Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture in Classical Social Theory

Social theory has long debated the claim that consumption plays a uniquely central role in modern Western societies. The terms consumer culture and consumer society imply that modern social order can be defined by the place of consumption in both social action and social structure. At the same time, this characterization carries a potent moral and political charge: The labelling of modernity as a consumer culture is generally part of an overall critique, or apologia, for the current state of the social.

Consumption is, of course, essential to any social order: To reproduce themselves as identifiable ways of life and social structures, societies require material and symbolic resources that are used to sustain bodies, interactions, institutions, and organizations (Slater 1997). Hence, both historians and anthropologists have well-developed literatures on the material cultures and consumption structures of non-modern societies. To talk of a “consumer culture,” however, is generally to make a much stronger set of claims: that initially in the modern West (but now increasingly as a global phenomenon), consumption was separated out from other social processes to become an identifiably separate sphere with recognizable identities, institutions, and values. This is often closely identified with the development of market capitalism. For example, in Marx's somewhat romanticized view, precapitalist society involved production of usevalues directly for consumption by the immediate producers or by known others within small communities. The development of markets and the commodity form drives a wedge between production and consumption, as well as introducing a veil of mystification, so that workers produce commodities in exchange for wages that they will spend on consumption goods that they did not produce. Similarly, feminist scholars have focused on the related division between public and private spheres in modern life, which divides public social action (including paid work outside the home) from a private, primarily domestic, sphere of consumption.

In both cases, a sphere of consumption is formed that is closely identified with the reproduction of meaningful everyday lives and identities within modern society (as opposed to the alienated spheres of work and political action); and the figure of “the consumer” appears as an identifiable social role for the first time in history. In positive versions, generally elaborated within liberal and utilitarian thought, the consumer represents an archetypal modern social subject, one who is “free to choose” on the basis of knowing his or her own wants and desires. However irrational these may be, the consumer is able rationally to calculate their intensity (particularly in relation to market prices) and to act accordingly. The consumer therefore contains the substantive underpinnings of the formally rational social subject of modern society. Thus, conventional economics, like liberal political thought, treats the private desires of individuals as sacrosanct and beyond judgement by social analysts or political actors. Similarly, the measure of a good modern social system is its ability to respond transparently and without moral judgement or political direction to the expressed preferences of the sovereign consumer through mechanisms such as markets or elections.

This has been a minority view within modern social thought, however. For the most part, both the consumer and consumer culture have been held to represent a range of debasements and degradations that characterize the modern. First, the consumer is able to act entirely on the basis of their preferences to the extent that they have the money [Page 140]to finance them. From the eighteenth century onward, this marked a concern with the disintegration of traditional and collective forms of regulation, such as religion, status orders, and heredity, which previously tied consumption to stable social structures (for example, through sumptuary law). From that point onward, there is a continuous literature and debate on luxury and excessive consumption (that is, consumption beyond what had previously been appropriate to a given social status), as well as the fixation of modern subjects on material things and on money. For example, the figure of the “nouveau riche,” from Smollett through Veblen and on to Bourdieu, condenses wide contempt for social climbers whose new money allows them, under modern conditions of market freedom and status disorder, to buy whatever they can afford, without the inherited culture to exercise proper “taste.”

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