Canonical authors in consumption theory 9781138648968, 1138648965, 9781138648975, 1138648973

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CANONICAL AUTHORS IN CONSUMPTION THEORY

Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory is the first work to compile the contributions of the greatest social thinkers in the global conversation about consumption and consumer culture. A prestigious reference work, it offers original chapters by the world’s most prominent thought leaders and surveys how the work of historical theorists has influenced and shaped consumption theory, both through history and at the cutting edge of research. Consumption is at the core of contemporary lifestyles, of political successes and failures and of discussions around sustainability and environmental change. Contemporary consumer culture shapes modern identities, and is the engine of the globalizing capitalist economy. Still, most social theorizations over the last century and a half have addressed production processes rather than consumption processes. This is about to change. Studies of consumption play an increasing role as a topic and a domain of study in marketing, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. Currently, there is no single compilation that systematically links scholarly work published by the greatest social thinkers of the last 150 years to the understanding of contemporary consumer society. This book provides a solid framework for understanding the relevance of these canonical authors in social theory to facilitate analysis of consumer culture, and to act as a comprehensive reference point for consumer researchers, doctoral students and practitioners. Søren Askegaard is Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark. Benoît Heilbrunn is Professor of Marketing at ESCP Europe, France.

CANONICAL AUTHORS IN CONSUMPTION THEORY

Edited by Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-64896-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-64897-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-62609-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dedicated to the memory of Per Østergaard (1958–2016) Friend, scholar and colleague

CONTENTS

List of illustrations List of contributors Preface

xi xii xix

PART I

Introduction 1 In search of consumption . . . Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn

1 3

PART II

Political economy and the quest for value

13

2 Marx, commodity and consumer culture A. Fuat Fırat

15

3 Why bother with Nietzsche? James Fitchett

23

4 Beyond disenchantment: Weber and the search for legitimacy Melanie Wallendorf

29

5 Karl Polanyi: whence the marketing mind? Dannie Kjeldgaard

34

viii

Contents

PART III

Anthropology and consumption

41

6 Marcel Mauss: the gift that moves . . . Eric J. Arnould

43

7 Thick prescription: notes on the influence of Clifford Geertz on CCT John F. Sherry, Jr.

54

8 Mary Douglas: consumption codes, meaning structures and classification systems Ian Woodward 9 In defense of cultural economy: Marshall Sahlins Eric J. Arnould

61

69

PART IV

System and structuration

77

10 Bronislaw Malinowski, or the elementary material and symbolic forms of production, exchange and consumption Dominique Desjeux

79

11 Claude Lévi-Strauss and the structural fabric of meaning Benoît Heilbrunn

86

12 Talcott Parsons: structural foundations for cultural sociology Melanie Wallendorf

93

13 The relevance of consumption in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society Kai-Uwe Hellmann and Marius K. Luedicke

100

PART V

Identity trajectories

111

14 Mind, self and consumption: George Herbert Mead Cele Otnes

113

15 Sartre’s insights for identity, desire, the gift and posthumanism Russell Belk

120

16 Paul Ricoeur, vigil of the self Benoît Heilbrunn

127

Contents

17 Habermas: reigniting enlightenment reason Jeff B. Murray

ix

135

PART VI

Civilization and history

143

18 Remembering Walter Benjamin, or the death of the last intellectual Robert Kozinets

145

19 Norbert Elias: figurations and consumption Robin Canniford

151

20 Braudel’s notions of time, capitalism and market Eminegül Karababa

158

PART VII

The language of commodities

165

21 Shopping with Charles Peirce: from sign meaning to sign degeneracy in the marketplace Kent Grayson

167

22 Roland Barthes: the (anti-)structuralist Luca M.Visconti

177

23 Jean Baudrillard: the Nietzsche of our times(?) Per Østergaard (with a little help from his friends)

185

24 Bruno Latour: philosopher of togetherness in action Domen Bajde

192

PART VIII

Power games

197

25 Adorno, Horkheimer and the audacity of reason Jeff B. Murray

199

26 Pierre Bourdieu: luminary or elitist? Capital and the project of consumption Christina Goulding

206

27 Producing Foucauldians: consumer culture theory and the analytics of power Craig J. Thompson

212

x

Contents

28 De Certeau: a thinker of the everyday Véronique Cova and Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse

221

29 Judith Butler: gender performativity and heterosexual hegemony Pauline Maclaran

227

PART IX

The imaginary and humanity

235

30 Freud the scientist? John Desmond

237

31 The consumer as sovereign: the general economy of Georges Bataille Christian Jantzen

243

32 Edgar Morin: the uniduality of the magical and the real Søren Askegaard

250

33 Beyond reductionism, constructivism and arbitrary sampling in consumer research thanks to Castoriadis Dominique Bouchet 34 Ž ižek: a pervert’s guide to the libidinal narcissistic economy Alan Bradshaw

258

266

PART X

Postscript

273

35 To ERR is human: on failing to read (and forgetting to remember) the classics Stephen Brown

275

Index

283

ILLUSTRATIONS

Tables 13.1 Service and audience roles 21.1 Signs

103 169

Box 35.1 Passages from Walter Benjamin’s Passages

278

CONTRIBUTORS

Eric J. Arnould is Visiting Professor of Marketing at the Aalto University Business School and Adjunct Professor at EMLYON France. He briefly held a social science chair in the Danish Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS). He has been on the faculty at four European universities and several in the United States. He has pursued a career in applied social science since 1973, receiving a PhD in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1982. Aalto University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2016. Early ethnographic research in West Africa inspired his approach to contemporary market-mediated society. Eric’s research on consumer culture, cultural marketing strategy, qualitative research methods, services marketing and development appears in many major social science and managerial periodicals and books. Current interests include collective consumer creativity, human branding, sustainable business practice, visual representations and digital mobility. He is at work on a collective text on consumer culture theory. Søren Askegaard is Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and a visiting professor at Aalto University, University of Lille II and University of Paris IX Dauphine. He has a postgraduate degree from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a PhD in business studies from Odense University. Current research interests are globalism and localisms in consumer culture, and ideologies of food and health. He is the initiator and director of the Market & Management Anthropology study program at SDU. From 2008 to 2014 he served as an associate editor for Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). His publications appear in a number of anthologies and journals, ranging from The Flag Bulletin to the abovementioned JCR. Domen Bajde is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark and associate

editor of European Journal of Marketing. He has published several book chapters and articles on moralized consumption and actor-network theory in journals such as Marketing Theory; Consumption, Markets and Culture; and Journal of Consumer Behavior. He has recently edited a volume devoted to actor-network theory and assemblage theory (Assembling Consumption, Routledge). His current research looks at the evolution of socially generative markets and high technology markets.

Contributors xiii

Russell Belk is York University Distinguished Research Professor and Kraft Foods Canada

Chair in Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University. He is a fellow, past president, and film festival co-founder of the Association for Consumer Research. He also co-initiated the Consumer Behavior Odyssey and the Consumer Culture Theory Conference. He has received the Paul D. Converse Award, two Fulbright fellowships and the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Consumer Research Award for Long-Term Contribution to Consumer Research, and has approximately 600 publications. He recently published Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior (Emerald 2017); Review of Marketing Research, Vol. 14: Qualitative Marketing Research (Emerald 2017); The Routledge Companion to Identity and Consumption (Routledge 2013); and The Routledge Companion to the Digital Consumer (Routledge 2013). He is currently co-editing Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior (Emerald), Romantic Gift Giving (Routledge), and Handbook on the Sharing Economy (Edward Elgar). In 2014, a tenvolume set of his work was published by Sage entitled Russell Belk, Sage Legends in Consumer Behavior. His research tends to be qualitative, visual and cultural. It involves the extended self, meanings of possessions, collecting, gift giving, sharing, digital consumption and materialism. Dominique Bouchet holds the professorship chair of International Marketing at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense. He is also Adjunct Professor at the School of Creative Arts, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. He worked as an associate professor in international economics and an associate professor in sociology and social psychology. He has served as Visiting Professor in the international doctoral program at ESSEC in Paris, Visiting Professor at Paris Dauphine University, as an external examiner at Dublin City University and as Professor II at the Norwegian School of Management (BI) in Oslo. He was awarded the Danish Researcher’s Prize for ‘Transcending Research’ in the fields of humanities, sciences and social sciences in 2007. Dominique’s research interests span a wide area that includes economics, sociology, philosophy, history, anthropology, semiotics, marketing and consumer research as they relate to social change, cultural differences, cultures of consumption, education and international relations. Alan Bradshaw teaches and learns at Royal Holloway, University of London. Stephen Brown is a man of many parts. Or pen names, at least. His professional professorial

pseudonyms include Aedh Aherne, Brian Boru, Craig Crag, Sue Denim, Peregrine Faulkner, Fintan Finnegan, Modesty Forbids, Alan Smithee and Al Terego. Once described as the ugly bastard lovechild of Dan Brown and Buck Mulligan, he occupies an office in Ulster University. Stephen’s never there, though. Robin Canniford is Co-director of the Cluster for Organization, Society and Markets

(COSM) at the University of Melbourne, Australia. At work, he enjoys being an associate editor of Marketing Theory, and encourages everyone to submit work there. In his spare time, he researches topics including smell, sport, markets and community. His work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Sociology, and Marketing Theory. He is the co-editor of Assembling Consumption (Routledge 2015). Robin obtained his PhD by subterfuge and has only this evening broken into his own house by smashing a large hole in the roof into which he inserted a ladder. This was the right thing to do, since although he can now see the stars while sitting in the bath, he was able to gain access to an excellent bottle of single malt.

xiv

Contributors

Véronique Cova is Full Professor in Marketing at Aix-Marseille Graduate School of Management, Aix-Marseille University, France. Her research interests focus on servicescapes design, consumer experience and consumption. In a Consumer Culture Theory approach, she specializes in the way the consumers reappropriate the offering through diversion tactics. She is a disciple of Michel de Certeau and wrote numerous papers in the line of this thinker. She has published in various French and international journals (Research and Applications in Marketing; International Journal of Service Industry Management; European Journal of Marketing; Journal of Business Research; and Marketing Theory) and books and book chapters including Currents in Consumer Culture Theory; Cultural Marketing Management; Consuming Experiences; and Interpretive Consumer Research. Dominique Desjeux is Anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne, Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité. He worked two years with Michel Crozier on the industrial politics of France, and later in sub-Saharan Africa on kinship, witchcraft and land. He has been carrying out qualitative field studies about consumers since 1987. He has published books and articles for 40 years about innovation, consumption and the decision-making process in companies and families. He has managed numerous research projects in France, China, Singapore, Taiwan and the United States. John Desmond is an Honorary Reader in Management at University of St. Andrews. He

is interested in contributing new insights to marketing theory. Continuing preoccupations include the development of new understandings of relations between consumers and marketers and of morality and marketing. Currently he is exploring the history of marketing, the construction of marketing knowledge and relations between marketing practitioners and academics. A. Fuat Fırat is Professor of Marketing at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley. His research interests cover areas such as macro consumer behaviour and macromarketing, postmodern culture, transmodern marketing strategies, gender and consumption, marketing and development, and interorganizational relations. His has won the Journal of Macromarketing Charles Slater Award for best article with co-author N. Dholakia, the Journal of Consumer Research best article award with co-author A. Venkatesh, and the Corporate Communications: An International Journal top-ranked paper award with co-authors L.T. Christensen and J. Cornelissen. He has published several books, including Consuming People: From Political Economy to Theaters of Consumption, co-authored by N. Dholakia, and is a founding editor of Consumption, Markets & Culture. James Fitchett is Professor of Marketing and Consumption at the University of Leicester School of Business, United Kingdom. He is the associate editor for Marketing Theory. His research interests include investigations into the politics of consumption, neoliberalism and consumer culture, and theory development in marketing. Christina Goulding is Professor of Marketing at the University of Birmingham, United

Kingdom. Her research interests are cultural consumption, including the arts and heritage; subcultural consumption; and the development and application of qualitative methodologies. She has published her work in a number of leading journals including Journal of Consumer

Contributors xv

Research; Annals of Tourism Research, Psychology and Marketing; Journal of Advertising; European Journal of Marketing; and Journal of Business Research. She is the author of a book on grounded theory and co-author of Critical Marketing: Defining the Field. Christina is the associate editor for European Journal of Marketing; on the advisory board for Consumption, Markets and Culture; and sits on the editorial boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory and Journal of Business Research. Kent Grayson is Associate Professor of Marketing and holds the Bernice & Leonard Lavin

Professorship at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois. His research focuses on trust, truth, deception and authenticity. Benoît Heilbrunn is Professor of Marketing at ESCP Europe. He has a background in philosophy and in semiotics. His research interests include branding, design, consumption and material culture. He has written several books, including Market Mediations: Semiotic Investigations on Consumers, Objects and Brands (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Kai-Uwe Hellmann is Professor of Consumption and Economic Sociology at the Institute of Sociology, Technical University of Berlin. He obtained his PhD in sociology from the Free University Berlin in 1995 and his habilitation from the Otto-von-Guericke-University in Magdeburg, Germany, in 2003. He is co-editor of the book series ‘Konsumsoziologie und Massenkultur’. His research interests include consumer research, sociology of military and organization, sociological theory and systems theory. Last published book: Der Konsum der Gesellschaft. Studien zur Soziologie des Konsums (VS-Verlag 2013). Christian Jantzen is Professor of Experience Design in the Department of Communication

and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. He has published several books on experience economy and experience design (in Danish). His research interests include experiential aspects of consumer culture. Eminegül Karababa is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Middle East Technical Uni-

versity, Turkey. Her research interests include historical development markets and consumer cultures and value creation processes in contexts of consumption and markets. She is currently researching sustainable consumption of nature-based solutions as part of a large competitive European Commission grant. Eminegül’s research is published in journals such as Economic History Review, Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory, Consumption Markets and Culture, and Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. She is an associate editor for Consumption Markets and Culture. Dannie Kjeldgaard, PhD, is Professor of Marketing in the Consumption, Culture and Commerce group at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU). Dannie’s work mainly focuses on change processes of market-based glocalization in domains such as place branding, branding, media and identity construction, global consumer segments, ethnicity and qualitative methodology. His research is published in Journal of Consumer Research; Journal of Consumer Behavior; Consumption, Markets & Culture; Marketing Theory; Journal of Macromarketing; and several anthologies. Dannie is editor-in-chief of the journal Consumption, Markets and Culture.

xvi

Contributors

Robert Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations

at the USC Annenberg, a position he shares with the USC Marshall School of Business. Rob is a globally recognized expert on social media, marketing, branding and innovation. Besides having invented netnography in 1995, Rob has authored and co-authored over 150 pieces of research on the intersection of technology, media, brands and consumers. His research examines topics such as social branding, word-of-mouth marketing, themed retail spectacle, media consumption, technology ideologies, brand archetypes, utopian consumer culture, capitalist emancipation and consumer activism through investigating sites such as Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, ESPN Zone, the American Girl brand, Walmart, Volkswagen, mobile device use, food porn, digital social networks and the Burning Man project. This research has been published in a wide variety of widely cited top-tier academic articles, book chapters, popular press articles, case studies, videographies and even poetry. Marius K. Luedicke is Reader in Marketing at Cass Business School, City University of

London. He obtained his PhD from the University of St. Gallen in 2006 and was a founding director of the Swarovski Brand Research Laboratory at the University of Innsbruck in 2010. His research explores the dynamics of consumer culture and branding with a particular focus on moralism and consumer conflict. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research; Consumption, Markets & Culture; Psychology & Marketing; and Long Range Planning, and has been cited in various international media including the New York Times, Huffington Post, and Wired. Pauline Maclaran is Professor of Marketing and Consumer Research at Royal Holloway,

University of London, United Kingdom. Her research interests focus on cultural aspects of contemporary consumption, and she adopts a critical perspective to analyse the ideological assumptions that underpin marketing activities, particularly in relation to gender issues. Her work has been published in internationally recognized journals including the Journal of Consumer Research; Consumption, Markets & Culture; Journal of Business Research; and the Journal of Macromarketing. Pauline has co-edited various books, including Marketing and Feminism: Current Issues and Research; Consumption and Spirituality; and Motherhoods, Markets and Consumption: The Making of Mothers in Contemporary Western Cultures, as well as co-authoring Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture. She is also Co-editor-in-Chief of Marketing Theory, a journal that promotes alternative and critical perspectives in marketing and consumer research. Jeff B. Murray, PhD, is Department Chair and R.A. and Vivian Young Professor of Market-

ing in the Department of Marketing, Walton College, University of Arkansas. Jeff teaches part time as a distinguished professor at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. He also teaches a seminar in consumer culture theory in the marketing doctoral program. In addition, he has taught courses or doctoral seminars in Australia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Scotland, Shanghai, Sweden and the United Kingdom. His research appears in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Consumer Policy, American Behavioral Scientist and Consumption, Markets & Culture. He remains active in the American Marketing Association, the Association for Consumer Research, the American Sociological Association and Consumer Culture Theory Consortium.

Contributors xvii

Per Østergaard was an associate professor at the Department of Marketing and Management and Research Director for the Innovation Network Brandbase. Per was educated in philosophy (BA), social science (MA), and marketing (PhD) from Odense University, Denmark. His research can be divided into two streams: a theoretical interest in analysis and deconstruction within marketing and consumer research concepts and an empirical interest in developing qualitative methods that he used to study primarily re-enchantment processes in consumer culture and tourism. Sadly, he died suddenly during the preparation of this book project, which has drawn much inspiration from his intellectual interest. Cele Otnes is the Investors in Business Education Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also Professor of Advertising; Professor of Recreation, Sport and Tourism; and Professor in the Campus Honors Program. She is an adjunct professor in the department of Strategy and Management at the Norwegian School of Business and Economics. Her research typically focuses on understanding the sociocultural and commercial impact of rituals within the spheres of culture, the marketplace and consumers’ social networks. She has published several book-length treatments on these topics (most recently Royal Fever: The British Monarchy in Consumer Culture, University of California Press). She has published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Retailing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Psychology and Marketing, and other journals in marketing and related fields. She primarily teaches a doctoral seminar in qualitative research methods, and undergraduate courses in consumer behavior. Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse is Professor of Marketing at the SKEMA Business School, Lille,

France, and head of the MERCUR Research Center in Lille. Her research topics focus on theoretical issues in transformative research and in consumption studies. She is one of the coordinators of the ‘Qualitative Methods and Research Design’ seminar, proposed by the European PhD on Consumer Culture Theorizing. With Penaloza and Visconti, she co-edited Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective (Routledge 2012). She remains active in the French Marketing Association, the Association for Consumer Research and the Consortium for Consumer Culture Theory. She is the editor-in-chief of the Recherche et Applications en Marketing. John F. Sherry, Jr. is the Herrick Professor of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame. He studies brand strategy, experiential consumption and retail atmospherics. He is a Fellow of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, past President of both the Association for Consumer Research and the Consumer Culture Theory Consortium, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. John has edited and written ten books, and authored more than 100 widely reprinted articles and chapters. He has won awards for his scholarly work and poetry. Craig J. Thompson is the Churchill Professor of Marketing at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He obtained his PhD in marketing and phenomenological psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1991. His research focuses on the cultural underpinnings of consumption meanings and practices, the construction of identity through marketplace relationships and the gendered nature of consumer behavior. He has published in a wide range of marketing, consumer research and sociological journals.

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Contributors

He has co-authored the book The Phenomenology of Everyday Life and co-edited the volume Sustainable Lifestyles and the Quest for Plenitude: Case Studies of the New Economy. Luca M. Visconti is Professor of Marketing at the Department of Marketing, ESCP Europe, Paris, and Visiting Professor at Università Bocconi, Milan. He is also an adjunct professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and at IFM – Institut Français de la Mode, Paris. He obtained his PhD in Business Administration and Management from Università Bocconi in 2005. His current research interests include consumer vulnerability and well-being, luxury brand management and brand storytelling. His research has appeared in Consumption, Markets & Culture (2008), Industrial Marketing Management (2010), the Journal of Advertising (2010), the Journal of Business Research (2012), the Journal of Consumer Behavior (2014), the Journal of Consumer Culture (2011), the Journal of Consumer Research (2010; 2014), the Journal of Macromarketing (2014), the Journal of Marketing Management (2014; 2016), and Marketing Theory (2015). His latest edited book is Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective (with L. Peñaloza and N. Özçağlar-Toulouse). Melanie Wallendorf is McClelland Professor of Marketing in the Eller College of Man-

agement, and Professor of Sociology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She completed her MS in sociology and her PhD in marketing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research examines the sociocultural aspects of consumption. She has published work on the social processes of taste acquisition, consumption as a means of altering gender relations, consumption as an expression of normative political ideology, consumption during collective rituals, the role of possessions in constituting social classes and ethnic groups and the meanings of favorite possessions and collections. In 1992, she and co-authors Russell Belk and John F. Sherry, Jr. won the Association for Consumer Research Award for the Best Article in the Journal of Consumer Research for ‘The Sacred and Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey’. Ian Woodward is Professor in the Department of Marketing and Management at the Univer-

sity of Southern Denmark. He has research interests in the sociological aspects of consumption and material culture, and in the cultural and consumptive dimensions of cosmopolitanism, cultural openness and boundary work. Most recently he published the co-authored books Vinyl, The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2015, with Dominik Bartmanski) and Cosmopolitanism, Uses of the Idea (Sage/Theory, Culture & Society, 2013, with Zlatko Skrbis). He has published widely on a range of related theoretical and empirical areas within consumption and material culture studies, alongside studies of everyday cosmopolitanism, including most recently studies around consumer cosmopolitanism, gender, hospitality, fairness and encounters. With Frederick F. Wherry, he is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Consumption, and with Julie Emontspool, co-editor of the collection Cosmopolitanism, Markets and Consumption.

PREFACE

This volume grows out of encounter between a small group of researchers in consumer culture who, throughout the 21st century, have met at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense every two years together with a good group (usually around 30) of doctoral students to lecture on – and discuss with the students – the legacy and importance of a “canon of classics” in consumption studies. The canonical figures presented at the seminar have been constituted by two kinds: the ‘usual suspects’ in contemporary consumer society theorizing such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jean Baudrillard and Mary Douglas and a number of other canonical figures in various disciplines of social theorizing and philosophy ranging from philosophy (Nietzsche) to social history (Foucault) and from political economy (Marx) to anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, etc.) and critical theory (Horkheimer, Adorno, etc.) The selection presented at the seminars has been highly dependent on the availability and current interests of faculty members invited to share their insights and passions about these authors, whom they all thought could inspire at least some of the doctoral students and their projects and provide them with a steady anchoring in social theory, something that could not be taken for granted since most of the students came from programs in business schools. In all fairness, it must be added that a lot has changed on this front since the seminars started more than 15 years ago, and contemporary doctoral students are considerably better than they used to be in terms of insights in various domains in social theory. The faculty present has varied, but consisted of a core group of scholars in and around the consumption, culture and commerce research unit in Odense plus invited friends, some regular visitors, others on a more occasional basis. In between presentations, roundtables and discussions, the idea was born that these insights and reflections might be interesting for other colleagues and students beyond the narrow circle of those present at the seminars. The current book is the (first; we are dedicated to a Volume 2) fruit of this idea and an editorial collaboration between the organizer of the seminar series and a steady contributor. Generally speaking, former presenters at the seminar were asked to join the rank of contributors – some were asked to provide two chapters based on their former seminar presentations and a few even managed to do that, as will be evident from the content. But in order to fulfil our vision of a book that is composed of a much broader array of canonical thinkers in social theory than we have ever

xx

Preface

been able to include in the seminars, as well those social theorists that consumer researchers currently do find inspiration from as some of those we think that they ought to seek inspiration from, the circle of contributors was considerably enlarged beyond faculty members from the doctoral seminar. The selection may seem odd to some readers. Obviously, at the outset the selection was and is a reflection of our own orientations and preferences. Additionally, a few contributors suggested writing about a different canonical scholar than the one we had initially proposed. Most significantly, however, we started out with approximately 15 more contributions than we have in this finalized volume. We have the utmost respect for our colleagues and the strain they are under for performing well in terms of research, teaching, administration and knowledge dissemination, to name just a few of the most central obligations in contemporary academic life. And we fully realize that a chapter in this kind of anthology may not be what yields the most respect in the eyes of research-evaluating managers and bureaucrats. In other words, we know that everyone accepted to participate con amore, and we therefore gave our friends and colleagues the longest leash possible – to such an extent that by the time that those who ended up not being able to realize what they (and we) had dreamt of, it was too late to replace them. Furthermore, as we realize from our correspondence, they gave up on delivering with a feeling of loss, not so much of status-giving, obituary-improving research results but in terms of not being part of a community. This, and the fact that we realize that there are plenty of canonical authors that are sorely missed from this first volume – Erving Goffman, Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen to name but three of the most obvious – makes us determined to work on a Volume 2 to quickly follow up on this one.

PART I

Introduction

1 IN SEARCH OF CONSUMPTION . . . Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn

What is the topic of this book? The title may seem puzzling to many since it seemingly refers to a non-existing field of study. No academic program or any scientific journal caters to and carries the torch of such a domain of research. “Social theory on consumption” is a neologism as a denominator. The irony becomes even thicker when the title also seems to assume that there is such a thing as canonical authors in this non-existing field of study. Already at this point, the reader may have started to expect some kind of avant-garde scientific experiment – or a public joke – in the legacy of John Cage’s composition 4:33 or Yves Klein’s empty gallery. However, even if we wanted it to be, and even though we have included some of our most respected and talented colleagues in this project, we could never claim such a significant contribution to cultural life. This modesty notwithstanding, we do want to address – from a variety of angles – a really central question: How can reading some of the more prevalent social philosophers and social scientists inform our understanding of the phenomenon of consumption, in particular in its current role as a trope that, for better and for worse, permeates more and more social institutions and social and personal arrangements? Our society has been called a “consumer society”, and other fine anthologies have addressed its constitution by including texts from great scholars that addressed consumption in various forms (e.g., Schor & Holt 2000). However, the present book raises another question, which is about the meanings of consumption and the tools that can be envisaged to understand consumption as seen through lenses that, for most of the canonical figures appearing in this book, have not analyzed or written directly about consumption. Furthermore, since the consumer society is arguably a recent phenomenon, the question may be expanded to the roots of the social significance of the market institution, and the question becomes: What does it mean to live in a commercial society? As Murray (1997) has demonstrated in his wonderful anthology, such reflections on commercial life go back to antiquity. Murray’s book contains powerful insights, dating back to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, but also brings forth the thoughts of John Locke, Adam Smith, and Hannah Arendt to name but a few. In our book, we would like to stress the ambition of using the reflections of a selection of established social theorists for the purpose of understanding the consequences of

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Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn

the power of the market institution and the commercialization of social processes not in and by itself but together with insights on and in terms of their consequences for consumer agency, identity, and resistance. Consumption was theorized by economists before it really became a matter for other kinds of social scientists and for philosophers. Economics and in particular the branch of microeconomics represented an attempt to give a scientific status to the behavior of consumers. This scientific status provided a legitimacy to consumption without it becoming a real field of investigation. Granted, a number of scholars, such as Werner Sombart (who was scheduled to be part of this volume, alas), addressed consumption issues. The same can be said about a number of anthropological and sociological texts appearing prior to the 1970s, where also such fields at home economics contributed to a focus on the study of consumption (Askegaard & Scott 2013). But consumption by and large remained a marginalized field of study in the social sciences. It has to be added that consumption was never really an in-depth topic of investigation for microeconomists either, since it was included in microeconomics through fairly abstract proxies such as indifference curves between price and quantity and assumptions of full information and utility maximization on behalf of consumers, to indicate but a few of the most central ways in which consumption entered the life of a standard economist. It is probably fair to say that research on consumption today is quite widespread among different disciplines but also that it has remained – or at least until fairly recently – quite marginalized in most contemporary scientific environments as testified by Miller’s anthology from more than two decades ago that made an explicit call for the acknowledgment of consumption (Miller 1995). Microeconomics has of course been representative of the classical view on consumption as utility maximization (more on that later), but we are increasingly witnessing the emergence of quite significant groups of scholars interested in the sociology of consumption, the anthropology of consumption, the geography of consumption, and so on. However, institutionally speaking, only within business studies has a larger disciplinary field emerged since the 1970s with several journals and an array of institutionalized events, associations, etc. formed with an explicit focus on consumption: consumer research. Furthermore, it is debatable how much this changed the status of consumption and consumer within social sciences, since this sub-field of marketing never made much impact outside the ranks of marketing scholars and business schools. “Consumer research”, as understood from a business school perspective, is nevertheless a well-established scientific field with academic courses and textbooks as well as conferences and journals to sustain it. However, “consumer research” as a term carries with it both a certain legacy of instrumental exploitation of consumers in the interest of marketers and corporations and a built-in individualizing focus. The former legacy is the witness of a history full of dispute internally about the status of consumer research (see Bode & Askegaard 2017). Notwithstanding the various attempts at establishing a consumer research free of the burden of managerial relevance, if not as an outcome at least as a predefining and research-guiding characteristic, consumer research has often been seen, maybe in particular by groups of interest outside the ranks of consumer researchers themselves, as an auxiliary discipline to marketing practice where, as it has been formulated, consumer researchers study consumers as fishermen study fish rather than as marine biologists study fish (Tucker 1974). Regardless of the final aim of the research process, consumer research as a discipline has been – and still is – dominated by behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, both approaches with a distinctly individualizing foundation.

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The field of consumer research has changed profoundly, not least due to the influence of several contributors to this volume. While marketing researchers like Sidney Levy preceded the movement by several decades (cf. Levy 1959), the 1980s and onward saw the emergence of a consumer research tradition that abandoned the psychological and individualizing approach in favor of looking at consumption and consumer behavior as a social communication system and as the production and result of consumers pursuing meaningful life in a society where resources provided through the market had become increasingly central, conditioning and structuring the meaning of life for modern people increasingly seen predominantly through their role as consumers. The whole endeavor was developing hand in hand with an interpretivist and constructivist critique of the dominant logical empiricist paradigm in consumer research. In 2005, two associate editors at the Journal of Consumer Research made an attempt at summarizing 20 years of interpretivist and constructivist consumer research and rebranded it Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). The central theme, “consumer culture”, they understood institutionally as “a social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, and between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets” and discursively as “an interconnected system of commercially produced images, texts, and objects that groups use – through the construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities, and meanings – to make collective sense of their environments and to orient their members’ experiences and lives” (Arnould & Thompson 2005, 869). This evolution has been taking place simultaneously with an exploding interest in the social sciences more generally in consumption phenomena. In the decades preceding and following the turn of the millennium, consumption has evolved from a quite marginalized field of study in other social sciences to becoming an increasingly central issue worthy of investigation in for example sociology and anthropology. The already mentioned Consumer Culture Theory has to a large extent felt nourished by this development, and – at least to some extent – also contributed the other way around. But this renewed social theory interest in consumption has also generated a debate about the scope of consumption as a phenomenon. Most profoundly, perhaps, in the reflections of renowned anthropologist David Graeber (2014) on what could and should be considered “consumption”. Graeber’s starting point is the observation made by Richard Wilk (2004) that “consumption” basically is a metaphor that refers to either fire or eating in the sense that consumption uses up and makes disappear its object. This metaphor incites Graeber to reflect on how it happened that almost all kinds of human activities that involve material or immaterial cultural objects all of a sudden could be summarized in this one metaphor as if it was similar to eating food. Why, Graeber asks, when kids pick up their instruments and start to form a garage band, is this first and foremost “consumption”? Why do such activities and practices become classified as “consumption” just because the material objects are mediated by the market, he proceeds, with a nod to the above-mentioned definition of consumption in a CCT perspective. Whence the imperialism of this concept from the realm of political economy in contexts of study where it might not belong? The metaphor of consumption most certainly does not exhaust what such or other practices are about. In any case, it should be underlined that any application of a sharp distinction between consumption and production, challenged already Marx, has not been valid thought in Consumer Culture Theory for at least a couple of decades. Furthermore, one can ask the logically ensuing question: If the guitar is not “consumed” when it is played, when is

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it “consumed”? It might not be consummated but it is worn and torn, it gets patina, it becomes personalized, it undergoes a number of the processes addressed by consumer researchers. Reducing “consumption” to the act of buying would be to revert to an old (business) school perception of consumer behavior as “buyer behavior”, where all that matters is that in the moment of acquisition one particular brand or product is chosen over another. What subsequently happened to the item need not bother the marketer. Such a reductionism is – for obvious reasons – of little or no satisfaction to anyone interested in consumption processes. Consequently, scholars interested in consumption would be wise to remain interested in the full biography of objects (Kopytoff 1986) or services, events, etc., acquired and used, even if not consummated as presupposed in Graeber’s use of the food metaphor. The question becomes how to avoid, as Graeber correctly worries, that every human practice involving some market-mediated device (and in a contemporary market economy that, indeed, includes a lot of practices) becomes reduced to an act of consumption. One suggestion is not to consider consumption as referring to a particular given set of practices. Rather, consumption is a perspective that one may (or may not) apply to these practices. Applying the consumption perspective engenders an acknowledgment that the economy (and, hence economics!) is, indeed, political – and consequently also social, cultural, historical, . . . . Applying the consumption perspective refers exactly to the inscription of our modern lives in an institutionalized flow of market-mediated goods, services, and events. As with all material culture in the history of humanity, this means that consumption is the stuff we have fun with, provide meaning to various life situations with, build communicative meaning structures with, and use as social markers. But it obviously also means that we should never forget that the provisioning of these resources is inscribed in a political economy with particular consequences in terms of power structures, inequality, in- and exclusion, (lack of ) sustainability, and resource depletion. Just because one is employed at a business school, one does not have to be apologetic about capitalism or neoliberalism. Thus, unless we remain conscious about this, applying the consumption metaphor – let us stick to that – does come with the risk of serving a particular moral (Wilk 2004) and political agenda. However, it does not have to be like that. Applying the consumption metaphor uncritically can generate a mythologized naturalization of the consumer role; applying it reflexively can generate a critical understanding of the power of liberal markets in contemporary consumer culture. We would therefore concur with Graeber when he encourages us to treat consumption “not as an analytical term but as an ideology to be investigated” (Graeber 2014, 502). Consumption scholars and students in all disciplines in general, but possibly in particular adherents to the Consumer Culture Theory community – since they are most immersed in the logics of the capitalist economy, the scholarly members of the community mainly being employed in business schools – should observe Graber’s call. Consumer Culture Theory might as well – and should – strive for relating to consumer culture much the same way that Marx’s Capital relates to capitalism; with an acknowledging nod to the progress and the indisputable if unevenly distributed growth in material wealth it involves but also with a profound and critical scrutiny of its social, cultural, political, and economic logics and the ensuing negative social and environmental consequences of its dominance. These reflections on Graeber’s critique underlines the general lack of a theoretical underpinning of what is consumption and hence brings forth the more general question: Has consumption actually been theorized as a social phenomenon in and by itself? Situated in the crossroad of economics (which has a hard time acknowledging itself as a cultural science), the

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other social sciences, and the humanities, consumption theory has never acquired disciplinary status. Contrary to economics, consumption theory has never had its own “Adam Smith problem” and has not been able to establish itself as an autonomous discipline. Here, we are referring to what the Germans have called das problem Adam Smith. How is it possible that the same author, considered a founding figure of economic science, could produce on the one hand The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the purpose of which was to establish which virtues are necessary for a well-functioning society, and on the other, The Wealth of Nations, in which he argues for the primacy of egotism and self-interest with the “invisible hand” as the force securing the collective harmony among individuals striving for the maximization of their own personal benefits. As Dupuy (1997) reminds us, economics poses as a science and even when it discusses moral or political questions, it expresses itself through a scientistic discursivity. This fact, Dupuy observes, raises the problem of a social science which, in the image of the natural sciences, has freed itself from all value judgments and has lost all traces of its own teleological dimensions. The paradox of economics is exactly that it assumes an independence from the social, moral, and political philosophy that constituted its cradle while making references to its founding father, a moral philosopher by profession. It might be argued that the complete separation of economics and morality is a too simple way of considering a complex issue. Louis Dumont (1977) thus reminded us that it was not so much an issue of separating economics completely from any moral consideration but of establishing one very particular morality as an anthropological fact that subsequently becomes subservient to economic logic and its coherence. Since, epistemologically speaking, it is currently not possible to conceive of a discipline called “consumption theory”, it is necessary instead to draw attention to how various social sciences and social scientists have been able to, or potentially could, enrich the study of consumption through the problems raised and the methods used. This is indeed the objective of the present volume. However, the first obstacle for the endeavor is that consumption, as we have already evoked, for a long time remained the “blind angle” of the social and human sciences. Consumption is the “un-thought” of the human sciences. Does anyone recall a philosopher that declared him- or herself a philosopher of consumption? It is sometimes easy to forget that the notion and the idea of a society of consumption is recent, as it first appeared in the early 1960s, at least according to Paquot (2008) who traces the notion of a “society of consumption” to Jean-Marie Domenach, editor of the journal Esprit. The fact that Jean Baudrillard’s (1970) eponymous (and not Consumer Society!) book had to wait almost 30 years before its translation into English is edifying in this regard. It appears as if the Anglo-Saxon world completely overlooked Baudrillard the consumption theorist, only to be resurrected after having embraced Baudrillard the bard of postmodernity. The paradox of consumption is that it is the human activity par excellence in contemporary society; it saturates everyday life while still living a life in the more shadowy parts of the social sciences. Maybe exactly due to its ubiquity as a daily practice or set of practices, much of it inconspicuously passes under the radar with the exception of some of the more spectacular acts such as compulsory buying or cosmetic surgery that may evoke the interest of both reality TV and social and human sciences. Hence, to render consumption intelligible beyond the banal, to “think consumption”, is finally also to contribute to making visible that which was invisible, that web of roots which weaves our daily being together without really necessarily becoming flourishingly spectacular, since consumption, at least traditionally, was not considered under its existential or political angle. As a consequence, consumption remained hidden from much of the social

