Table Of ContentSee
CONSUMER
CULTURE &
MODERNITY
DON SLATER
Consumer Culture
and
Modernity
Consumer Culture
and
Modernity
Don Slater
Polity Press
Copyright © Don Slater 1997
The right of Don Slater to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 1997 by Polity Press
in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Reprinted 1998, 2000, 2002
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Slater, Don.
Consumer culture and modernity / Don Slater.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0—7456—0303-3. — ISBN 0-7456-0304—-1 (pbk. )
1. Consumption (Economics)—History. 2. Culture—History.
I. Title.
HC79.C6S58 1997
306.3’09—dc21 9644027
CIP
Typeset in 10% on 12 pt Ehrhardt by Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, Somerset
Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Comwall
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgement
1 Consumer Culture and Modernity
2 The Freedoms of the Market
3 Consumption versus Culture
4 The Culture of Commodities 100
5 The Meanings of Things 131
6 The Uses of Things 148
7 New Times? 174
Afterword 210
Bibliography 213
225
Index
Introduction
This book is an introduction to the field of consumer culture. More
specifically, it focuses on theories of consumer culture and on the issues
through which people have organized their thoughts on consumption and
culture in the modern world. The fundamental aim of the book is to situate
and make sense of these theories and issues as part of the broad development
of social thought over the modern period. The book is less concerned with
asking, ‘What is consumer culture?’ and more with how certain modern
experiences and dilemmas have been formulated: the rise of commercial
society, the relation between needs and social structures, the relation
between freedom of choice and the power of commercial systems, the nature
of selves and identities in a post-traditional world, the reproduction of social
order, prosperity and progress, and of social status and division, the modern
fate of individuals and of the intimate, private and everyday world.
The framework of this discussion is indeed modernity. The issues and
concepts central to thinking about consumer culture are the same ones that
have been central to modern intellectual life in general since the Enlightenment.
Neither consumer culture as a social experience nor the issues through which
that experience has been addressed are new or even recent: consumer culture
is a motif threaded through the texture of modernity, a motif that
recapitulates the preoccupations and characteristic styles of thought of the
modern west.
This way of introducing the field of consumer culture is a response to an
endemic problem with this ‘field’: consumer culture is rediscovered every
few decades; or, to be uncharitable, it has been redesigned, repackaged and
relaunched as a new academic or political product every generation since the
sixteenth century. The latest relaunches — by postmodernism and neo-
liberalism in the 1980s — have constituted a particularly profound ‘year zero’
of the consumer revolution. Postmodernism in particular has produced
astonishing insights and productive disruptions. Because of its very nature,
2 Introduction
however, it has tended to define consumer culture in opposition to
modernity, as itself constituting a disruption of modernity. Newcomers to
the field, digging their way through the avalanche of new material, might
well have difficulty connecting either consumer culture or postmodernism
itself to the longer-term context of modern thought which alone can make
sense of either of them.
This way of putting things (and of organizing the book) is tendentious.
It assumes that postmodern thought and experience can be ‘made sense of”
in terms of older, modern structures of thought and experience, that neither
postmodernism nor postmodernity has blasted these into irrelevance. Hence
this book is structured by another feature (which I was not aware of when
I started it): a commitment to something very loosely called ‘sociology’.
Consumer culture is probably less a field (which evokes the steady tilling of
a well-marked patch of productive land) and more a spaghetti junction of
intersecting disciplines, methodologies, politics. The enduring issue that
underlies all of them is the nature of ‘the social’. Where productive work has
been carried out it has been on the assumption that the study of consumer
culture is not simply the study of texts and textuality, of individual choice
and consciousness, of wants and desires, but rather the study of such things
in the context of social relations, structures, institutions, systems. It is the
study of the social conditions under which personal and social wants and the
organization of social resources define each other.
How can we relate consumer culture to this nebulous thing called ‘the
social’? Underlying this book are several central themes through which this
connection has been made throughout modern discourses on consumer
culture and society. The most central theme is the concept of ‘needs’, which
explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Ways
of thinking about this relation can be further grouped around three central
issues: commercialization and the economy; cultural reproduction; ‘ethics’
and identity.
Commonsensically, being a consumer is about knowing one’s needs and
getting them satisfied: choosing, buying, using and enjoying — or failing in
these. Need is often not seen as a particularly social concept. On the one
hand, needs can be seen as natural and self-evident (for example ‘basic needs’
for food, clothing and shelter); on the other hand, they are often seen as
arbitrary and subjective - as ‘wants’, ‘whims’, ‘preferences’ or ‘desires’ that
are entirely bound up with the peculiarities of individuals. Both of these
approaches obscure the fundamentally social nature of needs. This must be
very clear: needs are not social in the simple sense that there are ‘social
influences’ or ‘social pressures’ or processes of ‘socialisation’ through which
‘society’ ‘moulds’ ‘the individual’. The central point is a different one. When
I say that ‘I need something’, I am making at least two profoundly social
