The productivist bias inherent in both classical economics and orthodox Marxism has delayed the recognition of the ‘consumer revolution’ that accompanied the industrial one and has come, over the course of the last century, increasingly to drive the transformation of capital. Today, however, the consumption of commodities has entangled itself with almost every facet of social life. Indeed, the critique of consumption is now arguably fundamental to any critique of contemporary capitalism. I have entitled this examination area, ‘Mass and Individual in Consumer Society,’ hoping to capture in this phrase a specific set of issues related to the analysis of consumer capitalism. To elucidate them, I will here address each of the title’s key terms in reverse order.
To speak of ‘consumer society’ rather than other, closely related terms (e.g., ‘advertising’ or ‘consumerism’) is to address the social and cultural transformations engendered by the metastasisation of the commodity form and its “promotional logic” (Wernick 1991) rather than the problems posed by particular kinds of ‘bad consumption.’ Zygmunt Bauman (2007) provides a clear formulation of this distinction:
If consumerist culture is the peculiar fashion in which the members of a society of consumers think of behaving or in which they behave ‘unreflexively’ […] then the society of consumers stands for the peculiar set of existential conditions under which the probability is high that most men and women will embrace the consumerist rather than any other culture, and that most of the time they will obey its precepts to the best of their ability. (P. 52)
A first group of references attempt to account for the emergence of such a society of consumers (Campbell 1987; Cross 2000; Ewen 2001; Frank 1997; Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill 2005; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982; Williams 1982). They are primarily historical in orientation; however, in describing the development of modern consumerism and explicating its differences from other social formations, these authors also provide an initial theoretical description of consumer society. As Grant McCracken (1988) suggests, the rhetoric of the consumer revolution is somewhat deceptive: though the aggregate transformations described by these historians have indeed changed capitalism in profound ways, it has been a ‘long revolution.’ Thus, rather than seeking a radical rupture, we must look to a number of historical periods in different societies to trace the genealogy of consumer society. Key moments include England in the 18th century (the industrial commodity, distribution and marketing apparatuses), France in the 19th century (the Arcades, department stores, and the consumerist gaze), and the United States in the 20th century (increasing mass-mediation of marketing communication, post-war affluence, and ‘hip consumerism’).
The keyword ‘individual’ refers to a second group of texts that is concerned with explaining consumer behaviour (Baudrillard 1981, 1996; Campbell 1987; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Fiske 1989; McCracken 1988; Miller 1997, 1998). These authors are largely from anthropological and cultural studies backgrounds, and much of their work is based on ethnographic accounts of everyday consumption (Jean Baudrillard is the notable exception). Their attempts to make consumption decisions rational and explicable serve to reveal the complexity of the consumer subjectivities that prevail under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. They tend to privilege the experiences of individual consumers over and against the totality of the society in which they live and often stress the pleasure and the possibilities for the exercise of agency that can be derived from the acquisition and consumption of commodities. The key questions, then, relate to how consumers appropriate the commodities furnished by capitalism and use them to produce meaning in their everyday lives.
A third group of sources deals with the organization of consuming subjects into different kinds of groups and audiences by the rationalizing apparatuses of capital and the culture industry—a process that I have described using the keyword ‘mass.’ This group largely comprises scholars from radical or Marxist traditions (Adorno 1991; Bauman 2007; Bourdieu 1984; Horkheimer and Adorno 2001; Marcuse 1991; Wernick 1991) but is also inclusive of liberal critiques of mass culture (Galbraith 1958; Holt 2000, 2002; Simmel 1957; Veblen 1953). Speaking in very general terms, these writers are concerned with the effects that the commodification of culture—embodied, for example, in the structures of modern marketing—has on the human subjects who are produced as consuming masses. Here, consumerism is a tool of class privilege that distorts people’s true needs and desires and serves to reinforce capitalist relations of domination. Also included within this group are a smaller set of sources describing recent developments in niche marketing (Turow 1997) and the development of the lifestyle concept (Veal 1993), which represents the increasing rationalization of the process of demand-creation.
Perhaps the major theoretical challenge in approaching this subject is the large gulf that stands between the ‘consumer studies’ literature, with its focus on the emancipatory potential of individual consumption, and the ‘mass society’ literature, with its critique of the repressive functions of consumerism. The former tends to dismiss the latter as elitist and pessimistic for its normative judgements on consumption and its recourse to spectres of false consciousness and ideological manipulation. For its part, the mass culture critique might suggest that more celebratory studies have mistaken the subjective experiences of pleasure derived from individual acts of consumption for the objective conditions of constraint or oppression that are imposed by consumer society—a fact which is self-evident once the entire system of consumerism is considered as a whole. Yet some form of rapprochement between the two camps is necessary to make sense of the deeply contradictory phenomenon that is modern consumerism.
Bibliography
Adorno, Teodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Chapters 2–4, 8.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.
—–. 1996. The System of Objects. London: Verso.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming Life. Malden, MA: Polity.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. New York: Basil Blackwell.
Cross, G. 2000. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapters 1, 4, 7.
Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Allen Lane.
Ewen, Stuart. 2001. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books.
Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Chapters 1–2.
Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galbraith, John K. 1958. The Affluent Society. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press.
Holt, Douglas B. 2000. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Pp. 212–252 in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by J.B. Schor and D.B. Holt. New York: New Press.
—–. 2002. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29(1): 70–90.
Horkheimer, Max and Teodor W. Adorno. 2001. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Pp. 71–101 in Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, edited by M.G. Durham and D.M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 7.
McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1991. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.
Miller, Daniel. 1997. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg.
—-. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Simmel, Georg. 1957. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541–558.
Turow, Joseph. 1997. Breaking up America: Advertisers and the New Media World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Veal, A.J. 1993. “The Concept of Lifestyle: A Review.” Leisure Studies 12(4): 233–252.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1953. Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The New American Library.
Wernick, Andrew. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage. Chapters 1–2, 5, 8.
Williams, Rosalind. 1982. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkely: University of California Press.
Thanks for reading. If you’d like to talk about this post, please feel free to tweet me @wooesque, find me on Google+, or email me at bmw@benjaminwoo.net.