Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

George Herbert Mead was an American social psychologist whose ideas on the social nature of the human self exerted a profound influence on sociology, especially on the American sociological strand known as symbolic interactionism. Mead did his graduate training first at Harvard, and later in Germany (Leipzig and Berlin). After a brief experience in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mead joined the department of philosophy of the University of Chicago in 1894, where he remained until the end of his career. Much like Berlin for Georg Simmel and Paris for Walter Benjamin, fin de siècle Chicago became a crucial context for Mead's intellectual life and an enduring object of his radical democratic civic engagement. Chicago was primarily for Mead a production site of manufactured goods and a destiny for hundreds of thousands of European emigrant workers. [Page 929]The conspicuous consumerism of the emergent leisure class that caught the attention of his contemporary Thorstein Veblen was not an issue of immediate concern to Mead, whose main object of research was a social theory of human subjectivity. The latter, however, is a valuable resource in the analysis of contemporary consumer culture.

There are two main reasons for this. First, Mead's social conception of the self helps us understand how our identity is formed through what we consume. Consumption is here understood as the acquisition, usage, and exchange of things. For Mead, human beings live in a world made of objects. Most objects are physical: we can grab them, feel them, use them. But human beings are objects too, albeit of a different sort. We are social objects insofar as we are able to reflect on other objects, including other human beings and ourselves. Mead explains this process through the sociopsychological mechanism of “taking the attitude or role of the other.” We constitute ourselves “through taking the attitude of the other individuals toward ourselves so that we stimulate ourselves by our own gesture” (1934/1997, 279). This is true both of physical and social objects: we are what we are by putting ourselves in the role of the other, be it a pen or a friend. Hence, in Mead's work, the consumption of physical objects assumes an original character. Consider the example of a pair of trousers. By assuming the role of the trousers, we are able to incorporate some of their qualities even before we actually put them on (their size and style, for instance), and adjust our action toward them accordingly. We are capable not only of anticipating whether they fit us but also, and crucially, of anticipating what will be the reaction of other individuals to our wearing of them.

Second, and relatedly, the study of consumption practices can benefit from Mead's concepts of the significant symbol and meaning. A word is a significant symbol insofar as it calls out in the individual uttering it a functionally identical response that is called out in his interlocutors. Mead exemplified this with a footprint of a bear. When we stumble on this imprinted piece of mud, we associate it with the passing of a bear at some previous moment. We might be afraid, not of the footprint itself but of what it means—the bear. The footprint is the symbol, and the bear is its meaning. For Mead, symbolization creates objects: the piece of mud becomes a “footprint” only when we look at it and interpret it as meaning “bear.” Mead's generative conception of symbolization has relevant implications for the analysis of consumption today. Along with the concept of “taking the role of the other” discussed above, it helps clarify the sociopsychological underpinnings of the process of consumption. Mead's process view of reality undercuts the rigid dichotomy that tends to separate production from consumption. Consumers of physical objects are responsible for their symbolical transformation into socially meaningful objects. A piece of clothing is as materially produced in a factory as it is symbolically produced by the consumers themselves: it ceases to be a piece of cloth and becomes a socially meaningful object only because of the human ability of symbolization. In this sense, social actors symbolically produce their objects of consumption. Although not directly aimed at the study of consumerism, Mead's seminal contribution to social theory contains valuable insights for the analysis of consumer culture today.

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