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science efforts to understand human organization and practice. Nor has it been the topic of much philosophical investigation. Intellectuals have for a long time considered consumption with a deep mistrust and skepticism. Why? Are consumption objects not sufficiently noble? Surely, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, materialism has been looked upon with disdain. But materialism and acknowledging the significance (cultural, environmental, social) of as well as the fantasies, feelings, and fun around consumption practices are far from the same thing. Consumption in contemporary society cannot be exhausted by utility or destruction (consummation). We in the late modern world inhabit a world of goods, whether this plethora conveys thoughts of wealth or of poverty. This is why researchers interested in consumption have been forced to glean a good number of their central ideas and concepts in various disciplines of the social sciences, just like de Certeau’s strategic and tactical individuals glean among the objects of industrial society. In no way this should be considered as poaching. On the contrary, we are trying to bring forth different paradigmatic platforms in order to establish a number of different approaches to the study of consumption. What can we learn about consumption by studying canonical figures from the social sciences, even if these canonical figures never studied or evoked the phenomenon of consumption in the first place? Historians of material culture such as Lucien Febvre or Fernand Braudel never speak directly about consumption but about structures of everyday life. The same thing can be said about thinkers such as Sartre, Polanyi, or, more recently, Agamben. Consumption reveals processes and practices that contribute to the web of meanings that structures our lives. Nevertheless, consumption has remained tangential for social science and oftentimes studied as a derived epiphenomenon rather than studied directly. If consumption could be reduced to consummation, as suggested by Graeber, the whole affair would be much more straightforward. It would only be a matter of destruction of substance and matter and would refer to a particular objectivized relation between humans and objects. However, philosophy and in particular phenomenology have adopted the object in order to show how the subject cannot construct itself other than through its relationship to objects. In order to understand the relation between humans and objects, and going beyond an ontology of the object, subject-object interactivity is that which allows the human to engage in the being, the having, and the doing, the three essential philosophical modalities of our relationships with things. This said, to reflect on consumption as a social and cultural phenomenon involves not only going beyond the process of consummation but also realizing that our relationships with objects in the role of market-mediated commercial goods are not just existential-phenomenological but also social, political, anthropological, in kind. The quest in this volume is a collective search for ways in which we can obtain an increased understanding and clarification of the conceptualization of consumption by looking at certain canonical thinkers from the social and human sciences that would allow different types of perspectives to emerge. The aim is an enlarged inspiration for “thinking consumption”. Finally, a few words on what may seem to be a highly randomized selection of canonical authors. The initial selection emerged through a brainstorm between the two editors. Following a quite heavy-handed mutilation process, the number of potential canonical authors was finally brought down to 50. We then tried to couple those canonical authors with colleagues that had contributed, at some point in time, to the doctoral seminars “consumption theory: a canon of classics” at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. In addition to these friends and colleagues, we reflected on other potential contributors for the various canonical figures given our knowledge of our colleagues’ past works and knowledge and usage of the

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various canonical authors. A few friends declined, but most said yes – and we succeeded in replacing those who had to decline the offer of participating. A few invited contributors suggested a change of canonical figure, something we accepted in those few cases. In other words, all of these canonical figures are authors that have something to contribute to the study of consumption as a social phenomenon and as a set of practices. But the selection is to some extent randomized and, needless to say, highly idiosyncratic. There could have been many others – the selection is neither exhaustive nor do we intend it to be hagiographical. This book is thus neither a meta-theoretical work nor a work that objectively accounts for the history of the social sciences, but rather a series of percussions in an attempt to both scientize and humanize consumption, or rather an effort to think of consumption from the point of view of “scientific humanities”. We are conscious that this companion inscribes itself in a burgeoning catalog of handbooks and companions that are emerging from various publishers in these years. This is a tendency that is also clearly detectable in the domain of consumer and consumption research. Nor is this an encyclopedia or a systematic presentation, but rather it consists of various incises that assume a strong variety of subjectivities and presentation styles. It was not possible to account for the whole thought of each author in a few pages. Each contributor hence had the freedom to choose which issues should be raised regarding the author under consideration, resulting in a variety of styles and a range of texts from descriptive, linear approaches to more subjective approaches where the contributor takes command and resolutely assumes a point of view. The purpose has been to create an engaged companion with a highly personalized style for each individual contribution. Hence, it might very well be argued that from reading the present volume one will learn something about the various scholars investigated, but possibly one will learn infinitely more about the contributors through their way of approaching the task. Despite the subjectivity of the choices of authors and the impossibility of proposing a project of a systematic nature, it is nonetheless possible to trace an intellectual arc that builds this collective project. First, there is a clear search for eclecticism and finally a reflection on the perdurance of the major currents of thought. Rarely for this type of anthology, authors of structuralist observation coexist with Charles Sanders Peirce. There is no ideological bias in the book, which strives to go beyond ethnocentric divisions. It is quite obvious that American and English scholars have often over praised thinkers from the so-called French Theory, such as Foucault, Bourdieu, and Baudrillard and more recently Latour. American scholars have more or less rejected structural semiotics even though structuralism was really born in New York in the 1940s when Lévi-Strauss who had read Franz Boas met Roman Jakobson (introduced by Boas!) and had the intuition to use linguistics as a model to scientifically ground his anthropological insights. In this book, authors that can be considered as neglected despite the importance of their work are well represented and defended. Such a statement is of course always controversial, but we will maintain that this could be said to be the case for Fernand Braudel, Marcel Mauss, Clifford Geertz, Georges Bataille, Michel de Certeau, Edgar Morin, and Cornelius Castoriadis to name a few. There are many possible ways in which to read this collective work. Many issues and questions appear and reappear in the various chapters, not to speak of the many explicit and implicit influences and dialogues in the historical relationships and currents linking these canonical scholars. However, we would like to highlight a small sample of broader research issues for which we hope the following chapters can help to illuminate and inspire.

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The question of our relationship to objects, goods, and, more generally, the gestures and practices that characterize our relationship with the sensible world, as illustrated by authors such as Mauss, Benjamin, and de Certeau who have gained an increasing importance in the Consumer Culture Theory field while Daniel Miller and a whole current of the so-called material culture school has rightly departed from the theory of Mauss’s gift by reinterpreting the question of sacrifice. The question of our links and connections to others. Consumer goods are primarily mediators that allow us to maintain various kinds of links. Objects are primarily relay facilitators through exchange. This is what authors like Mauss, Sahlins, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, and Morin help us to understand. The question of meaning and symbolic order and the way in which categorization of goods enables us to organize our perception of the world and to operate a form of sharing the sensible and sharing of the social as illustrated by authors as different as Bourdieu, Douglas, and Lévi-Strauss. The question of power relationships which can be traced through consumer practices, as illustrated by the representatives of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas) but also by Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler, and Ž ižek. The question of structure which runs from Boas to Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, and Bourdieu and that tends more or less to evict the subject (and therefore humanism) as opposed to approaches that rehabilitate the agent (e.g., de Certeau, Butler). This of course may also be confronted with the question of the role of the agent and the rising influence of the Latourian school in a number of consumption studies. Whereas any collection like this is also a political statement of inclusion and exclusion, we would like the reader to allow for a certain degree of randomness in the selection of canonical authors. Absolutely central thinkers for the understanding of contemporary consumption such as Zygmunt Bauman, Jacques Derrida, Emile Durkheim, Anthony Giddens, Erving Goffman, Marshall McLuhan, Georg Simmel, Adam Smith, Werner Sombart, and Thorstein Veblen had to be excluded based on subjective choices. It is our hope and intention to include these in a sequel. Equally important, a number of great colleagues were not invited to contribute to the present book. We sincerely hope to approach them for the second volume. A second volume will allow the investigation of other questions, and for instance contain chapters addressing classical economic thought through authors like Aristotle, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Bernard de Mandeville. Furthermore, we would like to address questions of strength, rivalry, and sovereignty through the inclusion of authors such as Thomas Hobbes, Giorgio Agamben, and René Girard. And finally, of course, we could be considering moral questions of consumption with such figures as Epicure, John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, and others. The search for theorizations of consumption is to be continued. . . .

References Arnould, Eric J. & Craig J. Thompson (2005), “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research”, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (4), 868–882. Askegaard, Søren & Linda Scott (2013), “Consumer Culture Theory: The Ironies of History”, Marketing Theory, 13 (2), 139–147. Baudrillard, Jean (1970), La société de consommation. Paris: Gallimard. Bode, Matthias & Søren Askegaard (2017), “Marketing and Consumer Research: An Uneasy Relationship”, in M. Keller, B. Halkier, T.-A. Vilska & M. Truniger, eds., Routledge Handbook on Consumption, London: Routledge, 61–71.

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Dumont, Louis (1977), Homa aequalis, Paris: Gallimard. Dupuy, Jean Pierre (1997), Libéralisme et justice sociale, Paris: Hachette. Graeber, David (2014), “Consumption”, Current Anthropology, 52 (4), 489–511. Kopytoff, Igor (1986), “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”, in A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, London: Sage, 64–91. Levy, Sidney (1959), “Symbols for Sale”, Harvard Business Review, 37 (4), 117–124. Miller, Daniel, ed. (1995), Acknowledging Consumption. A Review of New Studies, London: Routledge Murray, Patrick, ed. (1997), Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, New York: Routledge. Paquot, Thierry (2008), “De la société de consommation et de ses détracteurs”, Mouvements, 54, 54–64. Schor, Juliet & Douglas B. Holt, eds. (2000), The Consumer Society Reader, New York: The New Press. Tucker, William T. (1974), “Future Directions in Marketing Theory”, Journal of Marketing, 38 (2), 30–35. Wilk, Richard (2004), “Morals and Metaphors. The Meaning of Consumption”, in K. Ekström and H. Brembeck, eds., Elusive Consumption, Oxford: Berg Publishers, 11–26.

PART II

Political economy and the quest for value

2 MARX, COMMODITY AND CONSUMER CULTURE A. Fuat Fırat

Anyone who truly wants to understand what and how people consume in modern times, specifically in capitalist societies, or how consumer culture came into existence ought to study Karl Marx. The phenomena that Marx analyzes are, as is evident from his philosophy and analytical approach, temporal and contextual, not universal nor eternal. These phenomena, such as commoditization, capitalism, commodity fetishism, which together create consumer culture as modernity matures, were contingent on specific developments in the relations of production at a certain time in human history, and in certain parts of the world, until they eventually began to globalize. Marxian analysis suggests that despite globalization history will demonstrate the contingency and contextuality of these phenomena also in the future. Study of Marxian analysis is, therefore, essential to understanding the nature and constitution of, and transformations in, consumer culture. A modernist economist and philosopher, it can be argued that Marx was the producer of the most insightful analysis of capitalism. In his time, within the prevailing circle of modernity, he could clearly see that capitalism was the order of modern life that was becoming increasingly dominant. By deciphering the laws of value and capital, he was able to predict many later developments in capitalism with quite remarkable precision. The political implications of Marx’s analyses have caused works by Marx to be both revered and vilified. It can be argued, however, that the impact of Marxian analysis of modern capitalism has endured despite its being shunned and ignored for a long time by mainstream economics and social science. This endurance is due to the strength of Marx’s theories and insights. Although often not acknowledged, Marxian analyses have been silently present in many modern social scientific discourses. With the developments of postmodernist thought and neoliberalism, Marx’s modern analyses need to be re-evaluated and re-contextualized, yet this does not diminish Marx’s influence in terms of understanding capitalism’s inner workings. In many ways, his methods and historical insights have also informed postmodernist thought. Some may think that Marx did not have much to say about consumption or consumer culture. I wish to argue that Marx did not see consumption as a separate phenomenon, but as a moment in the whole cycle of political economy. In his analysis, he posits four key moments of this cycle. These are production, distribution, exchange, and consumption. He then explored

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how production was the most determining moment, in hindsight quite evidently so, in the modern capitalist political economy of the time. In this chapter, I wish to discuss the different aspects of this exploration in order to expose how Marx analyzed and explained the advent of consumer culture before it was evident.

The important thing to emphasize here is only that, whether production and consumption are viewed as the activity of one or many individuals, they appear in any case as moments of one process, in which production is the real point of departure and hence also the predominant moment. . . . The individual produces an object and, by consuming it, returns to himself, but returns as a productive and self reproducing individual. Consumption thus appears as a moment of production. Grundrisse, p. 94 ALSO The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself, . . . but over the other moments as well. . . . That exchange and consumption cannot be predominant is self-evident. Grundrisse, p. 99

Capitalist production Marx theorized that capitalism and capital production and accumulation begin with simple commodity production. Consequently, the discussion of commodity is the starting point of Capital, Volume 1, arguably his central opus. Any ‘external object’ that is exchanged or, especially, produced to be exchanged in the market and has ‘qualities [that] satisfies human needs of whatever kind’ is a commodity. Imagine a household or a community that is isolated from the market. This household or community, say, that produces its own food to satisfy its nutritional needs, weaves clothing, builds shelter, makes shoes to protect the bodies of its members and does not exchange any of these things with other households or communities, simply sharing the effort in producing them and sharing the outcomes of these efforts, is not involved with commodities or commodity production. A market economy begins when production efforts create (exchangeable) commodities.

The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities”; the individual commodity appears as its elementary form. Our investigation therefore begins with the analysis of the commodity. Capital, Vol. 1, first two sentences

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Simple commodity production occurs when a producer exchanges part of her/his products on the market. Simple wealth accumulation can occur when some part of what the producer receives in the exchange is not consumed by her/him but is saved to be used in the future. This wealth is not capital, however, until the producer enters into a relation with others whose labor-power she/he utilizes and pays wages for, in order to produce more commodities for market exchange. That is, capital is a social relation between the one who employs labor and those who sell their labor-power in order to earn wages. This relation between labor and capital only functions when the system makes it impossible for labor to survive in a different manner, and accumulation of capital is impossible if the system makes it possible for labor to escape this condition. It is this social relation that creates value to be exchanged in the market as well as surplus value and accumulation of further capital. According to Marx, when such a relation is created, ‘generalized commodity production’ begins. For a capital social relation to begin, two historical conditions have been significant. One is private property, which allows for different means of production, such as land and buildings as space for production, equipment to speed up processes, and raw materials to be processed – all to be claimed as the private property of one entity, available only to one until and unless others are given permission to use them. The second is, as a result of private property rights controlling the means of production, deprivation of many from access to such means of production. As a consequence of these historical conditions, many were left with the only alternative of selling their labor-power in order to stay alive. In Part Eight of Capital Volume 1 Marx discusses that the period of history of this denial of access to the means of production to many, which he labels as a period of so-called primitive accumulation, was long and bloody. It involved wars, slavery, violence, piracy, and robbery more so than savings and frugality. Once means of production were accumulated in the hands of a few as wealth, generalized commodity production began through the transfer of this wealth into capital.

Value production Marx’s most significant insight may be his understanding, early in the game, that value, specifically economic value, measured in exchange-value, would be the organizing principle of modern capitalism. That is, in capitalism there is a tendency for all institutions and relations to be organized so that economic value can be maximized. Marx, through his analysis, signaled to us that in capitalism everything, including human beings, and even the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, would come to serve economic value accumulation, which is also reflected as the growth of the market. All moments of political economy (that was the foundation of the constitution of societal order under capitalism) – production, distribution, exchange, and consumption – would be ordered so as to enable economic value maximization. In examining value, Marx classifies it into two categories. Use-value is determined by the usefulness of a commodity to a person. This usefulness is not independent of the commodity’s cultural meanings as they are inscribed into the physical properties of the commodity in its production. That is, the moment of production produces the commodities and the meanings

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of usefulness they will have for their consumers. Once obtained, the use-value of a commodity is realized in use or consumption.

[T]he use-value of every commodity contains useful labour, i.e. productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim. Use-values cannot confront each other as commodities unless the useful labour contained in them is qualitatively different in each case. Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 132–133

The second form of value, exchange-value (which Marx also calls ‘value-form’), seems to be arbitrated in the market when, for example, six bushels of corn are exchanged for a coat, or they are equal in terms of amounts of money exchanged for them. Other economists may say that this equivalence is due to the fact that these amounts of the two commodities are ‘worth’ the same in terms of their usefulness to those who are exchanging them. Marx argues, however, that this seeming quantitative equivalence is due to the existence of a third element in both commodities in identical magnitude. This element is social labor, that is, labor expended in production that is socially organized according to prevalent (in this case capitalist) relations of production. Marx’s conjecture is that for value accumulation to be maximized, magnitudes of social labor existing in each commodity need to be equalized in exchange in the long-term. Otherwise, labor – the fundamental producer of value – employed in the production of the commodities exchanged would have been wasted by being undervalued.

All commodities are non-use-values for their owners and use-values for their nonowners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this changing hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange puts them in relation with each other as values and realizes them as values. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 179

This implies that according to Marx, labor is the only means of production that can produce value. All other means of production are unable to produce value without labor, whereas labor can produce value without other means of production. When other means of production – such as machines – become involved, they increase labor’s capacity to produce value, but they are unable to produce value on their own. As such, owners of means of production who employ workers for their labor-power are not producing value, but enabling laborers to produce more value. The big question is whether having appropriated means of production that are products of labor in the first place, and even having the vision to manage and organize their use by laborers – which is also a form of labor, although different from wage labor – gives owners of these means of production the right to appropriate the lion’s share of surplus-value that has been created as a result.

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Should not each laborer share in the fruits of labor expended in the proportion of labor she/he puts into the total effort, resulting in all laborers to share in ownership of and right of access to the means of production? This idea was, and continues to be, radically revolutionary.

[T]he worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker, and is separated from its own means of objectification and realization; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-labourer. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 716

Furthermore, Marx indicated that because of the structure of relations of capital and the nature of capitalist competition, there would be increasing concentration – what he called ‘centralization’ – of capital and of means of production, thus wealth, in fewer and fewer hands. He foresaw, therefore, that decision-making power would also become more concentrated than it was in early capitalism. Ever-larger proportions of society would become less able to engage in social choices, further aggravating their feelings of alienation and powerlessness. In these analyses, Marx expected that there could be different modes of centralization of means of production in different countries. That is, he estimated that cultural differences, while not changing the essential nature of and tendencies in capitalism, would impact the speed and the ways capitalism would assert itself.

It becomes quite clear to see here that because of historical and other circumstances which have had a varying effect upon the relative magnitude of the concentration of the means of production, there is a correspondingly greater or smaller expropriation of the mass of immediate producers. In the same way, there is a very different development of the forces of production and of the capitalist mode of production in general. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 1078

The political implications of Marx’s analysis arise from these issues. If labor is the only producer of value, then the fact that owners of means of production other than labor appropriate an inordinate amount of value created – well above and beyond the amount of labor they contributed to the total effort – implies exploitation of the workers and their alienation from their own labor and products. That is, working class people are deprived of their rights and dignity and capitalists are privileged beyond their contribution to humanity. This condition is parallel to and facilitates another significant outcome of the capitalist mode of relations of production, one that is more directly related to consumer culture: commodity fetishism.

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Commodity fetishism and consumer culture Briefly, commodity fetishism is the belief that commodities have a life of their own, independent of the social relations within which they were produced, and that they contain in themselves qualities that have the power to fulfill what people are looking for. Attributing such special powers to commodities, then, people who have been deprived of their connection to the products of their own labors, having lost meaning as a result of loss of control of their own lives, and being alienated, turn to commodities to find the qualities that they have lost. In analyzing this process, Marx signaled the rise of consumer culture where people would equate owning and using commodities to having meaningful, successful, accomplished lives, where they define themselves through their ownership of commodities and consider a good life as one that is full of commodities.

The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 164–165

In the same moment of production that commodities are produced for the market, the ideology that sustains the attraction to these commodities, the desire for them, is also produced. Several processes contribute to this production of desire. First, commodities produced become visible in the market, and the fact that they are there and seen, along with marketing activities, make these commodities at least of interest. Second, in the moment of production it is the capitalists who make the decisions regarding what commodities are to be produced based on their perceptions and interpretations of desires in the market, which naturally favors their own consumption desires. Third, the visibility and privileges of the capitalists in society promote emulation and, thus, the diffusion of the desires inscribed in the commodities. Consequently, many nonessential commodities are produced and get consumed by all, even the working class, before many essential needs of the working class are fulfilled. For those with little incomes, consumption that is necessary for healthy living is substituted with attractive and often frivolous commodities.

Crises of the market In capitalism, significant determinations of class relations occur in the organization of relations of production. Those who own the means of production and put them to use as capital, constituting the capitalist class, represent and promote interests of capital accumulation and market growth. They are able to appropriate the lion’s share of value created above and beyond the total values of the means of production that are used in producing the commodities offered in the market, that is, they appropriate most of surplus-value. Each individual capitalist tries to keep the wages she/he is paying to workers down to a level that is just enough for workers to produce the labor-power for the next cycle of production in order to maximize the share they get from surplus-value. In an order that has value as its organizing principle, any consumption

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of the worker above the necessities for reproducing her/his labor-power, for the worker’s own pleasure, is considered to be unproductive consumption. It simply is seen to be draining resources away from being put back into value producing process of social production.

The worker’s consumption is of two kinds. While producing he consumes the means of production with his labour. . . . This is productive consumption. . . . On the other hand, the worker uses the money paid to him for his labour-power [by the capitalist who has bought it] to buy the means of subsistence; this is his individual consumption. The result of the first kind of consumption is that the capitalist continues to live, of the second, that the worker himself continues to live. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 717

One way that capitalists try to achieve maximizing the portion they get from surplusvalue is to substitute labor-power they buy from the workers with machines that increase the productivity of labor. In this way, same or larger magnitudes of value, more commodities, are created with less total wages the capitalist pays to workers, thereby increasing the portion of surplus-value for the capitalist. From the perspective of each individual capitalist this seems rational. When the whole capitalist system is considered, however, this capitalist urge to minimize wages and maximize accumulation of capital results in crises in the market. Unless sufficient portions of the wealth created for the capitalists goes into consumption by the capitalists, instead of being used as capital to expand production, less and less earnings by the population of workers means decreasing capability to buy and consume in the market. This means that commodities produced are less likely to find buyers and left unsold, thus realization of value and capital accumulation is stunted.

All the capitalist cares for is to reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum, . . . What the worker consumes over and above that minimum for his own pleasure is seen as unproductive consumption. Capital, Vol. 1, p. 718

Implications for contemporary capitalism and consumer culture In Capital, Marx identified the tendencies in capitalism if and when relations of capital were unchecked and all was left to market forces. How could consumer culture grow, even when its ideology was diffused as explained earlier, but when sectors of the economy other than owners of capital, especially the workers, were increasingly deprived of the share of value created? Shrinking incomes for many would create crises, as discussed, as well as resistance and upheavals by those whose livelihoods were threatened. As others following Marx explained (cf., Baran and Sweezy 1966), this led to episodes of strong police repression, but eventually some political reforms and labor organizations, which served capitalism by both creating a ‘middle class’ that helped the market absorb produced commodities and by reducing the pressure for revolts.

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Yet, as the high concentration of wealth in the last decades of the twentieth century and the initial decades of the twenty-first century illustrates, the tendencies of capitalist production relations that Marx analyzed continue to thrive. The advent of consumer culture is also illuminated by Marx’s analyses. The transfer of meaning from one’s own activities and products to commodities was discussed earlier; that to find meaning in life and give meaning to one’s self, commodities become essential. It is what one is able to wear, where one can afford to live, what car one can drive, etc., that increasingly determine identity, and consequently people’s preoccupation with commodities has also made identity construction a major subject of interest for intellectuals and scholars in later stages of modernity. Although Marx did not discuss the consumerization of the human being in his writings, his analyses, especially regarding commodity fetishism and the commoditization of the worker as labor-power, do hint that in capitalism human beings would turn to seek meaning and agency in the moment of consumption, having lost any sense of propriety, pride, and creativity in the moment of production. It was understandable as an extension of Marx’s analysis that consumption remained as the moment that concepts like freedom could only be applied, no matter how illusory, since such application was all lost in the most determining moment of production. The legacy of Marx continues in many theories regarding consumption and consumer culture today. His critique of Hegel’s idealism and the social movements of the spirit while applying Hegel’s dialectic method in the realm of the material is today reflected in the deconstructions of the separateness of the subject and the object, mind and body. His identifying material conditions as powerful factors in the determination of human idea(l)s and discourses, and his analyses regarding the commoditization of labor-power, have triggered many contemporary theories regarding the role of objects and of objectification in the lives of contemporary consumers. Marx’s insights into the relations of production in capitalism thus contribute to new discourses regarding the mutuality of effects of things and humans upon each other and inform current theories. Applications of critical theory to studies of markets and relations between marketing organizations and their consumers, specifically regarding power disparities, as well as the critical marketing literature that is largely coming out of Britain and other European countries, owe much to Marxian analyses. Current theories that are popularly used in consumer research, including Bourdieu’s ideas regarding different forms of capital and Latour’s Actor-network theory are, again, indebted to Marx. Post-structuralist interjections, such as those from Baudrillard’s sign-value to Derrida’s deconstruction, and Foucault’s system of objects, works that are widely used in consumer research, are often direct dialogues with Marx’s insights even as they intend to expand our understanding of the human condition beyond the borders of modernity.

References Baran, Paul A. and Paul M. Sweezy (1966), Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks. Marx, Karl (1973[1939]), Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, translated by M. Nicolaus, New York: Vintage Books. Marx, Karl (1976[1867]), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by B. Fowkes, New York: Penguin Books.

Note: The author wishes to thank Dominique Bouchet and Nikhilesh Dholakia for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter. All errors, however, are the author’s.

3 WHY BOTHER WITH NIETZSCHE? James Fitchett

There are certainly many good reasons for consumer researchers not to bother with Nietzsche, and it is perhaps best that those committed to the pursuit of good reason should not do so. In the field of consumption studies there are practical reasons why one necessarily has to be selective about what and who to read because of the vast choice of appealing philosophies available nowadays. Nietzsche offers an extreme solution by dismissing virtually all modern philosophy as little more than the peddling of superstitious nonsensical falsehoods. Nietzsche’s contempt extends to all great intellectual leaders as well as those who follow and admire them. Through his main character Zarathustra Nietzsche speaks: “Filled with solemn jesters is the market-place – and the people boast about their great men. These are their lords of the hour” (Nietzsche 2005: 46). In 1869 Nietzsche, at age 24, was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel where he remained until the health problems that plagued him for most of his life forced him to step down. Most of the main works were completed over the next decade before his complete mental collapse in 1889. His works typify the late nineteenth-century admiration of Greek and Latin antiquity, language, literature and culture. Nietzsche had little interest in the nuances of modern political economy and none at all for the operation of markets or the conditions of modern consumption. Human society and all that it contains is just a brief and temporary failed interlude between the animal and what it is destined to become – someone who is finally free from all of the social moralities and ignorance of the human. Nietzsche prophesises the ‘over-human’, who will rise above society and out from the herd to create their own values. Consumer researchers need to take special care here for this overcoming is no co-creative act of self-realisation through any kind of social practice or social behaviour. In terms of subject relevance there are therefore good reasons why consumer researchers might want to leave Friedrich Nietzsche to one side, or at least to relegate his work further down the priority list of ‘useful’ theory. This should not be taken as any sort of criticism of Nietzsche’s work. On the contrary, it is difficult to exaggerate Nietzsche’s legacy on the philosophy of the twentieth century. Nietzsche is rightly considered to be a major influence as far as studies of the social, the self, psychology, epistemology, morality and ethics, and aesthetics are concerned – which is to say just about everything that consumer researchers are interested in nowadays. As Gilles Deleuze (1962/1983: 3) begins his

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Nietzsche and Philosophy, “It is clear that modern philosophy has lived off Nietzsche.” Several of the entries in this canon review theorists who owe a major part of their approach to the direct influence of Nietzsche and many have published their own often-extensive works on Nietzsche. These also include Heidegger, Bataille and Foucault’s seminal Genealogy (1977) which draws directly from Nietzsche. Whether and how much Freud explicitly drew on Nietzsche to formulate his own theories of consciousness remains the subject of some considerable speculation. Nietzsche’s writing on what now is generally termed the ‘unconscious’ and the identification of the importance of desire, irrationality and the passions in the constitution of the self, society and civilization pre-dates Freud by some decades. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887/2013: 70) he writes “All instincts that cannot be given external expression turn inwards – that is what I mean by the internalization of man.” For Nietzsche the ‘repression’ and misrecognition of instinct demanded by the conditions of modern civilization is the root cause of many social ills. Nietzsche argues that consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature, “We are unknown to ourselves, we men of science, and for good reason. Since we have never searched for ourselves how should we ever find ourselves?” (1887/2013: 3). The notion that consciousness is ‘socially constructed’ and that we humans generally make the error of thinking that we know what we are doing and why, lends support to the suggestion that Nietzsche was arguably the original ‘post-modern’ theorist even before there was a word for it. In modern terms Nietzsche is certainly among the first to debunk the age-old search for universal purpose or ultimate reason, or what is often referred to as the modernist quest for, and belief in, ‘grand narratives’. Stephen Brown, author of Postmodern Marketing, is one of the few marketing scholars to have attempted a translation of Nietzsche into a context intelligible to consumer research. He concedes that it is no exaggeration to state that Nietzsche’s work resists easy summary (Brown 1995: 34) not least because Nietzsche explicitly rejects any kind of philosophical system. It is for this reason that many look for insights about Nietzsche’s ideas via other writers who have translated, modernised and classified them into terms much more palatable for a contemporary readership. The proclamation that all moral systems and ethical codes are essentially arbitrary is arguably Nietzsche’s most devastating conclusion. In Twilight of the Idols (1889/1954: 501) he writes: My demand on the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. . . . Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena – more precisely a misinterpretation. Nietzsche’s wholesale rejection of any principle of ethical certainty casts an eerie shadow over the unfolding circumstances of the twentieth century, which has culminated in the cultural relativism of contemporary social life. How can we arrive at any credible notion of good and evil once we accept that there are only moral interpretations? What sense does it make to discuss a moral basis for human rights or the morality of economic and social exclusion when society has gone beyond virtue? Nietzsche is the master of reversal, turning moral categories inside out and upside down to deconstruct and historicize all moral notions of liberation, freedom, rights, care and responsibility. What in the golden age was considered good has come to be known as evil, and all that is weak and meek is venerated as virtuous. The only hope of transcending

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this perverse decadence is to go above or ‘beyond’ good and evil by painfully forging a new vigorous morality for oneself (Nietzsche 1886/1966). Nietzsche’s often-condescending style is not an easy read, almost to the point where one often seriously wonders whether he really wants to be understood at all. In the opening section of On the Genealogy of Morals he writes “If anyone finds what is written here obscure or unintelligible, I do not think that the blame should lie on me” (1887/2013: 19). Few writers exhibit so much apparent contempt for their readers as Nietzsche. Social science today however appears to be in general agreement with Nietzsche in that it seems more or less certain that we cannot know anything for certain. The proclamation of the modern sceptic that our capacity to know anything at all with any confidence other than our own experience (and even this is subject to some considerable lack of certitude) also resonates with Nietzsche. Many of the more enlightened cultural turn and critical consumer researchers are now quite relaxed about rejecting the modernist ideal of progress – the proposal that things will, over time, generally improve and get better as the principles of science and reason are allowed to inevitably prevail. This too is Nietzsche’s legacy. The ideals of political and social progress such as democracy and the pursuit of equality are exposed as nothing other than perverse fantasies and seductive means of oppression. They serve only to indicate the general decline, degeneration and weakening of the human spirit. In The Antichrist (1895/1954: 571) Nietzsche writes, “Mankind does not represent a development toward something better or stronger or higher in the sense accepted today. ‘Progress’ is merely a modern idea, that is, a false idea.” Nietzsche is considered one of the first existential philosophers, arguing that people who pine for the existence of universal truths and meanings to guide their behaviour and attitudes are being inauthentic and dishonest by refusing to accept the world and their place within it. In The Gay Science (1882/1974: 181) Nietzsche famously wrote that “God is Dead. God remains dead. And we have killed Him,” a proclamation that remains controversial even today. The meaning of this statement can be interpreted in many different ways. One interpretation is that it forces us all to rediscover our inherent freedom in the world and to finally abandon escapist fantasies and utopias whether heavenly or worldly in character. Nietzsche extends an idea about the fragile, socially contingent and constructed nature of human experience through his critical view of language and consciousness in terms that would be recognisable to twentieth-century movements including Lacanian psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism and various schools of linguistic determinism. In The Gay Science for instance Nietzsche (1887/1974: 299) concludes: “In brief, the development of language and the development of consciousness (not of reason but merely of the way reason enters consciousness) go hand-in-hand. The human being inventing signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more keenly conscious of himself.” Language with its associated ways of thinking diminishes our ability to relate to the world as it exists by making us more inwardly ‘conscious’ and self-aware. Our experience of the world is always misplaced because the principles that we usually hold as most truthful and authentic in fact mean the precise opposite. There is no doubt that Nietzsche is an intellectual giant, but other theorists who speak much more directly to the concerns of consumer research have stood on his shoulders for us and it is thanks to them that we are better able to translate and grasp the significance of Nietzsche’s writing. In the introduction to the seminal anthology and translation of Nietzsche’s works Walter Kaufmann (1954: 19) writes: “He does not want to be read as an arsenal of arguments

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for and against something, nor even for a point of view. He challenges the reader not so much to agree or disagree as to grow.” Nietzsche is not a philosopher at all but the original anti-philosopher. So what is there left of Nietzsche that others have not mapped out and explained in a more accessible philosophical genre? Is there anything else that we overlook in this general quest to document, classify and apply Nietzsche’s esoteric nineteenth-century polemics? Might there be something else valuable and unique to raise the vapours, even a little, in this field of consumption studies that is now so oversaturated with theories and explanations – so many lords of the hour. Here lies the possibility and vital opportunity that Nietzsche offers, and why his writings might just save consumer research from its own conceptual asphyxia. Nietzsche throws down the challenge of what is to be done when philosophy and theory become dead, over signified, laborious and lifeless, sapping all vitality. He diagnoses the malady – it is its own Apollonian tragedy that consumer research must confront. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche laments the loss of the Dionysian spirit and all that it represented: excess, intoxication, mysticism, the darker side of culture, the insignificance of the individual, and above all an aesthetic form of life. In its place the Apollonian spirit comes to dominate and reigns supreme with its rational illusions of moderation and reason. Man is no longer an artist but a work of art: So the Apollonian tears us away from the Dionysian universality and allows us to delight in individuals; it chains the arousal of our compassion to these individuals and through them it satisfies the sense of beauty which craves great and sublime forms; it leads a processions of images of life past us and stimulates us to grasp in thought the core of life contained in them. (Nietzsche 1872/2000: 115) Nietzsche does not simply attack philosophy; he also rejects its form and genre, abandoning all conventional explanatory and speculative philosophical style. In Human, All Too Human the discourse of philosophy with its insistence for linear argumentation, exposition and careful composition is superseded by a collection of piercing aphorisms: “I approach deep problems like cold baths: quickly into them and quickly out again” (Nietzsche 1887/1974: 343). Nietzsche is delightful because through this form and style ideas are paired down to the absolute poignant minimum, the aim being to move the reader in a kind of meditative osculation of abrupt waves of mounting intensity rather than through some plodding, nullifying methodical pace. From this perspective, consumer research, with its fetishism for laborious minutiae and theoretical contribution through context-upon-context, comes out rather badly as do all ‘sciences’. They have ended up providing one of the “most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning” (Nietzsche 1887/1882: 335). Nietzsche would conclude that the mechanistic world view produced by social science is essentially meaningless. Translators of Nietzsche emphasise the risks with his style of writing. His aphorisms have been easily and wilfully misinterpreted, misquoted and misunderstood for various malevolent and ignorant purposes. Nietzsche writes with a cynical irony and inconsistency so that one moment the text flows with humour and hubris to the point of incredulity only to then hit a wall of incomprehension and incoherence a passage or two later. Reading Nietzsche stimulates and infuriates more than it conveys, ‘teaches’ or confirms. Perhaps if consumer research could be written more with this style as its aim, if it could rediscover the Dionysian spirit that is

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modern consumption, then there is a chance that it could be rescued from the stasis of appearance, of exhaustion, of decline of decay – a vigorous and energetic endeavour confident in its future that is affirmative of life (Nietzsche 1887/2013: 137). Nietzsche gives little or no serious consideration to the controversies surrounding nineteenth-century capitalism. He is not interested in identifying any essential differences between communism, socialism, liberal capitalism and the various forms of authoritarianism for instance. For Nietzsche they are all equally perverse inversions in which the pursuit of pleasure and happiness serve only to diagnose the prevailing sicknesses that are our human, all too human failures; mere recent and unremarkable culminations of the herd mentality. People wilfully choose cultural slavery and the comfort of frightened obedience, turning their backs to the unbearable, terrifying and liberating freedom that can only come from confronting and overcoming their own flawed humanity. Modern human beings who live their lives through consumer identities can certainly never hope to attain the qualities of Nietzsche’s over-human, only a pale and parodic masquerade of individuality, sovereignty and freedom. All possibility of nobility or life-affirming qualities is unattainable in consumer culture and so the only real choice is to abandon it entirely. Nietzsche’s abject disgust with modern political economy is evident in this passage from The Gay Science (1882/1974: 56) where he writes, soldiers and leaders still have far better relationships with each other than workers and employers. So far at least, culture that rests on military basis still towers above so called industrial culture: the latter in its present form is altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has existed. If Nietzsche were to witness modern consumer culture he would no doubt extend this judgement of vulgarity to the economic relationships between marketers and consumers. His scathing exposure of herd mentality along with all of its delusions, deceptions and reversals fits particularly well with the general criticism of modern consumerism. If there is a political reading in Nietzsche it lends itself most clearly towards a marketaffirming logic rather than anything remotely collective or progressive in terms of solidarity or equality. It is probably only the stigma of fascism that still clings to Nietzsche which discourages contemporary neoliberals from embracing Nietzsche more fully. In some passages of On the Genealogy of Morals for instance he advocates a kind of pre-social economic naturalism (Nietzsche 1887/2013: 56), but Nietzsche is certainly no utilitarian liberal either. What then might Nietzsche say of modern consumer capitalism? He would say that it is not at all surprising that the common herd mentality (it makes no difference whether we refer to it as citizen, subject or consumer) should bear ill will against corporations and powerful individuals who derive great wealth from exploiting the consuming masses: the obvious privatisation of gains and the socialisation of liability and loss from recent financial booms and crashes serve as clear examples for how this mechanism usually works nowadays. The herd says ‘those corporations are evil’, and by implication those who are most unlike these evildoers are therefore ‘good’. There is no need for petty objections about the rationale for this ideal of modern economic morality; apart from perhaps that these ‘evil rich’ will most probably regard it with some degree of incredulity. Indeed, the philanthropic super rich might equally say something like ‘we bear no ill-will against the herd, would it only work and buy much, much more so that we can better satisfy our requirement and taste for endless market growth wherever it may be found’.

