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Title: Consumption Author: David Graeber Date: August 2011 Language: en Topics: consumption, Consumerism, anthropology Source: Retrieved on 28th November 2021 from https://davidgraeber.org/papers/consumption/ Notes: Published in Current Anthropology, Vol. 52, No. 4 (August 2011), pp. 489–511.
Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to be bombarded with
endless—and often strangely moralistic—exhortations to acknowledge the
importance of something referred to as “consumption.” The exhortations
were effective; for the past 2 decades, the term has become a staple of
theoretical discourse. Rarely, however, do anthropologists examine it:
asking themselves why it is that almost all forms of human
self-expression or enjoyment are now being seen as analogous to eating
food. This essay seeks to investigate how this came about, beginning
with medieval European theories of desire and culminating in the
argument that the notion of consumption ultimately resolves certain
conceptual problems in possessive individualism.
I do not want to offer yet another critique of consumption or of
consumer practices. I want to ask instead why it is that we assume such
things exist. Why is it that when we see someone buying refrigerator
magnets and someone else putting on eyeliner or cooking dinner or
singing at a karaoke bar or just sitting around watching television, we
assume that they are on some level doing the same thing, that it can be
described as “consumption” or “consumer behavior,” and that these are
all in some way analogous to eating food?[1] I want to ask where this
term came from, why we ever started using it, and what it says about our
assumptions about property, desire, and social relations that we
continue to use it. Finally, I want to suggest that maybe this is not
the best way to think about such phenomena and that we might do well to
come up with better ones.
To do so necessarily means taking on a whole intellectual industry that
has developed over the past few decades around the study of consumption.
For most scholars, not only is the category of “consumption”
self-evident in its importance[2] but also one of the greatest sins of
past social theorists was their failure to acknowledge it. Since the
mid-1980s, theoretical discussions of the topic in anthropology,
sociology, history, or cultural studies almost invariably begin by
denouncing past scholars for having refused to give consumption
sufficient due. The most frequent villains are the Frankfurt School. One
widely used cultural studies textbook begins by explaining that
theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer
argued that the expansion of mass production in the twentieth century
had led to the commodification of culture, with the rise of culture
industries. Consumption served the interests of manufacturers seeking
greater profits, and citizens became the passive victims of advertisers.
Processes of standardization, they argued, were accompanied by the
development of a materialistic culture, in which commodities came to
lack authenticity and instead merely met “false” needs. These needs were
generated by marketing and advertising strategies and, it is argued,
increased the capacity for ideological control or domination. (MacKay
1997:3)[3]
The author goes on to observe that this view was first shaken when
ethnographers such as Dick Hebdige (1979) began examining the actual
behavior of those involved in youth subcultures and discovered that
rather than being passive and easily manipulated ... young consumers
were active, creative and critical in their appropriation and
transformation of material artifacts. In a process of bricolage, they
appropriated, reaccented, rearticulated or transcoded the material of
mass culture to their own ends, through a range of everyday creative and
symbolic practices. Through such processes of appropriation, identities
are constructed. (MacKay 1997:3)
Of course, Hebdige was dealing not just with subcultures but mainly with
self-conscious countercultures. Still, this became the model. Before
long, what was taken to be true of rebellious youth came to be seen as
true, if perhaps in a less flamboyant fashion, of all consumers. Rather
than being passive victims of media manipulation, they were active
agents. In anthropology, a number of scholars soon began making similar
arguments and telling similar stories from the mid1980s to the early
1990s: Arjun Appadurai (1986) in The Social Life of Things, Jonathan
Friedman (1994) in Consumption and Identity, and above all, Daniel
Miller (1987, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2001) in a series of books beginning
with Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Each of these authors had
his own version of the story, and each developed his own idiosyncratic
theories of what consumption was all about, but what was ultimately more
important than any particular author’s version was what might be
described as the standard narrative that began to take shape in classes,
seminars, and informal graduate school conversations at the time. This
was a surprisingly uniform little morality tale that runs something like
this. Once upon a time, it begins, we all used to subscribe to a Marxist
view of political economy that saw production as the driving force of
history and the only truly legitimate field of social struggle. Insofar
as we even thought about consumer demand, it was largely written off as
an artificial creation, the results of manipulative techniques by
advertisers and marketers meant to unload products that nobody really
needed. But eventually we began to realize that this view was not only
mistaken but also profoundly elitist and puritanical. Real working
people find most of their life’s pleasures in consumption. What is more,
they do not simply swallow whatever marketers throw at them like so many
mindless automatons; they create their own meanings out of the products
with which they chose to surround themselves. In fact, insofar as they
fashion identities for themselves, those identities are largely based on
the cars they drive, clothes they wear, music they listen to, and videos
they watch. In denouncing consumption, we are denouncing what gives
meaning to the lives of the very people we claim we wish to liberate.[4]
The obvious question is, Who is this “we”? After all, it is not as if
cultural anthropology had ever produced any Frankfurt School–style
analysis of consumption to begin with. This seems all the more
significant because the story was not simply told at one historical
juncture. By now it has effectively become a regular instrument of
academic socialization whereby graduate students—many themselves coming
from countercultural backgrounds or at least still struggling with their
own adolescent revulsion against consumer culture—adjust themselves to
more settled, consumer-oriented lives. Still, the real (and rather
perverse) effect of this narrative has been to import the categories of
political economy—the picture of a world divided into two broad spheres,
one of industrial production, another of consumption—into a field that
had never seen the world that way before. It is no coincidence that this
is a view of the world equally dear to Marxist theorists who once wished
to challenge the world capitalist system and to the neoliberal
economists currently managing it.
Perhaps this is not entirely surprising. I have argued elsewhere
(Graeber 2010) that as an ideology, at least, neoliberalism consists
largely of such systematic inversions: taking concepts and ideas that
originated in subversive, even revolutionary rhetoric and transforming
it into ways of presenting capitalism itself as subversive and
revolutionary. And the story looks rather different if one looks at the
broader social context, particularly what was happening within
capitalism itself. Until the mid-1970s, economists and marketers, when
they sought outside expertise to help understand consumer behavior,
tended to consult psychologists. Starting in the late 1970s, essays in
the Journal of Consumer Behavior and other marketing journals began to
argue for the importance of social context—the foundational essay here
is often considered to be by Belk (1975)—and look to anthropology, in
particular, for models and assistance. At first there was a great deal
of resistance to this line of approach within marketing studies itself,
but as advertisers themselves began to speak of accelerated “market
segmentation” and increasingly move to defining consumers as,
essentially, a diverse collection of subcultures, it became more and
more obviously relevant.
The first major attempt at an alliance between anthropologists and
economists in the study of consumption was soon to follow—Mary Douglas’s
(1979) work with Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an
Anthropology of Consumption. Their work, however, had little real
traction in the discipline largely because it came from a fairly
explicitly conservative political position—it was framed in part as a
rejoinder to 1960s countercultural types who criticized materialist
values. In fact, with the exception of a few mavericks such as Steve
Barnett, who (also in 1979) left academia to set up his own marketing
consultancy firm, anthropology as a discipline remained largely
reluctant to answer the business world’s call.[5] The real breakthrough
occurred in the late 1980s with the populist turn described above, that
is, when anthropologists began to take the opposite approach to Douglas,
and rather than condemn countercultures, they effectively began treating
all cultures as subcultures and all subcultures as countercultures.
The following quote is from a recently published encyclopedia of
anthropology, in the section, “Anthropology and Business”:
The British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that this “turn”
represented a metamorphosis of anthropology, from a less mature state in
which mass consumption goods were viewed as threatening (i.e.,
signifying both the loss of culture and a threat to the survival of
anthropology), to a more enlightened outlook that frankly acknowledges
consumption as the local idiom through which cultural forms express
their creativity and diversity. This rather amazing about-face has
permitted a confluence of interest between anthropology and the field of
marketing. (Baba 2006:43)
The author goes on to observe that
the literature in consumer behavior and marketing produced by
anthropologists has been well received by marketing departments and
corporations, with the result that anthropologists now hold positions in
the marketing departments of several major business schools (e.g.,
University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of
Nebraska, University of Utah). It would appear that anthropology is now
a permanent addition to the disciplines that comprise the academic
marketing field. (Baba 2006:47)
A synthetic discipline, called “consumer culture theory” (see Arnould
and Thomson 2005) has emerged as increasing numbers of anthropologists
follow the path blazed by Barnett and work directly with advertising
firms on specific campaigns.
I certainly do not mean to suggest that pressures from the corporate
world created this discourse; as I say, all this was part of a much
broader infiltration of neoliberal categories into anthropology that was
happening at the time. Neither do I mean to suggest that the resultant
field of “consumption studies” has been driven by business interests or
for that matter that it has not produced any number of interesting and
worthwhile analyses. What I do want to argue is that this choice of
initial terms has made a difference.
This is what I really want to investigate. How did “consumption” become
a field of anthropology, and what does it mean that we now call certain
kinds of behavior “consumption” rather than something else? It is a
curious fact, for example, that those who write about consumption almost
never define the term.[6] I suspect this is in part because the tacit
definition they are using is so extraordinarily broad. In common
academic usage (and to an only slightly less degree popular usage),
“consumption” has come to mean “any activity that involves the purchase,
use or enjoyment of any manufactured or agricultural product for any
purpose other than the production or exchange of new commodities.” For
most wage laborers, this means nearly anything one does when not working
for wages. Imagine, for example, four teenagers who decide to form a
band. They scare up some instruments, teach themselves to play, write
songs, come up with an act, and practice long hours in the garage. Now
it seems reasonable to see such behavior as production of some sort or
another, but if one takes the common de facto definition to its logical
conclusion, it would be much more likely to be placed in the sphere of
consumption simply because they did not themselves manufacture the
guitars.[7] Granted, this is something of a reductio ad absurdum. But it
is precisely by defining “consumption” so broadly that anthropologists
can then turn around and claim that consumption has been falsely
portrayed as passive acquiescence when in fact it is more often an
important form of creative self-expression. Perhaps the real question
should be, Why does the fact that manufactured goods are involved in an
activity automatically come to define its very nature?
It seems to me that this theoretical choice—the assumption that the main
thing people do when they are not working is “consuming” things—carries
within it a tacit cosmology, a theory of human desire and fulfillment
whose implications we would do well to think about.[8] This is what I
want to investigate in the rest of this paper. Let me begin by looking
at the history of the word “consumption” itself.
The English “to consume” derives from the Latin verb consumere, meaning
“to seize or take over completely” and, hence, by extension, to “eat up,
devour, waste, destroy, or spend.” To be consumed by fire, or for that
matter consumed with rage, still holds the same implications: it implies
something not just being thoroughly taken over but being overwhelmed in
a way that dissolves away the autonomy of the object or even that
destroys the object itself.
“Consumption” first appears in English in the fourteenth century. In
early French and English usages, the connotations were almost always
negative. To consume something meant to destroy it, to make it burn up,
evaporate, or waste away. Hence, wasting diseases “consumed” their
victims, a usage that according to the Oxford English Dictionary is
already documented by 1395. This is why tuberculosis came to be known as
“consumption.” At first the now-familiar sense of consumption as eating
or drinking was very much a secondary meaning. Rather, when applied to
material goods, “consumption” was almost always synonymous with waste:
it meant destroying something that did not have to be (at least quite so
thoroughly) destroyed.[9]
The contemporary usage, then, is relatively recent. If we were still
talking the language of the fourteenth or even seventeenth centuries, a
“consumer society” would have meant a society of wastrels and
destroyers.
Consumption in the contemporary sense really appears in the political
economy literature only in the late eighteenth century, when authors
such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo began to use it as the opposite of
“production.”[10] One of the crucial features of the industrial
capitalism emerging at the time was a growing separation between the
places in which people—or men, at least—worked and the places where they
lived. This in turn made it possible to imagine that the “economy”
(itself a very new concept) was divided into two completely separate
spheres: the workplace, in which goods were “produced,” and the
household, in which they were “consumed.” That which was created in one
sphere is used— ultimately, used up, destroyed—in the other. Vintners
produce wine, and consumers take it home and drink it; chemical plants
produce ink, and consumers take it home, put it in pens, and write with
it, and so on. Of course, even from the start, it was more difficult to
see in what sense consumers were “consuming” silverware or books because
these are not destroyed by use; however, because just about anything
does eventually wear out or have to be replaced, the usage was not
entirely implausible.
