Week 4 Consumerism

1. Week 4Consumerism

2. Last week • Devaluation of work • Actual performance v. human potential • Pressure on people to remake themselves

3. The curse of ‘human potential’ • ‘tests of potential ability show just how deeply under the skin a knowledge system can cut. Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in character than the judgments of achievement. An achievement compounds social and economic circumstances, fortune and chance, with self. Potential ability focuses only on the self. The statement ‘you lack potential’ is more devastating than ‘you messed up’’ (Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism, p.123).

4. Work and consumption • The idea of ‘human potential’ affects the culture of work. • The return of abstract labour (transferable skills, frequent retraining, non-specialisation) (e.g. The Office, Armstrong and Miller, ‘What’s my job’?) • Parallel to this runs the consumption of • lifestyles (not products) • potency: huge cars, powerful computers etc.

5. consumerism • Ralph Schroeder, An Age of Limits. Consumerism as a foundation of global culture. • Bicester Village. • ‘I shop therefore I am’ • Sophie Kinsella, Confessions of a Shopaholic • Me: non-confessions of a shopaphobic. ‘Have you got a nectar card? Have you got a boots card? Are you collecting vouchers?’ No, no, no. • Role of consumerism in collapse of communism (encouragement of consumer goods by communist regimes in 1960s and 1970s).

6. Classical resources for thinking about consumerism • Rousseau (1860s): society leads people to compare themselves with one another; the social psychology of envy. • Adam Smith (late 18th century): the entire rationale for production is consumption. • Marx (1850s-80s): commodity fetishism. Marx was thinking about political economy as an academic discipline, and how it treated commodities as natural objects, neglecting their origins in the exploitation of human beings by other human beings. But the phrase itself has broader resonances. • Sombart (1900): luxury as a driving force of capitalism. • Georg Simmel (1908): The Philosophy of Money. Money is a means with which to express the ‘value’ of anything, so it is indifferent to the ‘character’ of the things whose value it expresses. The sociology of fashion(fashion cuts across class differences).

7. Weber and Durkheim on ethics and morality • Weber (1905): the role of asceticism, self-denial, self-discipline. The whole point about modern capitalism is the emergence of the ‘sober’ capitalist, the businessman or entrepreneur who can defer gratification, put off enjoyment, and invest where others would spend. • Ascetic protestantism helped forge an idea about selfhood, about what it is to be a ‘personality’ (hard work, devotion to a ‘calling’, sobriety etc.). • But at the end of PE Weber says that capitalism has its own dynamic, that it has no need of any religious/ethical support. • On the other hand...

8. Durkheim (1890s): the problem of anomie (normlessness). Discrepancy between desire and the means of realising desire. Anomic suicide: when the means of realising one’s desires are suddenly removed, the individual is faced with this discrepancy first hand (e.g. shareholders during economic collapse (1893)). The problem of individualism is exacerbated by the growth of cities, which create new objects of desire (Walter Benjamin on mid-19th century Paris shopping arcades: the phantasmagoria of capitalism). Durkheim’s problem: how do you reduce this discrepancy? Increase the means of realising desire, or decrease desire? Professional associations as a means of dampening desire: the more dense and satisfying people’s relationships with other human beings, the less likely are they to think about their relationships with material objects. BUT capitalism has to keep expanding, producing more, and to do this it needs people to buy things.

9. The most overt classical anticipation of ‘the problem of consumerism’ • Thorsten Veblen (1899) The Theory of the Leisure Class. ‘Conspicuous Consumption’. • From leisure to consumption as a mark of distinction. Historically there has always been a distinction between those who work and those who do not have to (the leisure class). • Four historical stages: • peaceable communities • predation (fighting as a source of esteem, the warrior as ruler) • Leisure as a sign of ‘pecuniary strength’ (the ruling class is marked out as a class that does not work) • with more varied communication within larger groups (e.g. in the city), and with the advent of a ruling class that works, ‘pecuniary strength’ is expressed in new ways.

10. ‘The exigencies of the modern industrial system frequently place individuals and households in juxtaposition between whom there is little contact in any other sense than that of juxtaposition. One's neighbours, mechanically speaking, often are socially not one's neighbours, or even acquaintances; and still their transient good opinion has a high degree of utility. The only practicable means of impressing one's pecuniary ability on these unsympathetic observers of one's everyday life is an unremitting demonstration of ability to pay. In the modern community there is also a more frequent attendance at large gatherings of people to whom one's everyday life is unknown; in such places as churches, theatres, ballrooms, hotels, parks, shops, and the like. In order to impress these transient observers, and to retain one's self-complacency under their observation, the signature of one's pecuniary strength should be written in characters which he who runs may read. It is evident, therefore, that the present trend of the development is in the direction of heightening the utility of conspicuous consumption as compared with leisure’ (Veblen).

11. Problems of the self • Classical sociologists: what kind of people inhabit this modern world? • Sigmund Freud: • Selves are caught between the irrationalities of libidinal desire (Id) and the overbearing demands of morality (superego). • The question is, how to strengthen the ego so that the person does not have to surrender to either.

