Tamed Hedonism

A number of works on the development of contemporary consumer culture have pointed to the new hedonistic directions taken by puritan morality in societies increasingly characterized by consumerism and promotional culture. Some, such as Chandra Mukerji, see a mixture of hedonism and asceticism as a characteristic of the kind of materialist culture that has fostered commercial modernity in Renaissance cities. Others, like Colin Campbell, consider that Romantic teachings, as developed from the late eighteenth century, have contributed to the birth of the modern consumer defined by modern forms of “mentalistic” hedonism whereby commodities become the prime matter for personal creative fantasy. Many others consider that it is from the dawn of the twentieth century and increasingly after World War II that signals have become stronger, for example, through the “therapeutic ethic of self-realization” that pushed actors to try to develop themselves through commodities so that it became a virtual duty to enjoy oneself, as suggested by T. J. J. Lears, and because of social groupings such as the “new bourgeoisie,” which has been considered the initiator of an ethical retooling responding to a new consumerist economy, as posited by Mike Featherstone. Chronological disputes notwithstanding, the notion of “tamed hedonism” has been proposed by Roberta Sassatelli to capture the hegemonic moral narrative of consumer capitalism in contemporary society, and in particular the flexible but essential compromises between hedonism and asceticism that consumers are required to manage.

This notion develops on the consideration that individual autonomous choice has a central place in consumer modernity. This points to continuity [Page 1429]between early and late modernity. Eighteenth-century philosopher economist Adam Smith affirmed that not only political order but also personal order became possible through consumption. This happened not just because individuals' desires for pleasure and acquisition were deemed to be socially positive but also because the subject of desires became a rational actor. Modeled onto production, consumption was tamed into a rational, self-interested, long-term pursuit of personal gratification. Smith portrayed the marketplace as an institution where subjects develop the capacity to reflect on themselves as social actors, to excel by the pursuit of a decent, commodious, and well-ordered life. Merchants—as we all become under market conditions—are not pictured as ascetic monks: they do not disdain the decencies of life; they are indeed good, well-behaved, rational consumers as opposed to the immoral, irrational, whimsical wasters impersonated by the declining nobility. Under these conditions, the consumer-merchant becomes the foundation of a new social and political order: the sovereign whose desires the market shall respond to and the sovereign of his own desires.

That the cult of self-control is crucial in the development of consumer culture may be found in the way alcohol consumption has been discussed under the rubric of diseases of the will since John Locke's famous example of the drunkard. Addiction remains one of the most powerful stigmatizing strategies against a variety of consumer practices. Likewise, the consumer's double-edged sovereignty remains the driving force of discourses about consumption. As the individual becomes the source of value, his or her desires and pleasures become the foundational horizon for commercial culture. Still, the satisfaction of desires is viable as long as desires do not come into conflict with individual autonomy and the self retains its hold on them. Although pleasure testifies to the realization of individual desires, it cannot guarantee that the desires that are so obviously satisfied are actually true to the self. Hedonism thus works as a theory of correspondence between individual desires and commodities. Yet, alone, it cannot deliver a self-possessed self. There is the crucial need for some management of desires through forms of detachment that suggest convincing images of self. Pleasures have to be both supported and neutralized: well-behaved consumers must enjoy their lot and still find that their deepest selves lie somewhere behind these pleasures, so that they can still govern their desires. The rhetoric deployed to support and regulate consumer practices in contemporary society thus relies on tamed hedonism in that “consumers must be after pleasure only when pleasure is after them” (Sassatelli 2001, 100).

...