All this did, certainly, bring home one of the defining features of
capitalism: that it is a motor of endless production, one that can
maintain its equilibrium, in fact, only by continual growth. Endless
cycles of destruction do seem to be, necessarily, the other side of
this. To make way for new products, all that old stuff must somehow be
cleared away, destroyed, or at least cast aside as outmoded or
irrelevant. And this is indeed the defining feature of “consumer
society” as usually described (especially by its critics): one that
casts aside any lasting values in the name of an endless cycling of
ephemera. It is a society of sacrifice and destruction. And often what
seems to most fascinate Western scholars—and the Western public—about
people living in radically different economic circumstances are
phenomena that seem to mirror this in one way or another. George
Bataille (1985[1937]) saw here a clue to the nature of culture itself,
whose essence he saw as lying in apparently irrational acts of wild
sacrificial destruction, for which he drew on examples such as Aztec
human sacrifice or the Kwakiutl potlatch.[11] Or consider the
fascination with the potlatch itself. It is hard not to think about
Northwest Coast potlatch without immediately evoking images of chiefs
setting fire to vast piles of wealth—such images play a central role not
only in Bataille’s but in just about every popular essay on “gift
economies” since. If one examines the sources, though, it turns out most
Kwakiutl potlatches were stately redistributive affairs, and our image
is really based on a handful of extremely unusual ones held around 1900
at a time when the Kwakiutl population was simultaneously devastated by
disease and was undergoing an enormous economic boom (e.g., Masco 1995).
Clearly, the spectacle of chiefs vying for titles by setting fire to
piles of blankets or other valuables strikes our imagination not so much
because it reveals some fundamental truth about human nature largely
suppressed in our own society as because it reflects a barely hidden
truth about the nature of our own consumer society: that it is largely
organized around the ceremonial destruction of commodities.
“Consumption,” then, refers to an image of human existence that first
appears in the North Atlantic world around the time of the industrial
revolution, one that sees what humans do outside the workplace largely
as a matter of destroying things or using them up. It is especially easy
to perceive the impoverishment this introduces into accustomed ways of
talking about the basic sources of human desire and gratification by
comparing it to the ways earlier Western thinkers had talked about such
matters. St. Augustine and Hobbes (1968), for example, both saw human
beings as creatures of unlimited desire, and they therefore concluded
that if left to their own devices, they would always end up locked in
competition. As Marshall Sahlins (1996) has pointed out, in this they
almost exactly anticipated the assumptions of later economic theory. But
when they listed what humans desired, neither emphasized anything like
the modern notion of consumption. In fact, both came up with more or
less the same list: humans, they said, desire (1) sensual pleasures, (2)
the accumulation of riches (a pursuit assumed to be largely aimed at
winning the praise and esteem of others), and (3) power.[12] None were
primarily about using anything up.[13] Even Adam Smith (1976[1776]), who
first introduced the term “consumption” in its modern sense in The
Wealth of Nations, turned to an entirely different framework when he
developed a theory of desire in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith
2002[1761]), one that assumed that what most humans want above all is to
be the object of others’ sympathetic attention.[14] It was only with the
growth of economic theory and its gradual colonization of other
disciplines that desire itself began to be imagined as the desire to
consume.
The notion of consumption, then, that assumes that human fulfillment is
largely about acts of (more or less ceremonial) material destruction
represents something of a break in the Western tradition. It is hard to
find anything written before the eighteenth century that precisely
anticipates it. It seems to appears abruptly, mainly in countries such
as England and France, at exactly the moment when historians of those
places begin to talk about the rise of something they call “consumer
society” or simply “consumerism” (Berg and Clifford 1999; McKendrick,
Brewer, and Plum 1982; Smith 2002; Stearns 2001), that is, the moment
when a significant portion of the population could be said to be
organizing their lives around the pursuit of something called “consumer
goods,” defined as goods they did not see as necessities but as in some
sense objects of desire, chosen from a range of products, subject to the
whims of fashion (ephemera again), and so on.
All this makes it sound as if the story should really begin around 1750
or even 1776. But could such basic assumptions about what people thought
life is about really have changed that abruptly? It seems to me there
are other ways to tell the story that suggest much greater continuities.
One would be to examine the concept of “desire” itself as it emerged in
the Western philosophical tradition, to understand how it is that
“consumption” could become our key idiom for talking about material
desire. Here I think there is a great deal of continuity, and
investigating it should make it much easier to understand why in fact
European thought provided fertile ground for the emergence of such a
concept—one that, I suspect, would have seemed quite odd almost anywhere
else.
This approach might seem surprising because it is not as if one can
immediately identify a single “Western” theory of desire. In fact,
thinking on the matter in what we have come to think of as the Western
philosophical tradition contains a number of apparently contradictory
strands. Since Plato, the most common approach has been to see desire as
rooted in a feeling of absence or lack. This does make a certain obvious
intuitive sense. One desires what one does not have. One feels an
absence and imagines how one might like to fill it; this very action of
the mind is what we think of as “desire.” But there is also an
alternative tradition that goes back at least to Spinoza (2000) that
starts off not from the yearning for some absent object but from
something even more fundamental: self-preservation, the desire to
continue to exist (Nietzsche’s “life which desires itself”). Here desire
becomes the fundamental energetic glue that makes individuals what they
are over time. Both strands continue to do battle in contemporary social
theory as well. Desire as lack is especially developed in the work of
Jacques Lacan (1977). The key notion here is of the “mirror stage,”
where an infant, who is at first really a bundle of drives and
sensations unaware of its own existence as a discrete bounded entity,
manages to construct a sense of self around some external image, for
example, an encounter with his or her own reflection in the mirror. One
can generalize from here a much broader theory of desire (or perhaps
merely desire in its more tawdry narcissistic forms) where the object of
desire is always some image of perfection, an imaginary completion for
one’s own ruptured sense of self (Graeber 2001:257–258). But then there
is also the approach adopted by authors such as Deleuze and Guattari
(1983), who wrote Anti-Oedipus, their famous critique of psychoanalysis,
largely as an attack on this kind of thinking. Appealing to the
Spinozist/Nietzschean tradition, they deny that desire should be found
in any sense of lack at all. Rather, it is something that “flows”
between everyone and everything; much like Foucault’s power, it becomes
the energy knitting everything together. As such, desire is everything
and nothing; there is very little one can actually say about it.
One might be tempted to conclude at this point that “desire” is not a
very useful theoretical concept[15] —that is, one that can be
meaningfully distinguished from needs, or urges, or intentions—because
even authors working within the same philosophical tradition cannot make
up their minds what it is supposed to mean. But if one goes back to the
origins of the alternative tradition of Spinoza (2000), one soon
discovers that the two strands are not nearly as different as they
appear. When Spinoza refers to the universal driving force of all beings
to persist in their being and expand their powers of action, he is
referring not to desire (cupiditas) but to what he calls conatus,
usually translated “will.” On a bodily level, conatus takes the form of
a host of appetites: attractions, dispositions, and so forth. Desire is
“the idea of an appetite,” the imaginative construction one puts on some
such attraction or disposition.[16] In other words, the one constant
element in all these definitions is that desire (unlike needs, urges, or
intentions) necessarily involves the imagination. Objects of desire are
always imaginary objects and usually imaginary totalities of some sort
because, as I have argued before, most totalities are themselves
imaginary objects (Graeber 2001).
The other way one might say desire differs from needs, urges, or
intentions is that as Tzvetan Todorov (2001) puts it, it always implies
the desire for some kind of social relation. There must necessarily be
some kind of quest for recognition involved. The problem is that owing
to the extreme individualism typical of the Western philosophical
tradition, this tends to be occluded; even where it is not, the desire
for recognition is assumed to be the basis for some kind of profound
existential conflict. The classic text here is Hegel’s (1998) “On
Lordship and Bondage,” the famous “master/slave dialectic” in
Phenomenology of Spirit that has made it difficult for future theorists
to think of this kind of desire without also thinking of violence and
domination.
If I may be allowed a very abbreviated summary of Hegel’s argument,[17]
human beings are not animals because they have the capacity for
self-consciousness. To be self-conscious means to be able to look at
ourselves from an outside perspective— that must necessarily be that of
another human being. All these were familiar arguments at the time;
Hegel’s great innovation was to bring in desire, to point out that to
look at ourselves this way, one has to have some reason to want to do
it. This sort of desire is also inherent in the nature of humanity,
according to Hegel, because unlike animals, humans desire recognition.
Animals experience desire simply as the absence of something: they are
hungry; therefore, they wish to “negate that negation” by obtaining
food; they have sexual urges; therefore, they seek a mate.[18] Humans go
further. They not only wish to have sex—at least, if they are being
truly human about the matter—but also wish to be recognized by their
partner as someone worthy of having sex with. That is, they wish to be
loved. We desire to be the object of another’s desire. So far this seems
straightforward enough: human desire implies mutual recognition. The
problem is that for Hegel, the quest for mutual recognition inevitably
leads to violent conflict, to “life-and-death struggles” for supremacy.
He provides a little parable: two men confront each other at the
beginning of history (as in all such stories, they appear to be
40-year-old males who simply rose out of the earth fully formed). Each
wishes to be recognized by the other as a free, autonomous, fully human
being. But in order for the other’s recognition to be meaningful, he
must prove to himself that the other is fully human and worthy of
recognizing him; the only way to do this is to see whether he values his
freedom and autonomy so much that he is willing to risk his life for it.
A battle ensures. But a battle for recognition is inherently unwinnable,
because if you kill your opponent, there is no one to recognize you; on
the other hand, if your opponent surrenders, he proves by that very act
that he was not willing to sacrifice his life for recognition after all
and therefore that his recognition is meaningless. One can of course
reduce a defeated opponent to slavery, but even that is self-defeating,
because once one reduces the Other to slavery, one becomes dependent on
one’s slave for one’s very material survival while the slave at least
produces his own life and is in fact able to realize himself to some
degree through his work.
This is a myth, a parable. Clearly, there is something profoundly true
in it. Still, it is one thing to say that quest for mutual recognition
is necessarily going to be tricky, full of pitfalls, with a constant
danger of descending into attempts to dominate or even obliterate the
Other. It is another thing to assume from the start that mutual
recognition is impossible. As Majeed Yar (2001) has pointed out, this
assumption has come to dominate almost all subsequent Western thinking
on the subject, especially since Sartre refigured recognition as “the
gaze” that, he argued, necessarily pins down, squashes, and objectifies
the Other.[19] As in so much Western theory, when social relations are
not simply ignored, they are assumed to be inherently competitive.
Todorov (2001:66–67) notes that much of this is the result of starting
one’s examples with a collection of adult males: psychologically, he
argues, it is quite possible to argue that the first moment in which we
act as fully human beings is when we seek recognition from others, but
that is because the first thing a human baby does that an animal baby
does not do is try to catch her mother’s eye, an act with rather
different implications.
At this point, I think we have the elements for a preliminary synthesis.
Insofar as it is useful to distinguish something called “desire” from
needs, urges, or intentions, then, it is because desire (a) is always
rooted in imagination and (b) tends to direct itself toward some kind of
social relation, real or imaginary, and that social relation generally
entails a desire for some kind of recognition and hence an imaginative
reconstruction of the self, a process fraught with dangers of destroying
that social relation or turning it into some kind of terrible conflict.
Now, all this is more arranging the elements of a possible theory than
proposing one; it leaves open the actual mechanics of how these elements
interact. But if nothing else, it helps explain why the word “desire”
has become so popular with authors who write about modern consumerism,
which is, we are told, all about imaginary pleasures and the
construction of identities. Even here, though, the historical
connections between ideas are not what one might imagine.
In the next section, I will look at theories of consumerism as desire
and see how they tie into this broader philosophical tradition—one
rooted, I believe, in some very fundamental underlying assumptions about
the nature of human beings.
Let me begin with Colin Campbell’s (1987) Romantic Ethic and the Spirit
of Modern Consumerism, certainly one of the more creative essays on the
subject. Campbell’s book aims to provide a corrective to the usual
critique of consumer culture, which is that it throws up all sorts of
wonderful fantasies about what you will get when you purchase some
product and inevitably disappoints you once you get the product. It is
this constant lack of satisfaction, the argument goes, that then drives
consumption and thus allows the endless expansion of production. If the
system delivered on its promises, the whole thing would not work.