12. Luxury versus routine conspicuous consumption • ‘no nation was ever hurt by luxury, for it can reach but to a very few’ (Samuel Johnson). • So what can ‘hurt a nation’?

13. Consumerism is older than you think • Edward Bernays (1891-1995!!) • Son of Freud’s sister, Anna; family moved to America in 1892. • Worked for Woodrow Wilson in World War I and after. • Irrationality of the public: they might not embrace democracy; so democracy needed to be promoted by means of propaganda, through ‘the engineering of consent’. Later, democracy could be encouraged by playing on ‘irrational fears’ of communism. • But Bernays is known as the ‘father of public relations’ and of modern advertising. So David Cameron is one of his great grandchildren. • 1929 launched advertising campaign to encourage women to smoke (they were forbidden to smoke in many public places). In New York Easter Parade women models smoked lucky strike cigarettes, described as ‘torches of freedom’. • Invented ‘bacon and eggs’ as the all American breakfast.

14. Bernays features heavily in Adam Curtis’s documentary, ‘Century of the Self’. • Clip from Engineering of Consent, part 3 of 6, first 5.35 mins.

15. Selves and collectivities • Curtis: what kinds of people grow up in but are in some sense also created by consumer culture? • But we can also ask: what types of connection between people arise in such circumstances? • Tonnies: Gemeinschaft v. Gesellschaft, community v. association, warmth v. impersonality, shared habits/customs v. shared rules of the game). • in terms of what do we build a common life? Marx thought that class conflict would intensify as more people fell into the ranks of the proletariat, and so he didn’t spend much time thinking about the forms of communal experience that might cut across these divisions: e.g. nationalism, religion, or fashion/taste. Durkheim’s term for class conflict was ‘the forced division of labour’ – less dramatic than Marx, but that meant that he tried to find new sources of integration.

16. Consumer culture is founded on...credit • Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: the Democratic Experience. ‘Consumption communities’: these were democratic, only they were not defined by place, work, belief, but be what people dreamed about, bought and consumed. The one thing that made them possible was: credit.

17. The universal lament today. Not that we are surrounded by sources of temptation, but that the means of satisfying desire are too easily available: the chief culprit being the credit card. • Consumer credit is older than the credit card. Credit card rests on legal, institutional and moral foundations established earlier. E.g. Weber. ‘The Protestant Sects and the spirit of capitalism’. W. was interested in the figure of the sober, self-disciplined capitalist who invests but does not spend on luxuries; but he was also interested in the ways in which business people were or were not able to get credit, and he insisted that the American business clubs required their members to ‘prove’ that they were credit worthy, and this required them to show that they could be trusted not to waste it. So ‘credit’ and ‘ethical behaviour’ were linked.

18. Methods of credit • Demand obligation (debt must be paid when creditor ‘calls’ the loan • Book credit (loan repayable at convenience of creditor • Single payment loans • Instalment plan. This was the most popular in the 1920s and 30s in US: ‘the instalment plan was to consumer credit what the moving assembly line was to the automobile industry’ (Lendol Calder, 2009. Financing the American Dream: a cultural history of consumer credit, p. 17))

19. Sources of credit (already in 1890s) • retailers • banks • personal finance companies

20. Facts about credit and personal debt in US • 1920s, debt was 10% of incomes • 1926, 2 out of every 3 cars bought on credit (same for radios, fridges, vacuum cleaners).

21. Worries about credit and debt • 1920s and 30s, worries about a ‘lost economic virtue’. Lack of disposable income had been the ‘moat’ which protected people from vanity fair. Credit was the bridge that crossed it . But Mark Twain was already documenting the shift from thrift to credit in the immediate post civil war years. • Galbraith, The Affluent Society. Advertising represented a retreat from puritanism. • Daniel Bell: ‘the greatest single engine in the destruction of the protestant ethic was the invention of the instalment plan, or instant credit’.

22. Counters to this argument • Jackson Lears: consumer culture has produced its own controls, which any culture needs in order to remain culture (this is a Freudian point). Consumer culture is ‘disciplined hedonism’, channelling productivity towards durable consumer goods • Calder: installment plan involved a fixed schedule of payments, and enforced regime of disciplined financial management. It was efficient in the way that Taylor’s scientific management was. Easy payments were not easy. • ‘In the culture of consumption, prudence, saving, and industry survive, and their persistence demonstrates in what sense consumer culture is about more than hedonism. The currents of consumer culture do not all flow in one direction. Consumption as a way of being in the world has developed restraints of its own, mechanisms of control that enable it to function as an integrating force for society. One of the most effective instruments of these mechanisms is consumer credit’ (Calder, Financing, p.28)

23. Pawnbrokers, pay day loans and the like • Pawnbrokers: 1897 in US: 134 licensed pawnbrokers in New York; 243 in San Francisco; ‘Usury’ defined as more than 6% interest a year! [cf. Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury] But in practice, 300% was possible;lendingwas regulated: high rate 3% per month of small loans; 2% on big loans. • Small-loan lenders. Charged well above statutory limits; seedy upstairs rooms out of sight. It was impossible to lend at only 6% and make a profit, so mostly the rate was 20 – 300%. 1907 in NY: 90% of employees of largest transportation company were making weekly payments to loan companies; even the smallest loans required that references be checked. • Compare this with today’s rates of interest from Wonga etc., companies which are not upstairs but which sponsor football teams and are invested in by the church of England.