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The condition that Nietzsche would be referring to here is what he sees as the absurd demand that strength and power should not express itself as power, or that in some way power should not wish to be powerful. This speculative application, inspired by a passage from On the Genealogy of Morals, illustrates quite succinctly how it is philosophy itself that is Nietzsche’s target rather than some particular context or setting. It is also why Nietzsche should probably come with some kind of advisory notice. It is easy to get carried away with Nietzsche, in the way that one might become engrossed in an opera, because this is exactly what he intends you to do. The messianic figures of the twentieth century seem to have responded to Nietzsche’s ‘God is Dead’ by concluding that it must therefore follow that there is a vacancy needing to be filled. Consumer researchers interested in Nietzsche should find J.G. Ballard’s novel Super-Cannes (Ballard 2000) engaging for imagining how quasi-Nietzschean philosophies are likely to be remodelled to suit the despots and psychopaths of post-modern consumer and leisure society. But it is not necessarily Nietzsche who should be considered the primary target of criticism but rather the popular uses to which his writings can be applied. There are certainly many good reasons for consumer researchers not to bother with Nietzsche, and it is perhaps best that those committed to the pursuit of good reason should not do so.

References Ballard, James G. (2000) Super-Cannes. London: Flamingo. Brown, Stephen (1995) “Nietzsche Marketing”, Irish Marketing Review 8, 32–41. Deleuze, Gilles (1962/1983) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlison. London: The Athlone Press. Foucault, Michel (1977) “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (eds.) Language, Counter-Memory: Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kaufmann, Walter (1954) The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1872/2000) The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1882/1974) The Gay Science: With a Prelude of Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1886/1966) Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1887/2013) On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Michael A. Scarpitti. London: Penguin Classics Nietzsche, Friedrich (1895/1954) “The Antichrist”, in Walter Kaufman (ed. and trans.) The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1889/1954) “Twilight of the Idols”, in Walter Kaufman (ed. and trans.) The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2005) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford Classics.

4 BEYOND DISENCHANTMENT: WEBER AND THE SEARCH FOR LEGITIMACY Melanie Wallendorf

There is near universal agreement among sociologists, a group not known for consensus, that Maximillian Karl Emil Weber is one of the field’s three most important classical theorists (Kim 2012). Along with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, he is almost universally included in canonical sociology doctoral seminars called Classical Sociological Theory or Sociological Theory I. Often, a fourth theorist is also covered in these seminars, but who that person should be is where sociologists begin to diverge from universal agreement. This essay is written for someone who is not yet familiar with Weber or his work, just as I was when I began my first doctoral seminar in Sociological Theory. When I heard from other students that we would be covering “Veber,” I tried to look him up in the library (this was in pre-Internet times). Although my surname is of German origin, I had no familiarity with the German language and was spared the requirement that all sociology graduate students have proficiency in either French or German because that requirement was eliminated the previous year. However, I was not spared the personal embarrassment of not knowing how to spell the great man’s last name. Although many sociology doctoral programs no longer require a foreign language, the vestigial practice of using a German pronunciation of Weber’s surname remains among American sociologists, but not among Americans who use a “Weber” to grill food in the backyard. This essay is not written for someone wanting a substitute for reading Weber directly. It is not sufficient exposure to grant people the right to cite Weber as if they have read him. Instead, this essay is intended to highlight key concepts from Weber that seem to me at this time to have the most direct application to consumer culture research, and to point to some more recent work that takes up where Weber left off. I hope to point Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) researchers to what they might gain by reading Weber’s work on those concepts. Social theorist Max Weber was born in 1864 and died in 1920 at the age of 56, without having yet attained the stature of being an eminent sociologist. His major works were completed in the first two decades of the 20th century, when major institutions were emerging and changing dramatically due to growing industrialism and capitalism. This context spawned his career-long interests in the emergence of power, authority, and industrial capitalism. In this

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essay, I will focus on the theses put forward in his two major works: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Economy and Society. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was first published in German in 1905, and then published in English in 1930 in a translation by Talcott Parsons (see more on Parsons in Chapter 12 of this volume). Thus, it is important to note that those reading Protestant Ethic in English translation (and in translations to other languages that worked from the English translation rather than the original German) are actually reading Weber through Parsons’ eyes. The original publication of Protestant Ethic in Germany followed a three-month trip that Weber and his wife, Marianne, made to the United States in 1904, during which they observed firsthand the secular impacts of the Protestant religion. The book’s thesis is that Protestantism provided an important foundation, if not the very engine, for the growth and success of industrial capitalism in the United States and Western Europe. The book traces the small but significant historical changes in the doctrines and practice of particular denominations of Protestantism that led to a belief in work or vocation as a spiritual calling rather than as simply a secular activity. As such, work came to be regarded as a new mode of religious participation. Idleness, even on the Sabbath as in Orthodox Judaism, came to be regarded as wasteful and therefore sinful. Further, Weber asserts that Protestantism was crucial to the development of industrial capitalism because it teaches its adherents that work is fulfilling in itself; work is not just instrumental to attaining fulfillment through the treasures that its wages can purchase. A central part of Weber’s argument is Protestantism’s encouragement of a form of asceticism in the world, distinct from Catholicism’s form of asceticism practiced apart from the world, as in monasteries. Weber asserts that Protestants were strongly motivated to work as a response to their appreciation of receiving the gift of grace; any capital accumulation was simply a consequence of that work. Weber depicts Protestantism as encouraging a form of everyday asceticism that seeks a simple life, saving as much as possible, and devoting some portion of earnings for charity; it condemned hedonism and self-indulgence as sinful pursuits of pleasure for its own sake. Weber argues that this devotion to hard work was part of the personality structure needed to promote the success of industrial capitalism in the West. It ensured that people continued working rather than stopping when they had sufficient resources to live comfortably. In his title, Weber labels this internalized motivation to engage in work and to live a simple life of relative asceticism the Protestant Ethic. It is a dynamic in which religion encourages self-control and disciplined work as a path appropriate both for life in this world and in the afterlife. In this respect, Weber diverges from Marx, who saw greed as the motivation for capital accumulation. Weber’s thesis also runs counter to the foundational presupposition of economics that people are motivated to work primarily by economic incentives. Weber (1958: 181-182) ends Protestant Ethic with a passage wondering if the future holds “the iron cage . . . (of ) mechanized petrification,” implying a complete loss of freedom to the calcified procedures and structures of industrial capitalism’s bureaucracies. Clearly, Weber was not advocating that society move in this direction, but instead feared it as a possible future scenario. This passage is an important harbinger of the issues he takes up in his second major work, Economy and Society (Weber 1968). Central to CCT’s use of Weber’s Protestant Ethic is its extension in the 1987 book by British sociologist, Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Campbell questions how the Puritan/Calvinist form of asceticism in the world with its utilitarian

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approach to consumption later turned into widespread hedonistic consumption within the same Protestant societies. In other words, as the title implies, Campbell extends Weber’s thesis to more recent consumption practices in Western Europe and the United States. It is a detailed historical accounting of changes in Protestant doctrines and practices from the late 17th through the 18th century that made way for more hedonic consumption to become part of Protestant religious practice. Thus, whereas Campbell’s work extends Weber’s work forward in time, it does not bring it to contemporary times. Interestingly, Campbell’s book was published prior to the rapid growth of nondenominational Christian churches in the United States since 2000, in which prosperity theology instructs that wealth and opportunities for luxury consumption are a consequence of the faithful practice of devotion to God. Research on consumer practices within this more recent version of Protestantism is an open area for study. Weber’s second major thesis is put forward in Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, first published posthumously in 1921–22, with his wife Marianne as editor. Although fragments appeared earlier, it was not fully translated into English until 1968. Here Weber conducts another historical analysis, and thus also discusses what he regards as an appropriate methodological approach. Methodologically, Weber tried to mediate between the methods of historicism, on which he relied, and positivism. He saw the tension as one of trying to find a way to systematically sort through the subjective perspectives encountered in developing historical accounts of social and cultural phenomena. He believed that the goal of attaining objective knowledge, such as in the natural sciences, was unattainable for those wanting to understand the meaning and values underlying human behavior. Instead, he advocated that sociologists nonetheless pursue that goal, while simultaneously being self-conscious about their subjectivity and recognizing that the goal is unattainable. Weber developed the method of employing ideal types, social formations that exist only in our ideas. (By ideal, Weber does not mean they are perfect or desirable, but rather that they are pure types.) Ideal types are methodologically useful in drawing conceptual distinctions apart from the messiness of empirical reality. They also provide a useful means for analyzing the extent to which an institution that is an empirical reality reflects the essential characteristics of a concept or ideal type. The book’s thesis concerns the emergence during modernity of Western rationalization as a new and increasingly prevalent way of thinking. (This use of the term rationalization is not to be confused with psychology’s use of the word to mean an attempt to provide an excuse for something.) Weber’s rationalization thesis asserts that the West developed economically and politically through the modernist historical trend of increasing belief in the world as calculable and predictable. Modernity differed from the past in its preference for action directed by the choice of efficient means to pursue rational ends (which he called formal rationality) rather than action directed by tradition, emotion, or values. Weber depicts modern capitalism as a rationalized way of organizing economic life because it is directed by calculations about efficiency in production. Following his Protestant Ethic thesis, Weber saw efficiency in productivity as modernity’s prevailing logic. To accomplish that productivity, gradually the rationalization of science replaced the mystical beliefs of religion, making life feel more predictable and controllable. Weber used the term disenchantment for this increasing reliance on knowledge over beliefs. It has the effect of putting value judgments that were previously based in a moral code in the realm of taste, which is certainly a topic of interest to CCT researchers. Although disenchantment has the effect of encouraging the individual to exert greater self-control, Weber was more interested in the way it granted bureaucratic organizations greater control over the individual worker.

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To put this work in context, Weber was writing Economy and Society partly as a response to his contemporary, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, who published the first edition of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (translated: Community and Society) in 1887. Weber and Tönnies were close associates; along with Georg Simmel, they were cofounders of the German Sociological Society, with Tönnies as its president from 1909 to 1933. To Tönnies’ ideas, Weber added that gemeinschaft is rooted in “subjective feeling” while gesellschaft is rooted in “rational agreements by mutual consent.” The rationalization of organizations produces bureaucracy, goal-oriented organizations that are rationally designed to efficiently attain those goals. Weber articulates seven characteristics of the ideal type bureaucracy: 1) hierarchy of authority, with information flowing upward and directives flowing downward; 2) career orientation of those working within the bureaucracy; 3) written codification of rules of conduct; 4) impersonality in interpersonal relations, meaning uniformity of application of those rules; 5) clearly specified division of labor; 6) promotion based on achievement rather than ascription; and 7) efficiency as a primary value. Within institutions, legitimacy is the perception of consonance with other values that grants authority to impose discipline on others. Legitimacy is authority accepted. Weber details three ideal types of authority. Charismatic authority is rooted in what is perceived to be the extraordinarily persuasive personality of a particular individual. It rests on the devotion of followers to the charismatic leader. Traditional authority, more characteristic in premodern society, asserts that contemporary social relations should be conducted following the forms that prevailed in the past. It is typically invested in a hereditary lineage, as with a monarchy, or in a position, as with the papacy, and often is conveyed through the transfer of historical artifacts that are believed to hold its power. Rooted in modern society, rational authority codifies the conduct of social relations through written laws. The book details how modernist social groupings often begin based in charismatic authority, but then become bureaucratized through the transformation of the authority of the charismatic leader into rational/legal authority. Weber, an early critic of modernism, is not known for having a hopeful view of the future. He ends the book by articulating two possible images of disempowered people in the future that are startlingly prescient: “sensualists without heart” doing whatever pleases them aesthetically without guidance from any underlying collective moral convictions, and “specialists without spirit” performing bureaucratic tasks methodically following the rules without questioning them. He questions how the modern individual can retain freedom in light of the codifying nature of bureaucracy. Weber’s ideas have been used and extended in several realms of CCT scholarship. His concern with how consumers can retain freedom in light of the codifying nature of contemporary life is the central issue addressed by Fuat Fırat and Alladi Venkatesh’s award-winning 1995 Journal of Consumer Research article, “Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption.” George Ritzer has also extended Weber’s rationalization thesis to fit contemporary times in his 1993 book The MacDonaldization of Society, updated in many successive editions. Several CCT papers on leisure have noted that the choice of particular leisure activities in contemporary times is often at least partly a response to the codification and restrictions people experience in their middle-class occupations (Holt and Thompson 2004; Moisio, Arnould, and Gentry 2013). Concerns with re-enchanting the world have been the topic of several widely cited books. Berman’s (1981) The Reenchantment of the World as well as Ritzer’s (1999) Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption are clearly important in this regard. And of course, enchantment is a central component of consumption sacredness

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as articulated in Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry’s (1989) “The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior.” The process by which a consumption practice gains legitimacy has been the focus of Ashlee Humphreys (2010) work on casino gambling and her (2013) coauthored work with Kathryn Latour on online gambling. These articles consider the roles of public discourse in media and legal regulation on consumer perceptions of the legitimacy of the consumption practices of casino gambling and online gambling. Conversely, Coskuner-Balli and Thompson (2013) study the ways at-home fathers employ consumption practices to help their gender identity attain greater legitimacy. Kates (2004) investigates how a brand comes to be perceived as legitimate within an identity community. As these works demonstrate, the ideas of Max Weber continue to have strong significance for contemporary research on consumer culture, both in still being applicable and in needing refinement to better fit contemporary consumer culture.

References Belk, Russell W., Melanie Wallendorf, and John F. Sherry, Jr. (1989), “The Sacred and the Profane in Consumer Behavior: Theodicy on the Odyssey,” Journal of Consumer Research 16 (June), 1–38. Berman, Morris (1981), The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Campbell, Colin (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Coskuner-Balli, Gokcen, and Craig J. Thompson (2013), “The Status Costs of Subordinate Cultural Capital: At-Home Fathers’ Collective Pursuit of Cultural Legitimacy through Capitalizing Consumption Practices,” Journal of Consumer Research 40 (June), 19–41. Holt, Douglas B., and Craig J. Thompson (2004), “Man-of-Action Heroes: The Pursuit of Heroic Masculinity in Everyday Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2), 425–40. Humphreys, Ashlee (2010), “Semiotic Structure and the Legitimation of Consumption Practices: The Case of Casino Gambling,” Journal of Consumer Research 37 (October), 490–510. Humphreys, Ashlee and Kathryn A. Latour (2013), “Framing the Game: Assessing the Impact of Cutural Representations on Consumer Perceptions of Legitimacy,” Journal of Consumer Research 40 (December), 773–95. Kates, Steven M. (2004), “The Dynamics of Brand Legitimacy: An Interpretive Study in the Gay Men’s Community,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2), 455–64. Kim, Sung Ho, “Max Weber,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/weber/, accessed March 20, 2016. Moisio, Risto, Eric J. Arnould, and James W. Gentry (2013), “Productive Consumption in the ClassMediated Construction of Domestic Masculinity: Do-It-Yourself (DIY) Home Improvement in Men’s Identity Work,” Journal of Consumer Research 40 (2), 298–316. Ritzer, George (1993), The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Ritzer, George (1999), Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press. Weber, Max (1958), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans., Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner. Weber, Max (1968), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Eds., Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. New York: The Bedminster Press.

5 KARL POLANYI: WHENCE THE MARKETING MIND? Dannie Kjeldgaard

Endeavors to attain a more realistic view of the general problem posed to our generation by man’s livelihood meet from the outset with a formidable obstacle – an ingrained habit of thought peculiar to conditions of life under that type of economy the 19th century created throughout all industrialized societies. This mentality is personified in the marketing mind. Polanyi (1977, p. 9)

What are the origins of the marketing mind? In this introductory quotation Polanyi suggests that it springs from a specific type of economy that diffused in nineteenth century processes of industrialization that swept the world. As such, the marketing mind is a recent historic phenomenon; this quotation seems to tell us. Rather than representing the vanguard of history, the marketing mind, the quotation also seems to tell us, is a “formidable obstacle” that possibly inhibits us from seeing how economy and sociality – our “livelihood” – potentially might be organized differently. In this chapter I will attempt to unfold Polanyi’s reasoning for being able to make such a proposition. Karl Polanyi is one of those canonical theorists whose ideas were shaped by the dramatic events of the twentieth century. Born in 1886 (died 1964), he spent his youth in Hungary and engaged skeptically with the intellectual and political currents of socialism and Marxism. As many other early mid-twentieth-century European intellectuals he left continental Europe, residing in Britain, the United States and Canada. His early work concentrated on developing socialist economic theory, including socialist accounting (Dale 2010). On the background of a relatively stable and peaceful nineteenth century, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the following depression became events that formed his reflections in his most well-known work, The Great Transformation, published first in 1944. In this he develops an institutional perspective on the emergence of market society. In the last part of his career he increasingly turned his attention to argue for the historic and social specificity of contemporary economic theory. This chapter concerns mostly his thinking laid out in The Great Transformation and the work that followed it, its relevance to the study of consumption and markets, and how his work is reflected in contemporary theorization of consumption.

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Key ideas At core, we might say that his work brings an institutional perspective on the economy: that economy is governed by social norms and beliefs which change over time (Dale 2010). In contemporary theorizing on consumption, he is probably most well-known for three institutional arguments: 1) pointing out the inseparability of state and market; 2) viewing the economy as embedded in society; 3) a fundamental critique of the totalizing idea of the free market. 1) A political economy. Following e.g. Marxian and Weberian thought, Polanyi took up the idea that society exists as a reality and that economic exchanges are embedded in social relations. To understand the significance of this, one must remember that much of earlier theorization was founded on naturalist and universalist assumptions, such as Adam Smith’s idea of man’s natural propensity to truck and barter and maximizing utility. However, like Marx and Weber, Polanyi understood the economy as a political economy, that is, not an objective domain governed by universal laws, but a domain that is infused and constituted by values and ideologies. The implications of this is that the economy works, is governed by, and to a large extent is shaped by surrounding institutions and political ideologies. Economic processes always emerge out of a mix of economic, political and cultural forces. This forms a cornerstone of Polanyi’s argument. 2) The embeddedness of the economy and the economy as instituted process. The second part of his critique is to point out the fallacy of this belief system by pointing out that in nonmarket societies the economy is intrinsically embedded in society and social relations such as kinship systems, systems of reciprocity, etc. Not only did he and others find examples of this in non-Western and archaic societies, but this was predominantly the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe in which e.g. trade and economy was organized from different types of logics such as status or honor (Polanyi et al. 1957). The market society, to Polanyi, is an ideal type that organizes the economy purely on the basis of contract and price and in which the individual is thought to be engaged in the economy purely on the basis of gain or avoidance of hunger (Polanyi 1977, 2014). What we see in market societies is that the economy has become institutionalized as a sphere of society with an impetus towards securing ever more independence from political and regulatory systems. He does this on the basis of an analysis of the Speenhamland laws. The Speenhamland laws were a set of local regulations that sought to secure minimum income to protect laborers from potential decreases of wage labor caused by the emergent national market system in England in the late 1700s (Polanyi 1944; Dale 2010). Here Polanyi sees that at the time in which the free market thinking germinates, society sets in motion regulations to curb the free market system. Polanyi hence makes the argument that the expansion of free market ideology pushed towards a separation of market and state (Polanyi 1944/2001). However, simultaneously as the free market system is beginning to enforce itself, social protectionism and local intervention sets in to secure the social fabric. This is his term of double movement. He pointed out that the Speenhamland laws and other local laws aimed to protect citizens of rampant marketization bore resemblance to the rises of protective trade tariffs, nationalism and totalitarian ideologies in the early twentieth century. These were similar reactions but to an increasingly independent and increasingly globalizing market system. In this way his work posits that in a market society there is an increasing pressure towards a disembedding of the market from society, one which left unhampered will ultimately cause

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strong counter-reaction. Also, with this analysis he is able to demonstrate that the free market system in its actual realization always was facing attempts of social regulation. Hence a mutual embeddedness of the political and the economical. This tension between, and mutual embeddedness of, the political and economical reflects to a large extent the influence of the work of Ferdinand Tönnies: the contractual nature of social organization of Gesellschaft (market society) versus the status and community based nature of social organization in Gemeinschaft (non-market society). The double movement is an attempt at protecting Gemeinschaft from the totalizing logic of market society (Dale 2010; Polanyi 1944). That is, rather than the economy being organized by society, society was increasingly organized by the (market) economy (Polanyi 1977). Polanyi posits that the rise of fascism, protectionism and nationalism of the twentieth century inter-war period – which ran counter to the idea of liberal societies and markets of the relatively peaceful nineteenth century – were systemic societal reactions to an underlying malaise (Dale 2010). They were attempts to protect national economies and forms of social organization from the consequences of the doctrine of integrated capitalist systems. In short, a reaction to a totalizing belief system of the self-regulating free and open market system that had developed in Europe and increasingly elsewhere from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. 3) Critique of the idea of the free market and “the economistic fallacy”. Polanyi’s idea of market society rests upon a distinction between a pre-market economic form of organization and the transformation to a market economy. A market economy, to Polanyi, is a system of exchange that is purely regulated by price (Polanyi 1944, 1977). To Polanyi this is a specific form of economy, alongside non-market society forms of economy, and it is governed by exchange (in Polanyi’s term exchange is defined purely in market society and is related to price and includes e.g. barter). He outlines two other ideal types of economic organization: Reciprocity – where economic arrangements are organized around logics of reciprocity in e.g. kinship systems what is often termed a gift economy, and Redistribution – where economic arrangements are organized so that resources are allocated to some central authority (e.g. a household authority or a village chief ) and then redistributed to members of the community (Polanyi 1957). These latter forms bear little resemblance to assumptions of the economic actor in a market society, motivated primarily by individual utility maximization. Rather these forms of economy operate around logics of community reproduction, honor, status, etc. This leads to his definitions of substantive versus formalist definitions of the economy. A substantivist understanding of the economy is one which seeks to understand economic arrangements in its historic and cultural specificity. The formalist understanding is one which seeks to understand economic arrangements on the basis of an assumption of universal economic behavior as reflected in theories of economics. By making this comparison to non-market forms of economy, Polanyi is able to argue that it is the belief system of market society that generates the modern economic subject, “economic man”. This stands in contrast to conventional economic thinking that considers utility-maximizing behavior a universal human trait. However, of course in a society where the economy is largely governed through market logic, formal economic theory – based on choice and utility maximization under conditions of scarcity – has explanatory value. This is, however, merely because there is

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a socio-historical co-incidence of the theory and the economic practices (Polanyi 1957, 1977). If one is to understand economies governed by other economic systems than the market (understood as valorization through the price mechanism), formalist approaches fall short.

Intellectual reverberation Polanyi’s work has been influential in social policy studies, economic anthropology and critical theory (e.g. Habermas; see Chapter 17 in this volume). In economics itself apparently his influence is miniscule; his work being picked up mostly in the fields of varieties of capitalism and comparative welfare studies (Dale 2010). However, his approach to markets, economy and consumption became a cornerstone of the long-running debate in economic anthropology between substantivist and formalist views on economic systems, not surprising given his strong reliance on early ethnographic accounts from the economic anthropology of e.g. Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski. Indeed another substantivist figure in the study of consumption, the economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, attended Polanyi’s lectures at Columbia University (Dale 2010; see Chapter 9 in this volume on Sahlins). It is unclear, to this author at least, whether Polanyi merely acknowledged that there were different forms of economy or if he wanted to strike a substantivist blow at formalist thinking. He seems to agree that the formalist approach fits with market society, but that there are other forms of economy (substantivist ones). However, this might be a substantivist argument in and of itself, which some of his later work seems to suggest as illustrated by the quotation opening this chapter: the models of the economy are embedded in a socio-cultural belief system of scarcity, utility, etc. This leaves three options for the theorization over contemporary market society. First, the economistic approach which seeks to understand market behavior from standard economic theorization. Second, a substantivist approach in which we point to the existence of other forms of value-generating processes amidst market society. This perspective aligns well with contemporary consumer culture theorization in which studies of markets emphasize meaning systems, alternative routes and processes of resource and value circulation as sociocultural constructions. The third perspective consists of taking the formalist perspective seriously, but from a substantivist vantage point. This latter perspective is akin to Sahlins’ idea of needs and markets as part of Western cosmology (Sahlins 1996). Indeed, scholars of the performativity of markets and economic models such as Callon and associates who study not so much the economy but the processes of economization, pursue such a perspective (e.g. Callon 1998). One might say that the third approach does not deny homo economicus, but is interested in how this figure came into being and came to loom so large in Western thinking on economic behavior. In theories of consumption from cultural perspectives Polanyi’s ideas are fundamental, frequently cited, yet often only in passing. The overall endeavor of sociology of consumption, consumer culture theory and anthropology of consumption is to understand the fundamentally social and cultural character of the contemporary market place, and Polanyi’s ideas of the embeddedness of society and economy fit the bill, as does the distinction between substantivist and formalist approaches to markets. A few exceptions exist. Varman and Costa (2009), for example, use a Polanyian understanding of embeddedness and substantive market systems to explore processes of cooperation among competitors.

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That is, they show that market place interaction may as well be socially integrative, as economically competitive as most marketing theorization would have it. Many others use Polanyi’s ideas as a foundation for an approach to markets and consumption as socially and culturally based (Karababa & Ger 2011). Recent advances in the discussions of the sharing economy have also mobilized Polanyi’s ideas systematically although with quite different applications. Scaraboto (2015) takes Polanyi’s ideas of embeddedness to indicate that different forms of economy exist in hybrid forms and are mutually constitutive. Such an interpretation would seem to follow the interpretation of his work that formalist and substantivist views are separate but mutually implicated, as in the second option discussed in the previous paragraph. Eckhardt and Bardhi (2016), on the other hand, seem to follow the third option when they interpret Polanyi’s thinking as that of how the market economy is socially organized, but at the same time operationalize these as different types of economic models in the sharing economy discussion. Such differing applications speak to some of the problems of using the work of canonical theorists. For one, there is ambiguity over a canonical scholar’s work as it evolves over time: it might be argued that Scaraboto’s application rests more on the central ideas outlined in The Great Transformation, whereas Eckhardt and Bardhi’s would resonate more with the work that followed in the 1950s where the substantivist ideas were unfolded more fully fledged. Polanyi’s ideas seem to resurface and go back to oblivion in cycles. Interestingly, and ironically, this seems to follow the booms and bust cycle of the global economic system. Whenever we are reminded of the limitations and potentially harmful effect of rampant economic globalization, it seems Polanyi’s ideas resurface. His idea surfaced among economic commentators and theorists such as Dani Rodrik, Joseph Stiglitz and George Soros, as well as activists after the financial crisis in South East Asia in the late 1990s. During the most recent financial crisis, Polanyi’s critique became influential in the Occupy Movements critique of the contemporary financial system and in the ubiquitous critique of contemporary neoliberalism (Dale 2010; Polanyi Levitt 2013). Indeed it was said that at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos in 2012 “the ghost of Karl Polanyi was haunting the deliberations of the assembled global elite” (Polanyi Levitt 2014). His work has been criticized. Braudel (see Karababa, Chapter 20 in this volume) stands among the critics of Polanyi as purporting a discontinuist argument, claiming that market forms did not exist prior to Western industrialization or market forms of organizing trade in other cultural contexts. Also, a point of critique is Polanyi’s opposition of the market and the social: that even market-based forms of economy have fundamental social elements, or are driven by them. Finally, one might add a methodological point of critique from a Braudelian perspective: that Polanyi compares very different temporal and spatial forms of economy, rather than following the transformation of one over the longue durée. His work is at once a historical, sociological and anthropological critique, as well as a theorization of the market. It seems he stands stronger on the former than the latter, and in some respects is therefore similar to many other great sociologically minded intellectuals such as Zygmunt Bauman or Richard Sennett. In terms of the latter, his theorization operates at a macro level and helps students of consumption and markets establish a cultural and historical perspective, rather than a theory per se. As a critical social commentary, his work reminds us of the historical specificity of contemporary neoliberal ideology, one in which we are all embedded, and reminds us of the historical roots, and social and cultural contingency of such

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an economic and social order. His thinking appeals more to theorizing of consumption and markets that operate at an institutional or systemic level of analysis, rather than phenomenological ones.

References Callon, Michel (1998), “Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics.” The Sociological Review 46.S1: 1–57. Dale, Gareth (2010), Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market, Cambridge: Polity. Eckhardt, Giana M., and Fleura Bardhi (2016), “The relationship between access practices and economic systems.” Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 1.2: 210–225. Karababa, Emınegül, and Gülız Ger (2011), “Early modern Ottoman coffeehouse culture and the formation of the consumer subject.” Journal of Consumer Research 37.5: 737–760. Polanyi, Karl (1944/2001), The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston: Beacon Press. Polanyi, Karl (1957), “The economy as instituted process.” In Trade and Market in the Early Empires, eds. Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Barry W. Pearson, New York: Free Press, 243–269. Polanyi, Karl (1977), “The economistic fallacy.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center): 9–18. Polanyi, Karl (2014), For a New West: Essays 1919–1958, eds. Giorgio Resta and Mariavittoria Catanzariti, Cambridge: Polity Press. Polanyi, K., Arensberg, C. M. P., Harry, W., Conrad, M. A., & Harry, W. P. (1957), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory (No. 338 (091)), New York: Free Press. Polanyi Levitt, Kari (2013), From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization: On Karl Polanyi and Other Essays, New York: Palgrave. Polanyi Levitt, Kari (2014), “Preface.” In Karl Polanyi: For a New West, Essays 1919–1958, eds. Giorgio Resta and Mariavittoria Catanzariti, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sahlins, Marshall, Thomas Bargatzky, Nurit Bird-David, John Clammer, Jacques Hamel, Keiji Maegawa, and Jukka Siikala (1996), “The sadness of sweetness: The native anthropology of western cosmology [and comments and reply].” Current Anthropology 37.3: 395–428. Scaraboto, Daiane (2015), “Selling, sharing, and everything in between: The hybrid economies of collaborative networks.” Journal of Consumer Research 42.1: 152–176. Varman, Rohit, and Janeen Arnold Costa (2009), “Competitive and cooperative behavior in embedded markets: Developing an institutional perspective on bazaars.” Journal of Retailing 85.4: 453–467.

PART III

Anthropology and consumption

6 MARCEL MAUSS: THE GIFT THAT MOVES . . . Eric J. Arnould

In recent years, Marcel Mauss’ star has once again begun to shine brightly among the canonical figures in social thought. He was born in 1872, the nephew of Emile Durkheim, the reputed father of modern sociology. Indeed, it may be that Durkheim’s mentorship instilled in Mauss the sense of collaboration and disciplinary responsibility that colored his professional life. Living until 1952, Mauss was an eminently modern figure, part of the formative era of social science. Mauss was the kind of polymath that hardly exists anymore, mastering both ancient and modern languages, philosophy, religion, history, political science, and of course sociology. He read widely in the social sciences both in the service of his scholarship and of the encyclopedic review he edited, l’Année Sociologique. Through his vast reading, Mauss eventually invented and codified ethnology, the science of cultural comparison and theorization based on ethnographic case material. Mauss’ ethnology espoused a positivist social science based on observable, knowable “facts”. Mauss was a scholar who sought out the materiality of social forms in time and space, as well as the sociology of material forms. His work returns repeatedly to the interconnection of language, action, and experience, and importantly for a field like market and consumption studies that are, of necessity in dialogue with psychology and economics, psychological dispositions. Mauss also espoused grounding analyses of contemporary phenomena in historical context, and recognized the constructive character of language and the meaningfulness of action. And he also saw social science as produced by the social scientists’ translations of local meaning into abstract conceptual terms (James 1998). Mauss is known for several important anthropological and sociological texts, all infused with that characteristic depth of historical and ethnological scholarship that has made them classics. These include Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions (1964/1899), which inspired among others Daniel Miller’s (1998) A Theory of Shopping. Almost all subsequent scholarship on magic serves as commentaries and extensions on his A General Theory of Magic (1972/1902). Primitive Classification, written with Durkheim (1963/1901), is little used in consumer research and marketing although foundational to Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism, and rather aligned with the more well-known work in consumer research of Greimas. His most famous work is Essay on the Gift (1990/1924) that appeared in the l’Année Sociologique, of which Mauss was the long-term

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editor, in 1924/25. Two other important texts are “Techniques of the Body” (1934) and “A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self ” (1985/1938).