Campbell is not denying this happens so much as he is questioning
whether the process itself is really so frustrating or unpleasant as
most accounts imply. Really, he says, is not all this a form of pleasure
in itself? In fact, he argues that it is the unique accomplishment of
modern consumerism that it has assisted in the creation of a genuinely
new form of hedonism.
“Traditional hedonism,” Campbell argues, was based on the direct
experience of pleasure: wine, women, and song; sex, drugs, and rock and
roll; whatever the local equivalent. The problem from a capitalist
perspective is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become
sated and bored. There are logistical problems. “Modern self-illusory
hedonism,” as he calls it, solves this dilemma because here what one is
really consuming are fantasies and daydreams about what having a certain
product would be like. The rise of this new kind of hedonism, he argues,
can be traced back to certain sensational forms of Puritan religious
life but primarily to the new interest in pleasure through the vicarious
experience of extreme emotions and states that one sees emerge in the
popularity of Gothic novels and the like in the eighteenth century and
that peaks with romanticism itself. The result is a social order that
has become, in large measure, a vast apparatus for the fashioning of
daydreams. These reveries attach themselves to the promise of pleasure
afforded by some particular consumer good or set of them; they produce
the endless desires that drive consumption, but in the end, the real
enjoyment is not in the consumption of the physical objects but in the
reveries themselves (see also Wagner 1995).
The problem with this argument—or one of them (one could find all
sorts)—is the claim that all of this was something new. It is not just
the obvious point that pleasure through vicarious participation in
extreme experience did not become a significant social phenomenon only
in the seventeenth century. It was accepted wisdom as early the eleventh
century that desire was largely about taking pleasure in fantasies.
Here I turn to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben
(1993a, 1993b) and the Romanian historian of religions Ioan Couliano
(1987) on medieval and Renaissance theories of love. These theories all
turned on the notion of what was called the “pneumatic system.” One of
the greatest problems in medieval metaphysics was to explain how it was
possible for the rational soul to perceive objects in the material world
because the two were assumed to be of absolutely alien natures. The
solution was to posit an intermediate astral substance called “pneuma,”
or spirit, that translated sense impressions into phantasmic images.
These images then circulated through the body’s pneumatic system (which
centered on the heart) before they could be comprehended by the
intellectual faculties of the soul. Because this was essentially the
zone of imagination, all sensations, or even abstract ideas, had to
proceed through the imagination—becoming emotionally charged in the
process—before they could reach the mind. Hence, erotic theory held that
when a man fell in love with a woman, he was really in love not with the
woman herself but with her image, one that, once lodged in his pneumatic
system, gradually came to hijack it, vampirizing his imagination and
ultimately drawing off all his physical and spiritual energies. Medical
writers tended to represent this as a disease that needed to be cured;
poets and lovers represented it as a heroic state that combined
pleasures (in fantasy but also, somewhat perversely, in the very
experience of frustration and denial) with an intrinsic spiritual or
mystical value in itself. The one thing all agreed on, though, is that
anyone who got the idea that one could resolve the matter by “embracing”
the object of his or her fantasy was missing the point. The very idea
was considered a symptom of a profound mental disorder, a species of
“melancholia.”
Here Agamben discusses Ficino:
In the same passage, the specific character of melancholic Eros was
identified by Ficino as disjunction and excess. “This tends to occur,”
he wrote, “to those who, misusing love, transform what rightly belongs
to contemplation into the desire of the embrace.” The erotic intention
that unleashes the melancholic disorder presents itself as that which
would possess and touch what ought merely to be the object of
contemplation, and the tragic insanity of the saturnine temperament thus
finds its root in the intimate contradiction of a gesture that would
embrace the unobtainable. (Agamben 1993b:17–18)
Agamben goes on to quote the French scholastic Henry of Ghent to the
effect that melancholics “cannot conceive the incorporeal” as such
because they do not know “how to extend their intelligence beyond space
and size.” For such depressive characters, lonely brooding is punctuated
by frustrated urges to seize what cannot really be seized.[20]
Now, one might quibble over whether anyone was ever quite so
consistently pure in his or her affections as all this might imply. A
fair amount of “embracing” certainly did go on in medieval Europe, as
elsewhere. Still, this was the ideal, and critically it became the model
not just for sexual desire but for desire in general—that is, at least
among the literate elites. This leads to the interesting suggestion that
from the perspective of this particular form of medieval psychological
theory, our entire civilization—as Campbell (1987) describes it—is
really a form of clinical depression, which in some ways does actually
make a lot of sense.[21]
Couliano (1987) is more interested in how erotic theory was appropriated
by Renaissance magicians such as Giordano Bruno, for whom the mechanics
of sexual attraction became the paradigm for all forms of attraction or
desire and, hence, the key to social power. If human beings tend to
become dominated by powerful, emotionally charged images, then anyone
who developed a comprehensive scientific understanding of the mechanics
by which such images work could become a master manipulator. It should
be possible to develop techniques for “binding” and influencing others’
minds, for instance, by fixing certain emotionally charged images in
their heads or even little bits of music (jingles, basically) that could
be designed in such a way as to keep coming back into people’s minds
despite themselves and pull them in one direction or another.[22] In all
of this, Couliano sees, not unreasonably, the first self-conscious form
of the modern arts of propaganda and advertising. Bruno felt his
services should be of great interest to princes and politicians.
It apparently never occurred to Bruno or anyone else in this early
period to apply such protoadvertising techniques to economic rather than
political purposes. Politics, after all, is about relations between
people. Manipulating others was, by definition, a political business,
which I think brings out the most fundamental difference between the
medieval conception of desire and the sort of thing Campbell (1987)
describes. If one starts with a model of desire where the object of
desire is assumed to be a human being, then it only makes sense that one
cannot completely possess the object. (“Embrace” is a nice metaphor,
actually, because it is so inherently fleeting.) And one is presumably
not intentionally in the business of destroying it, either.
One might say, then, as a starting point, that the shift from the kind
of model of desire that predominated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
to the kind of consumerist model described by Campbell is a shift from
one whose paradigm is erotic to one in which the primary metaphor is
eating food.
Still, even if one examines the original medieval version, the basic
conception is already surprisingly individualistic. This is because it
is so passive. Desire is the result of an individual receiving sense
impressions from outside. Now it is certainly true that this is one very
common experience of desire, as something that seems to seize us from
outside our conscious control, let alone better judgment, and often
causes us to do things for which we would really rather not hold
ourselves entirely responsible. But it also allows us to overlook the
fact that desire emerges in relations between people.
Granted, the relationship between lover and beloved, even an imaginary
one, is a relationship of a sort. Still, it is easier to see how much
this opens the way to a purely individualistic conception if one
compares this particular model of desire as developed explicitly in
medieval and Renaissance theory and tacitly through the sort of consumer
practice Campbell (1987) describes with, say, the kind of value-based
approach I have tried to develop elsewhere (Graeber 2001). Money, for
example, can be considered in Marxian terms as a representation of the
value (importance) of productive labor (human creative action) as well
as the means by which it is socially measured and coordinated, but it is
also a representation that brings into being the very thing it
represents, because after all, in a market economy, people work in order
to get money. Arguably, something analogous happens everywhere. Value
then could be said to be the way the importance of one’s own actions
register in the imagination—always by translation into some larger
social language or system of meaning, by being integrated into some
greater social whole. It also always happens through some kind of
concrete medium—which can be almost anything (wampum, oratorical
performances, sumptuous tableware, kula artifacts, Egyptian
pyramids)—and these objects in turn (unless they are utterly generic
substances, such as money, that represent sheer potentiality) tend to
incorporate in their own structure a kind of schematic model of the
forms of creative action that bring them into being but that also become
objects of desire that end up motivating actors to carry out those very
actions. Just as the desire for money inspires one to labor, the desire
for tokens of honor inspires forms of honorable behavior, the desire for
tokens of love inspires romantic behavior, and so on.[23]
By contrast, pneumatic theory begins not from actions but from what
might once have been called “passions.” Godfrey Lienhardt (1961) long
ago pointed out that while actions and passions form a logical
set—either you act on the world or the world acts on you—we have become
so uncomfortable with the idea of seeing ourselves as passive recipients
that the latter term has almost completely disappeared from the way we
talk about experience. Medieval and Renaissance authors did not yet have
such qualms. In pneumatic theory, “passions” are not what one does but
what is done to one (where one is not agent but “patient”); at the same
time, they referred, as they do now, to strong emotions that seem to
seize us against our will. The two were linked: emotions such as love
were in fact seen as being caused by just such impressions on the
pneumatic system. Far from being models of action, in fact, passivity
came to be seen as a virtue in itself: it was those who tried to act on
their passions, to seize the object rather than contemplate it, who
really missed the point.
Framing things in such passive terms then opened the way for that
extreme individualism that appears to be the other side of the
peculiarly Western theory of desire. A schema of action is almost of
necessity a collective product; the impression of a beautiful image is
something that one can imagine involves a relation between only two
people or even (insofar as love became a mystical phenomenon) between
the desirer and God. Even with romantic love, the ideal was that it
should not really be translated into an ongoing social relation but
remain a matter of contemplation and fantasy.
All this makes it easier to understand how it might be possible to shift
from erotic fantasies to something more like the modern idea of
“consumption.” Still, the transition, I would argue, also required a
number of other conceptual shifts and displacements in terms of both
class and gender.
Compare, for example, how images of paradise in medieval and early
modern Europe varied by social milieu. When peasants, craftspeople, and
the urban poor tried to imagine a land in which all desires would be
fulfilled, they tended to focus on the abundance of food. Hence, the
land of Cockaigne, where bloated people loll about as geese fly fully
cooked into their mouths, rivers run with beer, and so forth. Carnival,
as Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) so richly illustrated, expands on all the same
themes, jumbling together every sort of bodily indulgence and enormity,
pleasures sexual as well as gastronomic and every other kind. Still, the
predominant imagery always centers on sausages, hogsheads, legs of
mutton, lard and tripes, and tubs of wine. The emphasis on food is in
striking contrast with visions of earthly paradise in other parts of the
world at that time (such as those prevalent in the Islamic world), which
were mostly about sex. Erotic fantasies are usually strikingly absent
from the literature on the Land of Cockaigne; if they are present, they
seem thrown in rather by way of an afterthought.
As Herman Pleij (2001:421) has pointed out, the medieval high-culture
version of paradise was in many ways conceived in direct opposition to
the popular one—not that it emphasized erotic pleasures, either.
Instead, it tended to fix on what we would now call elite consumables,
the exotic commodities of the day that were primarily essences: spices
above all but also incense, perfumes, and similar delicate scents and
flavors. Instead of the Land of Cockaigne, one finds a hankering after
the lost Garden of Eden, thought to exist somewhere in the East, near
the fabled kingdom of Prester John (Delumeau 2000)—anyway, from
somewhere near those fragrant lands whence cardamom, mace, peppers, and
cumin (not to mention frankincense and myrrh) were harvested. Rather
than a land of complete fatty indulgence in every sort of food, these
were often conceived as lands whose ethereal inhabitants did not have to
eat at all but simply subsisted on beautiful smells (Friedman 1981;
Schivelbusch 1992). This emphasis on refined flavors and fragrances in
turn opens onto a whole different realm of experience: of “taste,”
ephemerality, fleeting essences, and, ultimately, the familiar elite
consumption worlds of fashion, style, and the pursuit of ungraspable
novelty. Once again, then, the elite—who in reality, of course, tended
to grasp and embrace all sorts of things—constructed their ideal of
desire around that which somehow seemed to escape their hold. One might
argue that the modern consumer ethos is built on a kind of fusion
between these two class ideals. The shift from a conception of desire
modeled on erotic love to one based on the desire for food
(“consumption”) was clearly a shift in the direction of popular
discourse; at the same time, though, one might say the innovative aspect
of modern consumeristic theories of desire is to combine the popular
materialist emphasis on consumption with the notion of the ephemeral
ungraspable image as the driving force of maximization of production.
This might at least suggest a solution to what has always struck me as a
profound paradox in Western social theory. As I have already noted, the
idea of human beings as creatures tainted by original sin and therefore
cursed with infinite wants, as beings living in a finite universe who
were inevitably in a state of generalized competition, was already fully
developed by authors such as St. Augustine and therefore formed an
accepted part of Christian doctrine throughout the Middle Ages. At the
same time, very few people actually seemed to behave like this.
