Conspicuous Consumption in Critical Theory

https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1i56q8w/conspicuous_consumption_in_critical_theory/

created by Known-Amoeba-82 on 19/01/2025 at 19:30 UTC

4 upvotes, 3 top-level comments (showing 3)

I'm working on a project connecting Thorstein Veblen to 20th century aesthetic theory. I've read Adorno's critique of Veblen's concept of conspicuous consumption (a theory motivated by "spleen" according to Adorno). I'm also familiar with Baudrillard's and Bourdieu's use of the idea. But are there other important theorists who have grappled with Veblen?

Specifically, I'm looking for a theorist who may have developed an aesthetic theory that postulates a form of beauty that cannot be reduced to status emulation. Adorno seemed to suggest such a theory, but his response to Veblen seems dismissive and vague (to me).

Comments

Comment by mahgrit at 19/01/2025 at 20:53 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Kenneth Burke, in A Rhetoric of Motives. The section on Veblen begins:

The "Invidious" as Imitation, in Veblen

We consider Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class better "in principle" than in the particular. Where Empson is fine to the point of evanescence, Veblen treads cumbrously. And his terminology of motives is far too limited in scope; hence, at every step in his explanation, important modifiers would be needed, before we could have a version of human motives equal to the depths at which the ways of persuasion (appeal, communication, "justification") must really operate. His primary distinction (between the "invidious" or "pecuniary" motive and the "instinct of workmanship") is neither comprehensive nor pliant enough. For instance, when discussing "honorific" and "humilific" words like noble, base, higher, lower, he says that "they are in substance an expression of sportsmanship-of the predatory and animistic habit of mind." Or again: "The canons of pecuniary decency are reducible for the present purposes to the principles of waste, futility, and ferocity." But we would question whether any motive ample enougli to rationalize wide areas of human relationship can be so reduced without misrepresentation. Allow, if you will, that there may be a high percentage of such ingredients in it. Yet there is nothing essentially "predatory" in the symbolic nature of money. Its nature is in its dialectical or linguistic function as a "spiritual" entity, a purely symbolic thing, a mode of abstraction that "transcends" the materially real.