Decommodification

In current theories of consumption, consumer practices are often described as processes of decommodification or decommoditization. The notion of decommodification indicates the active work—symbolic and practical—that people as consumers do on goods to make them effective, meaningful, and usable in everyday relations, thus partially removing them from the cash nexus. It denotes the fact that consumer practices amount to a relatively autonomous sphere of action and cannot be directly reduced to production or exchange relations.

[Page 429]In late capitalist societies, consumption is seen as related to the purchase, use, and disposal of commodities. Commodities are goods that are sold on the market at a price; they have often been produced for sale, but they may exit the circuits of monetary exchange, for example, through gift-giving relations. Commodities are thus goods that undergo what in Marxist terms is a commodification process. In turn, the word commodification denotes a particular social construction of things: it is the social process through which things are produced, used, and exchanged as commodities. Whatever its connotations in both scientific and ordinary language, the commodification process is often described as enlarging, with more and more aspects of life being produced and exchanged as commodities—from natural resources such as water, which is increasingly consumed in small, pricy bottles, to leisure time increasingly channeled through market relations such as in theme parks and tourist villages. Indeed, ordinary consumer practices entail some form of commodity appropriation that, partly, removes objects from their original economic meanings and relations to insert them in the circuits of daily life. As Igor Kopytoff has emphasized, even while being reducible to a single scale of value on the market (i.e., price), once acquired, commodities enter different social spheres and take on other values. Considered from the point of view of consumption, and thus from their symbolically rich contexts of use, commodities are irreducible to the logic of production and monetary exchange. They “represent very complex social forms and distributions of knowledge” of at least two sorts: “the knowledge (technical, social, aesthetic, and so forth) that goes into the production of the commodity; and the knowledge that goes into appropriately consuming the commodity” (Appadurai 1986, 41).

Corresponding with the inexhaustible commodification of goods and services, each of us relentlessly tries to preserve personal identities and relations from the logic of the market and price, and we often end up adjusting the second to the first. This adumbrates a dialectical configuration. According to Mary Douglas, even in consumer capitalist societies, the consumption of goods is predicated on a variety of logics related to context and personal relations, partly removed from the cash nexus. Douglas Holt notes that the production of goods for its part addresses consumption, with the phenomenon of branding adumbrating the power of personal(ized) attachments in the mass market and being predicated on the attempt to orient consumers in their practices of decommodification. Thus, Roberta Sassatelli suggests that one of the key paradoxes of our society is that we actually depend on commodities to complete our daily lives, yet we find it necessary to decommoditize—that is, personalize, finish with meaning, and translate in daily practices that are only loosely related to market relations—objects and services if we want our activities to have meaning for us as human beings. If the consumer society is that in which daily needs are satisfied in a capitalist way through the acquisition of commodities, it is also that in which each consumer has to constantly engage in reevaluating these objects beyond their price to stabilize meanings and social relations.

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