The Gift Mauss is most famous in anthropology and consumer research for the book The Gift. The Maussian model shows that people, objects and social relations form a whole, already a rather significant accomplishment that is still not widely digested; and this system is created and recreated in different ways when people transact with each other in gift and commodity relations. Basing himself on the best scholarship available to him at the turn of the 20th century, Mauss sought to show that right across the globe and as far back as he could go in human history, cycles of obligatory returns of gifts effected major transfer of goods and in so doing, organized social life. The book begins with a synthesis of the ethnographic work on the Northwest Coast Native American institution of the potlatch. The potlach is a kind of agonistic exchange system, elaborate gift giving celebrations given to legitimate the transfer of titles, to obtain recognition of ones’ right to a title, and to mark significant life passages. Mauss argues that the potlatch is an example of a total system of giving. Spelled out this means that each gift is part of a system of reciprocity in which the worth and honor of giver and recipient and the groups they represent, that is, their existential status as particular social persons, are engaged. It is a total system in that every item of status or of spiritual or material possession is implicated, and this for everyone in the whole community. To a significant degree, this is because all these things are the product of the labor of groups in the society, organized by group leaders. Further, the rule that every gift shall be returned in some specified way sets up a perpetual cycle of exchanges both within and between generations and across the society. If we ask where the system gets its energy, we can shift to the scale of individual motivation. In each instance from individuals who are due to gain renown by mobilizing the labor of their kin in acts of largesse or to lose honor through default as the kin group heaps shame on defaulters. All this is sanctioned by beliefs that transcendent forces punish those who do not reciprocate, since over time and circumstance group survival is at stake. Potlatches were exercises in power in which massive acts of generosity produced indebtedness among the receiving clans and their representatives, and honor amongst the givers. Potlatch debts could only be canceled by a greater countergift, which thus sets up an escalating cycle of gifts and countergifts. These potlatching cultures, which extended from today’s northern Oregon all the way to the hinterlands of contemporary British Columbia, could at one time be described through the catalogue of transfers that mapped all the obligations between the clans within various tribal groups, and individuals within those clans. It is not too much to say that the cycling gift system between the environment and persons and things was the society. As brilliantly demonstrated by Weinberger and Wallendorf (2012) in their recent study of the role of Mardi Gras gifting in the reproduction of social structure in south Louisiana, potlatching is far from an ethnological relic. The book then goes to Melanesians and an extended discussion of the kula system of circulation, and on to Polynesia and then eventually to ancient Roman, German, and ultimately the Indian Vedic texts. It appears to veer off into arcane debates on ancient law, but in fact the second part of the text is about early 20th-century politics and economics. And although much of the latter half of the book is concerned with how to rethink social policy in a time before

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the advent of the European welfare state, it simultaneously offers a Durkheimian critique of British Utilitarian philosophy. Mauss essentially argues that The Gift provides an alternative, empirically based model of the social contract to the Hobbesian one. I will return to this point. After the Northwest Coast Mauss turns his attention to Melanesia, the home of the now justly famous kula. These are systems of totalized competitive giving that incorporate in their cycles all things and services and all persons on the huge arc of islands that make up the system. Early observers never really appreciated the scale or social significance of the kula, hence limiting Mauss’ own analysis. But this has been rectified by subsequent scholarship notably by Weiner (1976, 1992) and contributors to an amazing edited collection (Leach and Leach 1983). In the discussion of the circulation of gifts, Mauss’ contribution is threefold. First, he offers an alternative ethnological model of human sociality to that imagined by Hobbes and his descendants. Second, he synthesizes the three normative obligations that comprise the gift system, namely those of giving, receiving, and reciprocating. One is obligated to give because giving creates obligations among others; it is foundational to relationships. Failing to give puts one beyond the pale of social life. One is obligated to receive because refusal creates a conflict and forecloses the possibility of relationship. When it came to obligation to reciprocate, Mauss’ theory takes a Durkheimian turn as he invokes a religious idea, that of the Maori hau, which he associates with the sacred. In Mauss’ theory the three obligations are of equal importance. Subsequent scholarship by Sahlins (1976) and others (e.g., Godelier 2004; McCall 1982; Weiner 1976, 1992) has found sociological explanations for reciprocation; theories related to the fundamental inalienability of gifted objects, or the ideas of restitution and completion, respectively. Here a key point is the convenient inconvenience that in gift exchanges that do not involve money, gifts and countergifts cannot easily “cancel” one another because they always involve exchanges of things that are in some sense incommensurate. No two potlatch “coppers”, kula necklaces, or armbands, or even modern dinner parties are exactly alike. According to Mauss, these obligations form the core of social relations in societies without centralized authority, but continue to animate social relations within more complex polities, even if in our own the obligation to receive sometimes seems to trump the other two. Thus, Cancian (1966) believes Americans attempt to maximize the equality of exchange when giving gifts. Exchange partners attempt to modulate their relationship by using gifts to maintain the desired degree of intimacy. And Caplow (1982) found that American Christmas gifts are frequently scaled to the kinship relationships between donor and recipient. One of Mauss’ points, as Mary Douglas (1990) insisted, is that the idea of a pure “disinterested” gift is a contradiction. A gift without the possibility of reciprocity is an act of symbolic violence that disempowers the recipient. Hence reciprocity has to do with tempering obligation. Ignoring the universal fact of obligation in the circulation of gifts makes our own experiences of interpersonal debt, moral responsibility, and obligation incomprehensible to ourselves. To avoid feeling inferior and to safeguard reputation, the recipient must reciprocate. Recent work on moral accounts reinforces Mauss’ insights (Williams 2015). Failure to reciprocate appropriately can result in an asymmetrical relationship. On the other hand, within culturally prescribed bounds, the reciprocity involved in gift exchange cannot be more balanced than are the respective social positions of donor and recipient. Otherwise, participants risk imputations of either of ostentation or meanness (van Baal 1975). Giving too much, too little, or ([too early or]) too late can strain a relationship to the point of dissolution (Sherry 1983, p. 58).

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A third key contribution in The Gift is to pose the question: “What force is there in the thing which one gives which forces the receiver to return it?” (Mauss 1990/1924, p. 33). Behind this question lies a fundamental Durkheimian question, “since people create things with their hands and construe the world . . . with their minds, why then do their products . . . compel them rather than vice versa?” (Jenkins 1998). Now this led Mauss as Durkheim’s nephew, to investigate religious causes such as the sacred, in ideas like the Maori hau, which is probably a misunderstanding of Maori understanding of the representational logic of nature (Kohn 2013). Mauss also proposed a more sociological idea about the sociological force in things. In total prestations, that is, gifts between social groups, Mauss said things are related in some degree as persons and persons in some degree as things. Or, as Strathern (1990, p. 189) says, in a gift economy, persons and things are “personified”: a process that makes people’s relations visible. And as Weiner says, “where exchange is the basic framework around which formal patterns of social interaction are organized, objects become highly significant because in their manner of presentation – quality, quantity, and the like – they can be read as objectification of desire and intent” (1976, p. 212). Thus, the famous kula valuables in Melanesian circulation systems are valued because of the genealogy of their successive trustees. In contemporary times, this is a bit like the idea of provenience where works of art acquire worth from the succession of owners. The general point is that every exchange, as it embodies some degree of sociability, cannot be understood in its material terms apart from its social terms, and vice versa. Objects become containers for the being of the donor, who gives a portion of that being to the recipient; there is an inevitable symbolic encoding of the gift with connotative meaning (Sherry 1983, p. 159). The basic idea Mauss explored in The Gift is that things have motivational force. And this idea is very much alive today in posthumanist scholarship for example. As mentioned, The Gift constitutes an intentional critique of utilitarian philosophy. The first element of critique is that utilitarian thought is based on an impoverished concept of the person seen as an independent individual instead of as a social being, which links to Mauss’ subsequent essay on the nature of the self, discussed in the next section. In short, a proper analysis of social life cannot begin with the individual; the self is the product of social life. This is what the analysis of gift-giving societies and ancient comparative law showed to Mauss. The second point of critique is that of cultural relativism: rather than fixed by nature (or “evolution”) social relations change with changes in the modes of economic production and circulation. The third point of critique is its simplistic view of methodological individualism, its lack of appreciation of the essentially normative construction of political action. This is the Hobbesian view that absent the State, self-interested actors are inclined to a state of warre. In contrast, Mauss’ early chapters emphasize, perhaps overly so, that the source of the gift economy is the desire of individuals to avoid loss of prestige either through failure to merit the offer of gifts from relevant others, or to make a claim on the public distribution of honor through generous prior giving of oneself or one’s ancestors. The general point, as both Douglas (1990) and Sahlins (1972) have pointed out, is that there are alternative normative foundations for circulation, for social security, and for the pursuit of personal recognition than the so-called free market. Mauss discovered a mechanism, the gift economy, by which individual desires, but not interests – since the latter is a construct specific to market economies – combine to make a social system, without engaging primarily in market exchange. Phrased another way, Mauss shows against methodological individualism on

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the one hand and Durkheimian social determinism on the other, that there is a third model of action in which liberty and obligation are commingled.

“A Category of the Human Mind: the Notion of Person; the Notion of Self” In this paper from 1938, Mauss sets out the proposition that the category of the self-directed, “privately conscious, autonomous person, congruent with the public endorsement and sanctioning of individual identity and agency” (James 1998, p. 15) is not a human universal but a product of Western, and perhaps now, global history. This is an idea that entails a foundational critique of both Western economics and psychology. It is an idea Campbell (1987) developed further in his study of the emergence of the Western consuming self from the Reformation forward. But Mauss’ interest has probably more to do with his idea of the total social fact; the idea that the social is only real when it is integrated into a system and that system must also be embodied in individual experience, and that, from two different viewpoints: first, in an individual history which would make it possible to observe the comportment of total beings, not divided up into their faculties; and after that, in . . . a system of interpretation accounting for the aspects of all modes of behaviour simultaneously, physical, physiological, psychical and sociological. . . . Only to study that fragment of our life which is our life in society is not enough. (Lévi-Strauss 1987/1950, p. 26) On the other hand, Mauss (1985/1938, p. 3) is at pains to make it “plain, particularly to us, that there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical.” But the aim of the essay is to explore how “over the centuries, in numerous societies, how has it slowly evolved – not the sense of ‘self ’ (moi) – but the notion or concept that men in different ages have formed of it?” (p. 3). So following the ethnological method he employed in the work on sacrifice, magic, and the gift, he sets out exploring how and where various conceptions associated with the modern, Western self develops. Thus, he first shows how ideas of role and role performance are deeply rooted in clan-based societies in which individuals inherit spirits, names, or titles and represent groups on important public and ritual occasions. Later he explores the principle of the moral person as developed in Roman law from ideas around the persona or public mask, worn literally by theatrical performers and figuratively by public figures. He further situates the idea of the volitional, conscious person in practices associated with Stoic philosophy. He then goes on to discuss the contribution of Christianity arguing, that “It is Christians who have made a metaphysical entity of the ‘moral person’ (personne morale), after they became aware of its religious power. Our own notion of the human person is still basically the Christian one” (p. 19). He points out how centuries of debate about the nature of the soul versus the body explored questions of determinism versus free will. Eventually he identifies the origin of the idea of “the me.” He says it is to “thought that is discursive, clear and deductive, that the Renaissance and Descartes address themselves in

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order to understand their nature. It is thought that contains the revolutionary ‘Cogito ergo sum’” (p. 21). And finally, as expressed in characteristically comparative form, the ideas of the Moravian Brothers, the Puritans, the Wesleyans and the Pietists are those which form the basis on which is established the notion: the ‘person’ (personne) equals the ‘self ’ (moi); the ‘self ’ (moi) equals consciousness, and is its primordial category. (p. 21) This is territory revisited by Campbell (1987) in his discussion of the emergence of the Romantic, self-improving consumer self so pervasive today (Askegaard and Eckhardt 2012; Moisio and Beruchashvili 2010). Mauss (1985/1938, p. 22) extends his thinking into the origins of the social science focus on the individual by arguing that the one who founded all science and all action on the ‘self ’ (moi), was Fichte. Kant had already made of the individual consciousness . . . the condition for Practical Reason. It was Fichte who made of it as well the category of the ‘self ’ (moi), the condition of consciousness and of science. In fact, it was Johann Fichte (1762–1814), a student of Kant who originated the argument that the phenomenal world arises from self-consciousness, the activity of the ego, and moral awareness. The latter point is important to Mauss’ position as a sociologist, since Fichte argued that the existence of other rational subjects somehow summons the subject or self into selfawareness as an individual. Readers will see that Mauss’ account is historical, anthropological, and genealogical in a Foucauldian sense, though the latter association is anachronistic. He succeeds in making the ancient past contemporary and pertinent, while rendering our own preconceptions about the self contingent and indeed problematic. What Mauss’ essay also suggests is the value of the same sort of groundwork that he develops with regard to the European self be pursued in other cultural contexts. For Mauss it is clear that views of what we call individuals among nonWestern peoples is foundationally different. And although he did not trace it out in greater detail, he insisted on the enduring importance of concepts like persona among the latter, even if ideas associated with legal personhood developed differently. More recent anthropological work, while adopting contemporary terminologies, seems to confirm Mauss’ relativistic view of selfhood (Hallowell 1955; Ho, 1995; White and Kirkpatrick 1985). This work is an invitation for consumer culture theorists to develop more culturally relative conceptions of the relationship between consumption and identity, a topic relatively untouched in anthropological work and consumer psychology.

“Techniques of the Body” In this paper from 1934, Mauss was staking out the crucial value, for the human sciences, of a study of the manner in which each society imposes a rigorously determined use of the body upon the individual through bio-social means (Lévi Strauss 1966; Maynard et al. 1999). Although taken up by some students of the anthropology of ritual, craft, sport, music, and

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dance and as foundational to a theory of material culture (Gélard 2013; Warnier 1999), it seems to me that insofar as the body is the site of consumption, and overwhelmingly consumer objects are the instruments of bodily technique, that this paper is of considerable significance to consumer culture theory as well. The text has four parts: first, an introduction to the idea of body technique or “habitus” and some examples; second, a simple taxonomy; third, an enumeration of techniques over the life course; and fourth, a conclusion that emphasizes that the “habitus” constitutes a total social fact, being bio-psycho-social. Here we find in Mauss, a more sociologically grounded precursor of Belk’s (1988) ideas, but at the same time he lacked a more elaborate theory of materiality (Miller 1987). In this essay, Mauss is the originator of the concept of habitus, a construct made famous by another Durkheimian, Bourdieu (1990). But Mauss offers slightly different ideas about the utility of this construct than Bourdieu. He says, I have had this notion of the social nature of the “habitus” for many years. . . . The word translates infinitely better than “habitude” (habit or custom), the “exis”, the “acquired ability” and “faculty” of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). . . . These “habits” do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason.” (1934, p. 73) Further, he argues that it is purposeful activities that both suppose and generate knowledge, what he himself called practical rather than discursive knowledge, but always social, culturally specific knowledge. Consistent with his key concept of the total social fact, Mauss understood that asserting or even debating the causal priority of bio-psychical or socio-cultural is pointless. The two are mutual translations, but in which sociological structures have some priority (Sahlins 1996). Phrased another way, Mauss sought to socialize the organic endowment of the living human body. Our most natural daily activities, he argued, walking, eating, sleeping, or swimming are collectively instigated, as are also procreation, emotional expressions, and illness. As these activities are available to others’ recognition and evaluation, they form part of the social makeup of individuals. He argued explicitly that culture and social structure leaves its imprint on individuals through the training of the child’s bodily needs and activities; through socialization the body becomes a cultural artifact. At the same time, bodily techniques exhibit great individual accessibility and variability as the quadrennial Olympic Games dramatically remind us. When he opened the new territory of body techniques to ethnological research, his insight was not restricted to acknowledging the relevance of that kind of study for the problem of cultural integration; he was at the same time emphasizing that body techniques have an intrinsic importance. To illustrate his contemporary relevance, Mauss (1934) offers a wonderful prescient example of the effect of consumption on body techniques. Reflecting on his time in hospital after World War I, he remarks: I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France,

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I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. (p. 72) The spread of Southern Californian beach and “Valley speak,” and urban hip hop lingo, attire, postures, and gaits are contemporary examples of diffusion of bodily consumer practice that Mauss identified from the earliest days of the cinema, but about which rather little has been written. Perhaps Thompson and Üstüner’s analysis of roller derby (2015) point a way forward in understanding consumer bodily technique as Maussian total social facts. Another point worth extracting from this essay is captured in Mauss’ (1934) remark that “The body is man’s first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man’s first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body” (p. 75). But at the same time, when Mauss wrote of specific techniques, he also made reference to materiality, or what he referred to as “instruments” or “supplementary means” (ibid: p. 83). Thus practical knowledge, habitus, and materials together form a total system of materiality. And this point in turn leads Mauss to call into question the ontological utility of ad hoc typologies of action. As he says, all such bodily techniques share the qualities of being effective in the eyes of practitioners and traditional, in other words cultural. “It is thanks to society that there is the certainty of pre-prepared movements, domination of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness” (p. 83). And finally again foreshadowing Clifford Geertz of the Balinese cockfight or Bourdieuan taste regimes more generally, he adds that techniques of the self of necessity refer to “the notion we have of the activity of the consciousness as being above all a system of symbolic assemblages” (p. 76). His elaboration seems to me a useful foundation for the recent work on self-tracking and life hacking, recognizing these activities as holistic representational assemblages. One final point comes from his last paragraph where he points out that traditional Indian and Chinese scholarship has far advanced study of the relationship between bodily techniques and altered states of consciousness. It seems this opening towards non-Western science of the body and its techniques remains relatively virgin territory (cf., Askegaard and Eckhardt 2012). Evolutionary psychology and neuro-marketing and neuro-consumer research would seem to have it that humans are a product of their bodies, but Mauss took pains to demonstrate that it is the other way around. Humanity has, at all times and in all places, turned the body into a product both of techniques, what today we call practices and his representations (Sahlins et al. 1996). In this way, Mauss is a precursor to contemporary Butlerian gender studies, on the one hand, and actor network and practice theory on the other, but the enemy now is as then of simplistic evolutionary thinking. Still the recent Nordic walking and Mars Coat King studies are among the few real Maussian studies of a market-mediated technique as material practice and consumer assemblage (Bettany 2007; Shove and Pantzar 2005)! Surely there is room for more.

Method I do not discuss Mauss’ book-length text on ethnological method but point to some aspects of his practice that I think respond to the call for more attention to context. As seen in his major works and more anecdotally in the shorter texts I reviewed, Mauss typically begins by trying to sort out an ontological conundrum: What compels reciprocity? What is this thing

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called “me”? In order to answer this he typically turns to an exemplary case of the phenomena in question. He then identifies native terms and categories and explicates them in the total context of the social institutions of the cultural context in question. Through this procedure some native concepts like mana or potlatch for instance have become scientific constructs. He is scrupulous about sources and historical context. On this basis he then builds up comparisons drawing upon similar phenomena among neighboring cultural contexts and then moving farther afield, while attempting to control the dimensions of contrast of his examples. Finally, he brings in possible parables from contexts still further afield and from historical periods different than those with which he begins. It is through this kind of controlled cultural comparison that he builds up syncretic models like those of the gift, sacrifice, magic, the self, and so on. He is scrupulous about building up theory from specific empirical materials rather than personal intuitions or taken for granted assumptions. He demonstrates rather than claims, and in so doing often uses examples to upend, reverse, or transform principles or theories that in the light of the empirical evidence appear faulty. This same ethnological technique has been deployed effectively by Mauss’ descendants. This is exactly the method adopted by the anthropologists Lévi-Strauss in his four-volume study of New World mythology and by Philippe Descola in his studies of human modes of figuration (ontology): And we can see echoes of this method in some of the more solidly empirically grounded studies in consumer culture theory such as those by Curasi et al. (2004), Joy (2001), Fernandez and Lastovicka (2011), and Weinberger and Wallendorf (2012) that have pushed the envelope in terms of understanding categories like the fetish, the gift, and inalienable wealth in consumer culture. To my mind, it is the combination of Mauss’ impeccable, comparative and historical scholarship combined with his commitment to resolving wicked social problems like the foundations of the social contract or the nature of the self or the cultured body that makes Mauss an admirable role model of the engaged public intellectual still today (Fournier 2006; Godelier 2004; Schlanger 1998).

References Askegaard, Søren and Eckhardt, Giana M. (2012), Glocal Yoga: Re-Appropriation in the Indian Consumptionscape, Marketing Theory, 12 (March), 45–60. Belk, Russell W. (1988), Possessions and the Extended Self, Journal of Consumer Research, 15 (September), 139–168. Bettany, Shona (2007), The Material Semiotics of Consumption or Where (and What) Are the Objects in Consumer Culture Theory?, in Russell W. Belk and John F. Sherry, ed., Consumer Culture Theory (Research in Consumer Behavior, Volume 11), Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing, 41–56. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (trans. Richard Nice), Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Colin (1987), The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Cambridge: Blackwell. Cancian, Frank (1966), Maximization as Norm, Strategy, and Theory: A Comment on Programmatic Statements in Economic Anthropology, American Anthropologist, 68 (April), 465–470. Caplow, Theodore (1982), Christmas Gifts and Kin Networks, American Sociological Review, 47 (June), 383–392. Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Price, Linda L. and Arnould, Eric J. (2004), How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (December), 609–622. Douglas, Mary (1990), Forward: No Free Gifts, in Marcel Mauss, ed., The Gift, London: Routledge, ix–xxiii.

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Durkheim, Emile and Mauss, Marcel (1963/1901), Primitive Classification, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fernandez, Karen V. and Lastovicka, John L. (2011), Making Magic: Fetishes in Contemporary Consumption, Journal of Consumer Research, 38 (August), 278–299. Fournier, Marcel (2006), Marcel Mauss: A Biography, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gélard, Marie-Luce (2013), “Les techniques du corps” de Marcel Mauss; Renouveau ou retour sur une question annexe?, in Erwan Dianteill and Marcel Mauss, eds., L’anthropologie de l’un et du multiple, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 81–100. Godelier, Maurice (2004), What Mauss Did Not Say, in C. Werner and D. Bell, eds., Values and Valuables, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 3–21. Hallowell, A. Irving. (1955), Culture and Experience, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ho, David Y. F. (1995), Selfhood and Identity in Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism: Contrasts with the West, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 25 (2), 115–139. Hubert, Henri and Marcel Mauss (1964/1899), Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, (trans. H. D. Halls), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. James, Wendy (1998) “One of Us”: Marcel Mauss and English Anthropology, in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds., Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Berghahn Books, 3–28. Jenkins, Tim (1998), “Derrida’s Reading of Mauss”, in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds., Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Berghahn Books, 83–96. Joy, Annamma (2001), Gift Giving in Hong Kong and the Continuum of Social Ties, Journal of Consumer Research, 28 (September), 239–256. Kohn, Eduardo (2013), How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. Leach, Jerry W. and Leach, Edmund, eds. (1983), The Kula: New Perspectives on Massim Exchange, London: Cambridge University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966), The Savage Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1987/1958), Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mauss, Marcel (1934), Les Techniques du Corps, Journal de Psychologie, 32 (3–4). Mauss, Marcel (1972/1902), A General Theory of Magic, (trans. R. Brain), London and NewYork: Routledge. Mauss, Marcel (1985/1938), A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self, (trans. W. D. Halls) in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–25. Mauss, Marcel (1990/1924), The Gift: Essay on the Form and Function of Exchange, London: Routledge. Maynard, Ashley E., Greenfield, Patricia M. and Childs, Carla P. (1999), Culture, History, Biology, and Body: Native and Non-Native Acquisition of Technological Skill, Ethos, 27 (September), 379–402. McCall, Grant (1982), Association and Power in Reciprocity and Requital: More on Mauss and the Maori, Oceania, 52 (June), 303-319. Miller, Daniel (1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption, New York: Basil Blackwell. Miller, Daniel (1998), A Theory of Shopping, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Moisio, Risto and Beruchashvili, Mariam (2010), Questing for Well-Being at Weight Watchers: The Role of the Spiritual-Therapeutic Model in a Support Group, Journal of Consumer Research, 3 (February), 857–875. Sahlins, Marshall (1972), Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine. Sahlins, Marshall (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall, Bargatzky, Thomas, Bird-David, Nurit, Clammer, John, Hamel, Jacques, Maegawa, Keiji and Siikala, Jukka (1996), The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology [and Comments and Reply], Current Anthropology, 37 (June), 395–428. Schlanger, Nathan (1998), The Study of Techniques as an Ideological Challenge: Technology, Nation and Humanity in the Work of Marcel Mauss, in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds., Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, New York: Bergahn Books, 192–212. Sherry, John F., Jr. (1983), Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective, Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (September), 157–168.

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Shove, Elizabeth and Pantzar, Mika (2005), Consumers, Producers and Practices, Journal of Consumer Culture, 5 (March), 43–64. Strathern, Marilyn (1990), The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Thompson, Craig J. and Üstüner, Tuba (2015), Women Skating on the Edge: Marketplace Performances as Ideological Edgework, Journal of Consumer Research, 42 (August), 235–265. van Baal, Jan (1975), Reciprocity and the Position of Women, Assen: Van Gorcum. Warnier, Jean-Pierre (1999), Retour à Marcel Mauss, in Construire la culture matérielle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1–59. Weinberger, Michelle F. and Wallendorf, Melanie (2012), Gifting at the Intersection of Contemporary Moral and Market Economies, Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (June), 74–92. Weiner, Annette B. (1976), Women of Value, Men of Renown, Austin: University of Texas. Weiner, Annette B. (1992), Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California. White, Geoffrey M. and Kirkpatrick, John, eds. (1985), Person, Self and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies, Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams Bradford, Tonya (2015), Beyond Fungible: Transforming Money into Moral and Social Resources, Journal of Marketing, 79 (March), 79–97.

7 THICK PRESCRIPTION: NOTES ON THE INFLUENCE OF CLIFFORD GEERTZ ON CCT John F. Sherry, Jr.

This entry is neither thumbnail sketch nor précis of the work of Clifford Geertz, the principal luminary of symbolic anthropology, but rather a panegyric to his influence both established and projected on consumer culture theory (CCT hereafter), as we endeavor to construct models of and models for consumer behavior and consumer research. Geertz’s insights and inspiration have taken root in the fertile ground prepared by Sidney Levy (1978) and his colleagues in the academy and Grant McCracken (1986) and his colleagues in industry, which has cultured marketplace behavior as the creation, translation and transformation of meaning among stakeholders. That this ground is contested both by mainstream currents in the discipline and by factions within the diverse CCT movement itself makes the prospect of Geertz’s continuing influence all the more interesting. I ground my remarks exclusively in Geertz’s six volumes of collected essays, whose depth and range provide the reader both an excellent cross-section of his ideas and a solid platform for engaging his other scholarly work, which is prolific. I offer just a few examples of CCT work enabled and informed by his writing. I organize this entry according to the following sequence: ontology, epistemology, axiology and praxis. I conclude by imagining the direction in which Geertz’s thought may nudge our field in the near future.

Ontology Every research tradition unfolds within a prevailing theory of being that accepts, however loosely, a particular conception of the nature of reality. Consumer research has traditionally operated within a positivist paradigm, which, at the risk of caricaturizing the scientific worldview, posits an external world (independent of and outside of the inquirer) of objectively knowable upper-case Reality. An alternative, or complement, to this approach posits instead a socially constructed world of intersecting and mutually influential subjective and material forces in which the inquirer is imbricated, which results in a negotiated lower-case, contextual conception of reality, or multiple realities. The so-called interpretive turn in consumer research documented by Sherry (1991) and elaborated by Arnould and Thompson (2005, 2007) giving rise to the CCT tradition has its taproot in the paradigmatic challenge to positivist social

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science issued by Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist of wide multidisciplinary impact whose seeds of discontent were smuggled in and sown by a wave of scholars building a niche in their adopted field. Geertz, the chief architect of an interpretive anthropology profoundly influenced by historical particularism, propounds a semiotic notion of culture, maintaining (after Weber) that we are “suspended in webs of significance” of our own spinning (Geertz 1973, p. 5). Culture consists of “significative systems posing expositive questions” (Geertz 1983, p. 3), and can be construed as “acted documents” depicting “symbolic action” (Geertz 1973, p. 10). Culture is “polyphonic, even disharmonic,” and its themes invoke “counter-themes, which re-invoke themes, instructively set off from the originals” (Geertz 1995, p. 48). Based upon his meticulous fieldwork in far-flung sites and his omnivorous, interdisciplinary reading, he adjudges all understanding to be inherently local (Geertz 2000, p. 134). Geertz’s meaning-based approach influenced early semiotic forays in CCT (Mick 1986). He employs a cultural systems approach to interpretation to illuminate such significant domains as religion, ideology, common sense and art, an effort eventually extended by CCT research to the field of advertising (Sherry 1987; Scott 1990; Zhao and Belk 2008). Inquiry into such consumption domains as ritual (Rook 1985), performance (Deighton 1992), lifestyle (Holt 1997) and acculturation (Oswald 1999), among others, has been facilitated by Geertz’s insights. Of particular interest to consumer researchers, Geertz pronounces the spurious division between meaning and materiality as ripe for revision, if not retirement, noting their inextricable interpenetration (Geertz 2010, p. 100). The interplay of these domains has been a staple of CCT research since the field’s inception (Appadurai 1986; McCracken 1986; Miller 1987, 2005). By interpreting cultures through the lens of meaning, and accounting for their interactions from contact through collision, the depth of human experience is plumbed and its breadth gauged by the researcher patient enough to tack among its genres, from the local to the global.

Epistemology Every research tradition is guided by a theory of knowledge that shapes understanding of the nature of knowing. Mainstream consumer research has customarily relied upon a hypotheticodeductive model emphasizing explanation via dispassionate researcher disengagement and quantitative methods. The CCT tradition has employed alternative and complementary methods (Sherry and Kozinets 2000) of a principally qualitative nature that emphasize intraceptive intuition and the role of the inquirer as research instrument. Many of the fields beyond marketing from which CCT originally drew participation and both borrowed and refined methods – anthropology, sociology, human development, literary criticism, semiotics, cultural studies, etc. – had incorporated a Geertzian ethos into their orientations that facilitated transmission into this emerging discipline. A champion of “thick description” (a term borrowed from Ryle), Geertz espouses an ethnography that is at once a creation of “action-oriented accounts” of informants’ understandings and a recognition of that creation as a “fiction,” an interpretation constructed by the analyst whose “substantive content” is intimately intertwined with the “mode of representation” (Geertz 1973, p. 15). That is, the analysis of meaning systems embodied in symbols and their interrelation both to “social structural and psychological processes” (Geertz 1973, p. 185) are inseparable from the interpretive practice of ethnographic writing. Such reflexive ethnography has been a mainstay of CCT research from the beginning (Belk et al. 1988).

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Culture is presented as an “ensemble of texts” (ensembles themselves) subjected to a close reading – within, between and across forms in comparative perspective – by the ethnographer “over the shoulders” of informant-owners (Geertz 1973, pp. 452–453), in an enterprise Geertz calls “cultural hermeneutics,” the interpretive “understanding of understanding” (Geertz 1983, p. 5). This enterprise unfolds as a “continuous dialectical tacking” between the “local” and the “global” in a manner that brings each into “simultaneous view,” and between the “parts” and the “whole” in a manner that turns them into “explications of one another” (Geertz 1983, p. 69). This hermeneutic tacking is the essence of what Geertz labels the “interpretive turn” in anthropology (Geertz 1983, pp. 170, 233). The hermeneutic approach is one of the most productive traditions in CCT research (Arnold and Fischer 1994; Thompson 1997; Thompson et al. 1989). The charm of interpretations is the way they lead to “extended accounts which, intersecting with some other accounts of other matters, widen their implications and deepen their hold” (Geertz 1995, p. 19). Progress in interpretive anthropology is “marked less by consensus than by refinement of debate,” and by the increasing precision of our understandings. Of likely comfort to many CCT researchers is Geertz’s quip that cultural analysis is “inherently incomplete . . . and . . . the more deeply it goes the less complete it is (Geertz 1973, p. 29). The conversational ethos of interpretive research is a hallmark CCT tradition (Hudson and Ozanne 1988). The practice of unpacking deep cultural constructs revealed through thick description emerging from protracted local engagement exalts the emic perspective. The researcher seeks the most faithful approximation of informants’ understandings of their lived experience as intimate association and perpetual probing permit.

Axiology Every research tradition is motivated, implicitly or explicitly, by a theory of value that attributes intrinsic merit or worth to the enterprise. Such value is typically appraised in ethical, aesthetic, religious or other virtue-based terms. Arguably, beyond the drive for scientific explanation itself, consumer research has traditionally been concerned with pecuniary or commercial value, its findings being most commonly sifted for managerial implications, and less often (discontinuously over time, but recently more frequently) for societal impact. Beyond its sanctioning of alternative and complementary ways of knowing, the CCT tradition has routinely explored the extra-economic dimensions of consumer behavior, offered critical reflection upon the managerial enterprise, and explored the cultural antecedents and consequences of consumption. This devotion to diversity, holism and critique emerges from prolonged contact with and deep immersion in consumptionscapes across cultures and time, a history of institutional marginalization, and the global nature of its maturation as a discipline. These values of pluralism and reflexivity derive directly and indirectly from the influence of Clifford Geertz, and are reflected in CCT research by such authors as Thompson and Arsel (2004). Geertz understands the point of our interpretive “grasping” and “rendering” of the “multiplicity of complex conceptual structures” comprising culture to be “not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others . . . have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record” of humanity. His is not an “experimental science in search of law,” but an interpretive one in search of meaning” (Geertz 1973, pp. 5, 10, 30). Ethnography is properly the “study of thinking as it goes on in the fora and agorae of modern life” (Geertz 1983, p. 152).

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Believing the chance of generating law-like generalizations to be remote, Geertz suggests that “generalities are more useful as heuristic starting points for deeper-going local inquiries” (Geertz 1983, p. 4, 2000, p. 135). Rejecting reenactments of old nomothetic/ideographic erklären/verstehen debates, he calls for “demonstrations, on the one hand or the other, of either an effective technology for controlling the overall directions of modern social life or the development and inculcation of more delicate skills for navigating our way through it, whatever directions it tales” (Geertz 2000, pp. 139–140). As disciplinary boundaries erode in contemporary inquiry, Geertz (siding with Charles Taylor) repudiates the natural sciences as a model for the social sciences, preferring instead to “clear a space for hermeneutic and interpretivist approaches to explanation,” a practice that highlights the prospective value of the humanities as a source of insight (Geertz 1983, p. 20, 2000, p. 143). The work of Brown (2005); Hirschman (1986); Holbrook et al. (1989); Scott (1994); Sherry and Schouten (2002); Stern (1989, 1995); and Varey (2014), among others, is notable in this regard. Geertz marks a “missing genre” in ethnography, observing that “we lack the language to articulate what takes place when we are in fact at work” (Geertz 1995, p. 120), an especially glaring problem given that anthropology is far more reliant upon a particular research method than nearly any other science (Geertz 2000, p. 110). I revisit this issue of reflexivity in the following section of my entry. Geertz sees fundamental value in the ability of ethnography to “enable conversations across social lines . . . that have grown progressively more nuanced, more immediate and more irregular.” Ethnography enlarges the “possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another . . . and yet contained in a world where . . . it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other’s way” (Geertz 1988, p. 147). Recording the lived experience of the other is both an ethical and practical act of egalitarian humanism that can be considered in equal measure salvage ethnography, respect for the inherent worth of diversity, and professional obligation to sharpen the nuance of social scientific conversation.

Praxis Every research tradition evolves guidelines for the enactment of theory that facilitates the ways in which wisdom is put into practice. This might range anywhere from the tight specification and execution of research design to imparting heuristics and work-arounds in the training of apprentices (for example the scrubbing, editing, massaging finessing, manipulating, wrangling and mining of data) to attempting to identify and eradicate researcher misconduct. Disciplines also wittingly and unwittingly provoke change both within themselves and in the world at large. Systematic and comprehensive reflection can help refine and improve research practices as well as encourage the diffusion of knowledge from the so-called pure domain to the so-called applied domain. While the principal practical application of theory in mainstream consumer research is enlightened managerial intervention, it has a dark side disciplinary consequence that has been called the “tyranny of paradigms” (Arndt 1985) – a position from which I believe the tradition of critical marketing (Cayla and Zwick 2011; Saran et al. 2007; Tadajewski and Brownlie 2008) to have sprung – which can prematurely narrow the focus of inquiry, prescribe and proscribe forms of representation, and devalue other contributions such as description itself. Arguably, the history of CCT reflects a rebellion against this tyranny, and, again, has been enabled by the work of Clifford Geertz.

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Characterizing his approach to research as less a “straightforward matter” of strategy and logistics than an attitude of “plunge in and see what happens,” Geertz focuses on the attributes of a situation or event – its “dramatic shape,” its “metaphoric content” and its “social context” – in constructing an interpretation of a cultural phenomenon (Geertz 1995, p. 117; Geertz 1973, p. 444). He challenges ethnographers to “represent the research process in the research product,” admonishing them to “bring one’s interpretations of some society, culture, way of life . . . and one’s encounters with some of its members, carriers, representatives . . . into an intelligible relationship.” More pointedly, he advises ethnographers to “get an I-witnessing author into a they-picturing story” (Geertz 1988, p. 84). Geertz’s use of the essay form in a variety of its types is perhaps the most diagnostic feature of his praxis. As a conscience and a critic of the discipline he actively seeks to reform, he is a master stylist (Geertz 1988) who enjoys (sometimes snarkily) unpacking the styles of other scholarly interlocutors to discern contribution from claim. I even suspect, for example, that his disapproval of Clifford’s “deep hanging out” trope (Geertz 2000, p. 110) was collateral damage in the critique of multi-sited ethnography, as the metaphor might easily have been turned by Geertz himself to capture the fruitful synergy between heroic labor intensity and capricious serendipity. As disciplinary citizens, our professing has an activist or engaged aspect as important as our devotion to theory. We co-create knowledge with our informants through our writing, whose dimension of craft we must seek to refine, of critique we must fearlessly explore, and of credibility we must enhance through authentic reflexivity.

Motivating the field Geertz’s body of work offers some guidance for the shape research in CCT might assume in the future. The hegemony of theory, especially of the ingratiating crypto-positivist type designed to placate gatekeepers of flagship journals, might be among the most prominent and fervently desired casualties of the engagement. Our fear of “particularism, subjectivism, idealism, relativism” (Geertz 1983, p. 153) and a host of other dogmatic bugbears is likely sapping the vitality and limiting the range of our field. The interpenetration of consumption with other cultural institutions and systems seems a logical research stream in the making. Active interdisciplinary outreach – the quest for the “useful miracle” that is “access to one another’s vocational lives” against the “deep dissimilarity of métier-formed minds” (Geertz 1983, p. 160) – would bring more nuanced interpretation to complex systems. The comprehensive extension of interpretive approaches to marketing theory and practice beyond our current focus on consumption seems also an incremental evolutionary extension. The same broadening of inquiry and application holds true as far as adopting a stakeholder focus (e.g., managers, public policy makers, NGOs, citizens, etc.) is concerned. A stakeholder focus virtually presumes the fielding of public intellectuals to broker the insights of a dynamic discipline. We might find no better role model for such brokerage than Clifford Geertz. Finally, the crisis of representation now rippling through our discipline promises to provoke the expansion of genres interpreting consumer behavior and marketing, enriching our experience in the bargain. Geertz’s rejection of the “strange idea that reality has an idiom in which it prefers to be described” (Geertz 1988, p. 140) might free us up to celebrate and explore more vehicles that might be used as vessels of our understanding. Arts-based

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approaches to consumer research, including poetry (Wijland et al. 2010; Sherry et al. 2016), short story (Hill 2001; Schouten 2014), novels (Brown 2006, 2008, 2009) and videography (Belk and Kozinets 2005), for example, are currently being undertaken.