Economically, the Middle Ages were still the time of “target incomes,”
in which the typical reaction to economic good times, even among urban
craftspeople and most of the protobourgeoisie, was to take more days
off. It is as if the notion of the maximizing individual existed in
theory long before it emerged in practice. One explanation might be that
until the early modern period, at least, high culture (whether in its
most Christian or most courtly versions) tended to devalue any open
display of greed, appetite, or acquisitiveness, while popular
culture—which could sometimes heartily embrace such impulses—did so in
forms that were inherently collective. When the Land of Cockaigne was
translated into reality, it was in the form of popular festivals such as
Carnival; almost any increase in popular wealth was immediately diverted
into communal feasts, parades, and collective indulgences. One of the
processes that made capitalism possible, then, was what might be termed
the “privatization of desire.” The highly individualistic perspectives
of the elite had to be combined with the materialistic indulgences of
what Bakhtin liked to call the “material lower stratum.”
Getting from there to anything like the capitalist notion of consumption
required, I think, one further shift, this time along lines not of class
but of gender. The courtly love literature and related theories of
desire represent a purely male perspective,[24] and this no doubt was
true of fantasies about the Land of Cockaigne and similar idealized
worlds of gastronomic fulfillment, too. Although here it was
complicated, the fact is that in the folk psychology of the day, women
were widely considered more lustful, greedy, and generally desirous than
men. Insofar as anyone was represented as insatiable, then, it was
women: the image of woman as a ravenous belly, demanding ever more sex
and food, and men as haplessly laboring in an endless but ultimately
impossible effort to satisfy them is a standard misogynist topos going
back at least to Hesiod. Christian doctrine only reinforced it by
saddling women with the primary blame for original sin and thus
insisting that they bore the brunt of the punishment. It was only around
the time of the industrial revolution and the full split between
workplace and household that this sort of rhetoric was largely set aside
and women—proper bourgeois women, anyway—were redefined as innocent,
largely sexless creatures, guardians of homes that were no longer seen
as places of production but as “havens in a heartless world.”
Significantly, it was at just the moment that consumption came to be
defined as an essentially feminine business (Davis 1975:125–151; Graeber
1997; Thomas 1971:568–569; cf. Federici 2004).
The legacy of this shift is still with us. As feminist theorists
emphasize (e.g., Bordo 1993), women in contemporary consumer culture
remain caught in a perpetual suspension between embodying the extremes
of both spirit and matter, transcendent image and material reality, that
seems to play itself out in impossible dilemmas about food.
Incumbent Therein
What I am suggesting, then, is that while medieval moralists accepted in
the abstract that humans were cursed with limitless desires—that, as
Augustine put it, their natures rebelled against them just as they had
rebelled against God—they did not think this was an existential dilemma
that affected them; rather, people tended to attribute such sinful
predilections mainly to people they saw as social and therefore moral
inferiors. Men saw women as insatiable; the prosperous saw the poor as
grasping and materialistic. It was really in the early modern period
that all this began to change.
Agamben (1993a) has a theory as to why this happened. He suggests that
the idea that all humans are driven by infinite unquenchable desires is
possible only when one severs imagination from experience. In the world
posited by medieval psychology, desires could be satisfied for the very
reason that they were really directed at phantasms: imagination was the
zone in which subject and object, lover and beloved, could genuinely
meet and partake of one another. With Descartes, he argues, this began
to change. Imagination was redefined as something inherently separate
from experience—as, in fact, a compendium of all those things (dreams,
flights of fancy, pictures in the mind) that one feels one has
experienced but really has not. It was at this point, once we were
expected to try to satisfy one’s desires in what we have come to think
of as “the real world,” that the ephemeral nature of experience, and
therefore of any “embrace,” becomes an impossible dilemma (Agamben
1993b:25–28). One is already seeing such dilemmas worked out in De Sade,
he argues, again around the same time as the dawn of consumer culture.
This is pretty much the argument one would have to make if one were to
confine oneself, as Agamben does, entirely to literary and philosophical
texts. In the past couple sections I have been trying to develop a more
socially nuanced approach that argues, among other things, that the
modern concept of “consumption,” which carries with it the tacit
assumption that there is no end to what anyone might want, could really
only take form once certain elite concepts of desire—as the pursuit of
ephemera and phantasms—fused, effectively, with the popular emphasis on
food. Still, I do not think this is quite a complete or adequate
explanation. There is, I believe, another element that made all this
possible, perhaps inevitable. This was the expansion of the market in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the redefinition of the
world according to an essentially market logic that came to accompany
it. MacPherson (1962) first referred to it as an ideology of “possessive
individualism”—but in this case, an ideology that extended far beyond
the disputations of the learned and effected the perceptions of artisans
and rabble-rousing politicians—one by which people increasingly came to
see themselves as isolated beings who defined their relation with the
world not in terms of social relations but in terms of property rights.
It was only then that the problem of how one could “have” things, or for
that matter experiences (“we’ll always have Paris”), could really become
a crisis.[25]
There is a great deal of debate about when the ideal of private property
in the modern sense first developed and how early it could be said to
have become common sense even among the popular classes. Some (e.g.,
MacFarlane 1998) insist that it was well under way in the High Middle
Ages, at least in England. It was certainly so by the time of
Cromwell.[26] The notion of “consumption,” I would suggest, eventually
came to resolve a certain contradiction inherent within this ideal.
From an analytical perspective, of course, property is simply a social
relation: an arrangement between persons and collectivities concerning
the disposition of valuable goods. Private property is one particular
that entails one individual’s right to exclude all others—“all the
world”—from access to a certain house or shirt or piece of land, and so
on. A relation so broad is difficult to imagine, however, so people tend
to treat it as if it were a relation between a person and an object. But
what could a relation between a person and an object actually consist
of?
In English law, such relations are still described according to the
logic of sovereignty—that is, in terms of dominium. The power a citizen
has over his or her own possessions is exactly the same power once held
by kings and princes and that is still retained by states in the form of
“eminent domain.” This is why private property rights took so long to
enshrine in law: even in England, which led the way in such matters, it
was almost the eighteenth century before jurists were willing to
recognize a dominium belonging to anyone other than the king (Aylmer
1980).What would it mean, then, to establish “sovereignty” over an
object? In legal terms, a king’s dominium extended to his land, his
subjects, and their possessions; the subjects were “included in” the
person of the king, who represented them in dealing with other kingdoms,
in a similar fashion to that by which the father of a family represented
his wife, children, and servants before the law. The wife, children, and
servants of a head of household were likewise “included in” his legal
personality in much the same way as his possessions. And in fact the
power of kings was always being likened to that of fathers; the only
real difference (aside from the fact that in any conflict, the king was
seen to have a higher claim) was that unlike fathers, kings wielded the
power of life and death over their subjects. These were the ultimate
stakes of sovereignty; certainly, it was the one power kings were least
willing to delegate or share.[27] The ultimate proof that one has
sovereign power over another human being is one’s ability to have the
other executed. In a similar fashion, one might argue, the ultimate
proof of possession, of one’s personal dominium over a thing, is one’s
ability to destroy it—and indeed this remains one of the key legal ways
of defining dominium, as a property right, to this day. But there is an
obvious problem here. If one does destroy the object, one may have
definitively proved that one owned it, but, as a result, one does not
have it any more.
We end up, then, with what might seem a particularly perverse variation
on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic in which the actor, seeking some sort
of impossible recognition of absolute mastery of an inanimate object,
can achieve this recognition only by destroying it. Still, I do not
really think this is a variation on the master/slave dilemma. I think a
better case could probably be made that the dilemma described by Hegel
actually derives from this. After all, the one thing least explained in
Hegel’s account is where the necessity of conflict comes from (after
all, there are ways to risk one’s life to impress another person that do
not involve trying to murder that person).[28] Hegel’s quest for
recognition does not lead to the destruction of property, but it does
lead to a choice of either destroying the Other or reducing the Other to
property. Relations that are not based on property—or, more precisely,
on that very ambiguous synthesis between the two types of
sovereignty—suddenly become impossible to imagine, and I think this is
true because Hegel is starting from a model of possessive individualism.
At any rate, the paradox exists, and it is precisely here where the
metaphor of “consumption” gains its appeal because it is the perfect
resolution of this paradox[29] —or, at least, about as perfect a
resolution as one is ever going to get. When you eat something, you do
indeed destroy it (as an autonomous entity), but at the same time, it
remains “included in” you in the most material of senses.[30] Eating
food, then, became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and
gratification in a world in which everything, all human relations, were
being reimagined as questions of property.
Hence we return to Hegel. But I want to emphasize here that Hegel is not
the starting point of this journey. He’s the end. An account that
focused on the actual emergence of the term “consumption” in the late
eighteenth century and early nineteenth century would, no doubt, have to
contend with the broader sociopolitical context of Hegel’s day. As Susan
Buck-Morss (2000; see also Fischer 2004) has recently made clear, Hegel
composed his master/slave dialectic with questions of real colonial
slavery—particularly, the revolution in Haiti—very much at the forefront
of his mind. The reappearance of actual chattel slavery in Europe and
its colonies was of course another direct result of the emergence of
possessive individualism and caused endless dilemmas for its
ideologists. The connections here are infinitely complicated: I have
argued that capitalism is really a transformation of slavery and cannot
be understood outside it (Graeber 2005). But in this essay, in this
argument, by taking things back to the eleventh century, before Western
Europeans had a colonial empire and when chattel slavery was at its low
ebb, I am trying to cast the net even broader to ask, What, in fact, are
the origins of that attitude toward the material world that allowed
people in certain corners of Atlantic Europe to create these colonial
empires to begin with? If we do not ask such questions, we are left with
the tacit assumption that there is nothing to be explained here, that
anyone in a position to massacre and enslave millions of people in the
name of personal profit would naturally wish to do so. I would hardly
suggest I have offered a full explanation for this, but I think the
material assembled here is quite suggestive in this regard.
What does all this imply about the current use of the term
“consumption”? For one thing, I think it suggests we should think about
how far we want to extend the metaphor—as Wilk (2004) has justly
emphasized, a metaphor is all this really is. It makes perfect sense to
talk about the “consumption” of fossil fuels. It is quite another thing
to talk about the “consumption” of television programming—much though
this has been the topic of endless books and essays. Why, exactly, are
we calling this “consumption”? About the only reason I can see is that
television programming is created by people paid wages and salaries
somewhere other than where viewers are watching it. Otherwise, there
appears to be no reason at all. Programming is not even a commodity,
because viewers often do not pay for it (and in the past they almost
never did); it is not in any direct sense “consumed” by its viewers.[31]
It is hardly something one fantasizes about acquiring, and one cannot,
in fact, acquire it. It is in no sense destroyed by use. Rather, we are
dealing with a continual stream of potential fantasy material, some
intended to market particular commodities, some not. Cultural studies
scholars and anthropologists writing in the same vein will of course
insist that these images are not simply passively absorbed by
“consumers” but actively interpreted and appropriated in ways the
producers would probably never have suspected and employed as ways of
fashioning identities—the “creative consumption” model again. It is the
undoubted truth that there are people who design their identities around
certain TV shows. In fact, there are people who organize much of their
imaginative life around one particular show—Trekkies, for instance, who
participate in a subculture of fans who write stories or comic zines
around their favorite characters, attend conventions, design costumes,
and the like. But when a 16year-old girl writes a short story about
forbidden love between Kirk and Spock, this is hardly consumption any
more; we are talking about people engaging in a complex community
organized around forms of (relatively unalienated) production. One can
imagine here a kind of continuum with this representing one extreme. At
the other, we have a considerable slice of television viewing by people
who work 40 or 50 hours a week at jobs they find mind-numbingly boring,
extremely stressful, or both; who commute; who come home far too
exhausted and emotionally drained to be able to engage in any of the
activities they would consider truly rewarding, pleasurable, or
meaningful; and who just plop down in front the of the tube because it
is the easiest thing to do.[32] In other words, when “creative
consumption” is at its most creative, it is not really consumption at
all; when it most resembles something we would call “consumption,” it is
at its least creative. And there is no particular reason to define
television watching as “consumption” at all.[33]
Does it really matter that we use the word “consumption” when speaking
of television programming as opposed to some other term? Actually, I
think it matters a great deal. Because, ultimately, doing so represents
a political choice: it means that we align ourselves with one body of
writing and research— in this case, the one most closely aligned with
the language and interests of the corporate world and not with others—
in this instance, that activist literature explicitly critical of the
role of television in contemporary life. Around the same time as Steve
Barnett was dropping out of academia to become an advertising
consultant, an advertising executive named Jerry Mander (1978) abandoned
the business world to publish a book called Four Arguments for the
Elimination of Television using his own technical knowledge of the
industry to make a case that the common popular discourse that sees
television as a mind-numbing drug and advertisers as cynical
manipulators is entirely accurate. Unlike the works of exponents of the
“creative consumption” paradigm, which remain largely confined to the
desks of graduate students and marketing executives, this volume found a
ready popular audience and continues to sell well to the present day.
