Philosophy

The relationship between philosophy and consumption influences the ways in which researchers approach the study of consumer culture. This entry outlines the few thinkers that contemporary scholars owe their allegiance of thought to in recent literature on commercial culture. Consumption studies do not merely entail the consumption of goods and services but also encompass different facets of the process [Page 1086]of consuming such as marketing strategies, discursive production of goods (such as ethnically inspired goods and services), the experience of consumption itself, and so on. More importantly, all these aspects of consumption do not stand in isolation. They overlap each other and are constitutive with the nature of how we consume things. In this light, a study of object, particularly object-subject relations, would be instructive in tracing the theoretical influences that define contemporary commercial culture studies. Following Daniel Miller, “a general perspective on the relationship between people and things” (1987, 4) is necessary to determine the philosophical positions of scholars and their approaches. The concept of objectification is explored through the theoretical inflections of G. W. Hegel, Karl Marx, Marcel Mauss, Georg Simmel, and Colin Campbell. Each of the above thinkers has different ways of theorizing subject-object relations and therefore consumption. Limiting these theoretical discussions to the above authors does not give justice to the vast amount of theoretical influences and philosophical debates present in contemporary commercial cultural studies, but it is hoped this entry provides a concise outline of the philosophical roots of our understandings of modern consumption.

This entry starts with the exploration of Hegel's works and especially of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) where Hegel's dialectical reasoning is discussed in terms of how we understand commercial cultures. It is imperative for us to understand Hegelian thought before engaging with Marxist perspectives, partly because the process of objectification can produce opposing “endpoints” and means different things between the two theoretical standpoints and partly because Marxist thought was greatly influenced by Hegel's works. Following these two thinkers, Mauss's work is explored in terms of how objects are conceptualized in terms of their relation to social and cultural meanings and relations. Simmel's work, The Philosophy of Money (1978), provides an extensive examination of the ways in which a highly monetized society is synonymous with high degrees of abstractions. To Simmel, objectification intensifies with the process of modernization. This entry ends with a brief discussion of Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) to explore Campbell's historical conceptualization of the rise of consumerism and its linkages with the Romantic ethic.