian concept of "anexternalworld which is, in part at least, only constituted through the particularmanner of its appropriation, but he did so without reducing thismerely to the static mechanisms of mind. He provides for the dynamicconstruction of these structuring mechanisms within the process ofappropriation itself. The spectrum covered by the Phenomenologyranged from the individualist psychology of the expanding conscious­ness, through to the objective context of laws, history, morality, andsocial relations. In terms of the particular problems of today it did soin a manner which echoes the helter-skelter thrust towards diversityand variability characteristic of modem life.Perhaps the most attractive feature of Hegel's ideas is that they.are

essentially positive. They assume;the development of the subject asdesirable, and although their pseudo-evolutionist implications maynow seem antiquated, they allow us to identify with a subject asprogressive. They thereby provide the foundation for a form ofcritical analysis which opposed the status quo not merely byrepresenting it as repressive, but also by comparing itwith what couldbe, with the immanent possibilities of the present. Although in theiroriginal form they sometimes tended towards conservatism in theirappraisal of the Prussian state, when abstracted as objectification theircritical potential was indicated most forcibly by the early writings ofMarx. When developed further as a concept, objectification maybecome highly atypical of modern theory. It places emphasis on acultural context for its realization, but its dependence upon someconcept of a developing subject refuses the allure of extreme relativismlost either in theory or empiricism. It provides for a progressivedevelopment which feeds on diversity without tending towardsnihilism. Its insistence that the products of culture will ultimately beknown as our own' creations which can be encompassed at somefuture stage, resists the attraction of the tragic.In brief, the model insists that a subject cannot be envisaged outside

the process of its own becoming. There is no a priori subject whichacts or is acted upon. The subject is inherently dynamic, reacting anddeveloping according to the nature of its projections and experience.

I.

179TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION

Th.e a~~u~ent which began with the abstraction of a concept ofobjectification from Hegel has led to the analysis of specific cases of.cont~mporarr mass consumption su~h ~ semi-detached housing andc!othmg fas,hlons.!he fUCfose of this final chapter is to complete thecircle by USl1~gt~e implications of the casematerial on consumption asrecontextualization to reformulate the concept of objectification as anapproach. to co~t~~por~ry con.sumption. The term objectificationwas c0!lsldered IDltlallym relation to a set of ideas concerning theresolu~lOnof the subject-object. ~ichotomy derived from an aspect ofHegel s Phen~menology of Spirit, The abstraction is only partial,how.ever. Unlike the. term dialectic, which signifies the use pf apartIc~lar form of lOgIC,~e concept of objectification, as developedhere, ISalways grounded In some notion of culture. 'Hegel representsonly one source for the meaning of this term, which was latertransformed through its exemplification in a variety of 'studies\ ofhuman devel~pment and cultural relations, all of which wereconc~rned WIth the .de~elopment of a given subject through ,tscreation of, ot projection on to, an external world and thesubseq~ent introjection of thes~ projections.' ' .I? this chapter, a? attempt wI~1be made to ass~ciatemodern British

SOCIetyWIth a particular phase m such a Hegelian scheme. It will beargued that, during the period since Marx, social conditions havechanged to such a degree that any translation of Hegel must advance astage ~ey~>ndMarx's original ref?rm~lation. As with Marx's analysisof capitalism, the present analysis will be compared with periods inthe Phenomenol~gy ~':lchas the unhappy consciousness,. which aremarked. by an inability to recognize the social nature of socialpro.ductlOns, and a series of competing philosophies and practiceswhich threaten to submerge human and social interest beneath severalover-autonomous and reified abstractions. Finally, some suggestions

Introduction

lTowards a Theory of Consumption

10

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 181

the case of Marx, the privileging of production as the ~ole sit~ ofself-alienation was rejected, as was the notion of communism, which,along with Hegel's original concept of absolute knowledge and allother Romantic versions of the end of history, was argued to bespurious as both a theoretical and a practical solution. Simmel, bycontrast used Hegel to provide a model of the increasingly abstractnature ~f modem culture based upon the quantitative and abstractnature of money. He also addressed th~ issue of incre~in~ div~rsi:y interms of the quantitative rise of material culture and Its Imphc~tIOns.Although Marx is far more explicit about his use of Hegel, Simmelcomes closer to the transformation envisaged here. This comparison ismisleading, however, in so far as certain centr~l t~nets of Marx:s mor~philosophy, and the att~ck on clas~and exploitation, had, by Slm~el. stime, become firmly integrated into the more general humanisticoutlook, and are implicit in, for example, the. comparable works ofDurkheim and Weber. These are goals which the present workattempts to espouse, notwithstanding the critique of some of Marx'smore academic structural reasoning.The views of both Marx and Simmel concerning the progressive

nature of capitalism are clear, though the latter tends to reduce t~is tothe impact of money and impersonal relations. !hey ~gre~th~t It hasreduced the obligatory ties of the feudal era and IS, by Implication, thenecessary foundation for any moder? c~mceptof ~ree~om. I~M~rx:scase, the freedom promised by capitalism IS an illusion, since It ISwrested away by the capitalist from the people and becomes merelythe freedom of the wage labourer to be exploited by the capital~s~.Itake the stress in Marx's analysis to be based largely on an oppositionto the illiberalism of the bourgeois, rather than, as in muchcontemporary Marxism, mainly an assault on its lib~ralism. Simmelalso notes the alienation consequent upon the nse of abstractrelations but sees this as the inevitable contradiction in abstractionitself, b~th freeing and estranged. Some of the ~ifferenc~s betwc:enMarx and' Simmel may be the result of the period of time. whichseparated them.The single historical inoment c.leady dominating M~rx's entire

perspective is the industrial revolution. He and Engels witnessed theextremes of degradation and trauma ~hisproduced, and, although t~eycould perceive more clearly than thel: conteI?p?ra~leSthe progressiveimplications of such a transformation, this 1Dslgh~was correctlysubservient to the immediate dilemma of the suffering and exploi­tation which had been the particular means of its accomplishment inBritain. The resulting bitter condemnation of the dehumanizingpractices of the day resulted, however, in support for an essentially

The attempts by Marx and Simmel to use Hegel as the basis for atheory of modernity were investigated in the first part of this book. In

Marx and Simmel

180 _ MASS CONSUMPTION

As an intrinsic part of being, and in order to attempt an understandingof the world, the subject continually externalizes outwards, producingforms or attaching itself to the structures through which form may becreated. All such forms are generated in history;which is the contextwithin which that subject - generally some social fraction - acts. As acultural theory, these forms may include language, material culture,individual dreams, large institutions or concepts such as the n~onstate and religion. In time, depending upon historical conditions,these externalizations may become increasingly diverse and abstract.Although the subject may at certain periods appear lost in the sheerscale of its own products, or be subject to the cultural mediation of adominant group, and thus fail to perceive these cultural forms as itsown creations, the tendency is always towards some form ofreappropriation through which the external can be sublated andtherefore become part of the progressive development of the subject.Although not necessarily ihtplied in Hegel's own use of these ideas,

such a return to the subject may be taken as a return to essentiallyhuman values from a period in which goals, values and ideas aredominated by a logic stemming from the interests produced by theautonomy of external forms created as culture. This interpretationwill be applied in the present work. Society progresses through thecreation of external forms, which may be either, aswith the Australianaboriginals of the ethnographic literature, concepts or complexinstitutions embedded in ritual and social structures, or else, as inBritain, of an increasingly material nature. In the former cas,e, themodel of objectification as culture, while not static, does not hare theelement of modernization which leads to ever increasing expansion, asis found in post-industrial societies. These externalizations alwaysthreaten to develop autonomous momentum. Within the concept ofobjectification lurks a Frankenstein image of a model, once externa­lized, turning away from and then against its human creators, ~s inMarx's theory of capitalism as rupture. Society in its variousmanifestations is always striving to reappropriate culture, and therebyprogress, a drive sustained by the feelings of estrangement generatedby such a condition of rupture. The term 'human values' is definedtautologically as that which contributes to the progressive tendency ofsociety.

underdeveloped, except through violent revolution. This is not alwaysthe case. India, for example, has resisted the pressures which wouldhave made it merely the working ground for external capitalism, butIndia has vast resources on which to draw in such a struggle.In Britain, however, many of Marx's assumptions appear to have

been greatly weakened by the praxis of historical change. The ideathat wages are merely intended to cover the demands of socialreproduction is unconvincing, as are those functionalist analyseswhich regard the welfare state as simply the latest extension ofcapitalist instrumentality (e.g. Castells 1977). The labour theory ofvalue, which,' as employed by Marx, postulated productive work asthe sole source of value, is even less convincing today than it waswhen it was first formulated. The idea that surplus value is merely theappropriation of human labour takes no account of the vast impact ofthe scientific revolution, since it cannot be applied to the age of themicrochip, of machines which often make the physical nature ofhuman labour itself entirely redundant. Indeed, at one point in theGrundrisse, Marx perceived this consequence of the imposition ofscience on to his own equation (quoted in Habermas 1972: 48-50).The worker as de-skilled machine appendage is increasingly replacedby the robot. If a quarter of the population still works in directmanufacturing, this leaves a large majority who probably never have,and there is little prospect of industrial production expanding its useof human resources. This is not to deny the continuity of class andinequality, which have made increasing use of the education systemfor their reproduction; but even such evidenceof continued inequalityas, for example, the demonstration that the welfare state hascontinually provided proportionally more aid to the better-off(Le-Grand 1982} does not contradict the general rise in materialprosperity of society as a whole over the last century, such that theaverage contemporary industrial worker may 'possess a greater wealthof material goods and machines which perform servile tasks than theaverage member of die middle class in the nineteenth century.Any progressive developments since the time of Marx have arisen

from several causes, among which the beneficent attitude of capital isnot numbered. Capital itself attempts to serve its own interests asgreedily and as totally as it has always done. Three factors ofparticular importance may be singled out. First, the trade unionmovement has achieved enormous advances in the interests of labour,but only through continual struggle and the ability of working peopleto undergo self sacrifice and deprivation to ensure the representationof their interests. The second factor is the impact of socialism itself,stemming from Marx, but also from more pragmatic and reformist

183TOWARDSA THEORY OF CONSUMPTION

~onservativ~ view of the place of production. Its paramountImportance In .the construction of social relations was simply inferredfrom r~cent history. The supersession of the present condition wasem~odled fa.rMa?, and many writers of the time in a series of utopiannonons which, In many cases, looked back for their models topre-industrial relations between the people and the means. ofproducti0I?-'the~e being no alt.e~nativeguide :0 the future. I.At ~~eorne SU!lmelwas ~rltlng, although ." was before the major

scientific revolutions of this century, the Image of the industrialrevolution' was less immediate than the overwhelming sense of itsproducts. Although many of the conditions described by Marx andEngels still obtained, the possibility of an industry which did notextract the maximum work out of labour for the minimum wage wasevident. Simmel was more impressed with the extent to which massconsumpt!on ha? become a feature of modern urban life, expandingthe material environment beyond all expectations. He describes thismoment of modernity as a new diversity and abstraction, whichperhaps only became evident when the middle class, rising in size andscope, began to create its distance from commerce and from thephysicality of production. The taste complexes described by Elias inThe Court Society, evolving from the ancient court regime with itsprinces and aristocracy, were being replaced by that mass struggleover :eputation and socialposition which-would emerge as the societydescribed by Bourdieu. With Simmel, then; a similar concern withes~rangementand abstraction took the form of the problematic ~se ofthis new commodity world, rather than being based entirely on theexploitation of labour. . I