The same can be said of more recent additions to the literature, such as
Kalle Lasn’s (1999) Culture Jam, and of the flagship journal of the
antimarketing activists, Adbusters, largely composed by current or
former employees in the industry, which (unlike, say, the Journal of
Consumer Research) can occasionally even be found for sale in
supermarket checkout lines (even if, admittedly, mostly cooperative
supermarkets). Some of this literature—which incidentally tends to take
a neo-Situationist rather than a Frankfurt School approach[34] —may be
anthropologically naive, but this is largely because anthropologists
have played almost no role in helping shape it. This literature in turn
overlaps with the truly voluminous critical literature on TV journalism,
corporate public relations, and the mediatization of political life,
from which again anthropologists have largely excluded themselves even
if they may often be personally sympathetic. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1999) On
Television, for instance, which emerges from this tradition and which
was a surprise best seller in France, has gone largely unnoticed as a
result. What I am really trying to draw attention to here is the
profound irony of the situation. While academics that espouse such
opinions risk being instantly denounced as elitists with contempt for
“ordinary people,” these opinions seem to resonate with many “ordinary
people” in a way that the creative consumption literature never has.
Oddly, those writing in venues such as the Journal of Consumer Research
itself often seem more open to this critical literature than most
anthropologists,[35] perhaps because they are aware that one cannot very
well represent consumers as subversive unless there is something out
there, some dominant ideology, for them to subvert. After all, if all
that existed was a collection of subcultures, there could not also be
countercultures, as there would be no hegemony for them to resist. The
shadow of the Frankfurt School’s “mass society” must therefore be
preserved if only to be eternally transcended. This is perhaps also why
the story with which I began, that “we used to be naive Marxists,” has
effectively become a permanent element in academic socialization. We all
come to graduate school already aware of the anticonsumerist discourse
precisely because it is a popular discourse (if obviously not the only
one). Part of our initiation into that peculiar elite that is academia
is our learning to denounce that discourse as elitist.
What methodological conclusions am I suggesting, then? Above all, I
think we should be suspicious about importing the political economy
habit of seeing society as divided into two spheres, one of production
and one of consumption,[36] into cultural analysis in the first place.
Doing so almost inevitably forces us to push almost all forms of
nonalienated production into the category of consumption or even
“consumer behavior.” Consider the following passage, found (in fact) in
a critique of the culture of consumption:
Cooking, playing sports, gardening, DIY (Do-It-Yourself), home
decoration, dancing and music-making are all examples of consumer
activities which involve some participation, but they cannot of
themselves transform the major invasion by commercial interest groups
into consumption which has occurred since the 1950s. (Bocock 1993:51)
According to the logic of the quote above, if I bought some vegetables
and prepared a gazpacho to share with some friends, that is actually
consumerism. In fact, it would be even if I grew the vegetables myself
(presumably because I bought the seeds). We are back to my earlier
parable of the garage band. Any production not for the market is treated
as a form of consumption, which has the incredibly reactionary political
effect of treating almost every form of unalienated experience we do
engage in as somehow a gift granted us by the captains of industry.
How to think our way out of this box? No doubt there are many ways. This
paper is meant more to explain why it is important to do so than to
propose an actual solution. Still, one or two suggestions might be in
order. The first and most obvious is that we might begin treating
consumption not as an analytical term but as an ideology to be
investigated. Clearly, there are people in the world who do base key
aspects of their identity around what they see as the destructive
encompassment of manufactured products. Let us find out who these people
really are, when they think of themselves this way and when they do not,
and how they relate to others who conceive their relations to the
material world differently. If we wish to continue applying terms
borrowed from political economy—as I have myself certainly done
elsewhere (e.g., Graeber 2001, 2005)—it might be more enlightening to
start looking at what we have been calling the “consumption” sphere
rather as the sphere of the production of human beings, not just as
labor power but as persons, internalized nexes of meaningful social
relations, because after all, this is what social life is actually
about, the production of people (of which the production of things is
simply a subordinate moment), and it is only the very unusual
organization of capitalism that makes it even possible for us to imagine
otherwise.[37]
This is not to say that everything has to be considered a form of either
production or consumption (consider a softball game—it is clearly
neither), but it at least allows us to open up some neglected questions,
such as that of alienated and nonalienated forms of labor, terms that
have somewhat fallen into abeyance and therefore remain radically
undertheorized. What exactly does engaging in nonalienated production
actually mean? Such questions become all the more important when we
start thinking about capitalist globalization and resistance. Rather
than looking at people in Zambia or Brazil and saying “Look! They are
using consumption to construct identities!” and thus implying they are
willingly or perhaps unknowingly submitting to the logic of neoliberal
capitalism, perhaps we should consider that in many of the societies we
study, the production of material products has always been subordinate
to the mutual construction of human beings and what they are doing, at
least in part, is simply insisting on continuing to act as if this were
the case even when using objects manufactured elsewhere. In some cases,
this can turn into self-conscious resistance to—or, for that matter, an
equally self-conscious enthusiastic embrace of—consumer capitalism. But
in many cases, at least, I suspect that our issues and categories are
simply irrelevant.
One thing I think we can certainly assert. Insofar as social life is and
always has been mainly about the mutual creation of human beings, the
ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us
forget this. Most of all it does so by suggesting that (a) human desire
is essentially a matter not of relations between people but of relations
between individuals and phantasms; (b) our primary relation with other
individuals is an endless struggle to establish our sovereignty, or
autonomy, by incorporating and destroying aspects of the world around
them; (c) for the reason in c, any genuine relation with other people is
problematic (the problem of “the Other”); and (d) society can thus be
seen as a gigantic engine of production and destruction in which the
only significant human activity is either manufacturing things or
engaging in acts of ceremonial destruction so as to make way for more, a
vision that in fact sidelines most things that real people actually do
and insofar as it is translated into actual economic behavior is
obviously unsustainable. Even as anthropologists and other social
theorists directly challenge this view of the world, the unreflective
use—and indeed self-righteous propagation—of terms such as “consumption”
end up undercutting our efforts and reproducing the very tacit
ideological logic we are trying to call into question.
School of Management, University of Leicester, University Road,
Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom (david.harvie@ gmail.com). 29 XI 10
We like this piece a lot. Our only real criticism is perhaps the journal
in which it is being published. It should be required reading for all
theorists of consumption, but alas, it seems few of them “consume”
Current Anthropology. A search on the Business Source Premier database
reveals that the journal has never been cited in any of the five
marketing journals ranked highest by the United Kingdom–based
Association of Business Schools or in “top” economics journals.
As Graeber stresses in his article, it is not that these disciplines do
not care about anthropology but that they largely care only about what
anthropology can do for them. (See Basbøll 2010 for an exemplary exposé
of the way organization studies scholars use and abuse anthropological
research.) Indeed, one of the most informative aspects of the essay is
the way it describes a performative power of “consumption” as an
imperialistic concept taking over the academic galaxy one discipline at
a time. Graeber shows us that many anthropologists have been willing to
add to the marketing and economics literature, but in so doing they have
accepted a readymeal understanding of consumption prepackaged by the
disciplinary demands of marketing and economics such that their research
serves to valorize the very category they should analyze.
Part of the appeal of consumption, then, is that it simultaneously
pleases the two handmaidens of the modern university: business and
intellectuals. It bridges the practical and the useless, the scholarly
and the mundane. But these material factors do not fully explain the
power of consumption-asconcept. All too often an analysis that focuses
on political economy does not take account of the libidinal economy.
Here Graeber shows us how the concept of consumption has changed over
time, from being a reference to waste and destruction to a mirror for
production in monopoly capitalism and now, finally, in the “consumer
society” to being a mirror to itself. It is not the things we consume
that are important to us anymore but that we consume. We no longer
produce things in a sphere of production that we consume elsewhere.
Rather, we consume everywhere. Or so say the scholars.
For many academics, consumption is a concept whose ingredients are milk
and honey. And it is true that for many of us in paradise, we plan to do
a lot of consuming. But there is a hell of a lot of consumption going on
in hell, too. Here, though, it is the individual who is being
consumed—by fire, hate, and frustration, by one’s inability to be
consumed. It is through prolonging desire, as desire for destruction,
that hell is imagined to be so, well, hellish. In hell, your appetites
are turned against you. The separation of appetite or desires and
consumption, we might conclude, is tantamount to hell. In short,
capitalism, for most people for most of the time, is a lot like hell.
And it is capitalism that produces this separation (or “scarcity” in the
language of economics) just as it consumes we who labor within it.
So for us, the power of Graeber’s piece is that it encourages us to ask
what the world might look like if we, like early political economists,
could draw a line around “consumption”—thus defining it and containing
it. (Indeed, it is notable that within marketing studies there is much
talk of a “nexus” between consumption and production, a blurring of the
categories, without ever specifying the contours of this nexus.)
Researchers would have to look at consumption rather than through
consumption. Traditionally, we have done this in terms of production,
but that has now melted into air or at least migrated to the global
South. But what if we had a concept other than production, consumption,
or some stupid combination of the two that would allow us to look into
the mirror of consumption rather than hold up another mirror to it?
If marketing scholars do not want to limit their studies, economists
rarely care, and anthropologists have been distracted by the very
concept they should be critiquing, what is to be done? One solution is
to look outside of academia. Those outside the academy are happy to
critique consumption. This work is being done. Graeber’s challenge to
us, though, is to force ourselves to regurgitate the concept, to stick
our scholarly fingers down our academic throats until we vomit up the
idea of consumption. The question is, once it has been exposed to the
disinfectants of sunlight, will we, like dogs, return to the concept and
swallow it down once more?
Independent Scholar, 408 West College Street, Fredericksburg, Texas
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This is a very persuasive analysis. Consumption, Graeber argues, no
matter how creatively it is used by the people we study, is an ideology
that tricks us into shouldering the modernist assumption of an economy
with two spheres, production and consumption. Whatever is not production
for markets becomes, by default, consumption, a symbolic eating that
both destroys and incorporates its object. Relegated to the sphere of
consumption, social life appears as the pursuit of products, its
life-giving creativity all but forgotten. In this ideological regime,
social life itself, the “mutual creation of human beings,” can appear as
“a gift granted us by the captains of industry.”
What Graeber is doing here is one of anthropologists’ most important
tasks: owning up to the cultural bias in our analytical vocabulary and
pruning it out. In support of this necessarily social effort—the mutual
creation of anthropologists—I would like to draw out a couple of
Graeber’s points, add a pinch of four-fields perspective, and suggest
further hidden entanglements of consumerist ideology.
Consumption, Graeber argues, embeds an “impoverished” theory of “human
desire and fulfillment” that breaks decisively with all previous Western
tradition. Centuries of Western philosophy viewed desire not as directed
toward objects for consumption but toward social objectives:
recognition, “sympathetic attention,” sexual pleasure, wealth (for the
praise and esteem of others), and power.
By the early modern period, however, the achievement of these social
objectives had become a vexing problem in Western thought. Graeber
illustrates with a parable of Hegel’s: two men desire mutual recognition
as free, autonomous, fully human beings but only if the other is
worthy—the recognition of an inferior does not count. But determining
whether the other is equally free and autonomous brings these men to an
impossible dilemma. How could they know for sure? A fight would only end
in revealing the inferiority of the loser. (It is rather like the other
Marx’s not being interested in joining any club that would have him as a
member.)
Consumption, Graeber suggests, resolves the dilemma of such “passions”
by redirecting the imagination from relations with persons to relations
with things. This resonates with Albert O. Hirschman’s (1977) study of
writings from the early Modern period, in which the winning argument for
the removal of legal limits on European capitalists was the substitution
of “interests” for “passions.” Rather than destroying each other, the
ideology of consumption, in Graeber’s words, has individual consumers
relating to each other in “an endless struggle to establish ...
sovereignty, or autonomy, by incorporating and destroying aspects of the
world around them.”
