The lost art of consumer critique:
a defense
“Consumption studies” and the backlash
against consumer critique
A productive positioning against the critics
(totalizing narratives, consumer dupes, overly
conformist portrayals, elitist attitudes, etc)
However, the pendulum swing has become
constraining, de-politicizing, and paralyzing wrt
macro analyses and outcomes…
The failures of consumer society are becoming
increasingly evident--time for a course correction
Re-integration of critical perspectives with their
critique--(“dialectical” re-formulation)
Re-valorizing Consumption
• Not a denigration of consumption a la the
masculinist bias of the earlier critiques, but the
reverse--a re-valorization of consumption
activities--but from a critical/analytic perspective
• To moralize or not to moralize? False question. All
analysis is moral
• Key is to reject the singularity of consumption as
a-moral and re-integrate consumption into larger
paradigm of social action
• “social death of stuff” problem of de-linking
symbolic and utilitarian dimensions of
consumption
Delivering the goods
30,000
25,000
20,000
15,000
Personal
Consumption
Expenditures
per capita
(2000$)
10,000
5,000
0
1960
1970
1980
But also the bads…
1990
2000
2005
The Output Bias:
Rising annual hours of work, CPS, 1967-2000
1900
1850
1800
1750
1700
1650
1600
1550
1967
1973
1979
1989
1995
2000
Income and Happiness:
GDP per capita v. % very happy, US 1946-1996
(Layard 2005)
Commerciogenic maladies
Prevalence of Obesity and Overweight,
NHANES, 2003-04
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
obese
obese and
overweight
Adults
Youth
Consumerism and
ecological disaster
Tracking The Global Footprint: sustainable
consumption was exceeded in 1978
16
14
12
10
8
Billions of hectares
6
4
2
0
1961
1978
2001
Per Capita Footprints
12
10
8
6
Footprint in hectares
4
2
0
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Veblen and the status consumption model
Features of status models
• Hierarchical social structures reproduced by
competitive status consumption.
• Game is played through visible consumption
(visibility, an efficient property, is necessary to
avoid moral hazard)
• Model not of all consumption, but of the pattern of
goods and the relationship among private c, public
c, savings and leisure
• Trickle down model
• Highly rational, but social, agents, uniform
(consensual) goods rankings
• Game characterized by prisoners’ dilemma (pure
Veblen’s critics
• Lacks an account of meaning
• Informational demands high; post-modern
market fragmented, Holt 2000: “good life”
not a matter of consensual status-symbols,
but project of individual self-creation
• Trickle up
Salvaging status accounts
• Diffusion path doesn’t need linearity, just a linear
segment
• Individuation not fatal if it’s not infinite
(individuation as a status strategy)
• Strong empirical support
• Collapse of high and low culture not evidence of
“democracy” and egalitarianism/socioeconomic
immobility and inequality have increased sharply
• Need to integrate income distribution into
consumption accounts
• Timing of the backlash/luxury boom
Social comparison and prisoners’ dilemmas:
Does rising inequality fuel competitive consumption?
Shares of Consumption by Household
Income
45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
top 20%
80%
60%
40%
bottom
20%
Adorno and Horkheimer and the
circle of manipulation
Critiques
• Totalizing, disempowering narrative
• Functionalist analysis btw production and
consumption without a micro-mechanism
• In dupes v agents: agents win (except at the
bank)
Theoretical cul de sac?
• Inability to analyze producers’ power
• Conflates micro and macro analysis by creating an
isomorphic structure
• Must analyse, not assume that isomorphism.
• Holt’s 1940s and 50s cultural authority thesis
(2002); Bourdieu’s habitus
• But producers now constructing and selling
consumer agency (Nike), rather than having it
deployed “against” them.
Back to Galbraith
Naturalized Insatiability: From want creation to WalMart stampede
Epidemic depression
Was Galbraith
Right that
Affluent
Consumption
Fails to yield
Much in the
Way of welfare?
Elitist, yes….
But why the singularity of the personalized attack? Why no
attack on adulterous ethicists or the tenured free market
economists? Curious singularity wrt consumption
Wither Corporate power?
But powerless
Against the
Sovereign
Consumer?
Corporate “takeover”
Of the govt,
Growing influence in universities,
Public schools, welfare, health care
Military, etc
Re-reading the Frankfort School
• Their worry: totalitarian system anchored
by a conformist consumer culture. Should it
be ours?
Time for a new american dream?
• Americans coming together to “change the
consumer culture” (100,000 registered activists)
• Holistic paradigm change--economic and cultural
• Values and lifestyle congruence (more of what
really matters)
• Personal, corporate and state accountability.
Participants demand moral consumption. But
consumption is not singular. They demand
consistency.
Consumer critique
& activist practice
Newdream.org