Tod~y, in-the late 1980s, we are still further in time from Sirnmelthan Simmel was from Marx. The changes which have taken plafe inthis century are atleast as great and have had,consequences at least asimportant as those.which overwhelmed Marx and Simmel. Althoughmany governments continue to assert the direct applications of Marx'sphi~osophical and political persp~ctives, the very concept of praxisindicates th~t th~se must be sUbJ.ectto transformation through theImpact of hlstor.lcal change. Taking a global perspective, there areareas today which may be seen as analogous with that pari: ofEuropean history experienced by these writers. The profundity ofMarx's model is perhaps greatest in the context of revolutionarymovements in the Third World. As a theory of multinational or localexploitation of a labour force, it is perhaps more important in thesecontexts today than it ever was in Britain in 1850, -since thesophistication of international capitalism is such that there seems littlepossibility of much of the world escaping from its position as

MASSCONSUMPTION182

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 185

but are merely experienced as the kind of ?ppres~ion signifie~ in theanomie of Durkheim or the blase and cynical attitudes described bySimmel. This make'Sthe roots of that oppression harder to id~ntify,and we become unable to recognize our own place either In thecreation of these oppressive structures or, potentially, in the~rpartialresolution (since the contradictions ar.e i~herent, resolutlo~s arealways partial and must always be maintained rather than SImplyachieved). . . . .The first source of this modern dilemma IS the continued nse of

mass industrial production and commerc~. The contradiction lies inthe nature of industry as revealed by history. 9n the one ~an~,industry has created all those products upon which modern life ISbased. Without the car or bus, the phone, the paperback, the healthservice, the television, the mass produced architecture, modern urbanlife is impossible to envisage. The twentieth century has se;n ~~eoriginal industrial revolution enormously expanded, ~ ~clent~flcadvances are continually translated into 'Pe,":,goods. There IS lIttle.Signthat most of the populace wish for anything other than.a continualincrease in the availability of such products and the benefits ~el~to bereceived by their possession. Such benefits are by no ~eans .!tmlted tomaterial or technological advances, but, as I~ evident ~n all theanthropological investigations of mass consumption, are.mal1~lybasedon the possibilities they p'resc;ntfor the exp~nslOnof society, Its formsand relations. There is little reason to think that a return to craftproduction on a large scale would pro~uce ~ore than. a radi~alrestriction of the availability of goods to elite sections of society. Withgrpwing ecological constraints future expansion will. tome increas­ingly from scientific innovation rather than new physical resources.The extension of industry is complemented by that of commerce

and monetarization. The importance of money as part of the generalexpansion of quantification and abstr~ct logic _is such that. it isprobably the main medium through which we ~hmk m~thematlcallyin everyday life. Simmel's argument that money ISthe baSISof ~odernfreedom and that the complexities and choices represented 10 oursociety are impossible e,:,en t? env~sagewithout .it,...seems entirelyapplicable today. Also stl!l evident IS th~.contradiction that moneygoes beyond serving evident human Interests and becomes, as'capital', an interest in itself, i? which people ar~ re~u~ed to questionsof 'profit and efficiency. The Instrument of capl~al~sindustry run onthe logic of profitabil~ty, and the acc~pted cnte.rIon for successfulindustry is almost entirely the expansion of capital rathe~ than t~eimpact of its products. Marx showed clearly that, left.to itself, thislogic tends to separate the market of consumers from ItSown wage

The Unhappy Consciousness

The concept ·of unhappy consciousness denotes periods of dichoto­mized subject-object relations resulting from the inherently contra­dictory nature of a number of aspects of modern society. This mayoccur, in part, because these contradictions are not perceived as such,

inspirations, which have provided models and goals. These havetended to operate through the growing power 'of the state as theinstrument through which certain excesses of capitalism could becountered, and, in the case of the fully socialist state, radicallytransformed. Today, therefore, the academic writings of Marx are

. complemented by the histories of a large number of explicitly soc~liststates and mixed economies, in their successes and their failures!The third, and for the present argument most important, factor is

the central 'contradiction of capitalism in which the labourerrepresents, in his or her other role as consumer, the market necessaryfor the goods produced by capitalism. However opposed capital andlabour may appear in the struggle of wages against profit, forcapitalism to achieve its goals, and its. sales, it is necessary for thelabourer to buy and to continue to desire more goods. When thelabour force does not reprelent the market, the interests of, the twogroups are totally antagonistic, but when the labour force is themarket the relationship becomes more ambiguous. In this respect, thelabourers' fight against capital has always depended upon theiracquiescence in the capitalist's desire to sell; that is, they 'agree' tofight for higher wages which may then be used for purchasing. Withthe decline of colonialism, British industry has had to take particularcognizance of its own people as its major market. The desire to represswages is offset by the profitability achievable through economies ofscale in mass production. When this happens, a certain identity ofinterests between capital and labour may appear. This mky beillustrated by postulating a scenario in which capital is always ~orcedmerely to produce that which its own labour force as' cons~mersdemanded from it in the way of goods. This subservience of capital tothe demands of the labourer could still serve the interests of capital,since it would no longer produce unprofitable, in the sen~e ofunwanted, products, providing that consumer demand continued toexpand. This potential identity of interests may have proved asimportant ..historically as the much more accepted historical antago­nism between labour and capital, and is an essential premise for thepossibilities of .socialism.

MASS CONSUMPTION184

Though a means to human progression, the state is as liable ascapital to become an autonomous institution which 'turns againstsociety. In some socialist societies, equality amounts to homogeni­zation and the complete suppression of liberal advancement orpluralistic diversity. The welfare state in Britain has also beenincreasingly regarded as an authoritarian force which suppresses theinterests of precisely those it is intended to aid. This contradictionwhich is inherent in the state was most forcibly expressed in thewritings ofWeber on the development of bureaucratic authority (197-4:329-41), and during this century has appeared as an increasinglyintractable dilemma.Ifmoney is the basis of modern freedom, and the state for modern

equality, then a third force which has seen commensurate growth, andwhich is promoted asan attempt to gainsomemodern understanding ofthese historical processes, is what might be called cultural modernism.The rise of scienceand quantification, and the continued destruction ofprevious ties, are all marked in the emergence of new modes ofexpression. These are most explictly promoted in the arts, that is,modern literature, theatre and cinema, but are equally prominent in thestyles of modem commercial goods. This force not only contributes tothe rise of diversity and abstraction, but is increasingly the mediumthrough which these are expressed and understood. For a considerableperiod, modernism seemed to be equated with largely benign andpositive forces, such as the sciences,which were eliminating diseaseandpoverty" or the avant-garde, which expressed the possibilities of thenew age. Over the last two decades, however, the social disaster of thenew built environment as the major expression ofmodernity, the imageof an inaccessible modern art, plus the general perception of theamorality of the white-coated scientist dealingwith the incomprehensi­ole, have contributed to an overall sense of the other side of modernityas alien abstraction so brilliantly described by Simmel.Although attempting to capture the advancesof science in its notions

of design, function and progress, modernism as an image may againlead to reification and lose any sense of the human nature of thesecreations. Hi-tech objects can become so functional in appearance thatthey no longer function particularly well for the user; art as high tasteand education as knowledge become not instruments for understand­ing, but, asBourdieu has shown, merely forms of obfuscation acting asinstruments for the maintenance of classdominance. Knowledge is nolonger used to develop, but to differentiate. Today; the negative side ofscientific advancement is so forcibly expressed in the destruction of thenatural environment, and in the threat of annihilation though atomicwar, that it is doubtful whether the older positive image will return.

(

187TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION186 MASS CONSUMPTION

labour, reducing the latter to the minimum wages necesary for social~eprodu~tion. ~~i~ situation is most clearly developed through a newinternational dIVISIonof labour, where workers in certain countriesmay be paid min~malwag~s since the market for their products isabroad. Where this separatIon could not be sustained, as in Britain,capitalism may still work towards a highly unequal distribution oOtsproducts. rThe contradiction posed by industry, which lies in the positive

nature ?f many of its produ~ts set against its historical tendency tofollow its own autonomous mterest rather than the interests of thepeople who create through it, has been partly responsible for thetra~sformation of the second powerful contradictory force in modernSOCiety,that of the modem state. Whether or not the state developedto ensure the efficient working of capitalism as it expandedinternationally, or to preserve' the hegemony ot a class, today the stateappears as the only force large enough to attempt to redirect the aimsof large-scale industry away from pure profit towards the interests ofthe population. Whether this is done on the massive scale of statesocialism, or by means of the more limited but still extensiveeconomic and social policies of the so-called mixed economies thestate appears in the twentieth century to have developed anincreasingly large-scale interventionist role. .Just, as money is the foundation for freedom, the state ~ the

ess~nt.ial~~chanism for the ~reation of equality. Although in certainsoc~etlesIt may serve as the mstrument of capital, it is the only !orcewhich has die potential, given certain historical conditions an therequisite social agency, to restrain capitalism's natural tend ncytowards inequality, and, through redistributive mechanisms :andlegislative means, to create the conditions for the achievement ofequality. Equ.alit:r s~ould not be defined in Rousseauist terms {ls anatural order mtrmsic to humanity, a primitive condition. Rather.lit isa highly abstract concept which probably could not be envisaged'as apractic~ (as opposed to a theoretical) proposition without the priordevelopment of a strong democratic state. The achievement of even adegree of equality is an extremely complex task requiring anenormous investment in bureaucracy, taxation and planning. It is,therefore, as essential to retain the services provided by the state, asthe products provided by industry. Again, there appears to be aconsensus of opinion in countries such as Britain in favour of someform of essential state services such as education and health, althougharguments continue over degrees of intervention and the balancebetween state and private control.