The problem here is that a truly autonomous being would have no desire
for recognition from another nor any other kind of social relationship.
Hegel and those who followed this line of thinking were not so much
“starting from a model of possessive individualism,” as Graeber
proposes, but rather from one of innate competition, a model that would
soon surface as “survival of the fittest.” Human beings are in no way
autonomous. (Hegel’s two men meet “at the beginning of history,” having
never encountered another consciousness, i.e., in the impossible
condition of having survived infancy without caregivers.) To the
contrary, we are, as the late Walter Goldschmidt (2006) put it, innately
“affect hungry,” such sluts for recognition that we are likely to see
worthiness in anyone who offers us encouraging words, as flatterers and
cons the world over have always known.
Consumption in everyday practice is a way to satisfy our affect hunger,
and that is exactly what advertisers promise. Get love with cosmetics.
Get respect with a Lexus. Be the envy of your friends with the latest
electronic gizmo. But not everybody can play this game, and here is
where the question of worthiness breaks out on ever larger scales. Take
“keeping up with the Joneses,” a competitive consumption that is at the
same time a mutual creation of human beings—neighbors become worthy of
recognition by exhibiting the material signs of having engaged this
torturous labor-money system and having been able to claim some of its
prizes (tokens, as Graeber says, of the actions they represent). Who
cannot play? The unemployed and the so-called underclass—constructed as
unworthy in consumerist ideology, they suffer the fate of political
scapegoats.
Take the same dynamic global and we find “backward” multitudes who have
not “evolved” to the heights of modern consumption. As enslavement and
colonization were once justified by enlightening the benighted native,
so the unworthiness of the “backward” justifies a so-called
international development that covertly pursues the same goals: cheap
labor, cheap resources, mass markets. Hidden in the ideology of
consumption, no matter how creatively people use it, is the
world-shaking contempt of the West for “the rest” that our discipline
has long been at pains to deconstruct. Graeber is right. Let it go.
Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Regionalstudien, MartinLuther-Universität
Halle-Wittenberg, ReichardtstraĂźe 6, 06114 Halle/Saale, Germany
(felix.girke@zirs.uni-halle.de). 26 I 11
This commentary provides a welcome return to a familiar text, which has
gained only a few hundred words since its last and considerably less
centrally placed appearance (Graeber 2007b), and I do believe it has
earned its republication and discussion in this much more visible
format. David Graeber’s anamnesis of the current hypertrophic attention
to consumption is to me plausibly argued. My commentary, then, is not
intensely critical of the argument itself: there is currently a broad
public tendency to see citizens as consumers or as “customers” of their
own governments even. This does entail a number of disconcerting notions
about who we are, what we want, and how we go about getting what we
believe we need or, rather, what we ephemerally think we desire. Some
anthropologists, instead of deconstructing public discourse, are
consumed by the very idea of consumption, having accepted it as our own
analytical term instead of treating it as an epistemological arena, as a
concept that sits in fact rather uneasily between phenomenon and
category. But even in fields such as tourism, where “consumption of
people” has long been augmented to “cannibalism,” the metaphor needs to
be understood as just that: even if people feel as if they are being
eaten alive, they are, in fact, not. By calling this “consumption,” we
actively impoverish our tool kit. Graeber’s text does us the
considerable service of treating the ongoing consumption conversation as
data, as an empirical phenomenon just like others we study, and tracing
its emergence as well as some of its ramifications with great clarity.
In the end, he returns us to the anthropological commonplace that social
life is really about “the production of people,” a statement echoing
Stephen Gudeman’s (2009) consistent calls for attention to what he has
termed the base, “the incommensurable collection of goods and services
mediating relationships between people, and connecting them to things
and intangibles,” providing “conditions for sustaining locally
constituted life” (64). Not every object-oriented segment of individual
behavior is an equally meaningful actualization of the self.
Still, has the argument not overstayed its welcome? Complaints about the
turn to consumption and its particulars are not a particularly new
phenomenon within anthropology; by now 15 years old, there are the
gently cautioning words by Jim Carrier (1996), “whether consumption is
the new master narrative we ought to construct about the world and, if
so, how we ought to construct it” (422), and Carrier and Heyman’s (1997)
only slightly later explicitly stated “intellectual and political
dissatisfaction with the anthropology of consumption” (356). Strikingly,
in these earlier texts, the hypertrophic overextension of the term was
not a critical issue; in fact, the authors themselves might be targets
for Graeber’s criticism because they include items from housing to
television in the category of consumption. Their thrust, then, was
instead turned against one-dimensional semiological analyses of the
“meaning” of objects rather than their actual consequences and practical
applications and the larger contextual constraints of class and race,
that is, inequality. Additionally, Carrier and Heyman (1997) emphasize
how much of consumption is in fact about reproduction of the household,
about necessity and practical uses more than about fantastic desires, a
turn that also allows them to divert the focus away from “the individual
actors who populate much of the conventional consumption literature”
(362). This is where they again converge with Graeber’s stance against
the commonly involved emancipatory narratives, which while seemingly
liberating the constrained agents and turning them into selfactualizing
individuals (or members of self-actualizing sub/ countercultures; e.g.,
Habeck/Ventsel 2009) also cast them out of their supportive dependences.
Of course, this eviction locks such agents with quite a bit of
interpretive violence into the everyday battle for “recognition,” which
in its antagonistic sense is usefully shown here as a social
unobtainium.
This leads me to the intriguing methodological (as well as ideological)
alternative of acknowledging “passion(s)” along with actions/agency.
Burkhard Schnepel (2009), not coincidentally a student of Godfrey
Lienhardt’s, has recently suggested a return of this dialectic to its
proper place: it could serve both to balance the overly individualistic
and infuriatingly vague postmodern propagation of human agency and to
better understand certain emic positions in which, classically, one does
not catch a cold but is caught by a cold. Just because it is more
difficult to talk about passions does not mean we should not try to do
it. Thinking through this dialectic, then, we soon reach the field of
the middle voice, where desire (to have, to absorb) might be reconceived
as “something that befalls the subject without subjugating him or her”
(Eberhard 2004:63), with untold effects on the idea of consumption. Such
an understanding might be critical for the research program suggested by
Graeber, to work out what it is that actually drives people to
destructive encompassment. In this theoretical tangent, I find this
valorously quixotic paper most stimulating.
Human Ecology Division, Lund University, Sölvegatan 12, 223 62 Lund,
Sweden (alf.hornborg@hek.lu.se). 26 XI 10
Although at times more convoluted than necessary, Graeber’s argument is
a welcome antidote to the currently fashionable neoliberal discourse on
consumption as creative self-expression. He is supremely justified in
asking how anthropologists became engaged in marketing and is to be
congratulated for reorienting anthropology toward a critical analysis of
the cultural foundations of capitalism. His paper raises several
worthwhile questions that deserve lucid and coherent treatment. The
least problematic is how consumption became a field of anthropology. For
many, it was Marshall Sahlins’s (1976) useful elaboration of Baudrillard
that taught us to view commodities as elements of semiotic systems that
shoppers sought to incorporate into their selves, as the consummation of
culturally constituted desires. Such an understanding of consumption, of
course, is not in itself a reason to turn to marketing.
Graeber provides several persuasive historical hypotheses for why the
metaphor of eating is now applied to whatever people do when they are
not working, including the fusion of medieval elite desires for ephemera
and plebeian desires for food, the expansion of market principles and
individual property rights, and the urge to destroy things in order to
gain recognition of one’s sovereignty over them. Eating is indeed the
perfect idiom for destroying something while literally incorporating it.
But Graeber argues that many activities conventionally classified as
consumption, such as watching television, do not involve goods that are
destroyed by use. Nor, for the same reason, does he think that a teenage
band practicing in a garage should be called consumption. Yet even these
activities must submit to the twin constraints of capitalism and the law
of entropy (Georgescu-Roegen 1971) that correctly identify consumption
as destruction: any activity that, for want of other resources, must
involve manufactured goods—or even using electricity—implies destroying
purchased physical resources in the process of creating meaning. The
concept of consumption thus deserves to be retained, paradoxically, for
its critical potential: because it highlights how that which capitalism
would have us maximize is ultimately destroying the planet. While there
is no exemption from entropy whatever the mode of production, the
specificity of capitalism lies in its relentless pursuit of ever higher
rates of resource destruction.
It thus seems that Graeber’s call for an abandonment of the discourse on
consumption, although highly understandable when directed at its
neoliberal version, would be at odds with those activists for whom the
concept remains integral to their criticism of the treadmill logic of
capitalism. His paper, conceived in the early 1990s and published some
years ago (Graeber 2007a), criticizes the concept of consumption from
two opposite angles, that is, for being perceived as creativity and
destruction. As much as I share his skepticism regarding the ideological
uses of the former perception, I am unable to abandon the latter (even
when applied to television programming). In fact, it is only by
acknowledging the material biophysical dimension of the global economy
that we can resist the seductive neoliberal glorification of consumption
as the right to creative self-expression.
Graeber traces the historical recognition that consumer desires are
potentially infinite and quite possible to manipulate. Clearly, it is
this latter dilemma that raises the most incisive doubts about
capitalism rather than the extent of resource destruction itself. For if
profits are proportional to our “creative” destruction of resources, it
means that marketing will be geared to fabricating increasingly
arbitrary incentives for us to maximize such destruction. To continue to
expose this fundamental logic seems a more trenchant criticism of
neoliberalism than to debate whether this or that activity is really
destructive of resources.
The most significant point in Graeber’s paper is his observation that
consumption is really about the production of people, echoing Marx’s
insight that in capitalism, relations between people masquerade as
relations between things. The human appropriation (and incorporation) of
things has always been about the production of persons, but as Graeber
reminds us, commodity fetishism encourages us to imagine otherwise.
Although the idea of private property is a thoroughly social relation,
that is, a person’s right to exclude others from access to a thing, it
presents itself to us as a relation between that person and that thing.
Nor do we generally see that the commodity is an embodiment of other
people’s labor and landscapes. If the consumer’s sovereignty over his or
her commodified objects is modeled on the monarch’s sovereignty over his
or her subjects, as Graeber suggests, the affinity between the two
relations thus boils down to a transformation of social power. Viewed in
this light, it is indeed revealing to see capitalism as a transformation
of slavery or even cannibalism. Graeber’s (2001, 2004, 2007a)
stimulating and entertaining contributions to economic anthropology
continue to generate insights about how human relations to objects are
ultimately about their relations to other humans, whether objects are
treated as humans or humans are treated as objects.
Office of the Provost, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive,
MS 3A2, Fairfax, Virginia 22030, U.S.A. (pstearns@gmu.edu). 5 X 10.
The challenge to open a new discussion on the meaning of consumerism is
both welcome and stimulating. I am accurately cited in David Graeber’s
article as among the several historians who have worked to identify the
emergence of new forms of consumer behavior in the Western world in the
eighteenth century, and it is useful to be reminded of how new
conceptualizations began to emerge at this point, if initially among the
dreaded economists, as well as new behaviors.
Even with a commitment toward identifying significant historical change
and using new intensities of consumer activities as one measure, the
need to explore continuities, which the Graeber essay emphasizes under
the broader category of desire, unquestionably deserves more scrutiny
than it has received from historians and others. Even those of us who
think that something new and important was emerging in early modern
Europe have faced the question of whether the essential novelty resulted
simply from greater prosperity and new shopkeeper lures, not from new
motivations at all. Is the consumer potential rather uniformly present
in human makeup, or at least Western cultural makeup, so that its
awakening requires little explanation once new levels of mass affluence
set in? The invitation to think more about continuities in desire—even
though framed in this essay largely in terms of intellectual constructs
rather than popular motivations— advances the issue constructively while
partly redefining it.