References Appadurai, Arjun, ed. (1986), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, New York: Cambridge University Press. Arndt, Johan (1985), “The Tyranny of Paradigms: The Case for Paradigmatic Pluralism in Marketing,” in Changing the Course of Marketing: Alternative Paradigms for Widening Marketing Theory, Research in Marketing, Supplement 2, eds. Nikhilesh Dholakia and Johan Arndt, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 3–25. Arnold, Stephen and Eileen Fischer (1994), “Hermeneutics and Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (1): 55–70. Arnould, Eric and Craig Thompson (2005), “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (4): 868–882. Arnould, Eric and Craig Thompson (2007), “Consumer Culture Theory (and We Really Mean Theoretics): Dilemmas and Opportunities Posed by an Academic Branding Strategy,” in Consumer Culture Theory, Vol. 11 of Research in Consumer Behavior, eds. Russell Belk and John F. Sherry, Jr., Oxford: Elsevier, 119–147. Belk, Russell W. and Robert V. Kozinets (2005), “Introduction to the Resonant Representations Issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture,” Consumption, Markets & Culture 8 (3): 195–203. Belk, Russell W., John F. Sherry, Jr., and Melanie Wallendorf (1988), “A Naturalistic Inquiry into Buyer and Seller Behavior at a Swap Meet,” Journal of Consumer Research 14 (4): 449–470. Brown, Stephen (2005), Writing Marketing: Literary Lessons from Academic Authorities, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Brown, Stephen (2006), The Marketing Code, London: Marshall Cavendish. Brown, Stephen (2008), Agents and Dealers, London: Marshall Cavendish. Brown, Stephen (2009), The Lost Logo, London: Marshall Cavendish. Cayla, Julien and Detlev Zwick (2011), Inside Marketing: Cultures, Ideologies and Practices, London: Oxford University Press. Deighton, John (1992), “The Consumption of Performance,” Journal of Consumer Research 19 (3): 362–372. Geertz, Clifford (1973), The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford (1983), Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books. Geertz, Clifford (1988), Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Geertz, Clifford (1995), After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Geertz, Clifford (2000), Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geertz, Clifford (2010), Life among the Anthros and Other Essays, ed. Fred Inglis, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hill, Ronald (2001), Surviving in a Material World: The Lived Experience of People in Poverty, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Hirschman, Elizabeth (1986), “Humanistic Inquiry in Marketing Research: Philosophy, Method, and Criteria,” Journal of Marketing Research 23 (3): 237–249. Holbrook, Morris, Stephen Bell, and Mark Grayson (1989), “The Role of the Humanities in Consumer Research: Close encounters and Coastal Disturbances,” in Interpretive Consumer Research, ed. Elizabeth Hirschman, Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, pp. 29–47. Holt, Douglas (1997), “Poststructuralist Lifestyle Analysis: Conceptualizing the Social Patterning of Consumption in Postmodernity,” Journal of Consumer Research 23 (4): 326–350.

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Hudson, Laurel and Julie Ozanne (1988), “Alternative Ways of Seeking Knowledge in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 14 (4): 508–521. Levy, Sidney (1978), Marketplace Behavior: Its Meaning for Management, New York: Amacom. McCracken, Grant (1986), “Culture and Consumption: A Theoretical Account of the Structure and Movement of the Cultural Meaning of Consumer Goods,” Journal of Consumer Research 13 (1): 71–84. Mick, David Glen (1986), “Consumer Research and Semiotics: Exploring the Morphology of Signs, Symbols, and Significance,” Journal of Consumer Research,13 (2), 196–213. Miller, Daniel (1987), Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Miller, Daniel, ed. (2005), Materiality, Durham: Duke University Press. Oswald, Laura (1999), “Culture Swapping: Consumption and the Ethnogenesis of Middle-Class Haitian Immigrants,” Journal of Consumer Research 25 (4): 303–318. Rook, Dennis (1985), “The Ritual Dimension of Consumer Behavior,” Journal of Consumer Research 12 (3): 251–264. Saran, Michael, Pauline Maclaran, Christina Golding, Richard Elliott, Avi Shankar, and Miriam Catterall, eds. (2007), Critical Marketing: Defining the Field, New York: Elsevier. Schouten, John (2014), “My Improbable Profession,” Consumption, Markets & Culture 17 (6): 595–608. Scott, Linda (1990), “Understanding Jingles and Needledrop: A Rhetorical Approach to Music in Advertising,” Journal of Consumer Research 17 (2): 223–236. Scott, Linda (1994), “The Bridge from Text to Mind: Adapting Reader-Response Theory for Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 21 (3): 461–480. Sherry, John F. J. (1987), “Advertising as a Cultural System,” in Marketing and Semiotics: New Directions in the Study of Signs for Sale, ed. Jean Umiker-Sebeok, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 441–461. Sherry, John F. J. (1991), “Postmodern Alternatives: The Interpretive Turn in Consumer Research,” in Handbook of Consumer Behavior, eds. Thomas Robertson and Harold Kassarjian, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 548–591. Sherry, John F. J. and Robert V. Kozinets (2000), “Qualitative Inquiry in Marketing and Consumer Research,” in Kellogg on Marketing, ed. Dawn Iacobucci, New York: John Wiley, 165–194. Sherry, John F. J. and John Schouten (2002), “A Role for Poetry in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 29 (1): 218–234. Sherry, John F. J., John Schouten, and Hilary Downey, eds. (2016), Calabash Cadencé Taisgeadan, South Bend, IN: Air Lyre Media. Stern, Barbara B. (1989), “Literary Criticism and Consumer Research: Overview and Illustrative Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research 16 (3): 322–334. Stern, Barbara B. (1995), “Consumer Myths: Frye’s Taxonomy and the Structural Analysis of Consumption Text,” Journal of Consumer Research 22 (2): 165–185. Tadajewski, Mark and Douglas Brownlie (2008), Critical Marketing: Issues in Contemporary Marketing, Chichester, UK: John Wiley. Thompson, Craig J. (1997), “Interpreting Consumers: A Hermeneutical Framework for Deriving Marketing Insights from the Texts of Consumers’ Consumption Stories,” Journal of Marketing Research 34 (4): 438–455. Thompson, Craig J. and Zeynep Arsel (2004), “The Starbucks Brandscape and Consumers’ (Anticorporate) Experiences of Glocalization,” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (3): 631–642. Thompson, Craig J., William B. Locander, and Howard R. Pollio (1989), “Putting Consumer Experience Back into Consumer Research: The Philosophy and Method of Existential-Phenomenology,” Journal of Consumer Research 16 (2): 133–146. Varey, Richard, ed. (2014), Humanistic Marketing, New York: Palgrave. Wijland, Roel, John F. Sherry, Jr., and John Schouten, eds. (2010), Canaries Coalmines Thunderstones, St. Bathans, New Zealand: University of St. Bathans Press. Zhao, Xin and Russell W. Belk (2008), “Politicizing Consumer Culture: Advertising’s Appropriation of Political Ideology in China’s Social Transition,” Journal of Consumer Research 35 (2): 231–244.

8 MARY DOUGLAS: CONSUMPTION CODES, MEANING STRUCTURES AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS Ian Woodward

Mary Douglas was a central figure in twentieth-century British social anthropology. Although only one of her books was directly about the meanings and uses of consumption, I argue in this chapter that in the best tradition of the structuralist project as an all-purpose theory of culture, the core of her oeuvre constitutes a crucial – and in the context of contemporary consumption studies, a corrective – elementary resource for analysing diverse consumption practices and contexts. The influence of Douglas’s writing extended beyond her home disciplinary field and continues to be an important touchstone for social and cultural theorists generally. Educated at Oxford University, Douglas became part of the influential Oxford tradition in anthropology, having the eminent British anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard as part of her doctoral dissertation supervision team. Working within social anthropology, her influence and thinking extended from cultural anthropology into anthropologically grounded cultural and social theory in the middle to later parts of her career. In the latter half of the twentieth century, alongside the key French intellectual figure in anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas is seen as a beacon of structuralist thinking and analysis. In revealing the elementary codes, thought structures and symbols that guided behaviours and institutions, Mary Douglas’s works are intellectually bold, systematic and generalising, attempting to make links across cultures and times. In this sense, her work should not be viewed only as a continuation of the structuralist effort to uncover the codes that drive cultural systems of classification, boundaries and social action. In her most important writings her work is characterised by an original and career-long attempt to extend and apply it by bringing it into intellectual contact with a diverse range of disciplinary questions, from consumption studies, studies of risk and environmentalism, biblical studies, and economics. Alongside giving a general orientation to and assessment of Douglas’s work, I argue in this chapter that the insights her work generated remain an essential ingredient within contemporary consumption studies, even if frequently un-acknowledged, or taken for granted. Moreover, in a time where scholars sometimes seem too ready to critically characterise efforts to understand cultural coherence and culture meaning-structures as an outdated, anachronistic set of intellectual resources in favour of a variety of ‘posts’, disembodied practices, liquidities and fluidities (see Warde 1997 for a discussion), Douglas’s oeuvre stands to show that structuralism and its analytic tendency

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to look for borders and classifications still offers some of the most incisive and crucial ideas and techniques of analysis we have to understand how culture (and consumption) works.

Intellectual inspiration and development To contextualise Mary Douglas’s work it is important to understand where her intellectual stimulus comes from and how it fits into the key intellectual currents of social and cultural research. To do this, at the most general level, we need to understand the intellectual basis of the tradition called ‘structuralism’. The name of this tradition does not refer to the sociological interest in social structures, but a tradition in cultural theory which looks to uncover cultural structures, and the codes and symbols on which they are based. Though structuralism had most influence in anthropology and semiotic theory, it originated in the field of linguistics as an intellectual movement dedicated to discovering the linguistic and cognitive structures that guide cultural actions and institutions. To this end, structuralism has a number of principles (see Smith 2001). The first is the appreciation that there are generative processes of social life that guide the playing out of the minutiae we observe at its surface. Thus, in order to come to grips with all that we identify at the face of social life, we need to look to deeper, constructive processes that are relationally patterned and limited in number. Furthermore, a structuralist principle is that the analyst of this generative scheme has the possiblity of identifying the objective structures of culture, reading it, or ‘cracking its code’, as Lévi-Strauss once put it (Lévi-Strauss 1979). According to this principle, there are deep generative principles to be discovered within cultures – there is a langue which grounds and directs the surface features of the observable and insistent parole. Everyday social actors who are immersed within these structures take them for granted and are consequently not able to identify them. The patterns that these structures create on the surface of cultural life can be best observed and analysed by a detached style of scientific investigation that identifies key symbols and codes in cultural practices and rituals. While early structuralism developed around the turn of the twentieth century from linguistic origins in the theories of Charles Peirce and Ferdinand Saussure, later developments by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, and beyond that by semioticians like Roland Barthes after the middle of the twentieth century, extended the analogies between language structures and culture. Furthermore, on the sociological side, the later ‘cultural’ works of Emile Durkheim, particularly his work on religious systems of meaning (1912), retain prime importance as foundation texts for understanding modes of structuralist analysis. Mary Douglas enrolled in the anthropology program at Oxford, completing the Bachelor program and finally a PhD in 1953 after undertaking fieldwork in Africa, which eventually culminated in her second monograph in 1963, the first which used her married name, The Lele of the Kasai (see Fardon 1999). After spending a year at Oxford following completion of her PhD and marrying, Douglas took a position in Social Anthropology at University College London, which she held until 1977 when she took up posts in the United States, including at the Russell Sage Foundation, Northwestern, and Princeton Universities. Douglas was sometimes criticised heavily for re-presenting the ideas of her mentor E.E. Evans-Pritchard in her work (Fardon 1999:33), though she argued in return that by building on his approach her work crucially extended it methodologically and also showed its applicability into numerous domains outside those ever contemplated before (Fardon 1999:33–35). Evans-Pritchard revolutionised modern anthropology by rejecting

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the distinction between primitive and modern or civilised peoples. Moving beyond the idea that in non-western societies knowledge is understood not as science but through notions of magic, Evans-Pritchard (1940) refused evolutionary models of culture and the invidious distinctions upon which they were based. Working within a philosophy and sociology of knowledge paradigm, he sought to compare and reconstruct the patterns of thought which were common across human societies. Furthermore, and the following Durkheimian and Annee sociologique trait is important for inspiring Mary Douglas, thinking practices, classifications and symbols are based on collectively shared representations. Ideas thus have a cultural coherence and performative efficacy. It is not necessarily the case that each member of a society believes them equally or that societies are static, but that ideas come to be reflected and performed in the context of institutional and group settings where they find collective efficacy.

Groups, their composition and systems of classification Consistent with structuralist anthropology, Mary Douglas uncovered the way unconscious social codes regulated behaviours. She was concerned with analysis of such codes, rituals and classification systems, and the ordering of symbols and semiotic meaning systems to reveal the reasons for behaviours and attitudes which people themselves constantly acted out and upon, but were not conscious of. Not surprisingly, her emphasis was on collective processes and the nature of the social, understood in its most broad sense. The central idea of group and the quality of ‘groupness’ and the rituals which reinforced it was at the core of Durkheimian sociology and also at the heart of the concerns of the British anthropologists of the time, including Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard (Fardon 1999:41). Consistent with Durkheimian structuralism, ‘groupness’ was a matter not just of socially efficacious and positive aspects of behavioural reinforcement, but a functional system of everyday behaviour, thought and institutions that drew boundaries, policed borders and sanctioned breaches of such codes. Via myriad everyday distinctions people observed but failed to be consciously aware of, groups came to embody the collective thought, the process reinforcing the feeling and function of groupness. This groupness was not just about defining and labeling deviance and criminality, but about how everyday objects, symbols and practices were classified as risky, impure or dangerous, and their opposite: clean, sacred and pure. In Natural Symbols, Douglas (1970) develops the idea that social morphology and mode of organisation affects the way boundaries and hierarchies are established and maintained, and how each brings different types of social relational possibilities. Each type of social system requires processes of ritual which define pure and impure categories. In Purity and Danger, Douglas draws on historical and anthropological data to present an elegant, synthetic account of the systemic basis of classifications of dirt and cleanliness. Dirt is not physical dirt, though it could be. Principally, dirt is defined by its location rather than by an absolute quality. Dirt is that which violates the symbolic and aesthetic integrity of cultural systems, requiring rituals for cleaning and cleansing to recreate order, as the following quote shows: If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt

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then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. (Douglas 1966:35) For consumption studies scholars, even for those not working in a cultural tradition, the idea of codes, symbols and rituals should feel rather obvious: rituals, for example, entrain us to certain episodes or practices of consumption; codes and symbols structure connotation and denotation. It is often the case, however, that scholars think about symbols, codes and all manner of consumptive communication – like the fashion system, or codes of food presentation, for example – but that they infrequently incorporate the ‘other side’, or relational mirror, of such systems. That is, it is less the case that such symbolic communications are considered in Douglas’s systemic terms of what they reject and identify as dirt. For example, in studies of taste, a field where Douglas’s work is clearly central, researchers have until recently tended to focus on the assumed positive dimensions of communication rather than the whole system of taste classifications in terms of rejections and hostilities. To miss the systemic dimensions of such communicative processes leads us to a series of problems in consumption studies that over-emphasise choice, identity and reflexivity (Campbell 1995). In a paper exploring evidence about hostilities, Warde explicitly cites and endorses Douglas’s work and reminds researchers of her importance for understanding the role of hostilities in cultural consumption systems (Warde 2011, see also Mennell 1985). We can look directly to Douglas’s work to understand the implications of her agenda. In her essay on bad taste and decoration, Douglas (1996:54) suggests that changes in taste and fashion for ornamental pottery is more likely established in hostility to particular styles rather than mobilised by envy of rival, innovative styles. Her attention to the character of negative judgements is revealing of her focus on the nature of cultural tastes as a systemic, relational combination of likes and dislikes when she states that “the discourse about dislike and ugliness is more revealing than the discourse about aesthetic beauty” (Douglas 1996:50).

Consumption and goods as ‘bonnes a penser’ Mary Douglas’s book written with the economist Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods (1979), is an influential attempt to apply Durkheimian insights to problems of contemporary consumption. To appreciate it in wider context we need to consider publishing practices and intellectual currents of the era. Through the 1960s both anthropology and economics were, in certain readerly markets and national contexts, intellectual fields that began to generate cross-over intellectuals who produced works that drew on their technical academic expertise, but write for wider readerships and for the purpose of sociocultural critique. In particular, this is an era when public critiques of economics such as those by JK Galbraith, EJ Mishan, EF Schumacher, Robert Heilbroner or Lester Thurow were becoming academically prominent and somewhat socially controversial. We might compare them in style to such contemporary books as Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. These sat alongisde competing ideological statements of the conservative and political right, such as books by Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. In The World of Goods Douglas and Isherwood articulated the broad goal of redressing what they identify as the poverty of economic theorising on consumption, which

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is seen as overly narrow and obsessed with abstractions of consumer ‘rationality’ and utility, or alternately, taken with the Veblenesque notion that consumption is a crude game of conspicuous, ‘competitive display’. In this latter tradition, the authors say, consumption and consumerist tendencies are commonly castigated and scorned as ‘greed, stupidity and insensitivity to want’ (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:vii). Douglas and Isherwood assert that neither moral indignation aroused by supposed excesses, nor micro-economic abstraction, is enough to understand the attractions of consumption. Here, their work provides a continuation of the platform established by earlier structualist thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim and Mauss, but also provides a clear statement of intent for modern consumption studies in the cultural, interpretive and anthropological traditions. In The World of Goods they provide what stands as probably the most systematic treatment of the nature of goods as cultural props, a set of ideas taken up by those working in the University College London anthropology group where Douglas was professor, notably Daniel Miller. Miller himself acknowledges this in an obituary for Douglas (Miller 2007), where he says that the two books which most influenced his thinking in terms of developing his oeuvre on material culture as a young scholar were Bourdieu’s Distinction, and The World of Goods. As he notes, both of these works advance a strongly anti-economic rationalist line in analysing fields and practices of consumption. In the preface to this work, they assert a manifesto: ‘goods are neutral, their uses are social; they can be used as fences or bridges’ 1979:xv). The general goal is thus to contextualise consumption practice within the social and cultural processes, broadly conceived, though uncovering its cultural codes, etiquettes and conventions. Along with this, it is necessary to understand the work consumption and commodities do to include, exclude, and construct social identities and categories. This, then, reads like a contemporary version of Lévi-Strauss’ bonnes á penser principle but without the call-to-arms, strident structuralism that sometimes crept into Lévi-Strauss’ work. In identifying consumption as essential to boundary work, identities and cultural performances, it also provides a remarkably clear intellectual platform for the growth of sociologial consumption studies in Britain some five to ten years later. An absolutely core argument Douglas and Isherwood make is that goods are resources for thinking, demarcating and classifying. They acknowledge that while goods, a term including a diverse range of consumer objects, originate in the system of capitalist production, at the same time ‘all material possessions carry social meanings’ and, as resources for thinking, commodityobjects make ‘visible and stable categories of culture’ (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:38). Once again, the direct influence of Lévi-Strauss should be clear in this line of thought. Though goods ‘come from’ the economy, in order to understand their attractions and meanings we should conceptualise them autonomously from economic frameworks, or at least economic theory should be blended with the insights of cultural anthropology. As something for making sense of the world, consumer objects assist people in demarcating social categories, maintaining social relationships, and thus assigning worth and value to things and people (Douglas and Isherwood 1979). Consumption then has a moral component, in that choice and selection are not driven solely by utilitarian needs nor understood by consumers as ‘simple choices’, but for the user consuming objects acquires a deeper emotional significance. This idea of basing the study of consumption within moral contexts is not new – it goes back to Mauss and Lévi-Strauss once again, but contemporary scholars might look to Douglas and Isherwood for a more modern reframing of that argument about the moral basis and meaning of economic activity. Offering a paraphrase and elegant resummary of Lévi-Strauss’s key dictum of bonnes á

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penser, Douglas and Isherwood recommend that to understand objects, analysts need to bracket out matters to do with markets and utility: we shall assume that the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense. Forget the idea of consumer irrationality. Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing and shelter; forget their usefulness and try instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty. (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:40–41) Consumption, then, is about meaning-making, and this is a remarkably clear and relatively early statement relevant to the development of material cultures studies and sociological studies of consumption, both of which appeared later than this key work by Douglas and Isherwood. The world of goods becomes a world of possible meanings for consumers. The attraction of consuming things, therefore, is only partly that it (temporarily) satiates needs. The more important attraction of consuming things is that it offers continuous opportunity to perform, affirm and manage the self in relation to collectively negotiated symbols. Social actors understand themselves in relation to others, and other things: they crave seeing themselves (or their potential, promised selves) reflected in others’ talk and actions, and in the objects that surround them. So, one picks and chooses from the available array of goods within any particular class taking into accounts one’s means and one’s preferences, all the time keeping in mind the selections of others. So we must see that episodes of consumption are not merely shopping or provisioning expeditions, but opportunities to give meaning to or affirm one’s social relationships and the wider social universe. Here again we see the importance of The World of Goods for Daniel Miller’s work, notably his key work Material Culture and Mass Consumption (1987), but also his ethnographic work on grocery shopping (Miller 1998). In that latter work, Miller shows that routine shopping expeditions involving household provisioning are really opportunities for shoppers to think through aspects of their relationships with others in market terms. This is not a surprising insight for consumption studies scholars working in sociocultural traditions, but an elegant empirical exploration and statement of the fundamental principle. We can see two other important points of influence for The World of Goods. The first is relevant theories of material practices. Douglas and Isherwood pick up on Barthes’ (1964) discussion of different ways to make coffee as an example of how routine, everyday acts of consuming things (coffee beans, liquid, cup, grinder) become opportunities to delineate crucial debates about self and non-self, the inauthentic and the truthful, the good and bad. Practice and material entanglements provide crucial information regarding the context of how consumption practices are understood – the material and technological limitations and affordances of consumption engagements matter. Douglas and Isherwood dwell on the symbolic meanings of whether one chooses to grind coffee beans with a mechanical grinder, or pestle and mortar and in this discussion give an unexpected prelude to the later deeply commodified re-birth of coffee culture and ‘hipsterism’: The grinder works mechanically, the human hand only supplies force, and electric power can easily be substituted for it; its produce is kind of dust-fine, dry and impersonal. By contrast there is an art in wielding the pestle. Bodily skills are involved, and the stuff on which they are bestowed is not hard metal, but instead the noblest of materials, wood. And out of the mortar comes not a mere dust, but a gritty powder, pointing straight to

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the ancient lore of alchemy and its potent brews. The choice between pounding and grinding is thus a choice between two different views of the human condition and between metaphysical judgements lying just beneath the surface of the question. (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:50) Second, Douglas and Isherwood assert that goods and their consumption are more properly seen within systems of information. Utility is but one component of the nature of goods. Most importantly, they are social markers: not just of beauty, status and prestige, but all sorts of social categories which find expression in goods people are associated with, acting for the consumer’s self, and for others who witness the consumption. Codes, messages and symbols circulate through commodities, and consumers attempt to be near the centre of message transmission in order to make sense of it and to participate. Douglas and Isherwood extend their thesis by suggesting that consumption becomes the social system itself: the actual means for constituting self, society and culture. This notion has overtones of the recent Foucault-inspired governmentality literature and literatures on the performativity of markets and consumption arguing that consumption becomes a means of expressing and managing self and also governing populations. The significance of consumption, Douglas and Isherwood suggest, is that it actually constitutes the social system – consumption is life, as Zygmunt Bauman once noted – with each episode or consumption event being merely one part of the process of building culture, through continuously expending, rebuilding and expending bits of it. In doing so, they suggest that consumption is more than just a way of social communication, but constitutive of it. The last phrase in the following quote, a brilliant insight about social performativity and economic activity that still bears heeding, is reminiscent of research on screen cultures and economic objects that surfaced much later: But consumption goods are definitely not mere messages; they constitute the very system itself. Take them out of human intercourse and you have dismantled the whole thing. In being offered, accepted, or refused, they either reinforce or undermine existing boundaries. The goods are both the hardware and the software, so to speak, of an information system whose principal concern it to monitor its own performance. (Douglas and Isherwood 1979:49)

Conclusion Despite the absolutely foundational character of Douglas’s writings, as with all scholars who develop strong and systematic accounts of culture and social life, there are predictable analytic blind spots. It is reasonable to argue that structuralism as an intellectual force never had a good way of thinking about action, performance and phenomenology, and also that it led sometimes to reification of culture structures without attention to how they might change, or be challenged. An adequate development of structuralism such as that advocated by Douglas must combine and fuse it with both a hermeneutic account, and also a performative account with an emphasis on process. So, combined with the key idea that consuming affords people entry to particular moral and symbolic depths, theories of social performance (Alexander 2004a, 2004b) offer a viable way to imagine consumption as an active and contextual process demonstrated through ongoing performances which fuse or entangle people with consumption relations in particular social settings. Such accounts show how moral force and symbolic

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weight is achieved, as so are consistent with the structuralist ambition, but – by drawing on diverse sources on performativity such as Schechner, Butler and Geertz – also highlight the role of social performance, active interpretation, and contingency in fixing meanings. The structuralist toolkit such as that developed by Douglas is indeed indispensable and relatively timeless in terms of the core claims its establishes, but it must also creatively adjust to fit with contemporary theoretical advances.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004a) ‘From the depths of despair: Performance, counterperformance, and “September 11”’, Sociological Theory, 22(1): 88–105. Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004b) ‘Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy’, Sociological Theory, 22(4): 527–73. Barthes, Roland (1964) Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang. Campbell, Colin (1995) ‘Conspicuous confusion: A critique of Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption’, Sociological Theory, 13(1): 37–47. Douglas, Mary (1963) The Lele of the Kasai. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary (1970) Natural Symbols. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Mary (1996) Thought styles: Critical essays on Good Taste. London: Sage. Douglas, Mary, and Isherwood, Baron (1979) The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. New York: Basic Books. Durkheim, Emile (1912) The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain. London: Allen and Unwin. Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan (1940) The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fardon, Richard (1999) Mary Douglas: An Intellectual Biography. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books. Mennell, Stephen (1985) All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miller, Daniel (1987) Material Culture and Mass Consumption. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Miller, Daniel (1998) A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, Daniel (2007) ‘Mary Douglas (1921–2007)’, Material World, May 18, 2007. Last accessed November 20, 2016, www.materialworldblog.com/2007/05/mary-douglas-1921-2007/ Smith, Philip (2001) Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Warde, Alan (1997) Consumption, Food and Taste. London: Sage. Warde, Alan (2011) ‘Cultural hostility re-visited’, Cultural Sociology, September, 5(3): 341–66.

9 IN DEFENSE OF CULTURAL ECONOMY: MARSHALL SAHLINS Eric J. Arnould

Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930) earned his Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia University in 1954. His main intellectual influences included Leslie White, Karl Polanyi and Julian Steward, mentors who influenced his perennial interest in the material culture, cultural economy and culture and historical change, respectively. In the late 1960s he spent two years in Paris, where he was deeply influenced by structuralist and Marxist anthropology. Sahlins’ work has focused on demonstrating the power that culture has to shape people’s perceptions and actions. He has been particularly interested in demonstrating that culture has a motivational force that is not derived from the economy, a position that puts him at odds with Marxists and Utilitarians alike. His early career work engaged with anthropological debates of the day, but his midcareer work focused on debunking the idea of economically rational man, the progressive notion of economic history, and demonstrating that economic systems adapt to particular circumstances in culturally specific ways. Two books punctuated this middle period: Stone Age Economics, and Culture and Practical Reason. After the latter book, his focus shifted to the relation between history and anthropology, and the way different cultures understand and make history. His many students of relevant interest to CCT include Grant McCracken, author of Culture and Consumption I, II; Rita Denny, author of Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research and the Handbook of Anthropology in Business; and David Graeber, author of Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value and Debt: The First 5000 Years.

Stone age economics The book title is a typical Sahlinsian joke; it refers not to the economic systems of stoneage societies, although it does focus on non- or pre-market societies, but instead refers to the rudimentary state of historically and culturally informed economic theory. It contains a number of important essays. “The Original Affluent Society” is profoundly anti-Hobbesian. It shows that aboriginal hunting and gathering bands were not materially poor if judged by their own cultural standards. Economically speaking, they sought livelihood or sufficiency, and acquired their material needs without exerting exhaustive labor because of their intimately detailed knowledge of their physical environment and their adaptive ingenuity. This essay is

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an important empirical critique of the assumption that scarcity is the foundational driver of human activity, including economic activity. “The Domestic Mode of Production,” which is composed of two essays, uses the findings of the Russian agronomist Chayanov (who wrote in the 1920s) to explain what governs the intensity of work-life of household groups in different tribal and peasant economies. He shows that labor intensity is generally inversely proportional to the ratio of productive to non-productive labor. Absent external constraint, peasant households do not maximize their economic productivity. Further he shows that the Neolithic revolution was not so much a revolution in productivity as social evolutionists have argued, but one in social organization that led to an increase in human industriousness and fueled the emergence of city-states. This perspective is perhaps helpful in thinking through how industrial capitalism becomes consumer capitalism or how consumer capitalism might become a post-consumer economy. Again, this is an attempt to complexify our understanding of the relationships among environment, culture and economy. “The Spirit of the Gift” offers a reinterpretation of Mauss’ (1990/1924) rationale for the obligatory repayment of gifts found in primitive societies. He suggests that the hau, far from being primarily a sacred principle, as Mauss (1990/1924) argued, is instead a productive principle, grounded in Maori appreciation for the natural productivity of nature. But the gift is also the embodiment of creative activity; it embodies the activity of some definite agents. Thus, circulation is motivated by persons and groups’ desire to reduce or at least moderate their dependence upon the creative power of another as materialized in the gift. Further, we are dealing with a type of society in which individual gain at others’ expense is not envisioned; instead, one gains in honor and prestige as much through others’ failure of generous expenditure as one’s own largesse. Advantage or increase must be acknowledged by a return. Further, and this is crucial, not two, but three parties are involved in the circulation of the gift. The benefit which a second party derives from passing on a gift to a third belongs to the first, original giver, which in much tribal usage is a collective entity that holds resources in trust, ancestors, the “forest,” the clan. The idea that gift exchange entails three parties is something consumer culture theorists have found in intergenerational giving where cherished possessions are transformed into inalienable wealth, that is, things that should be given but not sold (Epp and Price 2010; Curasi, Price and Arnould 2004; Weiner 1992). Curiously, in situations where a third party is clearly engaged in contemporary contexts, that is, the contemporary gift store, where people buy gifts to give to others, the implications of the tripartite structure have not been developed (Sherry, McGrath and Levy 1993). Nor have they in the context of the massive practice of in-store gift returns that follow major holidays. Sadly the entire social systemic aspect of gift systems recognized by sociologists has been rather lost on consumer researchers who have adopted a bilateral exchange logic that obscures these mesolevel systemic dimensions (Sherry 1983). In addition, Sahlins repeats and extends Mauss’ (1990/1924) argument about how reciprocal gift giving maintains peaceful relationships among stateless bands and tribes who have no institutionalized sphere of political life. “On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange” adopts very much Marcel Mauss’ ethnological method. With supporting evidence focused on reciprocity and kinship distance, kinship rank, and wealth drawn from a global ethnographic sample, Sahlins shows how different forms of exchange express social distance: to each social relationship is attached a permissible mode of circulation and exchange. But the ethnographic detail, though perhaps exotic and even outdated, alerts us to the actual complexity of the circulation of things,

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relationships and meanings in our own societies. Consumer culture theorists have elaborated these ideas (Bradford 2009; Marcoux 2009). This essay contains the famous formulation of generalized, balanced and negative reciprocity, with Sahlins showing that cross-culturally there is in inverse relationship between our sense of mutual implication with others and the dominant logic of exchange between us. There is much of interest in this formulation. First, generalized reciprocity is evident not only as a mechanism that creates, maintains and symbolizes close ties, but it is often extended to relative strangers as found in acts of charity to strangers or even in random acts of courtesy; in crowdfunded projects when the latter fail; and apparently in Reddit’s online Secret Santa exchange, to name a few. “Gifts make friends” as Sahlins (1972, p. 186) says; the gesture of giving always contains the potential for further sociality. Balanced reciprocity is also paradoxical, since, as Caplow (1982) and others (Cheal 1988) studying contemporary gift giving in Euro-American contexts have noted, partners are inclined to seek for what they can count as a rough equivalency; this of course, being culturally determined rather than subject to standard accounting principles. On the other hand, theoretically balanced reciprocity resembles market exchange in that it could be self-liquidating if people did in fact resort to auditing these exchanges in search of true equivalency. Consequently in consumer culture as Cheal (1988) points out, the ritual cycle of gift transactions provides a recurring sequence of opportunities to celebrate mutual affection and the continuity of interpersonal attachments through invented rites that affirm the maintenance of social bonds, which perhaps helps account for the otherwise curious persistence of quasi-religious holidays in secular contexts, the acceptance of so-called Hallmark holidays, and diffusion of Christmas gift giving to non-Christian cultural contexts. And finally there is negative reciprocity, which Sahlins himself glosses as “chicanery,” and some equate with self-interested market maximizing. But there are problems here. First, it has been shown in “pure” market contexts as diverse as fine art auctions and financial trading floors that these are infused with the other two exchange principles. Second, a better example of negative reciprocity is, in fact, the gift that admits no return as seen in some potlatch examples and in some contemporary “charitable” giving, which in fact is much the same thing. As stated earlier, the gift that admits of no return is a truly anti-social action, an act of violence that places the recipient in a permanently dependent position vis-à-vis the giver. Sahlins’ work on reciprocity has some weaknesses. First, it loses the perspective, as Mauss (1990/1924) did not, that non-Western societies are not the sediment of transacting individuals but the product of social relations among groups in which individuals may not have appeared except as representatives of groups. Second, Sahlins pays almost no attention to the variable relationship between money and gift giving. Third, things have neither biography nor agency in Sahlins’ treatment, as we now recognize they do; here they are mere counters in circulatory movements. Finally, of course, not only does he ignore production but also consumption in favor of distribution or circulation. A later book corrects some of these weaknesses.

Culture and practical reason The second early book that CCT scholars should know is a continuation of the themes initiated in the earlier text in pursuing the critique of the utilitarian presuppositions in North American social theory. The first part of the book is a reflection on two ideas of the nature of culture, a culturological idea of culture that is Maussian, Boasian, Douglasian and Geertzian

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in character and a practical idea of culture, a kind of reactive, utilitarian functionalism that explains cultural phenomena in terms of some other teleology, for example, functional utility or adaptive superiority (Hau n.d.). As Sahlins positions himself within a culturalist camp, his main opponent is utility theory and specifically the presumption that culture is the product of individuals pursuing their selfinterest through rational actions (Sahlins 1976, p. vii). Instead, as against both utilitarianism and certain tendencies in American anthropology at the time (Leopold Pospisil, Harold Schneider, Julien Stewart, Marvin Harris), Sahlins argues that although there is a materialist “base” for cultural difference, the quality of culture is such that it always adapts to these environmental opportunities and constraints through specific cultural schemes. Given cultural schemes are never the only ones possible, never determined exclusively by material forces (Sahlins 1976, p. viii). This is an important point in the critique of globalization of consumption seen as McDonaldization (Ritzer 2009), for example. Instead, Sahlins argues that the material causes must be the product of a symbolic system of meaningful values, since the general determinations of purposeful material action are always subject to the specific formulations of culture (Sahlins 1976, p. 57). Moreover, since culture is a symbolic system, symbolic systems maintain a fundamental autonomy of material factors. And although the dominant discourse in (Western) society proclaims the teleogical finality of material rationality, our cultural apparatus is hidden behind the experience of bourgeois subjectivity, the individually differentiated organization of consumption for hedonic satisfactions. For Sahlins, utility values are differential cultural values, not determinants of the cultural order. Of special interest to students of consumption are some 30 pages, La Pensee Bourgeoise, that contain the scholar’s ruminations about food, color and clothing preferences in the contemporary United States. Echoing early Baudrillard (this volume, Chapter 23), he suggests these systems of objects exemplify a structural logic and cultural continuity that operates independently of functional necessity. By focusing on the semiotic dimensions of the objects people value, Sahlins makes the telling point that production is itself a system of cultural intentions, as he illustrates by reference to food and fashion. A preference for cow versus horse meat has nothing to do with scarcity, for example, but with the position of cows and horses in a system of cultural classification. One of the pithy arguments he makes here is that what we call the economy can be thought of as the “organizing instance” of market society, as is kinship in stateless societies or sacred kingship in ancient empires. And like all organizing instances it imposes an order of meanings. Utility, he says, is a candidate for its core symbol, something we see expressed in a host of marketing tactics; perhaps most concisely in the single word “Sale.” Scarcity, one of the supposed natural motors of economic activity too, he argues, is socially constructed although his examples are rather artificial. However we can see scarcity manufactured all the time, the “hottest” is also the hard to find, to access, to duplicate or to purchase. Commodities he points out, as will be no news today in consumer culture theory, are organized as orders of symbolic difference. And perhaps more boldly, he argues that people in turn are organized by these orders of things; again, no news today to those familiar with the concept of consumer tribes (Shankar, Cova and Kozinets 2011). The market economy constantly charts new territories of differences (as he says, fashion is custom in the guise of a departure from custom). Expanding on the nature of things, Sahlins offers the following argument: first, that fashioning products always renders material a symbolic conception. And systematic variation in objective features of such products is the medium of a vast and dynamic conceptual scheme,

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in part, he says, because each difference is developed with a view toward the master symbol, “utility” (made in Brittany, new and improved, now with Açai, now without transfats; 20% off, organic, fairly traded, handmade, etc.). By the systematic arrangement of meaningful differences assigned to concrete commercial things, the cultural order is realized as an order of goods. Production (consumption) is thus the reproduction of the cultural in a system of objects. Sahlins offers a claim in this text that both assimilates Western societies into the purview of anthropology and identifies it in terms of a compelling distinction from the kinds of societies anthropologists originally set out to understand. And this distinction is simultaneously an invitation to take up consumption as an appropriate topic for anthropological inquiry. His claim is that it is the symbolic constitution of the economy, in contrast to the symbolic constitution of kinship, kingship or religion in other socio-cultural contexts, that is determining the organization of Western society, and that sets “la pensée bourgeoise” apart from “la pensée sauvage,” which preoccupied social scientists like Durkheim (1963), Lévi-Strauss (1966) or Levy-Bruhl (1926).