I;'II

IjI

Modern Consumption

Like the mass of material goods, consumption is examined at presentin most of the critical social sciences only as an aspect of the generalproblem of commodities. Goods are seen, as indeed Simmel in partunderstood them, as part of the ever growing proble~ of .abstractionand differentiation. Objective culture has become unimaginably vast,producing goods largely as symbols of wealth and fashion, of~enmodes of oppressive social differentiation. The processes leadingtowards autonomy described ~bove, command virtuall~ a.ll thechannels through which we obtain such goods. The vast majonty arepurchased and are pure commodities in that the money spent on themcould equally well have been s~e~t on some other ite~ out of ~hevastarray. Baudrillard and the cnncs of post-modernism prov~~e theclearest account of this sense of the complete interchangeability ofthings implying also a reduction of human relations to this exchangecycle ~f style. In those cases when we do nO.tobtain goods throughdirect purchase, the most comm~>n.alternative source l~ t~e state,which may provide the house we live in.jhe range of furmshtn&s,oureducation, the libraries, the sport facilities and so forth. Depending onone's place in class and society, the state may be far more Importantthan money as a source of goods. It is, however, comparable tomoney in making those goods symbols of an estranged andautonomous force which imposes itself on us as people who areeminently exchangeable one for another. . . .If this is the nature of the commodity, the mterpretanon of

objectification it implies would still largely foUo",:the two .authors sofar discussed. Wage labour may be more rewarding than It was, butthe place of the labourer as part of the market - that is, as nothingmore than the consumer of commodities bombarded by marketingand advertising (e.g.Williams 1980)- appears to follow a similar logicof estrangement. This i~crease in e~ternal form merely ~dvan~es thefirst phase of self-alienation. extending the abstract and diverse natureof culture, which thus appears the more alien and the harder toassimilate. Whether because, following Hegel, we are unable toperceive, or, following Marx, objective conditions prevent u~ fromachieving the conditions which woul~ allow for th~ s~~l~t~on ofgoods, the situation is clearly one of incomplete objectification asrupture, rather than of social develop~ent.. .This is the approach to goods I WIsh to reject. It IS an approach

predicated on reducing consumption to the nature of the commodity,and the consumer to the process by which the commodity is obtained.In opposition to this argument is that perspective with focuses upon

189TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION

,~t", ,

.,

, These three forces are illustrative of all these changes in' societywhich have combined to create the condition of the unhappyconsciousness of today. In all cases, these changes are based uponlargely progressive and essential developments which provide thefoundation for the unparalleled possibilities of modern life, and thepromise of socialism. The constant fight for higher wages by memqtrsof the work force at all levels cannot simply be reduced to a demandfor the paypacket. It must always jmply a demand for the purchasesrepresented by those wages; that .is, a continued demand for goods.For all the verbal attacks on modern goods, the more effective critiqueof practised asceticism is rarely encountered; that is to say, the privatepractices of many academic critics, amongst whom there are very fewGandhis and Tolstoys, may well contradict the substance of theirargument. As anthropologists who have examined consumption haveaffirmed, it is impossible to isplate a range of 'authentic' goods serving'real' needs (e.g. Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Sahlins 1976a). Thepolitical interventions made by the left may almost always" betranslated as a demand for services for a wide variety of social groups,and for state intervention in the redistribution of resources, whichimplies the continuance of a mass industrial base and bureaucracy tos~cure the means for such provisions.The period of unhappy consciousness is one in which we recognize

the negative and abstract nature of these forces as oppressive, but failto realize that these negative conditions are the outcome of a fholeseries of historical developments which we otherwise regatd aspositive and essential to our well being. Certain of the most evidentsigns of alienation, such as the pressures of mass advertisirtg, the ~levelof inequality and the imposed modernist form so contrary to ~assaesthetics and desires, might all be altered through positive politicalaction. This would not itself counter our inability to be reconciledwith the deeper contradictions by which a bureaucracy demands someanonymity to act fairly, and in many other areas institutional practiceshave to consist in compromises rather than resolutions. Following theHegelian logic, a recognition that the estranged conditions andfeelings of alienation created by the rationalism and abstraction of thepresent are, to a considerable degree, an inevitable consequence ofpositive developments, might itself be a first step (though only a firststep) towards the reappropriation of culture, but this implies arecognition that we are facing contradictions which have to be livedrather than removed. While the form taken by the contradictionsoutlined here are specific to contexts such as contemporary Britain,they relate to contradictions which are intrinsic, as Simmel indicated,to culture per se, and their equivalents may be found in quite 'differentsocieties, such as in New Guinea or India.

MASS CONSUMPTION'188

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 191not be confused with an acutal process performed as a significantcultural practice by people in society. Work in this sense does notnecessarily mean physical labour transforming the object; i~ maysignify the time of possession, a particular Context of presentation asritual gift or memorabilia, or the incorporation of the single objectinto a stylistic array which is used to express the creator's place inrelation to peers engaged in similar activities. The object is transfor­med by its intimate association with a particular individual or socialgroup, or with the relationship between these.Clearly, such work is not to be understood in the narrow sense of

that which happens to a particular object after it is obtained, but has toinclude the more general construction of cultural milieux which givesuch objects their social meaning and provide the instrumentemployed in ~ny such individual transformations. The ",:ork done ona pint of beer includes the whole culture of pub behaviour; such asbuying rounds, as well as the development of an often long te~massociation between the consumer and a particular beer, whichexcludes all other types of drink or brands identified with other socialgroups by gender, class, parochial affinity and so on. Such culturalpractices cannot be reduced to mere social distinction, but should beseen as constituting a highly specific and often extremely importantmaterial presence generating possibilities of sociability and cognitiveorder, as well as engendering ideas of morality, idealworlds and otherabstractions and principles. Although, for some, the age of the puband the authentic nature of the 'real ale' may be important, others mayperceive an atmosphere of plastic facades, parodied images and. theproducts of international breweries as more proper, unpretentiousana tasteful. The aesthetics may be entirely relativistic; it is the socialpractices to which they are integral which make such activityconsumption work. The ability to recontextualize goods is thereforenot reducible to mere possession, but relates to more general objectiveconditions which provide access to the resources and degree ofcontrol over the cultural environment. As demonstrated in chapter 9,an ability to appropriate cannot be assumed, and relates to the moregeneral inequalities evident in contemporary society. On occasion, asshown in the example of children's sweets, the act of appropriationstarts with the creation of the array of goods themselves.In short, the modern process of consumption is a much neglected

part of the great process of sublation by which society attempts tocreate itself through negation. Thus, far from being a mere com­modity, a continuation of all those processes which led up to theobject - that is, the mass abstractions which create objects as externalforms - the object in consumption confronts, criticizes and finally

the same problem, but sees it as one faced also by the consumer ofgoods, and whic~ emphasi~es the ,Period o~ time following thepurc~ase or allocation of the It~m.This alternative perspective is only~ossIble 'because of the. changI?g historical conditions in the periodSInce Marx .wrl;>te,dUrIn~ which the mass of the population havereduced th~Ir time spe~t In labour and enormously increased thein'nme spent In consumption. f

As consumers, we confront these abstractions of money and thestate ~ost fully at th~ moment of obtaining goods. In the process ofshopping, we have to Immerse ourselves in this vast alienated world ofproducts ~ompletelr distanced from the world of production. Wecannot .w~1l1eshoppIng relate a .packet of potato crisps to the factorywher~ It ISmade, In terms of either the people working there or themachines, At the momen~ of purchase, or allocation, the object ismerely the property of capital Oilof the state from which we receive it.The i~dividual may feel either estranged from this world of theshoppI.Ilgce?tre or public institution, or else excited by its scale andpote~·lt~al.EIther way, the situation is radically transformed uponobtaining the goods In question.O~.~urchase, the va.stmor.assof possible goods is replaced by the

~peC!fIclty?~~he particular Item. The extraordinary degree of thatItem s specificity becomes apparent when it is contrasted with allthose other goods it. is not. Furthermore, this specificity is usuallyrelated to.a person, either the purchaser or the intended user, and tpetwo .are In~eparable; .that is, the specific nature of that person ,sc0!lftrmed In the particularity of the selection, the relation betweenthIs. object and others providing a dimension through which thlepar:t1c?larsocial position of the intended individual is experienced.ThIS IS the start of a long ~nd complex process, by which th~con.su.m~rworks upon the object purchased and recontextualizes it~until It ISoften no longer recognizable as having any relation to thyworld of th~ abstract and becomes its very negation, something whichcould be neI~.e~bought nor given. If the item is allocated by the state;~henall.specificity I~a result of work done upon the object followingIts receipt.Thus, consumption as work may be defined as that which translates

the object from an alienable to an inalienable condition' that is from?eing a sYJ?bol o~ estra?gement and price value to bei~g an a;tefactInvested with particular Inseparable connotations. Commerce obviou­sly at~e~pts t? pre-empt this process through practices such as~dvertlsIng whI.ch most often relate to objects in terms of generallifestyle, but this does not mean that advertising creates the demandthat goods should be subsumed in this way, and these images should

MASSCONSUMPTION190

, !

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 193

have reduced culture to merely the external reflection of ~hehis~~ryofsocial conflicts and distinctions. In proposing consumption acnvity asthe continual struggle to appropriate goods. an~ se!"ices made inalienating circumstances and transform them into inalienable c~lture,the aim is to readjust a balance, but not ~o red.uce the subJ~ct ~fhistory to a world of objects. The manner 1~ whlch. cons':1mptl~~lSreformulated here as a process in terms of their place m which objectsare always understood, does not perm~t a return to ~~esimple st~dyof individuals or objects per se. It c(;mtmuesth~ tradltlo~ of .stt.\dy~ngsociety in relational terms, but insists ~n a Wider totality m whichsocial relations are always cultural relations, and ~s such are alwaysconstituted within the sphere of what Hegel and Simmel argued we:enecessarily contradictory circumstances existing over and above SOCialdivision and conflict.In contemporary British society, and indeed, as well be argued later

on, in any feasible socialist society, culture is generally pu~cha~edorallocated in the first instance, but this does not make It inferior toculture physically produced bY.the appropriation o~n,ature.That is tosay that society may construct Itself m the appropnanon of cu~tureasmuch as in the transformation of nature. To refer to SOCIetyas'constructing itself' is to signify that these activities ar~ based onhistorically given forms and peoples, and that both the suject and t~eobject of this process are cultural, rather than natural, forms. ~lSnotion of the self as a cultural form constantly re-evaluated by SOCIalcriteria is opposed to the concept of an essentialist ~atural ~elfmaskedby the artificial nature of cultu~e as .commodlty. This may beillustrated with reference to cosmetics. It IScommonly argued that thereal self is represented by the natural facewhich provides direct accessto the person as he or she truly is, while to cov,erthe f~cein cosmeticsis to mask it in terms of a set of unreahzable Ideals generallymanufactured by the capitalist market or patriarchal soci~ty in whichthe authentic person has become su~merged. Certain of th~seassertions relating to the predominantly single gender use of cosmeticsand the interests of the market are undeniable (e.g. Myers 1982), butwhat is questionable is the implication that the effect of cosmetics isalways to hide the 'real' person. . .In contrast to this may be set the attitude of New Guinea

highlanders to their own considerable use of self-decoration, includ,­ing face painting, a'Sanalysed, by Strathern [19~9]. ~ere we haveexactly the opposite conjecture. For the New Guinea highlander thenatural face is relatively arbitrary; they see no reason why the fact thatthey are the equivalent of freckled ?r blond, pockmarked ~rconventionally handsome should be a direct representation of their