There are, I think, a few additional angles to explore under this
general heading, not in frontal opposition to the Graeber formulation
but by way of extension and complication. First, a historian looking at
pre-eighteenth-century illustrations of premodern desire would not focus
solely or even primarily on the Western context. (I always worry about
Western statements that lack any real comparative ballast.) Those of us
interested in the emergence of consumerism but with a disproportionately
European or U.S. history background need to pay a great deal more
attention to the earlier emergence of consumer commitments in prosperous
urban settings such as Song China, where, among other things, tastes and
possibly motivations emerged that would directly influence European
interests later on. To the extent that we accept the Graeber focus on
desire as a human or at least clearly premodern category, we may need to
explore Asian (and probably other) manifestations as well. (It is also
relevant to note that Chinese consumerism, if that is what it should be
called, emerged in a cultural context officially hostile to undue
emphasis on romantic or erotic attachments.) Of course, premodern
Chinese consumerism, like its European outcropping until recently,
frequently encountered societal disapproval, with arrests and even
executions responding to some of the most vigorous consumer behaviors,
but this does not contradict the existence and significance of relevant
desire. Modern consumerism is gaining some excellent comparative
attention from several disciplines including both history and
anthropology, but we may well need more premodern work as well.
Even for the Western context, particularly before the eighteenth century
but to an extent even since, I wonder also about a possible overemphasis
on individualism. Another avenue to explore—and it may also encompass
identifiable categories of desire—involves group consumerism. Premodern
cities in the West but also elsewhere burst with group consumer projects
(and I know by now I am referencing consumerism a lot despite the
admonitions in the Graeber article). Religious projects were front and
center, with consumer decisions about church and clergy styles and
decorations, but guild presentations count as well. One of the
constraints on individual consumerism was the pervasive emphasis on
using costume and other objects to denote group identity and conformity,
though in terms of a basic definition of acquisitive efforts beyond the
needs of any reasonable subsistence, they fit a consumerism umbrella.
And this element, though by now far less organized, has hardly
disappeared from consumer behavior. The frequency of individual
decisions to acquire items or entertainments that in fact help blend
with a recognizable group—the peer cluster in school, the office
assemblage—is another complexity in consumerism that needs attention.
Here, too, links with as well as changes from more traditional patterns
factor in substantially.
All this said, let me return to my admiration for the Graeber hypothesis
about a transition, at least in Western culture, between desire for a
person to a desire for things (whether the food consumption focus is
entirely apt requires discussion, but it is beside the main point). I am
not sure I agree that this is what happened; certainly, it is not what
many new consumers thought was happening when they hoped to use objects
to express not only personal identity but also sexual or affectionate
relationships with loved ones. But perhaps it did happen, playing a role
in the misfiring of relationships in the modern Western world, and it
certainly is worth further exploration and analysis.
Department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University, Mailcode 4502,
Carbondale, Illinois 62901, U.S.A. (dsutton@ siu.edu). 8 XI 10
In the 1940s a Swedish sociologist traveled through the villages of
northern Sweden asking people about their “hobbies.” A farmer confronted
with this newfangled word hesitated, then answered “chopping wood.” (Ehn
and Lofgren 2010:111)
David Graeber’s article is a trenchant reminder of how problematic the
categories of political economy are for anthropological analysis.[38]
They were problematic in the 1970s, when it was all about modes of
production, and they are problematic now that the focus has turned to
consumption. The first step in thinking beyond these categories is to
excavate them, which Graeber does with his fascinating genealogy of the
concept of desire in the Western philosophical tradition. To the extent
that consumption studies have become ubiquitous and many of them fail to
define or even think through what is meant by the term “consumption,”
Graeber’s critique is all the more cogent. I think many of us are
familiar with the kind of studies he is referring to: ones that claim,
for example, that McDonald’s in Japan is really not so bad because they
serve squid, too (thus short-circuiting or deflecting attention from any
serious critique of their sourcing, labor, waste disposal, and other
practices). These types of analysis are so ubiquitous that one of my
students, Leo Vournelis, dubbed them the “It’s OK, they’ve appropriated
it” school of thought.
One of the key contributions of Graeber’s approach, then, is to get us
to consider the possibility of different models to analyze activities we
have been lumping under the consumption rubric. Surely, he is right that
it is dubious at best to think of television watching as an act of
“consumption,” and it would be more interesting to look at the
categories that people bring to the activity of television watching in
different contexts and communities. But I would like to briefly focus on
one object that Graeber has suggested is the epitome of consumption:
food. Indeed, food could be seen as “consumed” in the act of eating, and
Melanesian anthropologists— for example, Weiner (1992)—have claimed that
this is what makes food of limited social value: unlike shells, it is
used up in its transacting and thus cannot carry enduring meaning.
Indeed, Graeber suggests in his history of Western desire that food
plays a particular role: he sees it as key to the transition from
medieval and Renaissance to modern notions of consumption, from erotics
to gastronomics. The model of modern consumption, Graeber suggests,
highlights food because eating was “the perfect idiom for talking about
desire ... in a world in which everything, all human relations, were
being reimagined as questions of property.” Perhaps. But as Graeber
points out with regard to most of these philosophical musings, we are
probably talking about 40-year-old upper-class white men eating food, or
at least their ideas about their eating. Anthropologists have shown
repeatedly in many cultural contexts, including the United States, how
food is one of the key ways that humans imagine their
interconnectedness—how food is almost always about sharing and creating
social relations as well as for tying past, present, and future
together— not, primarily, their Marxian alienation and commodity
fetishism. Food, pace Weiner, does carry enduring social meaning through
its powerful role in imagining and in remembering social relatedness in
everyday and ritual contexts. This is merely to suggest that the fitness
of the metaphor of eating as a model for modern consumption is not
inherently obvious; many other factors were clearly at play.
Indeed, Graeber’s argument that we move beyond the categories of
consumption and production fits very well with an interest in food
preparation or cooking. Cooking clearly is not illuminated by a model of
identity, creative consumption, and resistance as much as it might be by
a model that focuses on cooking as part of a project of value
transformation (Weiss 1996), as the creation of flavors that influence
others (Adapon 2008), or as an embodied memory and skill that can be
studied just as many anthropologists study apprenticeship (Sutton 2010).
A reexamination of the usefulness of consumption as a theoretical
category opens up all kinds of new possibilities, and in this Graeber is
right on target.
I must confess I am a bit startled by the uniformly positive response;
when one writes an intentionally provocative piece, one expects that at
least someone will be provoked. Take it as a sign, perhaps, that as a
discipline we have turned a corner. At any rate, I must offer my sincere
thanks to the commentators for their grace and generosity and for giving
me so much to think about.
The lack of any need for elaborate self-defense also allows me an
opportunity to use the space to fill readers in on the background of
this small collection. The real mastermind behind it is Lauren Leve, and
the vision grew from a series of collective conversations between fellow
anthropologists in New York as far back as 2002 around a “new keywords”
project. Leve’s idea was not just to make a list of buzzwords and
explore—à la Raymond Williams (1983)—why at certain points in history,
certain terms (“culture” was his famous example) suddenly seem to jump
to the center of intellectual and social debate. Even more, she proposed
to study those theoretical terms that were not, really, being debated—or
often, really, defined—and why. Starting in the 1990s, anthropology has
moved away from grand questions of theory; indeed, it largely stopped
generating theory of any sort. Instead, we were greeted with a flood of
new topics of research and attendant technical terms (“identity,”
“consumption,” “agency,” and “flow” but also “the body,”
“governmentality,” etc.) whose meaning was largely assumed to be
self-evident. The approach instantly made sense to the rest of us, who,
as scholars trained to believe that it is, in fact, impossible to look
at the world without applying some base assumptions about what humans
are and how they interact and convey meaning to one another and that
those who do not consciously work out their theoretical assumptions are
generally condemned to simply reproduce the dominant ideology of the day
(usually some form of economistic individualism) without realizing it,
could not help but be suspicious. We soon reached the collective
conclusion that together, these terms did in fact begin to constitute a
kind of neoliberal orthodoxy that had crept over anthropology without
our being willing to admit it. It was neoliberal in the classic sense:
naturalizing market ideology in the form of a mushy but often
self-righteous populism even as anthropology itself (and now I am
speaking for myself here) abandoned its onetime political autonomy and
became, increasingly, a handmaiden to bureaucrats, marketers, and NGOs.
The project first led to a session called “The New Keywords: Unmasking
the Terms of an Emerging Orthodoxy” at the 104^(th) Annual Meetings of
the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in Chicago in November
2003. It has taken some years to come together as a volume, but the key
points of the essays continue to be all too relevant.
My own contribution was based on an idea that I had been working at on
and off since graduate school inspired by puzzlement over the peculiar
moral fervor with which, starting in the 1980s, anthropologists and
others critical of consumerism had been denounced as enemies of the
people by highly paid members of the academic elite. Why had this
particular assault happened at that particular time?
It would seem that moment of moral fervor has passed— though there were
some signs of outrage in the original peer reviews; the published
responses are quite remarkable. Most are concerned mainly to extend the
argument even further, and all of them offer something I would never
have thought of myself. Let us take them one by one.
Robert Cluley and David Harvie manage to be both funny and poetic at the
same time. Writing from a school of management, they suggest in their
relation to the business world, anthropologists have failed in their
primary duty, which is to challenge economists’ received categories
rather than reproducing them. This is perhaps not entirely fair (when I
say it either), because there are anthropologists who are critical; it
is just that marketers ignore them. But I would like to strongly second
their point that the main voices criticizing consumption now come from
outside the academy entirely. Here let me repeat an autobiographical
note relegated to a footnote in the essay itself. I actually come from a
working-class family—not only that, from a onetime Nielsen family that
during my early childhood represented the entirety of southern Manhattan
for ratings purposes until we gave an anonymous interview to TV Guide. I
know a little about ordinary Americans’ attitudes. This is why I find it
so bizarre to be lectured by a bunch of high-bourgeois-born academics
that critiquing consumption makes me out of touch. Maybe they should
stop designing so many surveys and talk to people for a change.
Dimitra Doukas suggests that perhaps possessive individualism is not so
much the culprit behind the rise of the ideology of consumption as the
principle of universal competition. She may be right. I think the appeal
of her notion of “affect hunger” is compelling. I guess I would only
ask, Is affect hunger and the resultant perverse competitive dynamics
the necessary result when you imagine your relation with the world
primarily by analogy with things?
I much appreciate Felix Girke’s suggestions that many have long been
reminding us that “consumption” is largely about the creation and
maintenance of households; one of the pitfalls of employing the term
“production,” even when referring to the production of people and social
relations (a usage that goes back at least to the German Ideology), is
that much of the most important labor—and particularly caring labor,
which should probably be considered the primary form of labor—is not
about “producing” so much as preserving, maintaining, and sustaining
things. So, too, with the point about passions. It dovetails both with
Gershon’s critique of agency (Gershon 2011) and in a complex way, I
think, with Doukas’s invocation of Herschfeld. We used to feel
“consumed” by passions. Now we have a passion to consume. Yet to what
degree is all this based not in an active desire to make, do, or
construct but a (sometimes secret) desire not to have to do so for a
change. In earlier drafts, one of the comments that most enraged
marketing theorists seemed to be the idea that some of the desire to
throw oneself in front of the television was grounded on the desire not
to have to do—or think—anything at all.
Alf Hornborg might be right that I let my old teacher Marshall Sahlins
off the hook in my genealogy of the modern notion of consumption, but if
so, it is a genuine irony, because if there is one theme that runs
through his entire intellectual history, it is a challenge to any
assumption that humans are cursed with infinite needs. (It is also worth
mention that as the commentator on the AAA version, he agreed strongly
with the argument.) More challenging is his proposal that we retain the
word “consumption” to remind us that everything we do has an ecological
impact. I am of two minds about this. Certainly, everything we do
(including production) expends resources and is subject to the law of
entropy, and Hornborg deserves much credit for being one of the few
anthropologists willing to consistently remind us of this fact. Still,
why does this mean we have to continue to embrace consumption as an
analytical category rather than as a native category that is having
almost unimaginably destructive ecological effects?
Peter Stearns’s generous comments raise a number of critical questions,
only some of which I can fully answer—though I take some comfort in the
suspicion that no one else can, either. I agree that the phenomenon of
collective consumption, in Europe and elsewhere, and the shift from
collective to individual (or family or interpersonal) forms and ideals
of enjoyment and fulfillment is absolutely crucial and is not adequately
addressed in the text. Here Puritanism played a crucial role. The
question of Song China is also a perennial challenge, along with the
broader “why didn’t China conquer the world instead of Europe?” question
(though this focuses more on the early Ming), which, to be honest, was
in the back of my mind when writing this piece, even though it is not
explicitly addressed. This is why I resisted calls from earlier peer
reviewers to focus more on colonialism: I was much more interested in
trying to get at the roots of that peculiarly European (or perhaps
“Western,” if that term is allowed to include Islam?) incorrigibility
that made colonial expansion possible. But, surely, what I offer are
just suggestions, and much comparative work is required.