Later work Much of Sahlins work of the past 30 years has been focused on a twin project of rewriting history culturally and culture historically all the while insisting on the priority of cultural templates for action and interpretation in making sense of history and culture. As he says, What guides my response is a concern to show that commonsense bourgeois realism, when taken as a historiographic conceit, is a kind of symbolic violence done to other times and other customs. I want to suggest that one cannot do good history, not even contemporary history, without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. (Sahlins 1995, p. 14) A critically important work in this regard is his deconstruction of the initial apotheosis, then murder of Captain Cook in Hawaii (1995). He insists that this death makes logical sense on the basis of complex ethnographic evidence involving beliefs about deities as applied to Captain Cook, humans’ relationship to the divine, the ritual calendar, kinship, kingship, political divisions and so on. It thereby contains a critique of the supposed universality of “practical reason,” the presumption of the universality of which would rob cultures of their cultural specificity. He has also been at pains in his later work to reject apocalyptic post-isms that equate the current historical epoch with the death knell of cultural difference as well as the kind of hand wringing post-colonialist identity politics that rejects the possibility of scientific understanding of others’ cultures. In this regard, he likes to point to the fact that despite colonialism, genocide, globalization and global warming, foraging peoples, who we might consider among the most threatened by these phenomena, persist. Thus, culture matters (Sahlins 1993, 1999a, 1999b). Perhaps the most interesting recent work both for scholars and critics of consumer culture appeared in Current Anthropology (Sahlins et al. 1996) and later in book form (2008). It is a culmination of Sahlins’ analysis of Euro-American “native anthropology,” which is to say, those axiomatic elements that infuse popular and social scientific discourse alike. In a nutshell, this is a genealogical analysis of the idea of need.

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Originally, need had distinguished mankind from God’s self-sufficient perfection. Echoing Mauss (1985/1938) in style and substance, and via a long genealogical argument, Sahlins shows how the idea of endless needs is based on a theological idea that need – the need for things as well as for society itself, nothing more than a vehicle of individual need fulfillment – was the outcome of the expulsion from paradise, where we may note neither were there things – Adam and Eve were naked after all – nor society – they were alone with God and his works. Originally understood by the Church Fathers as a form of bondage, each man’s endless and hopeless attention to his own desires became, in the liberal-bourgeois ideology, the condition of freedom itself. (Sahlins et al. 1996, p. 397) Sahlins expands, The original evil and source of vast sadness in [St.] Augustine, the needs of the body became simply “natural” in Hobbes or at least a “necessary evil” in Baron d’Holbach, to end in Adam Smith or Milton Friedman as the supreme source of social virtue. (Sahlins et al. 1996, p. 398) Thus, Western philosophy and social thought turns necessity into virtue, need becomes the alpha and omega of human motivation. In his argument Sahlins provides ammunition to those critics of consumer culture theory’s celebratory examination of the uses of consumption in identity work or community building as of a piece with liberal discourse of considerable historical depth. But at the same time, he shows that the critique of consumption excess descends from an older strand of the same Judeo-Christian ideology that can be found in St. Augustine and the medieval church fathers. Sahlins et al. takes up another matter in this paper, namely, the perceived biological determinism underlying the way things appear to be in consumer culture. For it appears “in people’s existential awareness, cultural forms of every description are produced and reproduced as the objects or projects of their corporeal feelings” (1996, p. 401). In other words, “In our subjective experience, culture is an epiphenomenon of an economy of the relief of bodily aches,” (ibid.) that is our desires conceived of as based in our physiology, a position re-articulated both in consumer culture theory (Belk, Ger and Askegaard 2003) and evolutionary consumer psychology. And again Sahlins is quick to point out that this conception is linked to the long-standing Judeo-Christian belief in the divided and opposed aspects of selfhood, the animalist body and the soulful, spiritual intellect. Not only that but it appears in some of the new evolutionary psychology as if God, the original Invisible Hand and its operationalization competition, has been supplanted by Nature, and its operationalization, natural selection. Parenthetically, here Sahlins continues a conversation begun by Mauss (1985/1938), who while pointing to the contribution of Christianity to the Western conception of selfhood rather glossed over the specifically oppositional construction of the pan human recognition of a distinction, but not an opposition, between body and . . . something else (Sahlins et al. 1996, p. 402). In any event, one of Sahlins’ concluding points in his deconstruction of the ideas of biological determinism of culture and the supposed innateness of consumer needs is that “the

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critical discovery of anthropology has been that human needs and drives are indeterminate as regards their object because bodily satisfactions are specified in and through symbolic values – and variously so in different cultural-symbolic schemes” (Sahlins et al. 1996, p. 404). It is this ethnological assertion that should inspire consumer culture theorists in making sense of our many cultures of consumption. Indeed it should impel consumer culture theories toward “a methodological cosmopolitanism: the situation of [consumer culture theory] in and as the series of cultural-ontological variations, which would allow the construction of more adequate ethnographic and interpretive schemata” (Sahlins et al. 1996, p. 425).

Action research Sahlins has been an activist. He is, for example, the inventor of the teach-in at the University of Michigan in 1965 as part of opposition to the Vietnam War. He wrote in opposition to the war in the popular media and visited and wrote about Vietnam. Subsequently, he has written scathingly (and humorously) about the infusion and consequences of neoliberal ideology in higher education (Sahlins 2009). In recent years, Sahlins has taken on The Confucius Institute. The Confucius Institute is an ambitious worldwide project devoted to teaching Chinese language and culture sponsored by the Chinese government. Based on a global investigation, Sahlins shows that the Confucius Institute is a propaganda instrument of the Chinese Communist Party that actively undermines academic integrity and free inquiry into Chinese society and government policies. He has played a significant role in reining in the Institute’s activities (http://apjjf.org/2014/12/46/MarshallSahlins/4220.html). From this pathetically abbreviated review, we can conclude that Sahlins’ career represents an extended defense of the culture concept generally, and an insistence on the preeminence of culture in human biology, ecology, economy, history and politics. His work simultaneously insists on culture as a product and historical process. Finally, he insists human nature is cultural and culture is always a holistic system of semiotic ordering through which humans apprehend the world and their place within it.

References Belk, Russell W., Guliz Ger and Søren Askegaard (2003), The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion, Journal of Consumer Research, 30 (December), 326–351. Bradford, Tonya Williams (2009), Intergenerationally Gifted Asset Dispositions, Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (June), 93–111. Caplow, Theodore (1982), Christmas Gifts and Kin Networks, American Sociological Review, 47 (June), 383–392. Cheal, David (1988), The Gift Economy, New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall. Curasi, Carolyn Folkman, Linda L. Price, and Eric J. Arnould (2004), How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth, Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (December), 609–622. Durkheim, Emile and Marcel Mauss (1963), Primitive Classification, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Epp, Amber M. and Linda L. Price (2010), The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation, Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (February), 820–837. Hau, Mark (n.d.), Producing Culture: A Reading of Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason, http://socanth101.blogspot.dk/2012/02/producing-culture-reading-of-marshall.html Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966), The Savage Mind, Chicago: Chicago University Press.

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Levy-Bruhl, Lucien (2015/1926), How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien (2009), “Escaping the Gift Economy,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (December), 671–685. Mauss, Marcel (1985/1938), A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self, (trans. W. D. Halls) in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes, eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–25. Mauss, Marcel (1990/1924), The Gift: Essay on the Form and Function of Exchange, London: Routledge. Ritzer, George (2009), The McDonaldization of Society, Los Angeles: Pine Forge Press. Sahlins, Marshall (1972), Stone Age Economics, New York: Aldine. Sahlins, Marshall (1976), Culture and Practical Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall (1993), Goodby to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History, The Journal of Modern History, 65 (March), 1–25. Sahlins, Marshall (1995), How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sahlins, Marshall (1999a), What Is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century, Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, i–xxiii. Sahlins, Marshall (1999b), Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 5 (September), 399–421. Sahlins, Marshall (2008), The Western Illusion of Human Nature, Ann Arbor: Prickly Paradigm Press. Sahlins, Marshall (2009), The Conflicts of the Faculty, Critical Inquiry, 35 (Summer), 997–1017. Sahlins, Marshall, Thomas Bargatzky, Nurit Bird-David, John Clammer, Jacques Hamel, Keiji Maegawa and Jukka Siikala (1996), The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology [and Comments and Reply], Current Anthropology, 37 (June), 395–428. Shankar, Avi, Bernard Cova and Robert Kozinets (2011), Consumer Tribes, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Sherry, John F., Jr. (1983), Gift Giving in Anthropological Perspective, Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (September), 157–168. Sherry, John F., Jr., Mary Ann McGrath and Sidney J. Levy (1993), The Dark Side of the Gift, Journal of Business Research, 28 (November), 225–244. Weiner, Annette B. (1992), Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California.

PART IV

System and structuration

10 BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI, OR THE ELEMENTARY MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC FORMS OF PRODUCTION, EXCHANGE AND CONSUMPTION Dominique Desjeux

Bronislaw Malinowski was born in 1884 in Krakow, which today is in Poland, but at the time was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This biographical detail was to play a key part in the life of Malinowski. In fact, after having gained a doctorate in philosophy in Krakow, and then a diploma in chemistry in Leipzig, and later a PhD in science in London, he found himself in Australia in 1914, just at the time when the First World War was breaking out. As an Austrian, he was considered as an enemy and risked prison. He was therefore banned from returning to England. He was finally to be sent to Papua in the Melanesian region, thanks to the support of his English professor and friend, Charles Gabriel Seligman. Between August 1914 and October 1918, he was to have three stays, each lasting between 8 and 12 months, and each time alone, without seeing any Europeans, learning the language of the Trobriand Islanders in the Trobriand Archipelago, which extends 35 km long and 10 km wide to the north-west of New Guinea. This survey was to be the origin of his most famous book, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, published in 1922, which will provide references in order to discuss the immense methodological contribution of Malinowski. It may already be noted that his choice of field was not at all “scientific” in the sense used in the experimental sciences, in which everything has to be controlled to isolate an independent variable in order to explain a phenomenon observed, in vitro, and hence outside of a real situation. Conversely, the anthropological field of Malinowski is in vivo. Nothing is controlled, and everything has multiple causes. He comes without “preconceived ideas” (Malinowski 1922, p. 7) and explains that it is necessary to be able to constantly change one’s point of view. His access to the field therefore comes from a constraint which he was able to transform into an opportunity, as is often the case in anthropological surveys, whether or not they have to do with consumption. Grasping opportunities, allowing oneself to be carried by one’s field, remaining open for the unexpected, for crises, for interruptions in routine, and for details (today people would speak of weak signals) – this is the method utilised and favoured by Malinowski in order to realise “scientific field work” (Malinowski 1922, p. 17). He was to call it “participant observation”. It is an approach centred on the user – or the consumer, to make an

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anachronism with reference to design thinking, which borrowed this idea from anthropology 80 years later. This method represents the great contribution of Malinowski for the anthropological discipline in general, and more particularly in the field of economic anthropology, which takes people and the production of goods as a starting point, travels through their circulation and ends with their consumption or their ostentatious “consummation”.

Participant observation, a survey method centred on the social actors “Participant observation” is a true “ground-breaking innovation” with respect to the anthropological tradition of “travellers’ tales”, the testimonies of missionaries, tradesmen or officials, or scientific expeditions, although some of the latter produce results of great quality, as Florence Weber shows in her book published in 2015, Brève histoire de l’anthropologie. In fact, some observers remain in the field for only a short space of time, or take an a priori interpretative framework as a basis for collecting information from the indigenous population. Others observe from the outside, and hence have a tendency to project their own system of explanation. This equates to “projective causality”, in which the observer attributes to the social actor intentions which he does not know, since he keeps an “etic” point of view of the society which he is observing. All of these limits remain applicable today in numerous marketing studies. The competition between brands has replaced that between Christian denominations. The objective is not to seek to understand the consumer from inside, in other words from an “emic” point of view, but to look for the “horizon of expectation” of the brand, to cite the reception theory of Hans Jauss, in literature and published in 1990, like missionaries in Africa in the 1950 who attempted, through anthropological surveys, to seek “stepping stones” for the Catholic religion in order to spread the latter better. However, one of the great recommendations of Malinowski is to start off from the real life of the “natives”, what would be called their “experience” in marketing today, and hence to take an “emic”, or internal, point of view, even if this term did not exist in 1922 since it only emerged in the 1950s in English. The objective of this debate is not to say that one method is better than another, or that “qualitative” methods are better than “quantitative” methods or vice versa, or that the microscale of observation is more precise than the macroscale, but to say that each section of reality displays different data which are largely invisible with other sections and other methods. It seeks above all to highlight the innovative contribution and the modernity of Malinowski with respect to techniques of collecting information in the field. In his book, he indicates practical rules for an interview by explaining that if an abstract question is used as a point of departure, such as “How do you treat and punish a criminal?” (Malinowski 1922, p. 9) there is likely to be no response, as the question is too abstract. On the other hand, starting off with a case or a concrete situation in order to ask the interviewee’s opinion will be much more effective. This is very far away from methods involving a questionnaire, or from non-directive interviews in which the observer must not become involved in order to avoid biases – methods which forget that life is made up of biases, particularly intercultural biases. The aim of accepting these biases, in other words these differences, is to harvest some tangible stories which make it possible, starting from the “how”, to infer by induction the “why” of the actions which are described.

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This is all the more important since the anthropologist is not an emotionally neutral observer. He observes, participates and feels what Malinowski calls “the full body and blood of actual native life” (Malinowski 1922, p. 14). He is close to the “evenly suspended attention” of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) for psychoanalysis and the “thick description” favoured by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1980s. In order to understand indigenous perceptions and interpretations from within, he recommends learning the language, and not limiting oneself to Pidgin English, the equivalent of Globish (Global English) today, practised in very many international studies in order to carry out interviews. Both Pidgin and Globish are practical for the purpose of communicating simply, but do not make it possible to penetrate into the world of ideas or in the magico-religious imagination as well as that of magic developed by Malinowski, a symbolic logic which is found in all human societies in very varied forms (Malinowski 1922, p. 5). Today, the diversity of fields and the time constraint for the realisation of studies no longer allows all languages to be learnt. The solution lies in working in pairs, with two languages – that of the natives and that of the anthropologist. The insider speaks the local language and that of the anthropologist. He has access to information which is invisible for the anthropologist. The anthropologist brings an external perspective, in order to ask questions which the insider would not think of, because he is too involved in the local culture. In the same way, today, it is not possible to remain for one year in the accommodation of members of the urban middle class, the new object of contemporary anthropology, in order to observe their practices of production, distribution, consumption and reproduction. However, it remains possible to interview them, to film the use that they make of objects which they use in their kitchens, bathrooms or living rooms, and to reconstitute their social system of interaction in the family and in amicable and professional contexts. What is important, beyond time and language, is to keep the inductive method practised by Malinowski, who takes concrete facts as a point of departure and then moves towards theory, as for instance when he makes the link between magic and the Kula.

The Kula, an exchange economy embedded in social interaction and human institutions The Scottish anthropologist James Frazer, author of the famous book The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion (1890), the reading of which was the trigger for the anthropological vocation of Malinowski, writes in the preface of his book for Argonautes: In the present treatise Dr. Malinowski is mainly concerned with what at first sight might seem a purely economic activity of the Trobriand Islanders; but . . . he is careful to point out that the curious circulation of valuables, which takes place between the inhabitants of the Trobriand and other islands, while it is accompanied by ordinary trade, is by no means itself a purely commercial transaction; he shows that it is not based on a simple calculation of utility, of profit and loss, but that it satisfies emotional and aesthetic needs . . . he proves that the trade in useful objects, which forms part of the Kula system, is in the minds of the natives entirely subordinate in importance to the exchange of other objects, which serve no utilitarian purpose whatever. (p. X)

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Kula is therefore considered as an institution which simultaneously has commercial, social and magico-religious dimensions, something which the French anthropologist was to call a “total social phenomenon”. Malinowski therefore shows, from the 1920s onwards, that the economy does not exist in itself. It is embedded in magico-religious practices, to borrow a term used in 1944 by Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), in his great book The Great Transformation. The functioning principle of Kula is relatively simple to explain: it is a form of exchange of goods, of presents, the vaygu’a, which are precious objects, just like the crown jewels, to use the comparison made by Malinowski. They are of two kinds: armbands made of shells which are called mwali, which circulate from the islands on the right to those on the left, and necklaces made of red shells, the soulava, which circulate in the opposite direction. Kula is restricted to men, and among the men it is the chiefs who have the greatest number of partners to exchange with. It is therefore a hierarchic and political system. In 1992 the American anthropologist Annette Weiner, in Inalienable Possessions, showed that there was also an exchange carried out by women at the time of marriage. These exchanges are subject to strict rules, and social codes which are the mark of collectivity. Each object must remain in circulation, they are only temporary possessions, and they circulate in the same direction. They take between two and ten years to go all around the islands. They are prestige items, which remain in the sphere of exchange. They resemble the trophies which are won by a sporting team, but which cannot be kept for more than one year, because they then need to be placed into circulation once again. They are gifts which require equivalent or superior gifts in return. For the Trobriand Islanders, the success of each transaction is attributed to the magical powers of each participant. Kula is therefore an institution which organises the circulation of ceremonial goods which cannot be possessed, except temporarily, nor used for ordinary consumption, but have the primary psychological function of comforting the provisional owner: “to possess vaygu’a is exhilarating, comforting, soothing in itself ” (Malinowski 1922, p. 512). For some anthropologists today Kula also has an implicit function; that of creating political cohesion between all of the clans which share the territory of the Trobriand Islands. Malinowski believed that he had found a general model of the circulation of ceremonial goods. This proved to be accurate. In 1923, Marcel Mauss, in his work The Gift, shows that Kula follows the same logic as the American Indian potlatches, which means “giving” in Chinook, the language of an American Indian tribe on the west coast of America. It is necessary to give and receive, most often in an antagonistic mode, in other words a competitive mode, in order to acquire the greatest social prestige possible. This mechanism of gift and counter-gift is found in numerous countries of Central Africa under the name “tontine”, or even in China under other names. In its form of collective saving, tontine brings to mind the crowdfunding of today. Based on this system of circulation of goods, which has the two characteristics of avoiding utilitarian use and functioning due to a magico-religious dimension, Malinowski was to describe the system of production and logistics which contributed towards the functioning of the Kula based on two principal itineraries. The first itinerary is that of the collective construction of canoes, from the felling of trees up to the introduction of canoes into the water, and including their fashioning. Canoes make it possible for the system of symbolic exchange of gifts to function and to catch the fish required to feed the group. The second itinerary is that of the production of vegetables in gardens, and particularly of yams. This itinerary begins with work in the gardens up to harvesting, and

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then passes through the storage of yams, which have a utilitarian function in food consumption, but which also play an important role in the presentation of the wealth of the chief. This belongs to the area of conspicuous consumption, as already described by the American socioeconomist Thorstein Veblen in 1899, in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class. The itinerary finishes with the kitchen and the various practices of food consumption, both ordinary and festive, which themselves are also often conspicuous. Behind this ethnographic description, we find a double system of circulation of goods which is symbolic and at the same time utilitarian. In fact, Malinowski shows that besides the ceremonial goods which circulate through the Kula and which therefore never enter into the utilitarian circuit, the other goods do not circulate according to clear, watertight boundaries between what is a gift and what constitutes trade: I have on purpose spoken of forms of exchange, of gifts and counter-gifts, rather than of barter or trade, because, although there exist forms of barter pure and simple, there are so many transitions and gradations between that and simple gift, that it is impossible to draw any fixed line between trade on the one hand, and exchange of gifts on the other. (Malinowski 1922, p. 135) This conclusion is highly interesting with regard to contemporary consumption, which also features a double circulation, one commercial and one non-commercial. Certain presents given by the family or close friends, in modern societies, such as perfumes, may remain on display in the living room as a sign of the social bond which unites the members of the family or friends. They may also be used in a utilitarian manner. However, it is more difficult to put them back on sale via direct selling sites on the internet, unlike certain less personal goods such as books or CDs (to take just a few examples from a survey carried out in France and in Brazil). It is this permanent transition between utility and the ceremonial, the monetary and the non-monetary, which shows that to a great extent the economy is embedded in social life, in institutions which participate in the social construction of value and which, in this sense, are opposed to theories which postulate the natural existence of a market functioning independently of society, as readers of Adam Smith may lead us to believe. Malinowski genuinely presents to us a theory which puts in place the elementary structure of the economy, in other words an economy embedded in logistical processes, material cultures, social interactions and collective symbols.

Magic and day-to-day life, or the early roots of modern advertising and marketing The second most important conclusion made by Malinowski is as follows: “All the data which have been so far mustered disclose the extreme importance of magic in the Kula” (Malinowski 1922, p. 304). In order to speak about magic, he refers (Malinowski 1922, p. 514) to the work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss on the manna published in 1902 under the title “A General Theory of Magic”. Magic is at the heart of the thought of the Trobriand Islanders. Each stage of the process of production or exchange is associated with an incantation, a ritual which makes it possible to overcome the negative forces which weigh on the daily life of the Trobriand Islanders.

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All of the negative events of daily life, sickness, shipwrecks, bad harvests and social conflicts are interpreted as coming from “witchery”. This can be countered by “beneficial magic”. Magic therefore has the function of protecting the sailors or gardeners. It aims to act on human activities favouring good harvests, good fishing or good hunting. The spoken word is at the heart of the effectiveness of magic. Without a spell magic is powerless. The crucial point in order to understand consumption in modern societies is what Malinowski calls a “rite of transference”. In order to make the canoes secure which are going to depart onto the open sea for the circulation of the Kula goods, the ritual consists of striking the canoes with a grass clump. This grass clump is “used to absorb the magical force and to transfer it to the final object” (Malinowski 1922, p. 406). However, this practice also describes the principle according to which marketing through advertisement functions in our modern societies. Advertising functions according to a principle of animist efficacy which entails that the good or service which is to be bought by a consumer possesses an energy, a force, which is supposed to be incorporated in the good, and thanks to which the consumer will acquire beauty, security, a status, a new identity, youth, nature, or a change: in other words, everything which makes up the great imaginations which enchant daily life and give it its sense. Just like the clump of grass which is struck on the canoe of Trobriand Islanders in order to grant them greater effectiveness at sea, advertising causes a good or a service to absorb a magical virtue which is subsequently to be incorporated by the consumers. Moreover, the brand changes the product into a person, as in Catholic consecration, but in an immanent mode. The brand possesses an “identity”. It is necessary to be “faithful” to it. It has an asset of “trust” and makes promises. The good changes its nature. This is transubstantiation in advertising, in other words, the change of an ordinary object into a person with magic qualities. The goal of this comparison is not a criticism of advertising practices, as it is clear that they are situated in the magico-religious and hence involve the production of sense and the imaginary. It shows above all the advantages of the anthropological approach and the modernity of Malinowski in order to understand the sense of modern institutions which produce sense based on competences which come from magical practices, whether we approve or disapprove of them. Magic, just like animism, has not disappeared. They are both part of our modernity. It is in this sense that we can understand the unconventional thought of Bruno Latour and Michel Callon when they describe objects as agents or “network actors”, as advertising transforms consumer goods into persons, that is, agents (see Chapter 24, this volume). As is done in marketing, they pick up the animist mode of thought of (so-called) primitive societies – even if they may deny it in defense of their modernity. Anyway, as Bruno Latour has suggested, “we have never been modern.”

Conclusion In 1944 a book by Malinowski was published posthumously: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. In this he develops his functional approach to culture which is based on two sorts of needs: basic needs, which are individual physiological needs, and derived needs, which are at the origin of great human institutions which organise production, distribution and consumption, and hence the survival of the group. They function thanks to education, morality and religion. For Malinowski, cultural determinism is as powerful as biological determinism. If we take away the biological side, we are not very far away from the effect of imposition which is

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found in the “habitus” of Pierre Bourdieu, as he develops it particularly in his most important book on consumption, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, in 1979. These different needs are also found in the famous pyramid of Abraham Maslow, published in 1943, which is taught in French business schools during their marketing lessons. Some anthropologists will not follow his general functionalist and determinist theory. As often happens, an author is more interesting because of the field which he creates, and the modelling which he produced based on this field (which allows a “limited generalisation” until new surveys can show the benefits and the limits of the generalisation) than because of any general theory which seeks to integrate phenomena often outside the empirical fields which were used to construct the theory. Malinowski is a sensitive and intelligent anthropologist, who was able to take the risk of exposing himself in person to a culture and individuals that were particularly remote from him. He invented a method which enabled him to understand magic from within. He showed the anthropological foundations of the economy. We may also note what he said at the end of his book: “What interests me really in the study of the native is his outlook on things, his Weltanschauung, the breath of life and reality which he breathes and by which he lives” (Malinowski 1922, p. 517). This phrase is all the more resonant spoken by Malinowski, since all the ideals in which he believed had just been trampled on by the war in Europe.

References Frazer, James (1890), The Golden Bow. A Study in Magic and Religion. McMillan. Latour, Bruno (1993), We Have Never Been Modern. Boston: Harvard University Press. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922), Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge. Malinowski, Bronislaw, (1960), A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays, New York: Oxford University Press. Mauss, Marcel (1972/1902), A General Theory of Magic, (trans. R. Brain), London and New York: Routledge. Mauss, Marcel (1990), The Gift: Essay on the Form and Function of Exchange. London: Routledge. Polanyi, Karl (1944), The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Veblen, Thorstein (1899), A Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The Modern Library. Weber, Florence (2015), Brève histoire de l’antrhopologie. Paris: Flammarion. Weiner, Annette (1992), Inalienable possessions. The Paradox of Keeping While Giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

11 CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS AND THE STRUCTURAL FABRIC OF MEANING Benoît Heilbrunn

The importance of Claude Lévi-Strauss on philosophy and social sciences is rather a strange phenomenon in the history of ideas. Although he often claimed he wanted to break with his philosophical background, he is one of the only anthropologists that really inspired philosophers (such as Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Ricoeur), semiotic theorists (such as Greimas and Barthes), psychoanalysts such as Lacan, and other renowned scholars (such as Foucault, Serres and Althusser) (Hénaff, 1998, 2006). Born in 1908 in Brussels, he studied law and philosophy at the Sorbonne and passed the agregation of philosophy in 1932. From 1935 to 1938 he taught at the University of Sao Paulo and conducted field work in central Brazil (among the Nambikwara and the Bororo). He then settled in the United States, passing the war in exile in New York where he met (and became friends with) Roman Jakobson. After three years of teaching at the New School for Social Research (1942–45), he returned to Paris where he taught at Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes and the College de France (where he was appointed for the chair of Social Anthropology in 1960). The mid-fifties was a turning point in the history of structuralism. In 1955, Lévi-Strauss published Tristes Tropiques, which was a tremendously popular success. This book, which is an account of his anthropological work of the Amazon, focuses on the discovery of the otherness of the Other. Describing the customs and systems of thought of the peoples he encountered, it reflects on how their differences illuminate the position and the culture of the observer. At about the same time, Roland Barthes publishes monthly analyses of contemporary cultural objects (from advertisements to cars) as myths of modern culture. His essays are collected in 1957 under the title Mythologies, which is a substantial theoretical essay describing a structuralist analysis of cultural signification. Barthes was to push his structuralist investigation further with The Fashion System (which was intended to be the PhD dissertation that Lévi-Strauss refused to supervise). At the end of the fifties, Lacan would publish his Ecrits, which clearly bear the mark of a structuralist influence. Lévi-Strauss’s major works include The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Tristes Tropiques (1955), Structural Anthropology (1958) and The Savage Mind (1962).

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The Maussian heritage Lévi-Strauss would not have been Lévi-Strauss without the major influence of Marcel Mauss and on the reverse Lévi-Strauss played a very important role in the building up of Mauss’s recognition. The original article of Mauss on the gift published in 1923–24 in the journal L’année sociologique gained a tremendous recognition after it was included in a book called Sociology and Anthropology in 1950 (Mauss, 1990). The anthology had a very important foreword by LéviStrauss, often considered to be the manifesto of structuralism. Lévi-Strauss demonstrates in this now famous text that as it was the case with phonology for linguistics, The Essay on the Gift (1990:1924) opens a new era for the human sciences. This text also symbolizes a new era for Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of matrimonial systems and more generally for the development of the Lévi-Straussian project, which is organized around the idea of exchange with a recurrent question: Why do groups exchange? Why must groups give their sisters and daughters to others, rather than keeping them for themselves? The answer is that by giving your sisters or daughters to others, you create networks of social relationships, since the rule of reciprocitiy compels others to give you an equal return. That is why the things distributed are clues to the nature of the social structural relationship of exchanges. The study of kinship convinced Lévi-Strauss that he was dealing with a domain in which there exist a finite number of formative elements and that can be modelled because the relationship between these elements is invariant across different systems. In other words, all systems of kinship are subject to certain universal constraints, which is the basis of the model called the “atom of kinship”. The basic element of kinship is not biological as traditional anthropology stated. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated that culturally the elementary group consists of a man, a woman and a representative of the group that gives the woman in marriage. One thus arrives at a general representation that includes relations of alliance between givers and receivers of wives. The man and woman couple is therefore a feature of alliance and can be understood as a system having not two terms but three: husband, wife and giver. This system illustrates the obligation of reciprocity and, in fact, constitutes one of the essential forms of the gift-giving relationships that Mauss had described in his The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. This leads to radical reinterpretation of the prohibition against incest, which in a Lévi-Straussian perspective becomes a social obligation to give and receive that serves as the foundations of exogamy, which may be codified in particular rules by different types of social organizations.

The linguistic turn of the structuralist project The analysis of matrimonial systems which constituted Lévi-Strauss’s dissertation led the way to a new way of doing anthropology largely influenced by structuralism. The term “structuralism” was coined by the Russian linguist and literary theorist Roman Jakobson in 1920 to describe the modern tendency to consider any set of phenomena not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and to take as the basic task to reveal the inner laws of this system. As Piaget later explained, structuralism should be contrasted with the “atomistic tendency to reduce wholes to their prior elements” (Piaget 1970, 4). But Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is particular in the sense it is entirely based on the seminal idea that theoretical work in anthropology needed to look to linguistics and in particular to phonology for inspiration. Moreover, the whole set of questions relating to language and the social sciences had to be

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considered as belonging to a much larger project that could be understood as a general theory of communication (Culler, 2006, 589). His program was largely influenced on the one hand by the Roman Jakobson’s seminars he attended in New York in the late forties and early fifties but also by a new field of research on artificial intelligence, complex systems and related topics that were to constitute the discipline of cognitive science. Two innovative books of the period had a great influence on his thought: The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour (1944) by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern, and Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) by Norbert Wiener. Lévi-Strauss was also influenced by the theoretical views of Franz Boas. Boas discussed the way in which each language and each culture provide systems of classification of persons, time, space but also colors, plants, birds and relatives (Boas, 1911, 67). Unconscious structures became a key idea in Lévi-Strauss’s method of analysis. As he notes, first structural semiotics shifts from the study of conscious linguistics phenomena to study their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system . . . finally, structural linguistics aims at the discovery of general laws. (Lévi-Strauss, 1963a, 33) The great idea of Lévi-Strauss was to apply the theoretical framework of linguistics to the analysis of culture. Structural linguistics, from which structuralism derives, was developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his posthumously published, Course in General Linguistics (1916). He insists that to understand language, analysts must concentrate not on the historical study of relations between languages, which had preoccupied linguists in the nineteenth century, but on the analysis of a language. For structuralism, the object of analysis is not the utterances that might be collected but the underlying system, a set of formal elements defined in relation to each other, and their rules of combinations. The focus is thus on the language (la langue) rather than on the speech (la parole). Transferred to material objects, this means that to understand pieces of clothes like ties is to treat them as signs and to look both for the distinctions that enable them to have meaning and for their function in the general system of the grammar of clothes (Culler, 1975, 113). This is the linguistic turn in the sense Lévi-Strauss saw structural linguistics as embodying the model per excellence of his approach (Hénaff, 2006, 590). There exists at the level of observable data (kinships, rites, narratives of origin, modes of cooking, styles of dress, arts and all form of plastic expressions) patterns of organization, an inherent logic, which means systems of objective relations called structures, which constitute the conditions under which meaning is possible. That is why Lévi-Strauss goes against the Sartrian idea that the subject would confer meaning on an opaque object by a sovereign gesture. Intelligibility exists for an individual (or a community) precisely because it is part and parcel the world of objects to begin with. In other worlds, subjective meaning can only exist because objective truth exists (Hénaff, 2006, 591).

Reconfiguring totemism and myths Lévi-Strauss’s work progressively moves away from the study of relatively concrete social structures (such as kinship structures) towards that of more intangible symbolic systems such as totemism and myths. The main postulate of structural anthropology is that to study a

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language is to analyze its structure and to describe a linguistic system which consists of relations rather than substance. In anthropology, structuralism insists on the reconstruction of underlying systems (of kinships, of totemic and mythic thought) through which a culture orders the world. In his four volumes of Mythologiques (Introduction to a Science of Mythology), Lévi-Strauss relates myths to one another so as to identify the contrasts they deploy and the way in which they rely on a set of binary oppositions – such as raw versus cooked, fresh versus decayed, sun versus moon – to work out their stories. Beyond the variability of the myth and more generally of cultural forms, there would be a vast system of underlying regularities (Culler, 2006, 114). This structural approach proved very efficient to reconsider the ancient and controversial problem of totemism. Before him, totemism was systematically analyzed through a term-by-term correspondence between aspects of the human world and of the natural world. Levi-Strauss showed that the controversy of totemism was in fact a false problem. Totemism is nothing other than a way of establishing and expressing differences between human beings using distinctions existing among animals or things. Thus, this is not a matter of persons and things resembling each other but the question of resemblance relates to differential relations among them. His analysis of myths follows the same path. According to Lévi-Strauss, myths constitute a complex expression of forms of thought specific to one or several cultures (and refer to an empirical corpus of material that is particular by definition). But they also reveal mental processes that may be found in all cultures. Therefore, the interpretation of myths cannot be purely functionalist (looking beyond the mythic account for a unique motivation) or symbolic (looking for a universal interpretation). A mythical account holds no interest in and of itself. The purpose of myths is to construct a representation of the world. Through the classification of sensible elements, it becomes possible to establish a symbolic order of both things and people and to exercise the logical faculties of the mind (opposition, symmetry, contradiction, disjunction, etc.). In The Raw and the Cooked (1964, part of his Mythologiques), he traces a series of narrative inversions that show that a Bororo myth about the origin of rainwater is in fact a transformation of a group of myths told by a neighboring Gé population, about the origin of fire.