1iIL ~ _ _.._...__~~ - - • -- • -- -----

may often subjugate these abstractions in a process of humanbecoming. If a commodity is defined as the product and symbol ofabstract and oppressive structures, then the object of consumption isthe negation of the commodity. Although the object's material formremains constant as it undergoes the work of consumption, its socialnature is radically altered. This is not, of course, a description 09 allconsumption or a realizable aim of all the participants in the mo&erneconomy, but what must be recognized is that it is immanent inconsumption itself. That is to say, we must know that the work we doon the goods we purchase, or obtain, and the cultural networks withwhich we associate ourselves, can be understood in a similar vein tothe work we do on the natural world. In consumption, quite as fullyas in production, it is possible, through use of the self-alienationwhich created the cultural world, to emerge through a process ofreappropriation towards the' full project of objectification in whichthe subject becomes at home with itself in its otherness.In our society, these two moments are inseparable; the same

circumstance' which constructs production as a moment ofestrangement provides the conditions under which consumption asreappropriation appears possible. Even if work conditions areimproved, the scale of production must make it unlikely that thiscould ever become again the main arena through which people canidentify with self-constructed culture. In turn, the possibility forconsumption emerges once goods are no longer perceived as[merecommodities, but are understood as a major constituent of modernculture. From this, it will be shown that, ironically, it is only thrbughthe creative use of the industrial product that we can envisage asupersession of any autonomous interest called capitalism, and :thatonly through .the transformation of the state's services can the statealso be reabsorbed as an instrument of development. In short,consumption is a major factor in the potential return of culture tohuman values. As is explicit in the work of Hegel, progress cannot bethrough recapturing something simpler and past; but only through anew mastering of the enormity of the present.To- argue the necessity of goods is no more than to argue the

necessity of culture. It is not, however, to assert the autonomy ofculture. In chapter 3, it is argued that Marx, in attempting to redressHegel's emphasis on the high culture of philosophy and intellectuallyappropriated forms, and to ground these ideas in a wider notion ofsocial relations of which social and economic conditions were anintrinsic feature, in .practice subsumed culture as form within the playof social differentiation. This tendency has been taken still further bywritings in the Durkheimian tradition and by later .Marxists, which

MASS CONSUMPTION192

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 195externalization of a self-understanding bf individual and society inhistory. Attempts to create societieswhich are entirely pro~otions ofeither individualism or communalism are therefore both disastrous,since they reify one element of a single abstraction. Both extremes tendtowards the dualism of subject-object relations which Hegel attemptedto resolve.The large-scale institutions which dominate industrial societies tend

to create a sense of an encroaching force which retains control over us,and since such institutions work on the basis of superordinatedecision-making which regulates our lives, they conflict with the equalsense of individual autonomy and freedom which is produced by thatsame force. It is the senseof institutional anonymity which provides uswith our most potent image of the struggling, free individual. Indeed,the productive communality of a local or self-constructed communitymay be achieved in large part by the necessary subsumption of theindividual to a group, in the interests of doing battle against these vastinstitutional forces. Just as these two sets of values are the results of twomoments in the same productive process, so their resolution may inpart be affected by examining them in terms of two moments of theconsumption process.The processes at the highest levelof state organization must be those

of quantitative assessment, technological efficiency and social control.Industry and the state could not be redu~ed to ~e sm~-s~~le,immediately accountable and approachable, Without losing their abilityto meet the vast demands of modern planning (which is not to say thatthey could not be more accountable than they are at present). Theseinstitutions can only be broken down to sufficiently small-scaleelements to be able to fulfil the requirements and reflect the interests of,as well as being a locus of affectivity for, the population, if there is anincreased concentration on the work, not of the bureaucracy, but of thepeople themse~veson the products of t~e state and i~dustry. ~t.i~at thisstage that we find the extreme expressions'of plurality, specificity anddiversity which, although conceived of as the opposite image of thecentral productive sphere, are' actually premised upon its veryabstraction. These are often directly related, since the larger theplurality of interests served, the larger the scale of planning andorganization required. In short, individualism and pluralism arepremised upon their antithesis: the autonomous homogenized bureau­cracy. A concern with the diverse populace is therefore served notthrough privatization - that is, switching from one abstractedinstitution, the state, to a far more invidious one, capatalism - butrather by concentrating on the articulation between the producers andconsumers of goods and services.

real selves. It is only when the face is something worked upon,through elaborate cosmetic preparations which provide an expressionof the self constructed by the self, that they appear in their true guiseto the observer. The moment when the British critic regards us asmost covered up is precisely the moment when the New Guineahighlanders see them.selvesas lying naked befo~e the w~rld; it is herethat aspects of their true self such as their cohesion with ,thecommunity, or their state of health, will emerge, as revealed by theirability to construct an acceptable cultural self on the external face. Theact of self-construction is therefore not totally controllable, but willrey-ealaspects.of their relat~ons~ipwith the wider society which theymight have WIshedto remain hidden. Although a self-construction itis a social being which is made evident. '.The Briton assumes an essentialist given self; the New Guinea

highlander a culturally constructed self. But it may be noted that theNew Guinea conception is not of the self as constructed entirely byexternal.forces, as in the post-structuralist reading of the body as text;the medium may be conventional and historical, but it is the particularnature of its manipulation b~ a given individual.which is significantfor the future development of that person in society. Nor does itappear of great consequence if some of the items obtained, such asfeathers and shells, are purchased with cash rather than salt or arefrom birds shot with guns rather than arrows. For the. highlander,therefore, culture is an objectification through which social relationsare developed through being made manifest. This view is closer t~ thatof.Wilson (1985: 228-47), discussed in the last chapter. Wilson\,alsorejects that notion of natural authenticity which is the premise behinda wide ra~ge of.critical discussions, in favour of the active projectionof the SOCialbeing upon the body, and argues for the possibilities ofpl~~sure as a radical activity against the implied asceticism of t~esecnnques,Returned to the context of modern Britian, this example showJ the

limitations of the debate between individualism and communal orsocial expressions (see also Abercrombie et a1.1986).Britain has ~ farlarger mass culture, with far more extensive communal forms, than~nr:~ew ~uinea society, and pr~bably also more explicit concepts ofindividualism. These are conventionally seen as alternatives, but theyare actually b.othprodu.cts of one set of differences between Britainand New GUInea.The Image and extent of modern individualism ispredicated upon the image and extent of communal mass society.They achieve their strength of imagery through contrast, which ismerely the product of the inherent contradictions resulting from aprocess of objectification, that is, the making explicit through

MASS CONSUMPTION194

.~TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 197

distance from the estranged conditions of work, and, by analogy withthe building styles discussed in the last chapter, it can be ~rg~ed,thatthe enforced and artificial communality of the workplace I~hke!y toproduce an overtly private, self-controlled response 10 lel~urepractices. It does not follow, however, that this tendency IS anecessary outcome of mass consumpnon. . ., ...The image of consumption as pnvate and individualistic ISclos~ly

tied to a further concern with its place in the production of. SOCialdifferentiation through taste, which has been emphasized 10 thetradition of consumption analysis represented by .veb~en and Bourd­ieu. This major consequence of mass consumpnon IS, o! course, athoroughly social activity, bu~ its social nature. IShere predicated onlyupon its place a's an agent 10 class oppression expressed throughgoods. In the following examples, by contrast,. consumptl~n can ?eexamined as an intra-class phenomenon used 10 establishing SOCialcohesion and normative order. These therefore serve to indicate apotential for consumption as a social practice contrary to that stressedin most accounts.From the work of Engels in the nineteenth century to the

long-running television -soap opera Coronation Street today, theLancashire town of Salford has been used as a model for t~econditions of working-class life in British industrial cent~es: Thismore than justifies the title of Robert Ro?ens' (1973) description ofgrowing up in the area as The Classic Sl!'m. In a chapter onpossessions, Roberts makes clear tha~, despite. some of the ~or~tpoverty seen in Britain, there was amajor dom~l~ ~f consumptl0_n10Salford which refused to be eliminated by the vicissitudes of the tu~e.Over a long period of time, there had developed among the workingclass a concept of the parlour. Despite lack of space, this roo~ was ~otused except on special occasions, but was reserved for displayinggoods such as ornaments. The parlour does not seem to be a result ofrecent emulation of the middle class, but may rather re~ate~omu~holder traditions. There is evidence of a similar concern with display 10

medieval Europe; in some cases it would appear that half thecommoner's house was set aside for display purposes (Burke 1978). Inthe history of European house interiors, display appears generally tohave been predominant over coo:fort (B,raudel 1~81~~06-11).Suchevidence based on a record of an industrial slum, ISqUItecontrary toBourdieu's representation of the 'true' worker as only interested ~consumption of a very immediate nature, directly connected to basicdemands. .Roberts describes the importance of the parlour, Its c~re,

furnishing, cleaning and decoration, among people who were pawmng

Mass Consumption and Equality

In evaluating the role of goods in the production of social re1atiohs, adifficulty arises from the common assumption that mass consump?onis inextricably linked to the commodity form and is therebysupportive of only one particular social form, usually termedcapitalist. This is despite the equal suitability of the label 'massconsumption' to societies as diverse as Britain, the Soviet Union andJapan. Embedded in a similar network of connotations is thesupposition that, while activities such as work may provide the. foundation for communal values, it is through consumption thatindividualist and competitive social relations, the 'bourgeois' privateworld, emerge. This forms part of the general critique of consumptionas materialistic and individualistic. Although, in a society dominatedby the market, .private individually-oriented consumption practicesbased on the pursuit of money and affluent lifestyles are common, it isuseful to question the degree to which the assumed links betweenconsumption, individualism and inequality are intrinsic to the natureof consumption as an activity. The relationship between capitalismand individualism has recently come under scrutiny (Abercrombie etal. 1986).Clearly, leisure is commonly used as a means of expressing a

196 MASS CONSUMPTION

The diversity of the products of this process of consumption isunlimited, since goods which are identical at the point of purchase or~l1~c~tionmay be recontextualized by different social groups in aninfinite number of ways. If we assume the continued existence oflarge-scale industry employing people en masse, of large-scale~sti~uti~ns providing services e? masse, and of a massive market jor~lstnbut1on, we must then consider the means by which people rftayfind new ways of relating to these institutions and recontextualizingtheir products without reducing the scale, or altering the necessarilydistanced nature, of these projects. Analysis of cooperatives, shareallocations and so forth has provided abundant discussion of theimplications of this problem with respect to the control overproduction, and, increasingly in recent years, with respect to welfarestate services - that is, the consumer influence on the health service,education and involvement in local government. However, it is in thework done on goods at the level of mass consumption that thisrecontextualization has gone furthest in practice, and this area is thelea~t studied and the least understood. This praxis may well offerlessons, however, for attempts to project plans for these otherdomains.

In this case, mass consumption goods are used to create the contextfor close social networks of which they are an integral part. They helpto provide equalizing and normative mechanisms promoting soli­darity and sociability. There are elements of this 'housewifery' whichare clearly problematic, just as class as context is problematic in otheranalyses, but these cases do at least suggest that the quantitativeincrease in material culture does not itself, even when purchasedthrough the capitalist market, mean that goods can only signify wealthand therefore the competition of conspicuous consumption. It iscommonly ethnography, immersed in the everyday lives of the peoplewhile being used to exemplify some academic argument, that appearsto counter the assumed 'truths' about, for example, the nature of newsuburban towns (e.g. Gans 1967). It is mainly those groups whoidentify themselves entirely with the abstraction of money asquantitative division, and thereby with goods as largely an expressionof wealth, which then engage in the kinds of strategies described sowittily by Veblen in his account of the leisure class.