Finally, I genuinely appreciate David Sutton’s comments about
food—appropriate indeed for a project that began in a restaurant in
lower Manhattan with just the sort of conversation he describes. I would
just reemphasize the second half of the clause “40-year-old upper-class
white men eating food, or at least their ideas about their eating.”
Indeed. Conviviality has always been, for most humans everywhere, the
definition of shared experience, a kind of communism of the senses that
puts the lie to the entire ideology of consumption. (And even when rich
white guys eat in expensive French restaurants—how often do you see one
eating by himself?) It is not even most eating that is the model; it is
the midnight snack, the piece of pie snarfed from the fridge when no one
else is looking, the sandwich you have at the train station, the morning
coffee, possibly the candy bar you buy when you are depressed. In a way,
that last one tells you everything.
—David Graeber
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[1] As Richard Wilk (2004) has shown in endless and elegant detail, the
term “consumption” is basically a metaphor of eating.
[2] To take one example, a while ago a book came out called The Consumer
Society Reader (Schor and Holt 2000), which contains essays by 28
authors, ranging from Thorsten Veblen to Tom Frank, about consumption
and consumerism. Not a single essay offers a definition of either term
or asks why these terms are being used rather than others.
[3] As Conrad Lodziak (2002), who also cites this passage, makes clear,
this standard version does not really reflect the actual arguments of
anyone involved in the Frankfurt School. It is all something of a myth.
[4] I note that such demotic wisdom is rarely precisely reflected in the
works of any particular author, though Miller often comes very close to
saying this. Yet they have tremendous power. Another example of the
phenomenon is the phrase “How can I know The Other?” and the debate
surrounding the question, which raged around the same time, in the late
1980s and early 1990s. As far as I know, the phrase never actually
appeared in print at all, even in the works of those authors (e.g.,
Marcus and Clifford) with whom it was broadly identified.
[5] In fact there was equal resistance in the early 1980s on either
side. Richard Wilk (personal communication) informs me that he and Eric
Arnould, a professor of marketing, wrote a paper called “Why Do the
Indians Want Adidas?” in 1981; no anthropological journal would accept
it, and American Anthropologist returned it unreviewed with the comment
“This is not an anthropological topic.”
[6] Of the few exceptions of which I am aware, one is Miller (1987), who
first defined “consumption” as an action that “translates the object
from an alienable to an inalienable condition; that is from being a
symbol of estrangement and price value to being an artifact invested
with particular inseparable connotations” (190), a rather idiosyncratic
and arcane definition related to his own Hegelian notion of
self-creation that, however, I do not believe is shared by any other
consumption theorist, and later (Miller 2001:1) as “the consequences of
objects for the people that use them,” a definition that is so broad it
is presumably not really meant as a definition at all. The other is
Appleby (1999:130): “the desiring, acquiring and enjoying of goods and
services which one has purchased,” though elsewhere in the same piece
she also defines consumption as “the active seeking of personal
gratification through material goods” (164).
[7] Especially if the band had not yet received a record contract or
many professional gigs; if they were able to market some kind of
product, it might be considered production again.
[8] Here I also want to answer some of the questions rather left
dangling at the end of my book on value theory (Graeber 2001).
[9] In French the word consummation, which is from a different root,
eventually displaced consumption. But the idea of taking possession of
an object seems to remain, and any number of authors have remarked on
the implied parallel between sexual appropriation and eating food.
[10] “Produce” is derived from a Latin word meaning to “bring out” (a
usage still preserved in phrases such as “the defense produced a
witness” or “he produced a flashlight from under his cloak”) or “to put
out” (as from a factory).
[11] Bataille’s argument was that production, which Marx saw as
quintessentially human, is also the domain of activity most constrained
by practical considerations—consumption the least so. To discover what
is really important to a culture, therefore, one should look not at how
things are made but at how they are destroyed.
[12] Similar lists appear throughout the Western tradition. Kant also
had three—wealth, power, and prestige—interestingly skipping pleasure.
[13] The sensual pleasures they had in mind seem to have centered as
much on having sex as on eating food, on lounging on silk pillows, and
on burning incense or hashish, and by “wealth,” both seemed to have in
mind, first and foremost, permanent things such as mansions, landed
estates, and magnificent jewelry rather than consumables.
[14] One could even argue that Smith’s approach to questions of desire
and fulfillment is so one sided, centering almost entirely on social
recognition and immaterial rewards (wealth, in his system, was only
really desirable insofar as wealthy people were more likely to be the
object of others’ attention and spontaneous sympathetic concern), that
it is meant to head off the very possibility of the consumption model
that was to develop from his economic work.
[15] Working here on the assumption that if one examines any
intellectual tradition carefully enough, one could find the materials
for a genuinely insightful analysis of such “big questions” (i.e.,
sufficient perusal of the Buddhist would also have yielded useful
results had I been competent to do it, which I am not).
[16] For the best collection of essays on Spinoza’s theory of desire,
see Yovel (1999). On his theory of imagination, see Gates and Lloyd
(1999) and Negri (1991).
[17] I am especially drawing on the famous “strong reading” of this
passage by Alexander Kojéve (1969) that had such an influence on
Bataille, Lacan, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon, and so on. Levinas (1998)
has recently challenged this reading, but it has certainly dominated
social theory, and particularly French social theory, for at least half
a century.
[18] In Hegel’s language, they construct themselves as a negation;
therefore, they seek to negate that negation by negating something else,
that is, by eating it.
[19] Lacan’s “mirror phase” itself actually draws directly on Hegel
(Casey and Woody 1983; Silverman 2000). I might note, too, that it is
the Hegel-Kojéve-Sartre connection that is responsible for the habit of
writing about “the Other” with a capital O, as an inherently unknowable
creature.
[20] “That is the incapacity of conceiving the incorporeal and the
desire to make of it the object of an embrace are two faces of the same
coin, of the process in whose course the traditional contemplative
vocation of the melancholic reveals itself vulnerable to the violent
disturbance of desire menacing it from within” (Agamben 1993b:18).
[21] There is a lot of evidence that suggests that levels of clinical
depression do in fact rise sharply in consumer-oriented societies; they
have certainly been rising steadily in the United States for most of the
century. I should emphasize, by the way, that while Agamben (1993b) and
Couliano (1987) draw exclusively on European sources, these ideas were
very likely developed earlier and more extensively in the Islamic world.
Certainly, it is well established that the courtly love tradition in
medieval France harkened back to Sufi poetic traditions of love as the
chaste and spiritually fulfilling contemplation of an idealized object
(e.g., Boase 1977; Massignon 1982:348–349). Unfortunately, I lack the
language skills to pursue the question of medieval Islamic theories of
the imagination, but I would underline that this is yet another way in
which when one refers to the “Western tradition,” one should think of
oneself, especially in this period, referring equally or even primarily
to Islam.
[22] Along lines already developed by the Art of Memory (see Yates 1964,
1966).
[23] Almost always this also ends up involving a certain degree of
fetishization, where the objects end up appearing, from the actor’s
perspective, to be the source of the very powers by which they are in
fact created—because from the actor’s position, this might as well be
true. Often, too, these objects become imaginary micrototalities that
play a similar role to Lacan’s mirror objects or similar critiques of
the commodity as capturing an illusory sense of wholeness in a society
fragmented by capitalism itself (Debord 1994; Graeber 2001).
[24] Even women, when they wrote love poems, tended to adopt a male
point of view.
[25] In other words, rather than asking how is it possible to truly
“have” or possess some object or experience, perhaps we should be asking
why anyone should develop a desire to do so to begin with.
[26] To the extent that, as MacPherson (1962) shows, populist
politicians such as the Levellers framed their arguments in such terms.
[27] Supposedly, in early Roman law, the paterfamilias did have the
power to execute his children as well as his slaves; both rights, if
they really did exist in practice, were stripped away quite quickly.
[28] “Similarly, just as each stakes his own life, so each must seek the
other’s death, for it values the other no more than itself; its
essential being is present” (Hegel 1998:114).
[29] Or, more technically, I suppose, synecdoche.
[30] And it has the additional attraction of being almost the only power
that kings do not have over their subjects: as one sixteenth-century
Spanish jurist wrote, in arguing that American cannibalism violated
natural law, “no man may possess another so absolutely that he may make
use of him as a foodstuff” (Pagden 1987:86).
[31] Obviously, with cable, PPV, TiVo, and so on, it is more a commodity
than it once was. But still it is so in a very minor sense: most
television is still a medium for advertising.
[32] The passage above is partly inspired by Conrad Lodziak’s (2002:
106–107) discussion of television viewing in his book The Myth of
Consumerism. Such thoughts are, of course, anathema to the mainstream of
media studies and will no doubt provoke the withering ire of many
readers, but as Lodziak cogently remarks, empirical studies and
questionnaires tend to ask what viewers find meaningful or important
about television programming, not how meaningful or important they take
the experience to be. Those few studies that do ask consumers how
important television viewing is to them find it “the most expendable or
least important of daily activities” (Sahlin and Robinson 1980). It is
hard to square such stated preferences with the statistical facts—for
instance, that in the average American household, the television is on
roughly 4.5 hours per day—in any other way.
[33] Lest I be instantly accused of affiliation—or at least
affinity—with the dreaded Frankfurt School, allow me to provide some
personal qualifications. I grew up in a Nielsen family and know all
about collective working-class family viewing but also have myself had
many horrific jobs from which I often returned to stare blankly at the
television. I also have a certain experience of fandom, being, in fact,
the first academic ever to publish an essay on the topic of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer (Graeber 1998), surely one of the greatest shows of all
time. I think my personal attitude is typical of most Americans:
television is a wasteland, except for those shows I like.
[34] The ritual vilification of the Frankfurt School is so relentless
that I cannot resist one small word in their defense. It is certainly
true that Adorno and Horkheimer could be remarkably puritanical and
elitist. But it is also important to bear in mind these were German Jews
who witnessed the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany and were keenly
aware that fascism was one of the first political movements to make full
use of modern marketing techniques. Starting from that fact makes it
much harder to deny that sometimes people really are intentionally
manipulated with political ends in mind. Would anyone seriously suggest
that most of those who “consumed,” for example, Goebbels’s anti-Semitic
effusions, were really creatively and subversively reappropriating his
messages—or that if they did, this made the slightest bit of difference?
No doubt Adorno and Horkheimer overstated their case in making fascism
the model for all subsequent political-economic forms, but one could
equally argue that others have overstated its uniqueness.
[35] For example, Arnould and Thomson (2005), in their summary of 20
years of “Consumer Culture Theory” in the Journal of Consumer Research,
are careful to acknowledge the importance of this critical literature
and sometimes sound very much like ideology critics themselves.
“Consumer culture theorists read popular texts (advertisements,
television programs, films) as lifestyle and identity instructions that
convey unadulterated marketplace ideologies”; thus, they aim to “reveal
the ways in which capitalist cultural production systems invite
consumers to covet certain identity and lifestyle ideals” (875).
However, they add, in such theory, “consumers are conceptualized as
interpretive agents rather than as passive dupes. Thus, various forms of
consumer resistance inevitably greet the dominant normative ideological
influence of commercial media and marketing. Consumers seek to form
lifestyles that defy dominant consumerist norms or that directly
challenge corporate power” (875). Lest this sound surprisingly radical
for a marketing journal, I note that the authors immediately go on to
argue that this by no means should be meant to suggest that there is any
natural alliance between such subversive consumers and anticorporate
“consumer activists.” The latter, in their “evangelical” zeal to reform
society as a whole, really see consumers themselves as “part of the
problem.” Corporate power is apparently to be challenged—but not
unreservedly.
[36] Or, at best, three: production, consumption, and exchange.
[37] Another approach that treats consumption largely as a form of
production—in this case, value production—is the “immaterial labor”
argument that has emerged from Italian post-Workerism, particularly in
the works of Maurizio Lazzarato (1996). I have critiqued this position
elsewhere (Graeber 2008).
[38] Thanks to my colleagues and students who shared their thoughts with
me on this article over dinner. Animal and vegetable products were
bought, cooked, and eaten and a fair amount of fermented beverages
imbibed. Properly sated, we discussed and debated a lot of ideas. Only a
bureaucrat would try to label this as either “production” or
“consumption.”