Luxury and Luxuries

Luxury refers to a condition of comfort characterized by opulence, elegance, and the enjoyment of desirable, inessential and rare objects, and pleasurable activities. As term, concept, and practice, luxury presents a complex history in Western cultures owing to its connotations of distinction, privilege, and self-indulgence and because of its relevance to notions of progress, stability, and decline. Already amply debated in the Hebrew and Greco-Roman civilizations, excessive sumptuousness and spectacular display have traditionally proved controversial issues. A gratuitous and therefore “scandalous” waste of resources, luxury has been associated with immorality and sin on a variety of levels. It is indeed significant that the Latin luxus has an etymological connection to luxuria, or lust. In particular, Western cultures have traditionally figured the pernicious effects of luxury through feminized allegories thus designating it as an intrinsically female quality and an effeminizing influence on men.

In An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767/1995), Adam Ferguson points out the difficulty of providing a satisfactory and coherent definition of luxury, as he observes that “we are far from being agreed on the application of the term luxury,” which may generally be taken to “signify that complicated apparatus which mankind devise for the ease and convenience of life” and “all that assemblage which is intended rather to please the fancy, than to obviate real wants, and which is rather ornamental [Page 874]than useful” (1995, 232–233). Presenting it as an “assemblage,” Ferguson avoids defining luxury as a mere accumulation of objects (or luxuries). In fact, luxury also implies distinctive activities and gestures of self-display crucial to its function as a positional category locating the individual in relation to other individuals and socioeconomic groups.

Luxury corresponds to a discourse, an intersection of knowledge and power in Michel Foucault's terminology, which undergoes important epistemic shifts in different cultural and historical environments. As such, it is both an object and a sign, the product of wealth and the representation of its usage. In semiotic terms, then, luxury is not an index but a multifaceted sign. It directs its addressee toward absent (and often largely implicit) signifieds belonging to complex cultural mythologies of lack and overabundance. A “cultural marker … halfway between object and sign,” and, more generally, “less an external substance than a cultural coefficient” (Morton 2000, 18–19), luxury is intimately related to artistic and literary representation, and therefore plays an important and multifaceted role in definitions of communal and individual identities.