These examples lead not only to a questioning of the materialismand individualism thought to be intrinsic to the process of consump­tion, but also to the equally common assumption that it is' a directexpression of capitalism which extends capitalist values into theprivate domain. In the Bergen study the women's normative andegalitarian practices could hardly be seen as a form of resistance tocapitalism given their general, emulation of the values of the businessclasses. The more basic question as to what forms of distribution andconsumption mechanisms might be considered as fundamentalcomponents of capitalism may perhaps be most clearly posed in termsof a possible alternative socialist society.

There are enormously diverse images of what socialism might be,and each has different implications for the ideas being explored here.Clearly, if the aim is to establish a critical position in relation to thestatus quo in countries such as Britain, these models need not berestricted to those governments currently claiming to representsocialism, although equally it would be wrong to ignore. theexperiences of such countries. One study which offers clear evidencefrom the history of socialism in practice, as well as examining thepossibilities for a more ideal socialist society which has not yetappeared, is that by Nove (1983) entitled The Economics of FeasibleSocialism. Just as it was argued in chapter 7 of the present text thatsocialism need not result in the elimination of individual property,though it would eliminate private 'collective' property, Nove's workshows that the advent of socialism as the end of class oppression mightnot mean the destruction of the market as the major means of

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----,,_

198 MASS CONSUMPTION

clothing to get by from week to week. Indeed, it may be that working~e~ple were ~evotmg at least as high a proportion of their much more~lted free time and cash to display purposes as- the contemporarymiddle class who are more commonly associated with such activities.This ~as not entirely undivisive, as it pertained to that section of theworking class who saw themselves as 'respectable', as against those whowere beyond the pale, but this is only to say that they were next tolhebottom of the social ladder. Recent work on the transference ofworking-class families to new towns such as Harlow in. the 1950ssuggests strong resistance by the occupants of these properties to theplans of architects and designers, which imposed a quite different andmore r~stricting, spatial order, which the residents had then to adjustfor their own purposes and in terms of their own traditions a.Attfield,personal communication).

Such practices emerge with particular clarity in a recent ethnographyof the lives of working-class Norwegian women in the town of Bergen(Gul!estad 1984). Gullestad describes a world in which men playarelatively small part. The women control the aesthetics of furnishingand household arrangements, spending some considerable effort onthese, with the men helping through do-it-yourself work and repairs.The women often undertake part-time work as childminders, cleanersor shop sales staff, otherwise working as housewives and mothers.They associate themselves with a particular social fraction opposed tothe values of both the 'trendy' left-wing students and the 'posh' middleclasses, but are to some extend emulatory of the wealthier bu~inessclasses. As in Salfor?, they have a strong sense of respectability ando~l?ose those who faIl,to keep up standards through heavy drinking or .failing to look after children. They appear to have much stronger socialnetworks th~ the men, ~nd although married, ,they go out to discos,and have par!leS a~d their ow~ clubs from which their husbands areexclu.ded. ~hls s~clal network.Is centred upon .the custom of regularly~eetmp to chat around the kitchen table m mid-morning. FurnishingIS a major part of the context of these meetings, and they all work hardto present their homes as suitable settings. There are, however, limits.The ~omen se~m weI.I a~are of the possi~iIit>:" of furnishing andcleaning becoming a vicanous and thus anti-social activity. Anyonewho carries on tidying in company, or is said to have 'dust on the brain'is held as culpable. Furthermore, although there is dear interest inevaluating different abilities in terms of home furnishing, there arestrong norma?ye limits. An individual possessing more than averagemoney and ability would be cautious about overdoing her furnishing inany way which would transform her from being a good example of hersocial group to being apparently above and beyond her peers.

TOWARDSA THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 201marketing geared to producer 'created' demand. This seems m?recredible than the attempt by Offe (1984) to argue a case for returnmgconsumption decisions to the workplace. There is no reason to assumethat factory workers who produce pig troughs or aids for the disabledare in any respect better judges than management ~oday <>,f~enecessity or quality of such products, Nove may be mistaken 10.hISestimation of the importance of the market as. the . a~propnatemechanism for relating goods to people; although It "':111 inevitablyplaya role, the threat of capitalist autonomy. where profit serves.onlyitself is extremely evident at present. ~~at IS.cu~ren~lyabsent I~ thekind of dynamic debate over alternat!ve dIst~lbut1v~~echanlsmsstarting from the nature of consumption, which. Wtlbams (1982)suggests operated in France a century ago. The precise models ,?f, forexample, consumer cooperatives, may no longer be t~e b~st available,but a change in our understanding ,,~what. consumption IS ~bo~t as asocial activity should provide a starnng pomt for a re-exammanon ofthis key question. In socializing mass material culture, debates overthe forms of distribution should properly follow rather than precededecisions concerning the desired form of consumption.It is hard to derive from historical example any support for the

argument that involvement in cooperative production p~oduce~ adirect association with production and, through production, Withculture itself. In the kibbutz of Israel, the one long term case of freecollective production (that is where collectivization is clearly ~erivedfrom social choice rather than political pressure) at present available, acooperative approach is taken to the.production ~f commodities ~uchas plastics, fruit and vegetables or micro electronic components. ~mcethe kibbutz is a cooperative, all members take a turn at the excessivelyboring-task of overseeing, often at night, ~he~achines. spewing outplastic buckets, soap dishes and s~ on. It IS highly ~nhkely that thesocialist nature of the production scheme provides for a newidentification between the worker and either the form or the result ofproduction. While these aspects of the original cooperative. continuetoday the total communal ownership of goods has generally fadedaway.' Although meals and child rearing facilities continued to becollective responsibilities for some time, individuals did not feel ~ble.to support a system inwhich a blouse they ha~ hand crocheted mlg~tbe redistributed to someone they did not like. Such a system ISprobably unsustainable except through highly authorit~rian stru~turesor Messianic beliefs. A more. reasonable outcome IS a continueddissociation from the mass production of plastic buckets though anequitable share of work, but combined with amarket which allow~forthe actual distribution of such products between these localized

t,distributing goods, only its elimination as a means of producinginequality. The better part of the present vast array of goods which areoften claimed to be solely the result of capitalism might therefore bepreserved under a socialist system.Nove examines the implications of a new situation in which control

over production is no longer in the hands of capital and the cla~ itserves, but has devolved to a version of the cooperative, the state oranother collectivemechanism. He assumes that such a socialist societywould retain the heavily industrialized base which provides for theproduction of mass commodities. His socialism is not, then, aconservative return to a kind of Morris craft- tradition. In theseconditions he argues that:

To influence the pattern of production by their behaviour asbuyers is surely the most genuinely democratic way to givepower to consumers. There is no direct 'political' alternative.There being hundreds of thousands of different kinds of goodsand services in infinite permutations and combinations, apolitical voting process is impracticable, a ballot paper incorpo­rating microeconomic consumer choice unthinkable (Nove1983: 225).

Nove refuses to accept that central planning and a free comp~titivemarket are mutually e:xclusivealternatives but argues for the essentialplace of both. The details of his discussion (see also Kellner ~984,Nove 1985: 24-7, 34-5) providing a picture of the complex logisticsof such an economy, which would have to deal with the vast problemsof a large modern state, give an often more profound understantiingthan that.available in abstract philosophy of the necessary articula~ionbetween the philosophical ideals of liberal freedoms and egalitarianjustice, the former enshrined in the abstraction permitted by money,the latter in the abstraction of the state. Although Nove notesithefaults of a market system, his argument is that for afeasible socialism,any alternative to it has far greater drawbacks and more invidiousconsequences. The model allows the consumer a measure of choice ofgoods, but proposes state regulation of their social implications, inorder, for example, to ensure adequate safety standards and to guardagainst the misleading representations so common today.If Nove's model of the distribution process were extended to

consumption, goods would be returned from the necessarily regula­tory and homogenizing domain of central planning, through the state,back to the parochial, transient and diverse needs of the populace. Thestate itself might well have to increase its regulatory activities in orderto counter practices which appear to favour only private interest or

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TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 203

poverty continues unabated (and indeed has recently clearlyincreased) in countries such as Britain, it is not (however much itought to be) the main pressure behind demands for material increase.These contradictions in modern society posed by the vast and

abstract nature of modern institutions might emerge more explicitlyunder socialism, since many of the more evident and in a sense'simpler' causes of social strife would have been eliminated; that is, theregulation of society for the social advantage and the identifiableinterests of a few. For this reason, any social practices which can beidentified today as having arisen in part as the population's responseto these contradictions, become of still greater consequence whenconsidered as models for a possible socialism tomorrow.Within contemporary Britain, examples of a reabsorbtion of

resources back from the autonomous and massive state through tosmaller-scale communal or popular bodies which then distribute themlocally may be found in diverse circumstances. There are cases ofgovernment bodies such as the late Greater London Council actively ,pursuing a policy of pluralistic redistribution, often to groups such asextremely orthodox representatives of minority religions who may bequite opposed to the council's particular political persuasion. Indeed,to a degree, this is true of all modern governmental services. Bodiessuch as the National Childbirth Trust and the Hospice movementmay arise at the consumer level and seek to re-order the impact ofnational services in the interests of given consumer groups. Othergroups, such as the miners' wives committees formed during the1984-5 miners' stirke to redistribute supplies and keep up morale,come from within a group acting in direct confrontation with thegovernment of the time. All of these serve to jransform welfareprovision into something appropriable on a local level. Theseexamples accord with the older liberal tradition of self-creation, ratherthan the imposed or philanthropic authoritarian image of welfareprovision. The Greater London Council was a particularly interestingcase of an avowedly socialist body which presented an image based onthe diverse possibilities of mass culture forms such as publicentertainment, as opposed to the generally rather austere image ofsocialism, whose- opposition to capitalism is thought to demand anopposition to mass consumption taken as synonymous with materi­alism. The GLC also made considerable use of advertising, marketingand the structures of the market to transform itself from a populist toa genuinely popular body. There has been a considerable increase inconcern with this area of cultural/commercial activity amongst theBritish left, as reflected in the pages of journals such as the NewSocialist (e.g. 1986: 38) and Marxism Today.

