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See CONSUMER CULTURE & MODERNITY DON SLATER Consumer Culture and Modernity Consumer Culture and Modernity Don Slater Polity Press Copyright © Don Slater 1997 The right of Don Slater to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 1997 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Reprinted 1998, 2000, 2002 Editorial office: Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Marketing and production: Blackwell Publishers Ltd 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 1JF, UK Published in the USA by Blackwell Publishers Inc. 350 Main Street Malden MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Slater, Don. Consumer culture and modernity / Don Slater. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0—7456—0303-3. — ISBN 0-7456-0304—-1 (pbk. ) 1. Consumption (Economics)—History. 2. Culture—History. I. Title. HC79.C6S58 1997 306.3’09—dc21 9644027 CIP Typeset in 10% on 12 pt Ehrhardt by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Comwall This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Introduction Acknowledgement 1 Consumer Culture and Modernity 2 The Freedoms of the Market 3 Consumption versus Culture 4 The Culture of Commodities 100 5 The Meanings of Things 131 6 The Uses of Things 148 7 New Times? 174 Afterword 210 Bibliography 213 225 Index Introduction This book is an introduction to the field of consumer culture. More specifically, it focuses on theories of consumer culture and on the issues through which people have organized their thoughts on consumption and culture in the modern world. The fundamental aim of the book is to situate and make sense of these theories and issues as part of the broad development of social thought over the modern period. The book is less concerned with asking, ‘What is consumer culture?’ and more with how certain modern experiences and dilemmas have been formulated: the rise of commercial society, the relation between needs and social structures, the relation between freedom of choice and the power of commercial systems, the nature of selves and identities in a post-traditional world, the reproduction of social order, prosperity and progress, and of social status and division, the modern fate of individuals and of the intimate, private and everyday world. The framework of this discussion is indeed modernity. The issues and concepts central to thinking about consumer culture are the same ones that have been central to modern intellectual life in general since the Enlightenment. Neither consumer culture as a social experience nor the issues through which that experience has been addressed are new or even recent: consumer culture is a motif threaded through the texture of modernity, a motif that recapitulates the preoccupations and characteristic styles of thought of the modern west. This way of introducing the field of consumer culture is a response to an endemic problem with this ‘field’: consumer culture is rediscovered every few decades; or, to be uncharitable, it has been redesigned, repackaged and relaunched as a new academic or political product every generation since the sixteenth century. The latest relaunches — by postmodernism and neo- liberalism in the 1980s — have constituted a particularly profound ‘year zero’ of the consumer revolution. Postmodernism in particular has produced astonishing insights and productive disruptions. Because of its very nature, 2 Introduction however, it has tended to define consumer culture in opposition to modernity, as itself constituting a disruption of modernity. Newcomers to the field, digging their way through the avalanche of new material, might well have difficulty connecting either consumer culture or postmodernism itself to the longer-term context of modern thought which alone can make sense of either of them. This way of putting things (and of organizing the book) is tendentious. It assumes that postmodern thought and experience can be ‘made sense of” in terms of older, modern structures of thought and experience, that neither postmodernism nor postmodernity has blasted these into irrelevance. Hence this book is structured by another feature (which I was not aware of when I started it): a commitment to something very loosely called ‘sociology’. Consumer culture is probably less a field (which evokes the steady tilling of a well-marked patch of productive land) and more a spaghetti junction of intersecting disciplines, methodologies, politics. The enduring issue that underlies all of them is the nature of ‘the social’. Where productive work has been carried out it has been on the assumption that the study of consumer culture is not simply the study of texts and textuality, of individual choice and consciousness, of wants and desires, but rather the study of such things in the context of social relations, structures, institutions, systems. It is the study of the social conditions under which personal and social wants and the organization of social resources define each other. How can we relate consumer culture to this nebulous thing called ‘the social’? Underlying this book are several central themes through which this connection has been made throughout modern discourses on consumer culture and society. The most central theme is the concept of ‘needs’, which explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Ways of thinking about this relation can be further grouped around three central issues: commercialization and the economy; cultural reproduction; ‘ethics’ and identity. Commonsensically, being a consumer is about knowing one’s needs and getting them satisfied: choosing, buying, using and enjoying — or failing in these. Need is often not seen as a particularly social concept. On the one hand, needs can be seen as natural and self-evident (for example ‘basic needs’ for food, clothing and shelter); on the other hand, they are often seen as arbitrary and subjective - as ‘wants’, ‘whims’, ‘preferences’ or ‘desires’ that are entirely bound up with the peculiarities of individuals. Both of these approaches obscure the fundamentally social nature of needs. This must be very clear: needs are not social in the simple sense that there are ‘social influences’ or ‘social pressures’ or processes of ‘socialisation’ through which ‘society’ ‘moulds’ ‘the individual’. The central point is a different one. When I say that ‘I need something’, I am making at least two profoundly social