What structuralism is not Structuralism starts from the basic insight that social and cultural phenomena are not physical and events but objects with meaning, and that therefore analysis should focus on the structures and oppositions that enable them to have meaning. By rejecting causal analysis, structuralism focuses on the internal structure of cultural objects and on the underlying structures that make them possible. Structuralism thus involves the attempt to spell out explicitly what members of a culture know without knowing it: the very structure that underlies cultural practice and makes possible, for instance, people’s judgement about what is ordinary strange, meaningful or meaningless. The identity of structure does not come from some essential core but from difference and contrast. Therefore structuralism implies a new understanding of the idea of truth. It goes beyond the classical or speculative way of thinking, which holds that the purpose of thinking is to define concepts and procedures capable of distinguishing between true and false judgements. On this view, the question of truth is seen as having to do with the validity of statements and ontological questions depends on logical assertions. Such a style of thinking characterized as rationalist usually takes mathematics as its model. By contrast with this tradition is a style of thinking called Romantic, which considers meaning

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as prior to truth. This means that truth is manifested and experienced through figures and events that can be understood as messages from a divine sender to mortal recipients. To grasp such a message is to understand its meaning and to acknowledge its objectivity, which means its truth. This gave rise in the nineteenth century to radical philosophies such as Karl Marx’s critique of history, Sigmund Freud’s critique of the subject and Nietzsche’s critique of truth itself (Hénaff, 2006, 590). The phenomenological turn then introduced the idea of a transcendental field of subjectivity on the basis of immediate conscious experience. This means reducing objects of sense-perception and acts of consciousness to their essence, expressed in value assertions about the world. Thus, phenomenology is viewed by Edmund Husserl as a descriptive analysis of essences in general. Phenomenology offers a way to escape the meaning/truth dilemma and also to reconcile the promise of uniting historical and cultural experience with the discipline of exact knowledge (mathematics and the natural sciences). This reconciliation makes it possible to move from shared experience to objective criteria. The intrusion of structuralism then introduced a major disruption with these assumptions. The discovery of structural linguistics persuaded philosophers that the expression and comprehension of speech is only possible because speakers unconsciously produce and recognize integrated units and syntactic forms. In other words language has an autonomous functioning and meaning is only possible by virtue of the existence on a deeper level of an objective process of differentiation – a system of relationships in which the subject counts for nothing, but without which the subject could neither speak nor be understood by others. Therefore there would be an intelligible order of things that allows the subject to confer meaning on those things. The work of Lévi-Strauss is fundamental because, for the first time, the main features of culture (systems of kinships, mythical accounts, etc.) could be rigorously analyzed without reference to hermeneutics. He demonstrated that, at the level of observable data (rites, narratives of origin, modes of cooking), there existed patterns of organization and an inherent logic. In other words, systems of objective relations called structures constitute the conditions under which meaning is possible. That is the reason why, to understand structuralism, it seems important to contrast it with several other approaches (Culler, 2006, 111): •

•

•

•

Structuralism contrasts with atomism which attempts to explain phenomena in terms of individual essences: everything is what it is by virtue of contrasts of differences within a system. Identity is a matter of relations; Structuralism contrasts with phenomenology, which is the description of how things appear to consciousness. Structuralism focusses on unconscious structures, systems of relations that operate through subjects and work to constitute subjects but are not necessarily accessible to them; Structuralism contrasts with hermeneutics which is a method of interpretation. Structural analysis seeks to understand the conditions of meaning and it takes the cultural meaning of objects and events as points of departure, as what requires explanations, whereas hermeneutics seeks to discover the “true” meaning of a text or cultural phenomenon; Structuralism contrasts with Marxism that treats language and culture as a “superstructure” determined by a material base (the class relations involved in the system of economic production). Structuralism sees superstructure of culture not as direct reflections of economic relations but as forms with a relative autonomy that themselves determine the parameters within which human beings live and act;

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And finally, structuralism is not a humanism that makes some version of the “human” a principle of explanation. It does not explain phenomena by referring to “human nature” or the “nature of man” or to individuality. All these notions are rather viewed as cultural formations that require analysis.

The mytho-poetical dimension of bricolage Structuralism opens up many methodological insights that could prove very fruitful when investigating consumption practices and other aspects of cultures of consumption. The precondition is, however, the acceptance of a conception of meaning which is anything but subjective and that goes far beyond individuals’ wants and desires. That is why structuralism has often been accused of being an anti-humanism where individual actors have no role in the process of producing meaning. The saying “structures do not take to the street” addressed to LéviStrauss in 1968 (see Dosse, 1997), is a reproach that encapsulates best the ideological stance underlining the capacity of individual agents to develop a high degree of autonomy as regards their opinions, choices and trajectories. Of course such movements as “consumers’ resistance” are not necessarily compatible with a structuralist conception of consumption. Anyhow, there is a high level of sensitivity in the work of Lévi-Strauss who was always fascinated by music and poetry. One of the last books from the man, who was often described as the “poet in the laboratory”, is called Look, Listen, Read (Lévi-Strauss, 1998). This raises an important question as regards consumption in particular. This question is about the degree(s) of freedom left to the individual if one accepts such a modelling of social and cultural phenomena. Lévi-Strauss showed increased interest in the functioning of the mind, in particular in its engagement in the production of symbolic systems of all kinds. This is another way of saying interest in the mind engaged in creative processes; hence, the opening up of the relevance of his writings to other fields such as aesthetics and poetics. Consequently, he demonstrates an interest in a wild mode of thought at the heart of cultural creation, something which is founded on an exploration of our sensory environment and which takes at its basis what structural anthropology calls “concrete logic” or “logic of sensible properties”. Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, first formulated in The Savage Mind, was originally presented as an analogy for how mythical thought works, selecting the fragments or leftovers of previous cultural formations and re-deploying them in new combinations. Significantly, from its source in structural anthropology, the concept has travelled in two directions, towards both the sciences (molecular biology and evolutionary theory) and the humanities (art criticism and critical theory). The original formulation of bricolage is a technical metaphor that came to transcend its status as simply a metaphor to become a universal concept. Lévi-Strauss starts with an opposition between the bricoleur and the engineer showing that bricolage is an ideological construct which carries with it a set of suppositions about the nature of science and technology in the postwar world. As Lévi-Strauss reminds us, the term bricoleur originally implies a notion of difference, namely that the bricoleur is essentially one who, much like a skilled artist, uses means diverted from other uses. Bricolage is also, according to Lévi-Strauss, the essence of mythical thought; in that it induces an ability to speak with a limited repertoire whose composition is disparate. There is therefore an essentially mytho-poetical character to bricolage. Bricolage is primarily a “μυϕος,” that is to say, a practice that refers to a narrative trajectory (it takes place over a span of time), but it also implies a ποιειν (“poiein”, “doing”) by which the individual produces an

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object using disparate elements. Unlike an engineer, a bricoleur is one who makes things “on a shoestring”, that is to say, plans his project with the aid of a finite set of materials and disparate tools he is constrained to use. He works within a “closed instrumental world” and subjects his project to items at hand, unlike the engineer, whose tools and materials are newly designed according to each of his projects. Thus, the bricoleur is using what is already “semi-customized,” that is to say, elements that are by nature reserved for “a specific and determined task”; all of the bricoleur’s play involves only using this half-constraint as a freedom, by reorganizing the functional value of each element via the definition of new relationships between the system components he has available. Bricolage is somehow creating a sense of purpose by the meaningful reorganization of relationships between pre-constrained elements. The idea of bricolage may be extended to the forms of poaching illustrated by Michel de Certeau. Both poaching and bricolage are obvious consumer tactics inducing another form of exchange and an aesthetic of blows, which is a way to reject the order established by law, meaning or fatality. This is why consumption is a gigantic bricolage of signs and meanings through which individuals are able to produce narratives about themselves and to give a meaning to their life which is simultaneously cultural and individual.

References Barthes, Roland, (1983), The Fashion System, Berkeley, University of California (1967). Boas, Franz, (1911), The Mind of the Primitive Man, New York: Mac Millan. Culler, Jonathan (2006), “Structuralism”, in Lawrence Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia History of TwentiethCentury French Thought, New York: Colombia University Press, 110–6. Culler, Jonathan (1975), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, London: Routledge. Dosse, François (1997), History of Structuralism, 2 vols., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hénaff, Marcel (2006), “Claude Lévi-Strauss”, in Lawrence Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, New York: Colombia University Press, 588–94. Hénaff, Marcel (1998), Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lacan, Jacques (2006), Ecrits, New York: Norton, (1966). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1998), Look, Listen, Read, New York: Basic Boks, (1993). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969–81), Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 4 vols., New York: Harper & Row, (1964–71). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1969), The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Boston: Beacon Press, (1949). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1966), The Savage Mind, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, (1962). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1964), The Raw and the Cooked, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, (1969). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963a), Structural Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, (1958). Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1963b), Tristes Tropiques, New York: Atheneum, (1955). Mauss, Marcel (1990), The Gift: Essay on the Form and Function of Exchange, London: Routledge (1924). von Neumann, John and Morgenstern, Oscar (1944), The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour: Princeton: Princeton University Press. Piaget, Jean (1970), Structuralism, New York: Basic Books, (1968). Saussure, Ferdinand de, (1959), Course in General Linguistic, New York: Philosophical Librairy (1916). Wiener, Norbert (1948), Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

12 TALCOTT PARSONS: STRUCTURAL FOUNDATIONS FOR CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY Melanie Wallendorf

The work of Talcott Parsons is not currently in vogue in sociology, and yet, it represents an important moment in the development of contemporary sociological thinking. Contemporary cultural sociology has taken a particular form as a result of its emergence out of resistance to Parsonian structural-functionalism. To understand the historical significance of cultural sociology’s current focus on agency and its exercise within structure, one needs a solid grounding in Parsonian theory about social structure from which contemporary cultural sociology emerged. Postmodernist sociological theories arose out of a critique of the progressive modernism of sociological theories of the mid-20th century such as that of Talcott Parsons. Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist who was born in 1902 and died in 1979 at the age of 75, after serving on the faculty of Harvard University for 45 years. After his graduate work at the London School of Economics and then at the University of Heidelberg, he began his academic career as an instructor in economics at Harvard. In 1931, he shifted from the economics department to become an inaugural faculty member in the Department of Sociology with Carle Zimmerman and Pitirim Sorokin. In 1945, he established the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations, along with psychologists Gordon Allport and Henry Murray and anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. Thus, although he was an eminent sociologist in his day, Parsons was interdisciplinary in both his educational background and in the eclectic group of social science scholars he surrounded himself with to nurture his work’s breadth of applicability. His interdisciplinary influence is also reflected in the impressive range of doctoral students he worked with. He chaired the dissertations of Robert Bellah, Kingsley Davis, Harold Garfinkel, Edward Laumann, Robert Merton, Neil Smelser, and Morris Zelditch, to name just a few, and also taught and mentored Clifford Geertz in the Department of Social Relations from which Geertz graduated (see Chapter 7 on Geertz in this volume.) Parsons was first introduced to the work of Max Weber during his graduate work at the University of Heidelberg where he studied German scholarship on capitalism. Early in his career, even before taking the Harvard faculty position, Parsons was the first to translate Weber’s classic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, from its original German into English. The translation was published in 1930, and continued to be a strong influence on Parsons throughout his career. (See Chapter 4 in this volume on Max Weber.)

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Reading Parsons’ work is not an easy task. He wrote at a very high level of abstraction without a basis in empirical research, and used a dense prose style that was difficult to understand, even for his contemporaries. Further, he constantly revised his ideas, so it is not impossible to find incompatibilities between some of his earlier and his later works. Nonetheless, Parsons set a lofty goal for his life’s work, attempting to form a “general theory of action” that would detail the concepts that were the foundational determinants of human action, and the relations among them. From a contemporary perspective, his theory seems taxonomic and static. But it organized a conception of social structure in ways that provided a foundation for later sociological theory that could focus on human agency and structural change, such as emerged in American society during the 1960s and early 1970s (Parsons 1956, 1966; Parsons and Smelser 1956). Since Parsons thought that the study of social change was impossible until the morphology of social structure was detailed, he first turned his attention to providing a systems theory of action that would explain how large social systems organize voluntary action. This was an important scholarly task because at the time (the 1940s and early 1950s), much of the world was in disrepair following World War II, and attempts were underway to rebuild physical and social structures. From 1948 to 1952, the United States alone spent $13 billion (approximately equal to $130 billion today) on the Marshall Plan (formally, the European Recovery Plan) to help rebuild the economies of Western Europe. Britain was no longer the colonial power it was before the war; for instance, India gained independence in 1947. Britain had learned the hard way that it could no longer manage the development of its colonies primarily to benefit the colonizer. Key questions at the time were: What are the key components of a stable society, whether it is England, India, Japan, or the United States? How are those components linked together in a system? How does a society evolve, change, and develop? What ensures that a society will maintain sufficient stability? Parsons’ background prepared him to address those questions; given his education in economics, Parsons was interested in the economy as an integral part of the social system. Parsons proposed that over time the general action system that structures voluntary human action differentiates into a hierarchy of four action systems. These four action systems are the organismic, personality, social, and cultural systems. In the preface to his 1951 book The Social System, Parsons notes that his ideas about the personality system were shaped by his interactions with his psychologist colleagues Allport and Murray, his ideas about the cultural system were shaped by his interactions with the Kluckhohns who were both anthropologists, and his ideas about the organismic system were based on his reading of the work of Sigmund Freud, trained as a medical doctor. (See Chapter 30 in this volume on Sigmund Freud.) The cultural system is postulated to be highest and the organismic system lowest in what is termed the cybernetic hierarchy. Higher-order systems control the information available to lower-order systems, and lower-order systems provide the energetic conditions for those above. Parsons saw the organismic, personality, and cultural systems as the environments within which the social system operates. The behavioral organism is the physical body of the human species. Parsons uses the term behavior rather than action for this system to indicate that behavior within this system may not be intentional or voluntary. The personality system of the individual is Parsons’ acknowledgement of the operation of psychological mechanisms in producing action. The social system, the system comprised of interactions among humans, is what sociology and Parsons are most interested in (hence, his book’s title), but he asserted that it is essential to understand how the

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social system is aligned with and is shaped by the other systems in its environment. The cultural system is a system of symbols that have meaning for actors within that culture. Each action system has a different unit of analysis and serves a different purpose. The physical body and its physical environment is the unit of analysis in the organismic system, which provides boundaries for action. Individuals are the unit of analysis in the personality system, which motivates the individual to find personal fulfillment or profit maximization that fits within that person’s needs and attitudes. Role interactions are the unit of analysis in the social system, which motivates role occupants to perform those roles appropriately. Meanings transmitted through socialization are the unit of analysis for the cultural system, which maintains social control. In his 1951 book The Social System, Parsons proposed a set of five pattern variables or dichotomies to characterize fundamental patterns prevalent in either Gemeinschaft or Gesellschaft societies. The first set of pattern variables, particularism versus universalism, was used to assess whether an evaluation or action is undertaken because of the particular relation between actors or because it applies universally to all actors in that role. Affectivity versus affective neutrality refers to the appropriate amount of emotion to express within a particular relation. Diffuseness versus specificity refers to how often the social relations that an actor has in one role overlap with the relations created by that actor’s other roles. In Gemeinschaft societies, any two actors are likely to be connected via many different roles, while in Gesellschaft societies, the relation between any two actors is likely to pertain only to very specific roles. The pattern variable Parsons first termed ascription versus achievement was later termed qualities versus performance to designate whether role positions were assigned based on an individual’s characteristics or previous performance. The fifth set of pattern variables, collectivity-orientation versus self-orientation was later dropped in Parsons’ writings. Parsons used the pattern variables in several ways: to explicate the modes of orientation of the personality system, the normative requirements of the social system, and the value patterns of the cultural system. Starting in 1953 in Working Papers in the Theory of Action a coauthored book with Robert Bales and Edward Shils and continuing through the publication of his 1969 book Politics and Social Structure, Parsons replaced the pattern variables with a set of four functions that must be performed by the general action system. This part of his theory is informally referred to by sociologists as A – G – I – L. This set of functions explains how the structure of an action system guides what people do. Thus, it is Parsons’ answer to the question of how the social system structures people’s action so they want to conform to society’s goals and rules. The four functions are 1) adaptation, 2) goal attainment, 3) integration, and 4) latent pattern maintenance. They form a set, each being necessary for the action system to function effectively. Adaptation is necessary so the system can respond to change in its environment. It requires the ability to get resources from the environment and distribute them in a way to address environmental changes effectively. Within the social system, Parsons saw the institution of the economy as serving an adaptive function in its production and distribution of wealth. Goal attainment requires an exercise of power over those resources to assert the priority of particular goals and have them accepted by other actors. Within the social system, Parsons saw the institution of the polity as the realm within which decisions are made about what goals society will work toward and which resources will be allocated to those goals. Integration ensures that conflicts can be resolved without disruption to the system’s longterm cohesion. It involves setting priorities among units through systems of stratification and institutionalizing the means of social control. Within the social system, Parsons saw the

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legal realm as performing this function. Social system integration occurs through laws and rules that enforce actions that produce cohesion even when they do not maximize individual profit or gain. This function controls that which morality doesn’t control. Parsons proposed that common or shared values developed by the cultural system are essential to ensuring integration. Latent pattern maintenance upholds the stability of institutionalized values. It is accomplished through structures that socialize individuals to act in ways that are consistent with existing cultural patterns. The primary institutions engaged in socialization are schools, religious institutions, and the family. Their function is to generate internalized common values that provide the basis for integration without relying on laws or rules. Socialization attempts to get the normative expectations of the society incorporated into the superego or morality structure of the personality system. Parsons refers to pattern maintenance as being latent (Merton 1968), meaning that the agents of socialization are not consciously intending their efforts to ensure stability in the social system. Nor is socialization conducted through deliberate conscious instruction; instead, it is mostly accomplished through modeling. Within the general action system, each of the four action systems specializes in performing one of the four functions as its primary, but not exclusive, function. The behavioral organism specializes in adaptation to environmental change; for example, it helps the physical body adjust to temperature changes through the involuntary behaviors of sweating and shivering. The personality system specializes in orienting individuals toward attaining the goals that they have set. The social system organizes the integration of action units, or people engaged in particular roles trying to attain their goals. The cultural system specializes in latent pattern maintenance by providing action units with a form of cultural grammar and syntax for action. The social system interacts with each of the other three action systems as part of its environment. Because the cultural system is highest in the cybernetic order, it serves to legitimize the social system. Parsons places religious institutions in the cultural system, and notes their importance in legitimizing the social system. This idea is an extension of Weber’s central thesis that Parsons encountered when he translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The cultural action system ensures the continuity of society by convincing individuals to make moral commitments to society through participation in social institutions such as the family, religion, work groups, and education. Parsons thus locates morality in cultural institutions, not in the individual. To account for societal variation in the relation between the cultural and social systems, Parsons asserts that as the social system becomes increasingly strong, it develops greater independence from the strictures of the cultural system. A second part of the social system’s environment is the personality system. There is a fundamental necessity for the social system to interact with the personality system in a way that gains control of actors’ motivation to meaningfully participate in the social system. Institutions such as the family and schools therefore attempt to ensure that the personality system motivates actors to participate appropriately and effectively in society. To ensure that fair rewards are available for those who meaningfully participate in society, the social system must constitute political institutions that operate in ways that are regarded as equitable. Through the social system’s interaction with the third component of its environment, the behavioral organismic system, it ensures that the physical bodies of individuals are made more capable of working on behalf of society. This is accomplished by encouraging people to develop new skills, including the ability to use technologies that extend the capabilities of

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their physical bodies. The social system also interacts with the behavioral organismic system to ensure that individuals are motivated to apply those skills in a productive way, typically through their roles in economic institutions. To accomplish the four essential functions in this environment, the social system brings together a normative order and a collectively organized population. The normative order includes values and norms. Parsons employs the concept of values, which he regarded as ideals for role relationships and institutions, to connect the cultural and social systems and explain the ends toward which they are oriented. Norms develop to guide behavior in areas of significance given those ends. The collectively organized population is one in which the personality of the individual is brought into the social system through the specification of role positions. Parsons further refines his concepts of values, norms, collectivity, and role by matching them each with a primary function. Values orient action to latent pattern maintenance. Norms integrate actors by regulating the implementation of their value commitments. The collectivity invites actors to attain goals, and then rewards them for doing so. In fulfilling their roles, individuals adapt by making the personality subservient to the demands of the social system. Most of Parsons’ work focuses on articulating structure rather than explaining change. However, later in his career in response to critics, he considered how change occurs. He theorized change as an evolutionary process in which the adaptive capacity is employed. He discussed the division and specialization of labor as an evolutionary process of change to produce greater efficiency. From Parsons’ perspective in the 1950s, contemporary Western social systems’ movement toward greater reliance on achievement than ascription in distributing rewards was an evolutionary change. In Parsons’ work, we see an emulation of Weber’s style in his reliance on ideal types. But the focus on social system stability in Parsons’ work is more resonant of Durkheim’s organic solidarity. This focus on stability rather than dynamism is one feature of Parsons’ work that has been widely criticized by later sociologists. His inattention to agency and creativity as part of social structure set the stage for contemporary cultural sociology’s focus on these concepts. His work has also been criticized for viewing US society through a bourgeois lens as being open, free, socially solid, and pluralistic; this criticism was particularly lively during the tumultuous social changes of the 1960s. The conflict theories of C. Wright Mills and Ralf Dahrendorf were a response to critiques of Parsons’ complete focus on normative consensus and lack of attention to non-normative actions, particularly conflict and the functions it serves. Contemporary sociologist Ann Swidler (1986) uses Parsons’ perspective on values to create a position for her work on culture and how it operates on action. In the lead sentence of her widely cited 1986 ASR article, she characterizes the idea that shared values are the basis for culture’s impact on action as “fundamentally misleading” (p. 273).1 Swidler points out that Parsons’ theory that cultural values direct action toward particular ends misses the fact that people with similar aspirations nonetheless often act in different ways. She asserts that these differences in action are determined by the cultural competences different actors have been able to acquire given their social positions. Swidler thus articulates a different causal schema in which “action and values are organized to take advantage of cultural competences” (p. 275). This is one of many examples of the ways Parsons’ work was foundational to contemporary sociology’s interest in culture. Parsons’ work provides several openings for CCT research to take up what he did not do. It provides an opening for CCT scholarship to dig deeper into how the social system structures life to encourage consumption, while simultaneously giving individual actors the sense that

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their consumption is an agentic choice rather than a structured action. Beyond the deterministic perspective Horkheimer and Adorno put forward in 1944, the way the entire social system operates to support consumption as a normative activity needs careful scholarship. (See Chapter 25 on Horkheimer and Adorno in this volume.) This is an important arena to explore theoretically, particularly given the political and environmental consequences of consumer culture. Parsons’ work also points to an opening for CCT research to address the ways that personality is ordered by the social system, which Parsons places higher up in the cybernetic hierarchy. Consumer research has, for the most part, relegated the concept of personality to study of “individual differences” by psychologists. But Parsons, like his Department of Social Relations colleague David McClelland (1961), reminds us that personality is in large part a product of social structure. Similarly, Parsons’ work also points to an opening for CCT research that wants to link culture and social structure to the embodied nature of material existence. His discussion of the embeddedness of the organismic system in the social and cultural action systems provides a beginning point to a cultural approach to embodied experiences. But Parsons’ work can also be used to lodge a critique of an extant gap in contemporary work on Consumer Culture Theory. With is current predilection for exploring human agency regarding consumption, CCT scholarship is unable to address what are arguably the two biggest threats to global consumer culture: consumption’s key role in escalating climate change and its close ties to both within-nation and global income and wealth inequality. It is impossible for CCT scholarship to begin to provide broad and substantial insights on either of these problems if human agency in taking individual actions is the primary focus. Climate change cannot be effectively addressed, let alone redressed, without considering how to bring about structural change in the relations within the social system that result from the polity’s prioritization of the need for economic growth through neo-liberalism’s support of a selforientation rather than a collective orientation. Turning to the topic of income and wealth inequality, large questions loom regarding how it is that the economy is not performing its adaptive function with regard to the distribution of income and wealth. These issues require system-wide thinking and scholarship about extant social structure and its relation to the other three action systems. Thus, though currently out of favor in contemporary sociology, the work of Talcott Parsons is nonetheless foundational to its renewed interest in culture and provides generative openings for CCT scholars to consider.

Note 1 It is interesting to note the genealogical tie embedded in this critique. Members of Ann Swidler’s dissertation committee at UC–Berkeley included Parsons’ students, Robert and Neil Smelser.

References Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer (2000/1944), “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Consumer Society Reader, Juliet B. Schor and Douglas B. Holt, eds. New York: The New Press, 3–19. American Sociological Association, “ASA Presidents: Talcott Parsons,” www.asanet.org/about/presidents/ Talcott_Parsons.cfm, accessed on March 30, 2016.

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Fox, Renée C., Victor M. Lidz, and Harold J. Bershady (2005), “Introduction,” in After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century, Renée C. Fox and Victor M. Lidz, eds., New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1–30. McClelland, David (1961), The Achieving Society, New York: D. Van Nostrand. Merton, Robert King (1968), “Manifest and Latent Functions,” in Robert King Merton, ed., Social Theory and Social Structure, Free Press, 73–138. Parsons, Talcott (1951), The Social System, New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott (1956), Economy and Society: A Study in the Integration of Economic and Social Theory, New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott (1966), Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Parsons, Talcott (1969), Politics and Social Structure, New York: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott, Robert Bales, and Edward Shils (1953), Working Papers in the Theory of Action, Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Parsons, Talcott and Neil J. Smelser (1956), Economy and Society, New York: Free Press. Swidler, Ann (1986), “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51 (April), 273–286. Turner, Jonathan H. (1974), “Functional Imperativism: Talcott Parsons,” in Chapter 3: The Structure of Sociological Theory, Belmont, CA: Dorsey Press. Weber, Max (1958), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans., Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner.

13 THE RELEVANCE OF CONSUMPTION IN NIKLAS LUHMANN’S THEORY OF SOCIETY Kai-Uwe Hellmann and Marius K. Luedicke

Consumption is everything is consumption A majority of international contemporary consumer research studies assumes that consumption has achieved a state of universal relevance. Mike Featherstone (1983: 4), for example, observed a “gradual extension of consumerism to more and more sectors of the population”, whereas Don Slater (1997: 25) observed that “values from the realm of consumption spill over into other domains of social action, such that modern society is in toto a consumer culture, and not just in its specifically consuming activities.” Steven Miles (1998: 1) even asserted that consumerism is ubiquitous and ephemeral. It is arguably the religion of the late twentieth century. It apparently pervades our everyday lives and structures our everyday experiences and yet it is perpetually altering its form and reasserting its influence in new guises. Featherstone, Slater, and Miles were not the first to claim such universality, however.1 Decades earlier, Kenneth E. Boulding (1945: 13) had already argued that it “is no exaggeration to say that consumption is the most important and intractable problem of mature capitalism.” Ten years later, Victor Lebow (1955: 7) noted that the “measure of social status, of social acceptance, of prestige, is now to be found in our consumptive patterns. The very meaning and significance of our lives is today expressed in consumptive terms.” Until today, a range of influential authors has joined this line of arguing, considering consumption as part and parcel of society as a whole, rather than merely a specific social form within the economic system (Featherstone 1991; Bolz/Bosshart 1995; Lury 1996; Slater 1997; Miles 1998, 2015; Bauman 1998, 2007; Vincent 2002; Schrage 2003, 2009; Zukin/Maguire 2004; Schor 2006; Prisching 2006; Misik 2007; Wirsching 2009). In these writings, what is growing is not only the list of practices associated with consumption but also the list of social spheres in which consumer expectations and practices are playing a key role. Individual-level consumer research has broadened its scope, for example, from studying searching, purchasing, usage, and disposition behaviours to also include individual consumer fantasies, daydreams, and imaginations (Hirschman/Holbrook 1982; Holbrook/

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Hirschman 1982; Campbell 1987; Miller 1995; Schor/Holt 2000; Ratneshwar et al. 2000, 2005; Hellmann 2008), whereas research in non-economic fields has begun to explore whether certain offerings that were originally provided without consumers’ expectations in mind – such as education, church services, health care, or political elections – are also becoming consumable commodities. Those new sectors in which consumption begins to play a role include art,2 education,3 health,4 intimacy,5 politics,6 religion,7 sports,8 science,9 and the mass media (Stauff 2004; Sandvoss 2005; Jenkins 2006). Because patients, “parents, pupils and passengers have all been re-imagined as customers” (du Gay 1996: 77) by contemporary social theorists, consumption seems to have become universal.10 But can that be true? What would it mean for the organization of society as a whole, if more and more patients, pupils, or voters considered themselves as, and behaved like, customers? In this chapter, we draw on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the modern, primarily functionally differentiated society as a theoretical lens to explore the possibility of the consumption literature portraying a world of universal consumption that does not (yet) exist. To do so, we first sketch out the pillars of Luhmann’s general theory of society. We then explain his theoretical distinction of service and audience roles, focussing particularly on (post-)modern consumption as a specific kind of audience role. Lastly, we adopt this Luhmannian perspective to challenge the universality of consumption thesis and to raise important questions about the consequences that it could have for society as well as our theory of societal organization if this thesis was (to become) true.

Luhmann’s theory of the functionally differentiated society Since about the 18th century, when the emerging modern society began to develop its current gestalt, sociologists have reflected upon and tried to capture its epochal quality. From the beginning of this analytical venture, scholars not only studied the modern society as class-based and stratified – based on social inequality (Giddens 1973; Bourdieu 1986) – but also explored the specific forms of internal differentiation through which society fulfils the functional requirements of organizing human life (Alexander/Colomy 1990; Schimank 1996; Schwinn 2004). Herbert Spencer (1862) was probably the first to promote the idea that social evolution must be understood as an on-going process of specialization and differentiation. Several years later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels distinguished between a base and a highly complex superstructure. For Engels (2015 [1877]), the economic structure of society built the real base, which ultimately allows for explaining the entire superstructure of the legal and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other imaginations of every historical period. Again a few years later, before the turn of the century, Émile Durkheim (1893) published his seminal study “De la division du travail social” where he analyses the modern society explicitly as functionally differentiated. For Durkheim, a society divides its social organization almost like a factory to solve key societal problems in specific ways, rather than through hierarchization alone. Talcott Parsons (1951) also adopted this perspective, largely motivated by Max Weber’s thoughts on different value spheres of modern society. Niklas Luhmann (1982, 1987, 2012, 2013), the protagonist of our chapter, decided to spend his academic career on developing a theory of the modern society, a society that he considered first and foremost as functionally differentiated. For Luhmann, functional differentiation meant that society takes care of specific social tasks that require continuous observation and administration by evolving sub-systems that take care of these requirements. Unlike Parsons,

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who thought of functional sub-systems as integrated through shared societal norms, Luhmann theorized functional sub-systems as autonomous and autopoietic, that is, as able to produce the means and meanings required for their perpetuation independent from other systems. The total number is still debated, but scholars tend to agree that arts, education, economy, health, law, mass media, politics, religion, science, and sports are such autonomous sub-systems of modern societies that perform the majority of tasks for organizing their respective domains. Not incidentally, these domains map quite well on governmental departments or even the columns of national newspapers. Each of these functional sub-systems evolves its own operating logic, relies on its own history, produces its own legitimacies and rationalities that make it not only unique, but also non-substitutable. This means that every system “observes” (in Luhmann’s terminology) society so differently and, most importantly, selectively, depending on the scope of the system’s responsibility for society that it can not be replaced by another social system: It is unique. For example, the law system does not normally decide what is and is not art, nor does the economic system normally interfere with what is taught in the education system (except from regularly complaining about a lack of business education in schools). But when sentences are passed, or goods and services are exchanged for money anywhere in modern society, the law and the economy are the systems that provide logic, procedures, and legitimacy. An important aspect of Luhmann’s concept of modern society is that sub-systems decide about everything inherent to them autonomously, including whom they allow to join and under which conditions. This brings us to Luhmann’s question about inclusion in general and service as well as audience roles in particular.

Service and audience roles of the functional sub-systems Again it was Talcott Parsons (1951) who first developed the idea that the encounter of a medical doctor and a patient is structured by a set of complementary, yet asymmetric roles. Doctors and patients both tend to act according to the specific expectations of their health system, with the service role of the doctor being structurally advantageous compared to the patient role, similar to the seller being advantaged compared to the buyer, as David Akerlof (1970) analysed it in his seminal article on “The Market of Lemons”. That is, in order to function properly, patients are required to devote themselves to the system’s logics and procedures, for example, by waiting, undressing, or answering questions as demanded, and trusting almost blindly that the medical procedures are configured in ways that doctors can ensure a rapid healing. Niklas Luhmann and others have adopted the idea of service and audience roles and argued that all functional sub-systems have evolved such complementary roles (Luhmann 1990a, 1995; Stichweh 1988, 2016; Burzan et al. 2008; Stichweh/Windolf 2009). Table 13.1 provides an overview of the state of knowledge in this regard. The modern society, which is influenced by the Enlightenment, pursues the normative mission of including everybody into the society: Nobody shall be excluded (Marshall 1950; Luhmann 1990b; Hellmann 2012). Through institutionalization of different audience roles that allow everybody to participate according to the specific requirements of the functional systems, society seeks to ensure the inclusion of everybody. Inclusion, however, operates differently in each system. The quality of inclusion of a person through the audience role of a pupil, for example, differs substantially from the person’s inclusion as a patient. The expectations that

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TABLE 13.1 Service and audience roles (in alphabetical order)

Sub-system

Service role

Arts

Painter, musician, author, curator, Recipient, e.g. theatre, movie or conservator museum visits, reader, music listener Producer, seller, manager Consumer of products and services Teacher, university professor, Participant in further education, educator pupil, student Medical doctor, nurse, midwife Patient Partners, parents, child, other kinship relationships, good friends

Economy Education Health Intimate relationships11 Law

Judge, attorney

Mass media

Journalists

Military Politics

Professional soldier Member of parliament, administrative officer Clergyman, nun Scientists Professional sportsman, trainer

Religion Science Sport

Audience role

Plaintiff, defendant, witness, spectators in a courtroom Recipient of radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, online media Civil population Constituent, administrative client Believer, parishioner Spectator at sport competitions and tournaments

Source: Burzan et al. (2008), slightly modified

a pupil has on a school are qualitatively different from the expectations that a patient has on a hospital. Another important aspect of the functionally differentiated modern society is that no person can identify entirely with one single service or audience role. The roles are too specific, too compartmentalized, to acknowledge the complexity of an entire person. A person can thus pursue a career within each role (consider the different careers of students at the university, for example), but is unlikely to be included in society only through this one functional system by its audience role. Instead, people participate in society in a range of specific service and audience roles simultaneously, depending on their profession, their health, their needs, their faith, or even the time of the day (Goffman 1967). To be a person therefore never means to participate in society in toto, but only through service and audience roles in different functional systems. Lastly but importantly, Luhmann argued that audience roles from one functional system are not substitutable with roles from another system. As these roles are inextricably linked to their sub-systems, a person is unlikely to succeed in a patient role, for example, when trying to sue a neighbour or vote for a government. Similarly, a person will likely get in trouble when trying to enter an emergency room in a consumer mindset. It is this particular audience role of the consumer that we look at next.

The consumer as an audience role From the perspective of Luhmann’s theory, the consumer role is undoubtedly part of the economic system and complements the role of the producer (Hellmann 2004). Whereas the producer is the service provider the consumer is the receiver of this service: Output on the one side, input on the other, is the simple reading (Boulding 1945).

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Despite a certain lack of depth when mapping output/input all too directly onto the producer/consumer role pair, it nevertheless seems to hit the mark. The consumer role is specified by expectations of receiving something, not only when buying and using products, but also when using services.12 Based on a theoretical distinction from social psychology (Luhmann 1978), it can be argued that producers act purposefully and actively to produce and distribute goods and services to consumers. The focal point of producers’ actions is therefore an “otherreference” (Fremdreferenz in the original). Consumers, in turn, experience purposefully and actively by receiving goods and services. Their focal point of attention is experiencing the consumption process and themselves during this process as “self-experience” (Selbstreferenz) in Luhmannian terminology (see also Schulze 1992, 1997). Even if consumers must typically also act (produce), by shopping for groceries, for example, the purpose of their actions remains on self-experience. Consumers sometimes even switch temporarily to the production mode when, for example, organizing family parties, pursuing leisure activities, or planning their vacations. Nevertheless, given that they purposefully act as consumers, they are ultimately interested in planning, pursuing, or organizing their own actual or future experiences. The ultimate goal of producers, in contrast, is to act for others, even if they must sometimes experience (consume) by including goods and services from other producers into their own activities (Marx 1979/1859). Consumer researchers explored the phenomenon of consumer experiences since Scitovsky (1981), Hirschman/Holbrook (1982), Holbrook/Hirschman (1982), and Campbell (1987), but Lawrence Abbott (1955: 39) had already argued three decades earlier that what “people really desire are not products but satisfying experiences.” Today, the concept of experiential consumption and its differences vis-à-vis material consumption are core notions in consumer research (Pine/Gilmore 1999; Holbrook 2007; Carù/Cova 2003, 2007; Lanier/Rader 2015). Self-experience alone, however, does not distinguish the consumer as an audience role from other roles sufficiently because experiences matter in other audience roles as well. What is unique to the consumer role is the expectation that consumption should be enjoyable and fun, evoke positive feelings and self-images, and ideally induce happiness (Scitovsky 1976). With Daniel Bell (1976) or Colin Campbell (1987) one could consider contemporary consumption as predominantly hedonic. No other audience role can legitimately be held to be primarily interested in evoking pleasure and happiness. Or can one expect much happiness from being hospitalized or being at school, for example? Other audience roles may induce pleasure and happiness as side-effects, but neither pupils nor voters, civilians, nor parishioners expect such outcomes from their participation in functional sub-systems that are concerned with education, politics, military, or religion, respectively. From our Luhmannian social systems perspective, happiness, fun, pleasure, and satisfaction are exclusively linked to the consumer role. We may therefore raise reasonable objections against the thesis that modern consumption has already gained universality status.