production units ensuring equal availability, and a free area ofequitable consumption which allows for-the assertion of control bythe consumer, with all the resultant pluralism. Communal consump­tion as sublation arises through similar desires concerning thespecific nature of goods and services; that is, consumption as aparticipatory normative activity. It is not solely the outcome p£communal work or an equal share in profits, which remain on theplane of abstraction.Such discussion offers two important lessons. The first is that,

even if we envisage (somewhat optimistically) the destruction of in­equalities, class divisions, profit-based distortions of claims to publicwelfare, and all the other iniquities of contemporary society, certaincentral problems integral to the contradictions, and essential to theproduction of the material conditions of modern life would remainto be faced. We would still! have a vast scale of industry, a vast(probably far more vast) state bureaucracy, and a massive populationin huge urban conglomerates, all requiring the powers of flexibility,rationalization and quantification which would be essential to suchincreased planning operations. The second lesson is that thiscontradiction is relevant for thinking about politics today, and notjust in some future society, because it radically affects the image ofpossible alternatives to present social conditions. If the intention isto stand by a commitment to the reduction of oppressive ine~uali­ties, then mass consumption appears as a key area in the resol .tionof the alienatory consequences of the mechanisms necessary fo theachievement of such goals. \This presupposes that the expansion of goods and services seen in

this century is a largely positive development, tied to some historicalrecollection of the constraints and suffering which this expansionameliorated. This is suggested by the general support for a stru~glefor higher wages. No populaton having fought for generations for a:nincrease in their pay packets is likely to give up all the mattrialadvances such wages represent without some evident and plausiblereason. Although new considerations might influence a decision tovote for a 'green' political party committed to raising electricity pricesas the only means of eliminating dangerous nuclear power stations.Such material advantages should not be confused with functional effi­ciency. It is not that workers have fought for some basic ornecessary level of attainment after which all further materialadditions are superfluous. For those with secure work, mostincreases in wage levels relate today to possibilities for holidays, anda new diversity in food, clothing and house facilities which, howeverdesirable, are hard to define in. terms of finite basic needs. Although

MASS CONSUMPTION202

A third form of the critique of fetishism, and the most precise, isthat derived from Marx's original use of the term in Capital. Marxnoted how both the structure of the political economy and thelanguage of business as a particular form of representation tended tomake the manufactured object appear, not as the work of the people,but as an alien form confronting them only as a commodity to bepurchased by them. This notion of fetishism follows from thearguments of Marx's earliest writings, as explored in chapter 3. Marxstressed, however, in this later work, the manner in which theseproblems of representation were closely articulated with the mechan­isms of class and the manner in which a class reproduces its interests.This critique may still be germane, even if, as has been argued, the

site of potential communal self-creation has moved increasinglytowards the sphere of consumption. Fundamental conflicts of interestbetween social classesmight still create analogous conflicts in the wayin which the relationship between goods and people appears to us.Much of the evidence presented in this book suggests that there iscommonly a close relationship between possession, the constructionof identity and the adherence to certain social values. This suggests intum that deprivation with respect to goods is not to be judged as mereloss of physical resources. If the identity of the peer group is formed,in part, through its association with particular items, then theindividual's inability to afford those items reflects directly on whatmay be for them a disastrous split between their desired social identityand their actual self-projection. Such close articulation between socialgroup and object possession is encouraged by advertising and design(e.g. Dyer 1982; Forty 1986), one of whose aims is to createunprecedented desires. In the context of present inequalities, withunequal distribution of goods and unequal access to forms ofideological control, these may exacerbate class and status differences.The market, which might work to express general consumer desire

in a socialist society, often does exactly the opposite today, as shownby those studies of media such as newspapers, which have demon­strated that the importance of advertising revenue creates biases infavour .of the wealthy, whose views are disproportionately repre­sented (Curren 1986).At present, then, some classes are consumers toa far greater extent than others, and their interests are thereforeunduly represented. This is compounded by the more subtle influenceof ideology discussed in chapter 9, which determines that these goodsare made according to specific perspectives and interests which resultsin a material culture constructed for one group in the image of thatgroup held by other dominant forces. This could result in what mightbe described as a lack of access to the means of objectification.

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205TOWARDSA THEORY OF CONSUMPTION204 MASSCONSUMPTION

The above account suggests a reworking of the various critiques ofconsumption subsumed by the term fetishism. The traditional uses ofthis term are problematic. First, fetishism is used to assert in a verybroad form a general discontent with consumer culture and the natureof goods, accompanied by an asceticism conveyed as a feeling of thegeneral malaise of materialism. Obviously, a book devoted to thesubject of material culture will in a sense place undue emphasis on therela~onsh~p between people and goods, rather than directly on therelationships among people. The argument of the first half of thisbook was intended to indicate, however, that all such social relationsare predicated upon culture, that is objectification, and that materialgoods are merely one, though an increasingly important, form ofculture. The blanket assumption of fetishism is therefore predicatedon the false notion of a pre-cultural social subject.The narrower and more reasonable accusation of fetishism comes in

the form of an argument related to the very particular conditions ofmodem mass consumption, in which it is said that goods are usedvicariously. That is, instead of engaging in social interaction, peoplebecome obsessively concerned with their individual relation tomaterial goods. Clearly, this describes an actual condition in modemlife and is a further example of that reification which defines theunhappy consciousness? in which the forms of culture becomeabstracted interests in t.hemselves,p~e,:enting rather t~an generatingthe development of SOCial values. This IS to say that, like those1otherinstitutions already discussed, such as the state and monetarization,consumption may be seen as having tendencies towards anti~ocialautonomy and exclusivity of interest. While some goods such aspri~ate art collections or guns may indeed favour antisocial otien­tations, other such as the telephone and bus do not. The examplesgiven in the last two chapters were intended to indicate that kuchfetishism ·isnot a necessary outcome of mass consumption, but ratherareification of goods comparable with other examples of reificarion.Mass consumption may also be seen as a key instrument in exactly theopposite tendency; that is, the creation of an inalienable world inwhich objects are so firmly integrated in the development of particularsocial relations and group identity as to be as clearly generative ofsociety. I~ this sense, the productive capacity of the object asexemplified in 'Mauss's account of the gift may be retained in the verydifferent social context of a highly extensive division of labour, inwhich objects can no longer be viewedas directly related to socialtotalities, but may nevertheless remain an instrument of objectifi­canon.

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 207

detail by Bourdieu add contemporary Marxists. The argument for thepotential progressive importance of consumption is one based on ahistorical" tendency, as over the last century populations haveattempted to overcome the problems of industrial society; but it is nota general description of the world today. Such a Romanticism is basedon the assumption that populism is right simply because it comesfrom the mass populace, and ignores the dear ability of massmovements. to favour antisocial politics such as fascism, or self­destructive private practice'S.At a lesser level, this Romanticism maylead to an undifferentiated treatment of popular culture as intrinsicallypositive (Williamson 1986a), an attitude which leaves no room forprinciple or discrimination. The problem is to avoid either a blanketcondemnation or blanket populism, and instead to investigate the keyissue of what conditions appear to generate progressive strategies inconsumption. It is evident from examples already given that suchtendencies may be identified in some aspects of present dayconsumption activity, and these might provide insights into thestrategies by which people are able to recontextualize cultural forms.The. limits to philosophical and theoretical discussion of thesequestions are evident in the extent to which what should be relevantcritical social theory appears to lead only to' an extreme relativism,nihilism, and anti-humanism. Although something of this. trendemerged from a particular branch of social anthropology - that ofstructuralism -, traditional anthropology may provide a means ofextricating social analysis from this tendency, because of its commit­ment to the close observation of everyday human practices as the basisfor: its generalizations.Since the world of practices refuses the separation of variables and

factors required for the development of most economic theory, ananswer to the question of the conditions favourable to particular kindsof consumption is best searched for in the same areas to which anyimplications drawn from it will in turn be applied. There are manydistinctions which are clearly of crucial importance, but about whichwe know relatively little in tenus of their social impact. The exampleof the distinction between the allocation of services by the state andthe effect of private purchase has already been noted. Since there arerelatively few studies of long term consumption and its place in theconstruction of culture, it is difficult to take account of such practicesin the development of planning. This deficiency of modern academiabecomes still more acute if the desire is to move towards a greaterreliance on planning as part of some varient of a socialist society.Such an anthropology presupposes that we regard the activities of

everyday life as a form of praxis; that is, a working out of

Learning from Consumption Practices

The attack on Romanticism for its derision of the mundane andtainted practices of everyday life could easily translate into analternative Romanticism about modern consumption as always actingto create inalienable, highly sociable communities. Clearly, this would?e a travesty of the social relations obsetvable today, and wouldIgnore all the uses of goods for social oppression documented in such

206 MASS CONSUMPTION

Fetishism as a representation of an apparently autonomous ~or1dof goods outside the context of human self-creation may also be afeature of certain academicpositions which might otherwise be relatedto Marxism itself. The critique of post-modernism discussed inchapter 9 appears to adopt a similar position, in which goods ¥eunderstood as entirely the result of the dictates of late capitalism, ~dall the ~~m~ work of consumption which goes into them is ignored.The reification of concepts such as <myth', <discourse', <deconstruc­tion' and so forth is as effectively dismissive of the actions,of the massof the population as are the more conspicuous languages of capital.Indeed, as wit!t M~rx's .critique of capitalist practice and represen­tanon, we are In a situanon today where goods are often regarded asmere commodities and their place in social development thereforegoes unrecognized b~ t!te veil people w~o .use t?em. . .Eq?ally problematic ISthat form of SOCIalIStphilosophy which was

so skIlfully demolished by Baudrillard's earlier critical writings. Thiswas ~he assumption that these goods possess some basic <usevalue'relating to a constant and evident need, and that stylistic diversity ismere waste promoted by the branding policy of capitalism. One of them~jor failur~sof socialist practice _isthat it is has attempted to embodythis modernist approach to function, A popular opposition to vulgarfunctionaJjs~ as a criterion for which goods should be produced,often emergl.ng.asconsumer con~em for ~tyleor fashion, is neither theresult of ~apltahsm or the operation of middle-class values, but simplyan assertion of the nature of goods as culture. If put into practicf bysome naive socialism, the functionalist perspective would threaten thevery ~eans by which goods may be reappropriated by the consumer,and t?IS may well alr~ady have occurred in the socialisms of Eas,ernEurope. A problem WIthall these uses of the term fetishism, however,is that they specify too narrow an area for what goods do, mainlyrelated to class relations. In contrast to this, when goods are treated asan element of culture itself, we find a much wider spectrum ofcontradictions and strategies within which objects are implicated:

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philosophical conundrums by other means. This in turn implies a" respect for the philosophy implicated in mass activity, according towhich suburbia, the council estate and the consumption patterns ofhousewives, aswell as more obvious alternative cultures such as youthgroups, are understood as active constructions of particular culturalforms from which we can gain some understanding, if we can lea,mhow to read what Berman (1984: 114) has called the 'signs in litestreet'.Compared to the purity of theoretical academic positions and

dichotomies, the practices of households as observed in ethnographyappear as a kind of mass kitsch whose pretensions articulate at thelevel of practice so much of that which is carefully kept apart inacademic study. Consumption at this level cannot be seen asconcerning simply one thing, and self-construction by society cannotbe reduced to two dimensions; rather, it is the site at which the wholerange of often self-contradictory and unbalanced desires, constraintsand possibilities come together in that very incoherent process oftenglossed as social reproduction. .Material culture contributes in specific ways to the possibilities and

maintenance of this kitsch contradictory nature of everyday culture.There are abundant examples of oppressive ideologies establishedthrough the dominance of certain groups over material production,enormous inequalities or taste as classism.Yet at the same time, ap.dinthe same society,. examples may be found of goods used torecontextualize and thus transform the images produced by indu~try,or goods used to create small-scale social peer groups by reworkingmaterials from alienated and abstract forms to re-emerge as', thespecificity of the inalienable. "'As noted in chapter 6, material culture promotes framing, which

provides for the maintenance of diversity, while keeping contradic­tory forces operating without coming into conflict. Reduced to thelevel of individual furnishings, these are often divided into a variety ofstyles designed to fit different circumstances from formal presentationto informal relaxation, different moods, or simply the use ofsmall-scale controlled environments to reproduce different possibili­ties in a manner which extends the notion of play also discussed inchapter 6. Consistency of self or object is not a noticeable feature ofthe modern age.This raises the question of what is indicated by such inconsistency.