24. From consumerism as a social problem to the idea of a ‘consumer society’

25. Bauman • ‘to consume means to destroy’. • Society no longer ‘engages its members’ as producers but as consumers. • This is a crucial cultural shift: modern industrial society is defined by its relative fluidity, and social mobility; by and large the last 200 years have seen the growing irrelevance of ascriptive categories, that is to say, the way the society works does not depend centrally on a shared understanding about the importance of characteristics that we cannot change. We don’t live in a society of orders and estates each with the their separate cultures, but in societies with what Ernest Gellnercalled a ‘shared high culture’ (think of national education systems); this society is an individualistic one in which we have to make ourselves or something out of ourselves on a scale that was unimaginable to even an 18th century farmer or craftsman. The most pervasive division has been along the lines of class, and class is defined by one’s position in a division of labour, by work..

26. More Bauman • Bauman thinks that there is nevertheless an order to producer societies, that they still give their members at least some anchorages on which to hang an identity. Identity could be hung on a job for life. • Bauman believes that the idea that work is worthwhile/a source of human dignity persisted, even in the face of the absence of job satisfaction in many sectors and types of occupation. ‘Ethically speaking, the feeling of a duty fulfilled was the most direct, decisive and in the end sufficient satisfaction work could bring, and in this respect all kinds of work were equal. Even the engrossing, intoxicating sensation of self-fulfilment experienced by the lucky few who could live their trade or profession as a true calling, as a secular mission of sorts, tended to be ascribed to the same awareness of the 'duty well done' which was in principle open to the performers of all jobs, even the meanest and the least engaging. The work ethic conveyed a message of equality; it played down the otherwise obvious differences between jobs, their potentials for satisfaction, their status- and prestige-bestowing capacities, as well as the material benefits they offered’ (Bauman, p.33).

27. More... • Now that ethic has given way to an aesthetics of work – which jobs give job satisfaction? The workaholic belongs not the ranks of slaves but to the privileged. (at least so Bauman claims) • But as we saw last week, the character of work has changed for significantly large numbers of people. The temporary contract and the temporary work relationships it brings with it have a parallel in the temporary character of consumer goods. Or like consumer goods, work roles too can have a ’built-in obsolescence’. • A new consumerist individualism? Bauman: work is inherently collective or cooperative; consumption is inherently individual. Is this true? • Work had an ethic; consumerism is aesthetic from the start. BUT Calder on the installment plan – financial discipline and regular repayments. Compare the credit card today: nobody calls to collect your payment. ‘Buy now pay later’ dissociates the act of buying from the act of handing over money.

28. Colin Campbell on the metaphysics of shopping • ‘Shopping ... is a way we search for ourselves and our place in the world. Though conducted in the most public of spaces, shopping is essentially an intimate and personal experience. To shop is to taste, touch, sift, consider, and talk our way through myriad possibilities as we try to determine what it is we need or desire. To shop consciously is to search not only externally, as in a store, but internally, through memory and desire. Shopping is an interactive process through which we dialogue not only with people, places, and things, but also with parts of ourselves. This dynamic yet reflective process reveals and gives form to pieces of self that might otherwise remain dormant ... the act of shopping is one of self-expression, one that allows us to discover who we are ...’ (April Benson, quoted in Colin Campbell, ‘I Shop therefore I Know that I Am: The Metaphysical Basis of Modern Consumerism’, p.32)

29. ‘...we live in a culture in which reality is equated with intensity of experience, and is hence accorded both to the source of intense stimuli and to that aspect of our being that responds to them. If then we apply this doctrine to the question of identity and the 'self' we can conclude that it is through the intensity of feeling that individuals gain the reassurance they need to overcome their existential angst and hence gain the reassuring conviction that they are indeed 'alive'. Thus although exposure to a wide range of goods and services helps to tell us who we are (by enabling us to formulate our tastes), this self-same exposure fulfils the even more vital function of enabling us to be reassured that our self is indeed 'authentic' or 'real'. Hence while what I desire (and also dislike) helps to tell me who I am, the fact that I do desire intensely helps to reassure me that I do indeed exist’ (Campbell, p.36).

30. Final thoughts • ‘to consume is to destroy’. • from consumer durables (pianos, furniture, cars) to built-in obsolescence, upgrading, self-fashioning. • home ownership as compensation for ephemerality (you can own something – or feel that you do – that, unlike a car, gets more valuable as it gets older). • ‘I’ must have the latest ‘I’ phone.