Although many philosophies and theories appear to assume that ahomogeneous and totalizing ego is the goal of psychologicaldevelopment (e.g, Greenberg and Mitchell 1983), while any fragmen­tation or splitting is pathological, and that by analogy the same is true

MASS CONSUMPTION208 TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 209

of society as expressive totality ~see examples. in Jay ~98~), the~eassumptions should be treated with some caution. As 1O~lcated.10chapter 6, there are alternative m_odels of the person 10 whichcontradiction may become an essential element of the developmentalprocess. If the modem personality appears as a kind ?f counter-factualself, which keeps afloat several possible characters, aided ~y a range ofgoods which externalize thes~ into diff~rent forms, this may be apositive response to a n~cessar!lycontradictory w.orl~. It may not besocially desirable to act 10 relation to a work srtuanon 10 the same w~ythat one interacts with a family at home, not because of some fault 10either situation, or the greater authenticity of one, but ~~c.ausethepossibilities of modem life.haye dev~lop,~dfrom such ~1VlSIO~Sandframes. A refusal of quantitative rationality as embodying at~1tudeswhich impose too great a distance .from human values l~ notnecessarily a progressive stance when directed, for example, against acomputer used for redistributing resourc~s. ~or is this. ele~ent ?fcontradiction solely an aspect of modernity; It ~ay be identified l.n'communities such as rural India, where the logic of the market 1Ssystematically separated from that of ritual exchange (Miller 1986).,These attributes of material culture may be used to counter the

pessimism in Simmel's view of the tragic nature of ~odern c~ltureitself. Despite the enormously powerful and reveal1O~quah~ ofSimmel's writing in this area, he tended to develop fro~ his analysis ofthe necessarily contradictory. nature of modem life, a commonfrustration with its apparently fragmentary co.nsequences.~e ~as­sive form taken by material culture, and Its extreme diversity,suggested to Simmel that, despite the liberating !la~re of itspossibilities, it would overwhelm what he called s~bJective cul~reand would always tend to remain the abstract, q~ant!fled, oppressiveand inappropriable presen~e of an.unsublated objective culture. ,What Simmel could not include 10 this argument, because they have

developed largely since his time, are t~e myriad strategies ofrecontextualization and consumption which have been used toovercome the alienatory consequences of mass consumer culture. Thesheer profusion encouraged by the transience of Iashion was expectedto overwhelm us in its very diversity, but in practice there is thebuilding up through bricolage of specific and part~cul~rsocial groupswhich define themselves as much through the rejection of all thosecultural forms they are not as from the assertion of their particularstyle. Small sections of the population be~ome imme~sed to ~extraordinary degree in the enormous profusion of hobbles, sports,clubs, fringe activities, and the nationwide organizations devoted tointerests as diverse as medieval music, swimming, ballroom dancing,

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image of participatory collective action, as a means of emancipation.Instead, there has been a growth or return of the small-scale,household-based strategies of obtaining and dispensing resources.This has also been a clear trend in the economic structure of t numberof socialist states (Nove 1983); Pahl tends to overemphasize theparticular level of household organization in a manner comparablewith others privileging either collective bureaucracy or autonomousindividuals, but the small-scale level of organization is clear.An important conclusion from Pahl's evidence (1984: 317; Pahl and

Wallace 1985), and that of others working on the 'informal' economy(e.g. Mingione 1985) is' that self-provisioning is not an alternativemeans by which resources may be obtained, and is only available tothose who have a basic level of income in the first place. As a result,there is developing a new polarization between those who areinvolved in both work and informal self-production, and thosewithout resources to be involved in either. This suggests that underpresent economic structures the development of positive consumptionstrategies by the majority is often supported by a worsening ofconditions for a large highly oppressed minority. Consumption is bydefinition concerned with the utilization of resources; it is not analternative 'leisure' arena which compensates for their absence. Anuncovering of the positive potential in consumption should notdetract from the struggle to eliminate poverty and inequalities. On thecontrary, what has been insisted upon is that it is absurd to call for theend of poverty and simultaneously imply that this would representthe end of authenticity. Consumption as portrayed here is not a returnto a simple 'enclosed' world, but a highly sophisticated historicaldevelopment predicated upon the articulation between small- andlarge-scale spheres of involvement.The evidence may be used to suggest a potential balance between a

strong state which might intervene to ensure some level of equalityand preserve public control over major resources, and activities whichencourage flexibility and plurality at the level of consumption. Bothneed to be stronger, and the condition for the strength of one is thepower of the other. Pahl is correct to stress the importance of primaryfieldwork in order to provide policy-making with insights gainedfrom the actual practices of the population at the micro-level. Hepoints, with caution, to writers who have started to move fromproduction to house ownership as points to identity formation, butfails to appreciate that one of the major reasons for the presentimportance of the household is that it is one of the sites of modernconsumption where these activities, as much as different kinds ofemployment, are articulated (see also Young and Willmott 1973).

211TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION210 MASS CONSUMPTION

steel bands and fan ~lubs. The building of social networks and leisureactivities around these highly particular pursuits is one of the strangestand most exotic features of contemporary industrial society, and onewhich is for ever increasing. There is no more eloquent confrontationwith the abstraction of money, the state and modernity than a lifedevoted to racing pigeons, or medieval fantasies played out on; amicrocomputer. All such activities, whose adherents may be wid~lydispersed, depend upon the paraphernalia of mass consumption suchas telephones, trains, and easy and relatively cheap access to relevantgoods from commercial markets.This plurality suggests a growth in the use of time for activities

which are seen by the general population as self-productive. In thissense, the older dichotomy between production and consumption isc~allenged. The workplace is not, and, indeed, never has been the onlySItefor self-production through work. This challenge is echoed in theeconomic sphere itself. Gershuny (1978, 1983, 1985) has writtenextensively on recent developments which enables processes previou­sly considered as the sphere of production or service industry to beperformed at home - for example, the flourishing do-it-yourselftradition, car repairs and house extensions. Today, even semi­industrial processes strongly identified with the workplace are part ofa hO?le economy, not paid for by wages, but saving the householdconsiderable amounts of money. Gershuny points out that this meansthat the expected increase in demand for service provision indeveloped industrial societies may well not occur. Anthropolo~istshave also analysed the way different resources may be looked to indealing with problems and crises (Wallman 1984), and Gortz (1Q82)provides a more extreme view of the significanceof a decline in wagedlabour as the definitional pivot of class relations. :These observations served as some of the points of departure fon an

ethnographic study of certain related trends in contemporary Britishsociety, based on fieldwork on the Isle of Sheppey (Pahl 19$4).Although not primarily concerned with consumption, Pahl's workfollows through the argument that one particular kind of work, thatof waged labour, has been over privileged in academic discussion, atthe expense of the wide variety of activities which are articulated bythe household as strategies both for producing monetary income andfor providing opportunities for non-monetary work with whichhousehold members can identify. .P~hl .notes that his fieldwork on Sheppey is complemented by

studies InHungary, New Zealand and the Soviet Union (1984: 331).The key point of agreement between many such observers' is theperceived failure of modernism, with its particular variant of the

I,

TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 213

diverse products and shorter production runs made for specific socialgt:oups. Late capitalism may have had to adapt to, rather than be thecause of current social trends. The potential benefit to the consumermight also be extended to the worker, allowing for more flexi?leworking hours, if this new technology was harnessed by pr~gr~sslvepolitical forces (jones and Graves 1986; Murray 19~5). Similarly,political theory appears to have fol,l<:>wedobservation of a newplurality in political practices a~d POSI?O~S(H.all 1985). .

Consumption cannot be considered In Isolation. There exist ':Iluchmore widely discussed parallel arenas,.such as the use of st;ateserrvces,including the National Health Service and the edu,catlon s~ste~,which are more obvious candidates for the transformatton of objectiveconditions. The stress on consumption is justified partly by itsprevious neglect. but also b>:th~ contention ~hat it is in this area ~~tthe strategies of recontextuahzatlon are at their most a~vanced. This ISto say that consumption is now at the vanguard of history, and mayprovide insights into the further transformation of areas such aswelfare and the workplace. .

Such an approach also implies a limitation to t~e kind of anal;:sI~ofconsumption offered by authors such 'as Bo~rdl~u: Altho~gh it. IS abrilliant picture of the nature of cultural pr~ctlces Inindustrial socleo/,Distinction reduces almost all consumpuon to the ~lay ~f SOCialdifferentiation. Yet, clearly, even the dominant groups 10 socle~ facethe problem of alienation, as shown from certain genres of lIteraryfiction such as nineteenth-century tragedy set amongst the bourgeoi­sie 'amongst other sources. Neither is this problem entirely reso~~edby the kind of close social solida!ity of~en ~ostu~ated as preVaIlIngamongst dominated groups. I~ this classism IS stnpped away, th~reremain common problems, 10 response to which cons.umpt~onpractices develop a plethora of proj~cts. As in~icated i? the dISCUSSionof fashion in chapter 9, such projects may include Ideas about theproper relationship between individual and society, models ofRomantic pasts and utopian futures develo~e~ through style~ oradherence to certain moral values, such as feminism or conservatism,expressed in developing particular forms of c~ltural rel~tions. ..' 'Iheseprojects, which include many ,domams ~therwlse treated 10

terms of religion, philosophy and morality, comprise a w?ole ~e.nesofoften fantastic possible worlds, partly su?m~rged an~ implicit, butwhich fin .r primary external expression 10 m,atenal f?~ .ratherthan i ny other media, and are the means by which posslblittles.are'dis vered and commented upon. These are largely mass practicesd. eloped in groups ranging from small youth sub-cultur~s to largeclass fractions, but with an individual level of expression. Such

Problems which arise from this stress on the household include thedanger of a 'nee-familism' ideology (Godard 1985:324-7), and also ofignoring the rise of an isolated and anomie part of the population,especially inthe larger cities.A more general ethnography might reveala series of levels of cultural construction through recontextualization.For example, television is clearly a home-based activity, but theappropriation of the media may not be centred on the househol1; as agroup. Soap operas, which are often condemned as providing vicariousneighbourhoods, are typical of a nationwide production system thatprovides material which can be dissected and commented on for itsmoral and social implications inawide variety of circumstances, aswithone's 'mates' at work, or in shopping- or street-based actualneighbourhoods, making the activity less vicarious than it at firstappeared. Consumption is concerned with the internalization ofculture in everyday life, but thereby incorporates parties, pubs andholidays as much as do-it-yourself, home-based activities.

In studies of this kind, extensive quotation from oral history oftencomplements the ethnography in showing the satisfaction gained fromcontrolling one particular domain of self-productive activity. It appearsthat there has been a return, in part, to activities such as performingrather than simply listening to pop music, and also to gardening, homebrewing and do-it-yourself, though this is balanced by leisure createdthrough maximizing monetary income and the full use of massmanufactured services.Again, this is because social groups workbese asa kind of practical kitsch, amalgamating and juxtaposing awide dnge ofactivities otherwise separated as work and leisure spheres. There arediverse areas which can be selected for emphasis by this kind ofproductive consumption, often conceived of as small domains or pondsin which one can feel oneself to be a significant fish. This all depends,however, on access to certain cultural and financial resources whichprovide the means for appropriation. Without such resources, thefeeling is simply one of increasing insignificance within a vast sea.

Capitalism itself has had to adjust to such transformations. For thefirst half of this century, commerce attempted to create larger, morehomogeneous, markets for its goods, using advertising to demolishregional, ethnic and other divisions in the consumer sphere (Leiss1983), and for a considerable period it was predicted that this trendwould continue; but since the 1950s it has had to respond to theemergence of a new ethnicity (e.g. Smith 1981) and general socialdiversity. The major technological advances brought to industrialproduction by the microchip appear largely to have followed. rather. than promoted. these new patterns of consumption, allowing conti­nued profits when these had been threatened by the demand for more

MASS CONSUMPTION212

ownership to inequalities and more general social oppression, while atthe same time insisting that these mass goods are indeed our ownculture, Emphasis has been placed on the implications of mass goodsas the product of industrialization and modernity, rather thanassuming that any problematic aspects may be dismissed as havingarisen within the context of capitalism. Equally, any attempt toconstruct models based on a separation of a population from itsmaterial environment as thereby embodying some prior or moreauthentic body of pre-cultural 'pure' social relations is based on anillusion concerning the nature of society, Mass goods representculture, not because they are merely there as the environment withinwhich we operate, but because they are an integral part of that processof objectification by which we create ourselves as an industrialsociety: our identities, our social affiliations, our lived everydaypractices, The authenticity of artefacts as culture derives, not fromtheir relationship to some historical style or manufacturing process -in others words, there is no truth or falsity immanent in them - butrather from their active participation in a process of social self­creation in which they are directly constitutive of our understandingof ourselves and others, The key criteria for judging the utility ofcontemporary objects is the degree to which they mayor may not beappropriated from the forces which created them, which are mainly,of necessity, alienating, This appropriation consists of the transmu­tation of goods, through consumption activities, into potentiallyinalienable culture, Again, no solution has been foreseen to thiscontradictory strategy, through which inalienability is achievable onlythrough societal self-alienation; and no panaceahas been proposed tothe ordinary human suffering engendered by the loneliness andmassivity of modern culture, Rather, there has been the more modestclaim that there is much to be learnt from the activities of those who,faced with the same problem on a mundane and daily basis, appear tohave developed strategies from which others might gain,Our difficulty in preceiving progressive possibilities in the con­

sumption activities around us may derive from three factors inparticular, First, there is the inherent invisibility (argued in chapter 6)of what otherwise appears to us as the highly visible material culturewhich is the form increasingly taken by culture's contradictions,Secondly, there is t continued attraction of a simplistic view of therelationshi een production and consumption, where the latter isreduce 0 merely the problem of the reproduction or completion ofthe ormer. Thirdly, under present conditions, consumption onlyrarely amounts to the ideal model developed here, which is based onits potential as evident in certain cases, and is not a description of

--------------....L_~~=.:....::::::::~ ~_-_-

215TOWARDS A THEORY OF CONSUMPTION

Conclusion

In this book a concept of bi 'f 'abstracted fro:O Hegel has b 0 JedI,ICa~n, sOJ?ewhat violently

ili~~~~ tt~n~h;n~~blem :t:n~:t~rI?thr~ ;r~~~~rIi~~I~t~dnf;~~s~h:towards a' ,eno,ogy of Spirit.a particular historical trend

following simI~~l~ish~~e :r;~~dt:h~; t!;~r:~:tha~~P~~~i~}th~manodt!.prominenr orms of ex" sCon tern life i pression an Increase in material forms:.:~~~;':i~;S'::d":::rti'n~~::,-:.;.r;:,,~:sb~~~:forms of culture ine~~~::tall a qua~~ltatlveadvance in ~hematerialworld whose internal reIatio~~h?;~I ~~dre:~~~ a ,mai~lve,externalextremely complex Th R "II Imp icanons, are

h~~b~~~~~i~h in .iimpliciihfb~:n ~~\~~~:~,~k~~h:r~lili~o~;A~~t:contrad' t' , eh~ahtu~e0 cu ture as mtnnslcaJ1y contradictorY. a1 ' ICIon w IC IS unresolvable The probl h b \'e ucidate the historical basis of this c~ntradictio ed' as een I torary nature, attempting to show how it is ro~nd d .I~ScontemJt>o­Hegel's non-reductionist approach provides: modetfo m t~e 1~~~,mg a process' of development which k 1 r u~ ~rsta.~ -conditions of contradiction, He illustrate~ es p a,ce WI ithin st(chsocietal If ion rh a contmua process 'ofwhich s~~i;tseealtlf_onl'r<?ughobjechtifi~ationand sublation, throu~h

a lenatlon was t e mstrum t £ h hi ,construction of culture, but the subjects of hi~to:;r ht de lIstorlfaIpreserve themselves from the autonomous fo a a ways towhose re-appropriation was the means of th ,rcdes tlhereby created,s hil h d eir eve opment Hegelhaw p I oShOPy anh ~omprehension as the means of sublatio~' hereowever, t e emp asis has been on ' hat i ,"

or strategies based on obi t" Pd~~XIS- t at IS,material activities, jec rve con mons,m!~:~e: t~r~~:~:~::!: ~~~!~a~r been hgued that it is pos~ible toproduced. by modern indust on to t e mass goods which arepresent relationships in the sp~;rea:~f ~ attackdthe, contribution of

ass pro ucnon and property

MASS CONSUMPTION

projects are not best stud' d h b . ,individual' d re , ,owever, .y starnng with the socialcuts acros; sl:iccl~r ern mate~lal culture I~so complex that it oftenindivid 'I p d ' bandpossibly contradictory aspects of the same

1 ua s, an IS est appr h d f hthemselvss, Given these charac~~fsJcs erili~otraehcultural patternsvide the most satisfactory meth d I ~ I g p y may well pro­this phenomenon, 0 0 ogica approach to the study pf,

214

TOWARDSA THEORY OF CONSUMPTION 217directly to negate the autonomy and scale of these historical forces,and turn to advantage ce~ ~pec~ of .~e ve~ maten~ty .of theobject world in consumption. It ISthis acnvrty which requires furtherstudy, elucidation and ~evelopment. . . .

For this reason and in order to obtain a greater understanding ofthese same processes and their limitations and possibilities, it isnecesary to pay far more attention to the qualities and conseque~cesof that surprisingly elusive component of mod~rn culture, which,although apparently highly conspICUOUS,has consistently managed toevade the focus of academic gaze, and remains the l~astun~erstood ofall the central phenomena of the modem age, that ISmaterial culture.

,general practice. Contrary instances naturally abound. What has beenshown, however, is that there, is evidence that consumption isdeveloping as one of the major sites through which the necessaryautonomy of the objects of commerce and of the modem state mightbe made compatible with the specific demands of dynamic socialgroups. An analysis of consumption may then once more become acritical theory of the status quo; but rather than through mireutopianism or nihilism, this will be achieved through the detailedanalysis of, and differentiation between, positive and negativetendencies in consumption activities as already practised within theotherwise infertile conditions of the class inequalities' of contem­proary society.Following Simmel, it has been argued that the trajectory which

leads to modernity has revealed with particularclarity the contradic­tions inherent in the process of objectification. The general claims ofthe Enlightenment, the development of its mode of thought andactivity and the material advantages which have been created throughthe division of labour, industrialization, the search for objectivescience and liberation from customary ties, are all accepted asirreversible historical developments, which cannot be offset byutopian totalities. The development of a strong state which alone canprovide the instrument with which social agents might bring about thepossibilities of equality, and which can control those forces inmodernization tending towards autonomous interest and reifiCa!l.on,is accepted, while acknowledging the state's own tendencies in isdirection.'The nature of state's institutions, their rationalistic, quantitat e,

abstracted orders, their scale, and their tendency to relate to particularinterests, makes them an externality for the mass population whi'chcannot simply be conceptually sublated through some form ~fidentification .with their construction, in the original Hegelian sense,as has been attempted is some totalitarian states. Real sublation maybe achieved only through a mass materialist practice, by which peop,ledirectly participate in the teappropriation of their culture. Self­consciousness, self-knowledge about the processes of objectificationand a progressive philosophy or political allegiance are not enough;nor, today, are collective curbs on the exploitation by a minority ofthe advantages and profits of mass production, or a degree ofparticipation in the political processes of adjudication over theallocation .of resources, although these laudable aims,are themselvesfar from achieved at present, and remain complementary to theprojects discused here. Observation of industrialized societies revealsa search by the mass population for other instruments which might act

MASSCONSUMPTION216

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Banh, F. 126Banhes, R. 145, 164My~hologies,164

Baudelaire, 139Baudrillard, J. 46-8,96, 117, 129,

164-5, 189, 206For a Critique of the foliticalEconomy of the Sign, 46

The Mirror of Production, 46The Precessionof Simulacra.

165critique of Marx, 46-8, 117

Bauhaus, 129, 159behaviourism, 87. 104, 105Benjamin, W. 9, 121, 124, 139,

155 .Bergen, 198-9Berger, P. and Luckmann, T.

64-5,81Bennan,~. 121,166,208Block,142Boas, F. 113-14Bourdieu, P. 9, 15, 52, 93, 102-6,

107, 146, 147, 149-57, 165,167, 168, 172, 182, 197,207,213, 158

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Outline of a Theory of Practice,146, 156

on class, 150-6

Australian aboriginals, 13, 50,53-8

authenticity, 10, 174, 193, 211,215

absolute knowledge, 14, 24, 2~,27,90, 181

Adorno, T. 45, 167advertising, 97, 143, 168-9, 171-2,

203, 205, 212aesthetics, 14, 80,97,98, 100, 113,

117, 149-50alienation, 27, 40-4, 62, 76, 78,

79, 118, 126, 156Althusser, L. 38-9America, 119, 148-9American history, 140-2American sociology, 68, 78ancestors, 54-9, 124Anderson, P. 165, 166Annales, historians, 135anthropology, 9, 11, 13, 50-1, 54,

51, 60, 64, 66-7, 71, 72-3, 96,102-3, 110-12, 118-20, 125,143-4, 145-6, 157, 167, 169·

of consumption, 18, 14~, 185,207-8,214

Marxist, 60Appadurai, A. 52, 120, 147archaeology, 111-12, 115, 122,

124-6, 140, 143ethno-archaeology, 112, 143

architects, 159-60, 165, 175, 198architecture, 97-8see also housing styles

art, 8, 10, 28, 32, 101, 111, 113,123, 127, 130, 149, 151-2,165, 166, 187

Arthur, C. 27, 41-2arts andcrafts, 114, 140asceticism, 72', 174

Index

\

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232