Will a universalizing of consumption lead to a colonialization and de-differentiation of modern society? With our Luhmannian concept of the consumer audience role in mind, we may now return to explore our initial question: Is consumption everything, and can everything be seen as consumption? Translated into Luhmannian terminology, existing consumer research tends to

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suggest that the consumer role has already widely contaminated and colonialized all functional sub-systems of modern society and thus gained hegemonic status (Hellmann 2013). Hence, it no longer matters if people participate in education, arts, mass media, health, military, politics, law, religion, sports, or science systems: They all expect to consume and evaluate those services like any other commodity. Now, to challenge this claim, imagine this scenario for the patient role: Someone gets sick and sees a doctor to receive the right treatment. In the most serious of cases, the success of this encounter decides on the person’s life or death. What would happen if the patient role became increasingly governed, or entirely “infected”, by consumer expectations? Would the patient expect to be entertained, that the receiving of medical treatment would make her happy, or at least evoke positive feelings and bolster a positive self-image? Such outcomes seem possible in periods of recovery, or possibly when examining the results of beauty surgery. During the treatment in a hospital, however, it seems more likely that other, more suitable goals are prevalent and the focal expectation of the patient remains to recover and be healed. Given these considerations, the universality thesis would first have to be empirically scrutinized in each system before being able to convince. Nevertheless, is it possible that such a colonialization has already begun and is likely to proceed further? This would raise some important questions: How would the functional systems respond to such a consumer colonialization? Which implications would it have for the complementary service roles and the people enacting them as teachers, artists, sportsmen, doctors, soldiers, politicians, judges, priests, and scientists? Would these service providers begin to consider themselves as producers entirely, with other-reference top of mind, rather than maintain their focus on their internal imagination, faith, performance, or vision? Which misunderstandings, intra-role conflicts, inefficiencies, and other dysfunctionalities would result from such changes for each system? How, for example, would university professors withstand their (paying) consumer students’ requests to be entertained and feel good about themselves even when confronted with complex subject matters or when showing weak classroom performance? And lastly, what would happen to the functionally differentiated society if the differentiation of service and audience roles would erode? Would this entail an evolutionary dedifferentiation of society as we know it (Buß/Schöps 1979; Gerhards 1991; Lenzen 1999), and a society emerge that is governed entirely by producer and consumer roles of the economic system? Would such a de-differentiated society develop new systems of checks and balances that replace existing structures? Is such a scenario thinkable in the theoretical confines of the existing theory of society? This chapter is not attuned to answer these important questions, but to question a particular answer, that is, the “universality of consumption” thesis. We have argued with reference to Niklas Luhmann’s theory of society that a colonialization of society by the consumer role is currently more a thesis than an empirical fact, which, if eventually came true, would have severe consequences for the social organization of our society. To empirically assess and critically reflect these changes and their implications seems to be a worthwhile task for (Luhmannian) social systems research, but for consumer researchers who follow their research subjects into social realms in which they were previously not to be found.

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Notes 1 See also Slater (1997: 9): “However, consumer culture is inextricably bound up with modernity as a whole.” In the same vein Riesman et al. (1950), Bickel (1960), Schelsky (1965), Baudrillard (1998 [1970]), and Bell (1976). 2 See Adorno (1962: 18f.), Toffler (1964), DiMaggio/Useem (1978), Panzer (2004), and Drummond (2006). 3 See van Til (1944), Lazear (1977), McMillan/Cheney (1996), Klein (2000), Fırat/Dohlakia (2006), and Jones (2009). 4 See Davis (1974), Stevens (1974), Schouten (1991), Bolzan et al. (2001), Flynn et al. (2002), Carroll et al. (2005), and Nordgren (2008). 5 See Illouz (1997) and Zelizer (2007). 6 See White/Chernatony (2001), Lamla/Neckel (2006), Shah et al. (2007), Rosenthal/Peccei (2007), Trentmann (2007), and Smith/French (2009). 7 See Luckmann (1967), Knoblauch (1989), and Miller (2005). 8 See Holt (1995), Wann et al. (2001), Pons et al. (2006), and Akremi/Hellmann (2010). 9 See Grush/Costin (1975), Sosteric et al. (1998), Newson (2004), and Barber (2007). 10 See Bolz/Bosshart (1995: 110, translated from German): “We are moving towards a society in which considers it normal that all services are evaluated through a marketing lense and thus consumption penetrates even the most remote corners of human life.” 11 The system of intimate relationships, which includes families, is the only sub-system where the clear distinction between service and audience roles fails. 12 In the case of shopping the “decision” is foregrounded, not the “experience”. See also Holbrook et al.’s (1986) distinction of buying vs. using. However, even the decision-making, the ability and necessity to choose, can be observed from the perspective of self-experience: Consumers choose to observe themselves during and afterwards with regards to how they feel about their decision. Lastly, everything that consumers aim at is the experiential value of their consumption (see Miles 1998; Ewen 1999; Gasteiger 2010; Hellmann 2013).

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PART V

Identity trajectories

14 MIND, SELF AND CONSUMPTION: GEORGE HERBERT MEAD Cele Otnes

George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) was a philosopher whose theoretical contributions reflect the influence of three intellectual movements. First and foremost, Mead was a pragmatist, adhering to its central argument that the most important goal when thinking or acting is not found in achieving an “ordered understanding of the subject matter [at hand], but in the uses to which it may be put” (Shalin, 2003, 300). Mead’s specific contribution to pragmatism is his assertion that people’s selves and identities emerge through social interaction; thus, they will be inclined to act in the best interest of their salient social groups. Mead’s ideas also reflect key tenets of a second philosophical movement, German Idealism. It is rooted in the perspectives of Kant and others that reality is only knowable through conscious thought; thus, individuals shape their own realities. Mead emerged from his three-year immersion in Germany while pursuing his doctorate with an admiration for the socialist-infused model of the academic-as-advocate, which argued that intellectual leaders were morally compelled to work for social justice. As such, Mead’s oeuvre embraces elements of Romanticism, expressed in his utopian belief that people will act collaboratively as advocates for positive social change. However, he argues, most people are unaware that they create their own realities. Thus, the philosopher should seek to “illuminate the transcendental categories humans use to construct their universe, and in the process make humanity realize its responsibility for the world they inhabit” (Shalin, 2003, 297). Mead’s 37-year career as a faculty member in the philosophy department at the University of Chicago had a somewhat unconventional beginning. His close friend and mentor John Dewey insisted that the department include a position for Mead in his own hiring package. Although Mead would not complete the doctorate he began at Harvard, he did form close intellectual and social relationships with scholars such as Josiah Royce and William James, who co-founded pragmatism, and also advocated a relativistic stance on reality through his notion of the “pluralistic universe.” In that regard, as an adamant constructivist Mead argues that a singular reality does not exist, but rather that different realities emerge when people perceive and interact with the social world. Furthermore, people themselves construct and inhabit multiple realities, stemming from interaction between myriad social contexts “out there” and people’s cognitive

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repositories of learned communicative and interpretive mechanisms housed within their brains “in here.” Of these mechanisms, language and its crucial companion, play, are the most important. Like his contemporaries Alfred North Whitehead and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mead was keenly interested in the ways language facilitates and limits people’s interactions with and in the world. Mead understood language as the set of all verbal and nonverbal elements, or “gestures,” that communicate “the very attitude of an individual” via physiological expressions and sounds (Mead, 1934, 14). At an early age, play becomes the means through which human beings acquire language and learn to understand others’ roles in society. Mead shares Wittgenstein’s belief that there is no such entity as a private language, and that “language is social all the way down” (“George Herbert Mead,” 3). Mead’s contributions to the mind/body/self dialectic appear in Mind, Self, and Society (1934). In actuality, all of the books listing Mead as author represent the efforts of other scholars and his students to compile his ideas; Mead himself published only articles and book reviews. In this book, he acknowledges humans possess physiological features (e.g., sensory organs, a central nervous system) to enable them to interact with the world. Yet, these objects are not in themselves necessarily related to a self. When we reach a self we reach a certain sort of conduct, a certain type of social process which involves the interaction of different individuals and yet implies individuals engaged in some sort of cooperative activity. (Mead, 1934, 164) Mind, Self, and Society also explicates the three key constructs that pertain to the social self for which Mead is most renowned: The “I,” the “me,” and “the generalized other.” For Mead, the “I” represents the primitive self, the one containing our physiological urges, cognitive capacities, and personality traits; from this raw material, our social selves arise. The “me” – or more correctly, the “me(s)” that emerge are the result of an individual expressing the “I” within a particular social context, and through a specific social role. In order to do so, the “me(s)” must accrue knowledge regarding what types of roles are appropriate and useful to express, to reap successful social outcomes and internal feelings of well-being. Once the individual successfully grasps and learns to express the required variations of the “me” in social settings, these “me’s” – become internalized, thus shaping and reshaping the “I.” To learn how to function in the world, a person must also be able to understand not just which “me” he or she should express, but also which “me’s” all of the other members within a social group could potentially enact. Mead calls the aggregate of all potential iterations of the self across the societal landscape of identity the “generalized other.” One of Mead’s most famous analogies explains the construct in terms of members of a baseball team. Players come to understand not only what is required of them in their own positions; but also internalize the “behaviors associated with every position on the field . . . so we . . . come to view our own behaviors from the perspective of the game as a whole . . . a system of organized actions” (“George Herbert Mead,” 2008, 4). Mead avers that besides language, other key mechanisms within the “I” enable the expression of the “me’s” – especially symbols and social roles. He argues that the ability to share and understand symbols is the essence of human intelligence. He squarely locates the origin

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of symbols within “our social conduct, in the conversation of gestures – in a word, in . . . language” (Mead, 1934, 122). Mead’s interest in symbols contributes to what is perhaps his most lasting cross-disciplinary legacy – co-founding symbolic interactionism, along with Charles Cooley and W.J. Thomas. Symbolic interactionism focuses on the “dynamic use, interpretation, and changing meaning of symbols within social interaction. It focuses on communication as actors actively negotiate shared meaning of social objects, including but not limited to products” (Flint, 2006, 351). Sidney J. Levy, whose 1959 article “Symbols for Sale” foreshadowed the field of consumer-culture studies by about 30 years, credits Mead as spurring his interest in the symbolic nature of (consumer) behavior during his own doctoral studies (Levy, 2003). As noted earlier, Mead avers that play is central to the development of the social self; crucial to his philosophy, it is the specific activity through which children learn to understand the scope and usefulness of “social roles,” or “constellations of behaviors that are responses to sets of behaviors of other human beings” (“George Herbert Mead,” 2008, 4). Mead argues the social role is the key mechanism enabling individuals to fluidly and frequently manage and enact their multiple selves within various social milieu. Through social interaction, people assess the types of social roles that they must master and express, to successfully engage with people in a particular context. Depending on their goals and those of others, they typically choose the most appropriate for any given social interaction. For example, a college student attending a class will likely enact the behaviors and adhere to the norms assigned to the role of “student,” reserving the role of “party animal” for expression that evening with friends. Furthermore, argues Mead, people’s identities (or their “I’s”) are aggregates of their social roles; as social beings, individuals have the “capacity to be several things at once” (Mead, 1932, 63). As such, identity is not a meaningful construct unless it is understood as a socially constructed, performative phenomenon – a notion Goffman [1959] builds upon in his dramaturgical theory of social interaction. Scholarly interest in the nature of the self clearly traverses many intellectual terrains. So it is unsurprising that Mead’s interests extend to a variegated set of constructs such as democracy, games, language, social advocacy, symbolism, and temporality. Mead himself believed his theories would be of greatest interest to those within the nascent field of social psychology, because he offers an alternative to the theories of the leading behaviorist, John Watson. Behaviorists believe a stimulus exists prior to and independent from the response it elicits . . . [Mead believed] what is or is not a stimulus cannot be decreed by an outside observer, but must be determined in situ and in actu, [depending on] the actor’s changing agenda . . . in the broader context of collective behavior. (Shalin, 2003, 311–12) Ultimately, behaviorism became the dominant paradigm within social psychology, and Mead found favor within qualitative sociology, where he remains acclaimed. Within that field (and within consumer culture), however, Mead’s unique contributions to pragmatic philosophy/sociology are overshadowed by his attribution as a co-founder of symbolic interactionism. Indeed, within the consumer-culture canon (e.g., Goulding, 1999; Hudson and Ozanne, 1988; Leigh and Gabel, 1992), many scholars cite Mead when leveraging symbolic interactionism to bolster their rationale for choosing qualitative methodologies, rather than relying on his ideas in any true ontological sense.

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Mead’s thoughts on temporality In The Philosophy of the Act (1938), Mead lays out his beliefs about the temporal nature of reality, which is compatible with his belief in fluid, unbounded realities. Mead observes that since the world is always evolving, the past can be “understood as a working hypothesis that has validity in the present within which it works” (Shalin, 2003, 310). Reflecting his pragmatic philosophy, he also believes the value of the past lies in its ability to help people complete tasks in the present, or that they anticipate in the future. Although society is very much a structured entity, it nevertheless also is an ongoing process. As such, people make “quantum leap[s] from one symbolic frame of reference to another . . . coming and going, entering and departing, identifying with and dumping roles . . . [as] an on-again, off-again affair” (Shalin, 2003, 310).

Mead’s influence on consumer-culture scholarship As alluded to earlier, most references to Mead’s theories by scholars of consumer culture are relatively nonexistant. Solomon’s (1983) conceptual paper on the value of symbolic interactionism to marketing scholars is a notable exception; he offers a cogent explication of the theoretical underpinnings of the construct, and outlines its salience to consumption studies. Moreover, he proposes a comprehensive research agenda – still useful today – designed to spur knowledge creation. Of course, many studies within consumer culture explore the interplay among people, symbols, and culture; however, they typically do not link these to Mead’s theoretical tenets about the social self(ves). One recent study (Schwer and Daneshvary 2011) does use symbolic interactionism as an enabling theory when examining the symbolism inherent in rodeo apparel. It is worth asking how symbolic interaction may continue to inform the study of social roles within marketplace settings, themselves outlets of culture. Indeed, some scholars have recently begun to leverage Mead’s work to explore such topics pertaining to social relations between customers and service providers (c.f., Flint, 2006; Grayson and Shulman, 2000). With respect to Mead’s core concept of social roles, Otnes, Lowrey, and Kim (1993) rely upon this construct as an explanatory mechanism when exploring why consumers label potential recipients as “easy” or “difficult” when purchasing Christmas gifts for them. They argue that givers approach this task with the goal of expressing specific social roles through their choice of gifts. Recipients are interpreted as “difficult” when they somehow block or countermand givers’ ability to express desired social roles through gifts. In contrast, easy recipients do not place any such obstacles in givers’ paths, and in fact may facilitate givers’ ability to express desired social roles. Furthermore, givers themselves try and help their own role expression by selecting specific gift-shopping strategies they have found useful in helping them achieve their role-playing goals. Ruth (2003) has since leveraged Mead’s role theory to explore gift giving in the workplace as well. More recently, Langer (2005) argues in a conceptual paper that Mead’s concepts of the socially constructed self can be useful in exploring children’s social understandings and reactions to a globally mediated consumer culture. She explicitly discusses the salience of Mead’s key constructs of the “I,” the “me,” and the “generalized other” within this focal context. She argues that as children begin to acquire knowledge of the global marketplace as a socially mediated “generalized other,” they come to understand that it offers potentially endless variety and abundance. The unfortunate consequence of this knowledge is that children then

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experience negative outcomes, such as anomie, as they come to realize that they will never be able to have access to all of the delights of the marketplace to which they have been exposed. Langer notes that Mead believes the “I” possesses free will and determinacy such that it can exert great influence over the ultimate expression of a contextualized “me.” But within a marketplace that is essentially relentless and hegemonic, she asks, “to what degree can ‘individual’ reactions modify ‘global’ social processes?” (Langer, 264). Lynch and McConatha (2006) also posit on the specific nature of the “generalized other” within a consumer culture. They argue that in a digital age, the speed and reach of technology contributes to the dominance of computer-mediated representations of people and society, which leads to “the digital, rapid fire . . . just-in-time ethos . . . we define as hyper-symbolic interaction” (p. 91). They argue that this construct does not merely represent “old wine in new bottles,” because the digitally mediated world focuses less on human-to-human interaction (as does Mead), and more on people’s processing of social images within increasingly isolated contexts. Echoing Mead’s own prescient interest in the neurological aspects of cognition, and reflecting the increasing diversity within consumer behavior, the authors ask, “where do human interaction, physiology, biology, evolutionary psychology, and marketing intersect? Perhaps they meet in a reconsidered view of how we socially construct our world and where our symbolic world originates and resides” (p. 94).

Mead’s potential for contributing to consumerculture scholarship Although offering unique insights on the relationship among the mind, the self, and the social world, Mead’s theoretical contributions on sociality, language, symbols, and social justiceadvocacy remain underutilized by scholars of consumer culture. Perhaps the fragmented nature of Mead’s output has discouraged consumer researchers interested in exploring these topics to rely on more transparent and accessible scholars such as Goffman and Merton. Nevertheless, many excellent summaries of Mead’s oeuvre exist (e.g., “George Herbert Mead,” 2008; Shalin, 2003). Obviously, interest in the nature of person/symbol/culture relationships continues within our field. One way to engage in a focused symbolic-interactionist approach would be to apply Solomon’s (1983) underutilized conceptual framework to deeply and empirically apply Mead’s philosophy pertaining to social roles and symbols. To move beyond Mead’s symbolic-interactionist work, researchers could consider how his reflections on the constantly evolving social environment, and thus of time, shapes their consumption practices (e.g., through their “timestyles”; Cotte, Ratneshwar, and Mick, 2004). Furthermore, if people are free to reconstruct the past to gain maximum efficacy in the present, Mead’s perspective on time also deflates critiques of such methods as depth or focus-group interviews that yield retrospective data. To Mead, an informant’s current interpretation of a past event, no matter how reconfigured, would be just as valid an account of that event, if that current interpretation still shapes the informant’s reality, or proves useful. There also appears to be ample room for theoretical application of Mead’s triumvirate of the self, as articulated through the “I,” the “me(s)” and the “generalized other.” For example, the generalized other as a representation of people’s ability to understand and interpret all potential social roles within a salient group could motivate research on how empathy drives consumption. Empathy emerges as salient in studies of charitable donating (Merchant, Ford, and Sargeant, 2010); however, leveraging the lens of the generalized other could lend theoretical

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heft to more logical-empiricist constructions of empathy (e.g., through the typical scales and experiments that assess levels of empathy). Furthermore, the notion that people only realize aspects of their identity when their various “me’s” interact with other social beings is directly relevant to the “looking-glass” self, or the variant selves emerging when we see ourselves reflected through others’ eyes (Cooley, 1902). More pointedly for scholars interested in topics pertaining to transformative consumer research and in particular, advocacy-oriented work to spur social change (Ozanne and Saatçioğlu, 2008), Mead’s stance on people’s responsibility for the welfare of their social group to further socially embedded goals might prove to be a fruitful area of theoretical inquiry (e.g., Giesler and Veresiu, 2014).

Mead archives The University of Chicago Library houses the George Herbert Mead (1865–1968) papers in its Special Collections Research Center; it contains his correspondence with key associates and collaborators, his published papers, academic correspondence, and students’ notes on Mead’s lectures. An even more comprehensive source is the Mead Project, archived by the Brock University Department of Sociology. It is a comprehensive digital resource for exploring Mead’s influences, writings, and intellectual legacy (Throop and Ward, 2007). Both sources should prove quite valuable to scholars interested in deepening their understanding of Mead.

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Mead, George Herbert (1932). Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mead, George Herbert (1938). The Philosophy of the Act . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. The Mead Project, www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/inventory5.html Merchant, Altaf, John B. Ford & Adrian Sargeant (2010). Charitable organizations’ storytelling influence on donors’ emotions and intentions. Journal of Business Research, 63 (7), 754–762. Otnes, Cele, Tina M. Lowrey & Young Chan Kim (1993). Gift selection for easy and difficult recipients: A social roles interpretation. Journal of Consumer Research, 20 (3), 229–244. Ozanne, Julie L. & Bige Saatçioğlu (2008). Participatory action research. Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (3), 423–439. Ruth, Julie A. (2003). Gift exchange rituals in the workplace: A social roles interpretation. In Consumption Rituals: A Research Anthology, Ed. Cele C. Otnes and Tina M. Lowrey. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 181–211. Schwer, R. Keith & Rennae Daneshvary (2011). Symbolic product attributes and emulatory consumption: The case of rodeo fan attendance and the wearing of western clothing. Journal of Applied Business Research, 11 (3), 74–81. Shalin, Dmitri (2003). George Herbert Mead. In The Blackwell Companion to Major Classic Social Theorists, Ed. George Ritzer. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 290–332. Solomon, Michael R. (1983). The role of products as social stimuli: A symbolic interactionism perspective. Journal of Consumer Research, 10 (3), 319–329. Throop, Robert & Lloyd Gordon Ward (2007). Project Inventory. Toronto: The Mead Project, www. brocku.ca/MeadProject/inventory5.html

15 SARTRE’S INSIGHTS FOR IDENTITY, DESIRE, THE GIFT AND POSTHUMANISM Russell Belk

Sartre’s major areas of conceptual contribution with direct relevance to consumer research and theory involve 1) identity, 2) desire, 3) gift-giving, and by extension, 4) posthumanism. Within these areas of conceptual contribution other relevant concepts are embedded, including exchange, ownership, generosity, possession, love, money, and the existential triad of having, doing, and being. Sartre’s major theoretical work on these topics is found in his most famous and Nobel-winning existential philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943/1956). However, further development of these constructs is found in several of his other works as well. As one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Sartre’s work has also spawned analyses and comparisons by subsequent generations of scholars. Despite his relevance to consumer research topics Sartre’s contributions have had limited impact on consumer research, at least directly. Indirectly there is greater influence inasmuch as his conceptual work strongly influenced a paper by Belk (1988) which, at least as of 2015, was the most heavily cited paper to have appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research’s in its then 40-year history (Wong, Bendle, Mai, and Cotte 2015). At a broader level, as a key player in the phenomenology movement in philosophy and psychology, Sartre has also been an important epistemological and methodological influence on phenomenological consumer research (e.g., Churchill and Wertz 1985; Thompson and Hirschman 1998; Thompson, Locander, and Pollio 1989). Nevertheless, as Arnould and Thompson (2007) have argued, consumer culture theory research is struggling to free itself from Sartre’s existential insistence that we humans have absolute freedom, agency, and responsibility to construct our lives (see also Elliott and Ritson 1995; Lai, Dermody, and Hanmer-Lloyd 2007). But the current chapter will focus on the substantive rather than the methodological and philosophical influences of Sartre’s work on consumer research.

Identity Consumer identity projects are one of four areas of consumer culture theory identified by Arnould and Thompson (2007) as constituting CCT research appearing in the Journal of Consumer Research from 1985 to 2005. Of the work that they cite in this area as well as several

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subsequent or un-cited papers (e.g., Ahuvia 2005; Bahl and Milne 2010; Belk 2013, 2014; Connell and Schau 2013; Reimann and Aron 2009), only Belk (1988) relies directly on Sartre. The major ideas in that paper drawing on Sartre involve the existential states of having, doing, and being. Sartre (1943/1956; henceforth BN), sounding a bit like William James, saw possessions as closely tied to who we are: The value of things, their instrumental role, their proximity and real distance . . . do nothing more than to outline my image – this is my choice. My clothing (a uniform or a lounge suit, a soft or a starched shirt) whether neglected or cared for, carefully chosen or ordinary, my furniture, the street on which I live, the city in which I reside, the books with which I surround myself, the recreation which I enjoy, everything which is mine . . . all this informs me of my choice – that is, my being. (BN 596–97) He referred as well to “the indissoluble unity of identity – myself and my property” (BN 752); “The totality of my possessions reflects the totality of my being. I am what I have” (BN 754). In order to be or become through objects (which he also considered to include people) they must be appropriated; we must come to have them; and in coming to have them, having and being merge. Sartre outlined three ways in which this can take place. First we can master or gain control of things. This can be an instantaneous mastery as with successfully skiing a difficult trail or it can involve an extended engagement like a career. He notes (BN 756) that while we can purchase a bicycle in a moment, it can take a lifetime to fully master it. Furthermore the difficulty of fully mastering such an object can lead to an urge to destroy it and thereby reabsorb it into the self. More commonly however, it is through the consumption or using up of the possession that a “secret joy of possession” is realized. In contrast with new possessions Sartre observes in a footnote (BN 757) that wearing new clothes is pretentious dressing up: “what is new is ‘dressed up’ because it does not belong to anybody.” At the same time he argued that we must also accept responsibility for negative objects, like a war in which we participate, that unavoidably becomes a part of us, symbolizes us, and represents us. A second way in which we may appropriate an object according to Sartre is to create it. When we paint a painting, build a birdhouse, plant a garden, or write a poem, it is ours, consistent with Locke’s labor theory of value. But Sartre further argued that purchasing something is another form of acquisition via creation. Even the monetary potential of acquiring an object offers a form of appropriation: The object which I possess is the one which I have bought. Money represents my strength; it is less a possession in itself than an instrument for possessing. That is why except in most unusual cases of avarice, money is effaced before its possibility for purchase; it is evanescent, it is made to unveil the object, the concrete thing; money has only a transitive being. But to me it appears as a creative force: to buy an object is a symbolic act which amounts to creating the object . . . like the magic wishes of fairy tales. Stop before a show case with money in your pocket; the objects displayed are already more than half yours. (BN 752–53)

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The power of money also has an obverse side; stop before a showcase without money and nothing is yours. As noted earlier, a justified criticism of Sartre is that his ideas of absolute freedom of choice ignore structural constraints on agency such as the traps of poverty, the ravages of war, and structures of self-governance like those discussed by Foucault. But as the subsequent section on desire attests, the power of longing is great; sacrificing “necessities” to acquire “luxuries” is one way to bend or overcome purchase constraints (Belk 1999). A third way of making objects a part of self is by knowing them. To buy a book allows us to own it, but not to possess it. Only by reading, understanding, and remembering a book does it truly become ours. Sartre also invokes the notion of carnal knowledge to suggest that sexually knowing a person is a form of possession. The mechanism of intimate knowledge means that we can also possess a city, a subway system, or a favorite restaurant by learning their ambiance, intricacies, smells, and flavors. As Martin-Gruen and Darpy (2015) demonstrate with the Autolib electric carsharing system in Paris, by using a single model of electric automobile with the same interior and exterior, users can appropriate the car by being familiar with where everything is and how to work it, even though they may actually be in a different car each time. A fourth way of making an object a part of the extended self that was not considered by Sartre is through positive contamination (Belk 1988; see also Gregson and Crew 2003; Roux 2006). Because products touched by others or on which they have left a mark are subsequently associated with them, there can be both positive contamination, as with a celebrity’s things, or negative contamination, as with a stranger’s or a villain’s things. The result, accordingly, can be desire or disgust (e.g., Miller 1997; McGinn 2011; Rozin, Mitlman, and Nemeroff 1986).

Desire “Desire is a lack of being” Sartre tells us (BN 735). Thus, there is a link between Sartre’s nothingness of being and Lacan’s later formulation of lack. The fundamental desire for Sartre is the desire for being. In the context of love, the desire for the loved one is a desire to possess without enslavement, for that would be to possess an automaton (BN 478). That is, the lover does not want to possess the other as a thing, but with the same freedom that Sartre and his long-time partner Simone de Beauvoir enjoyed in their amorous relations with others. Only in this way, he argues, can someone remain in a state of perpetual desire. This same state of desiring to desire was detected by Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2003) in their study of consumer desire. Elsewhere Sartre traced the arc of desire to a desired future state of being: Man is not the sum of what he has, but the totality of what he does not yet have, of what he might have. And if we steep ourselves thus in the future, is not the formless brutality of the present thereby attenuated? (Sartre 1955) He offered these comments in a critique of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and suggested that without a focus on future desires we also have to accept the rest of the Shakespeare quotation that “Life’s . . . a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet, it is pursuing these desires rather than fulfilling them that Sartre celebrates, since “pleasure closes the sluice to desire” (BN 515). Thus Sartre does not advocate overcoming desire as in Eastern religions (Belk 1983), but he does advocate never fully achieving our desires.

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For Sartre a desire to have or do is ultimately a desire to be. As Churchill and Wertz (1985) point out, this is the reason that advertisements commonly promote not so much the qualities and utility that the object advertised possesses, but rather the self that one could be leading in a new life with the product or service: The internal connection between the product and its world, including the very self of the consumer, is implicit in those ads that set the product, by language and pictures, against the background of the world which resonates with a complex ensemble of desires. It’s not the bottle of perfume, or of cola, but rather the possibility of becoming a chic, sensual, intriguing person in a glamorous world, or of being a fun loving, socially active part of the proverbial “Pepsi generation,” that the ad holds out through this brand which is merely ‘a node in the woof ’ of a certain existence. (552) Or, in Sartre’s terms, “Thus the desire of a particular object is not the simple desire of this object; it is the desire to be united with the object in an internal relation in the mode of constituting with it the unity ‘possessor-possessed’” (BN 751). Again, desire is desire for a mode of being rather than simply having.

Gift-giving As Smith (2002) points out, Sartre’s ethical take on the gift went through three distinct phases. In the early 1940s Sartre held a negative view of apparent generosity, seeing it as an aggressive act binding the recipient to reciprocate or to lose face. “To give is to enslave,” (BN 758) he said, drawing on the analyses of the potlatch by Mauss and Lévi-Strauss. This message is also evident in Sartre’s play No Exit (1944). During a second phase in the late 1940s Sartre found a way to embrace generosity by regarding it as an exchange between equals as found in romantic love (see Belk and Coon 1993). But by the 1950s he returned to a negative view of gift-giving as a soulless exchange more characteristic of commodity transactions. Sartre’s vacillation about the morality of the gift is due to the ambiguity of gift-giving, which Mauss (1925/1967) summarized: “The form usually taken is that of the gift generously offered; but the accompanying behavior is formal pretense and social deception, while the transaction itself is based on obligation and self interest” (1). Sartre also detects what he calls “false emotions” on the part of gift recipients who sometimes feign delight at gifts that they do not like (see also Belk 1996). Still, Smith (2002) detects lingering traces of a positive view of gift-giving in Sartre’s later doctrine of “loser wins,” which Smith sees as a partial legitimization of the potlatch model of giving away all one’s material wealth in order to win esteem. Both this hinted view and the oscillation of viewpoints in Sartre suggest the ambiguous character of the gift as well as a need for considering multiple types of gifts (Belk and Coon 1993). Given Sartre’s theorizations of the key role of objects in identity, desire, and gift-giving, it is tempting to see his focus as being on material objects to the exclusion of immaterial things. But although his examples are mostly couched in terms of physical possessions and ownership, he also acknowledges that we may desire other people whom we may not possess and that we may claim possession of immaterial objects like the view from a mountain we have scaled. Since identity and desire may incorporate non-material possessions, we can imagine that Sartre might also embrace non-material gifts such as personal services like a massage, experiences like

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a hike with the gift-giver, ephemeral objects like a birthday party, and digital objects like an MP3 file. To the extent that such non-material gifts may foster interpersonal relationships to a greater degree than material gifts (Chan and Mogliner 2017), it is possible that non-material gift-giving may be seen in a more positive light than the previous summary of Sartre’s more general views on the gift. In addition, since sharing does not involve a transfer of ownership and obligation as gifts do (Belk 2010), it is likely less agonistic than reciprocal gift exchange. And we might consider the impact of resources and age in considering the enslaving potential of gift-giving. When a middle class middle-aged adult gives a gift to young children or much older adults, the expectation of reciprocity is attenuated. The counter-argument might be that feelings of dependency are increased by such gifts, but this may reflect capitalistic and Western individualistic bias. Still, objects play a prominent role in Sartre’s formulations, especially with regard to our perception that our self has continuity and that we are the same person today that we were yesterday or last year. Material objects play a key anchoring role in this perception of self continuity. As Morris (1975) puts it, “There is a frequent sense of disorientation when one wakes up in a strange city or enters a new group. If there were no continuity of objects of consciousness, there might be a permanent sense of disorientation” (42). This is of course the destabilizing intent of total institutions that strip inmates of possessions in order to rebuild them in another identity (Goffman 1961). There is the continuity of memories of course, and both voluntary and unbidden Proustian memories are indeed key to our sense of self. But as Segal (1981) observes, “a memory can never have the precision of a material object” (99). That is for Sartre, despite being mirrored in the reactions of others (Gregory 2011), the self that is being reflected lies as much in external objects as in some imagined internal self.

Conclusions While Sartre has had a clear influence on consumer research and has the potential for yielding more insights than those discussed here, his strong agentic views and phenomenology face challenges in an age of flatter ontologies of people and things and post-phenomenological epistemologies and philosophies. Nevertheless, identity, desire, and gift-giving remain core concepts for a meaningful understanding of the consumer. And in a world of object-oriented ontologies and sociomateriality we might well ask how having, doing, and being will apply to robots and super-intelligent machines. Can they desire? What constitutes identity for androids, gynoids, cyborgs, and clones? What constitutes being human? What of the role of digital avatars and virtual objects? These and similar questions await us in future consumer research. In other words, in the future worlds now envisioned by science and science fiction, we might well flip the script and ask the questions Sartre asked of humans of quasi-humans and non-humans. Pursuing these questions gets into other issues that have not been discussed here. They include the notion of consciousness or what the phenomenologist Sartre called “being-foritself.” Consciousness, for Sartre, is not something we have, but something we are. It constitutes our being. Although he was Cartesian in the sense of distinguishing the mind from the body and soul, he did not see the self being purely cognitive. Rather it includes our hopes, fears, desires, memories, and perhaps our bodies. “Being-in-itself,” on the other hand comprises the non-conscious things of the world – furniture, clothes, mountains, rocks, and so forth. Sartre calls these non-conscious things “beings-in-themselves.” These are the objects that we encounter through having and doing. In order to address questions like those raised in the

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previous paragraph we would need to ask whether the boundary between being-for-itself and being-in-itself is permeable. This constitutes a conflation that Freud called uncanny; Sartre called it magical and imagined it to be impossible. But is it? Can a computer, robot, or hybrid have consciousness as Sartre defines it? Alternatively, can it be that our consciousness extends beyond our brain and body to encompass objects in our environment (e.g., Clark 2003)? When we use a calculator, a computer, or Google, do these devises not become a part of the extended mind? What of the human-computer hybrid of cochlear implants for hearing or neutrally linked video cameras for seeing? These are among the questions that are currently pondered by those working with artificial intelligence, robots, posthumans, and artificial life (Belk 2016; forthcoming). These are not just idle questions, but have moral, economic, and legal implications. Can non-human or quasi-human objects be legal persons like corporations? Could such persons have a right to “life” without “slavery?” Should a human be able to marry a robot? These are questions that Sartre did not directly contemplate, but answering them may nevertheless be informed by his formulations.

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Clark, Andy (2003), Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connell, Paul and Hope Schau (2013), “The Symbiosis Model of Identity Augmentation: Self-Expansion and Self-Extension as Distinct Strategies,” in Ayala Ruvio and Russell Belk, eds., The Routledge Companion to Identity and Consumption, London: Routledge, 21–30. Elliott, Richard and Mark Ritson (1995), “Practicing Existential Consumption: The Lived Meaning of Sexuality in Advertising,” Advances in Consumer Research, 22, 740–45. Goffman, Erving (1961), Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Gregory, Mary (2011), Search for Self in Other in Cicero, Ovid, Rousseau, Diderot and Sartre, New York: Peter Lang. Gregson, Nicky and Louise Crew (2003), Second-Hand Cultures, Oxford: Berg. Lai, Ai-Ling, Janine Dermody, and Stuart Hanmer-Lloyd (2007), “An Existential Analysis of Consumers as ‘Incarnated Beings’: A Merleau-Pontyian Perspective,” European Advances in Consumer Research, 8, 381–89. Martin-Gruen, Adèle and Denis Darpy (2015), “The Role of Design in the Appropriation of Shared Objects: Autolib in Paris,” Advances in Consumer Research, 43, 388–92. Mauss, Marcel (1925/1967), The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, Ian Cunnison, trans., New York: Norton. McGinn, Colin (2011), The Meaning of Disgust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, William (1997), The Anatomy of Disgust, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Morris, Phyllis (1975), Sartre’s Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Reimann, Martin and Arthur Aron (2009), “Self-Expansion Motivation and Inclusion of Brands in Self: Toward a Theory of Brand Relationships,” in Deborah J. Macinnis, C. Whan Park, and Joseph Priester, eds., Handbook of Brand Relationships, Armonk, New York: Sharpe, 65–81. Roux, Dominique (2006), “Am I What I Wear? An Exploratory Study of Symbolic Meanings Associated with Secondhand Clothing,” Advances in Consumer Research, 33, 29–35. Rozin, Paul, Linda Mitlman, and Carol Nemeroff (1986), “Operation of Laws of Sympathetic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50 (April), 703–12. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1955), “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, Annette Michelson, trans. London: Ride and Company. Sartre, Jean-Paul (1944/1956), Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, Hazel Barnes, trans., New York: Washington Square Press. Segal, Naomi (1981), The Banal Object: Theme and Thematics in Proust, Rilke, Hofmannsthal, and Sartre, London: University of London, Institute of Germanic Studies. Smith, Douglas (2002), “Between the Devil and the Good Lord: Sartre and the Gift,” Sartre Studies International, 8 (1), 1–17. Thompson, Craig and Elizabeth Hirschman (1998), “An Existential Analysis of the Embodied Self in Postmodern Consumer Culture,” Consumption, Markets and Culture, 2 (4), 401–47. Thompson, Craig, William Locander, and Howard Pollio (1989), “Putting Consumer Experience Back into Consumer Research: The Philosophy and Method of Existential Phenomenology,” Journal of Consumer Research, 19 (2), 135–47. Wong, Xin, Neil Bendle, Feng Mai, and June Cotte (2015), “The Journal of Consumer Research at 40: A Historical Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research, 42 (1), 5–18.

16 PAUL RICOEUR, VIGIL OF THE SELF Benoît Heilbrunn

Paul Ricoeur was many things: Protestant, prisoner of war, pacifist, professor of philosophy, author of more than 500 articles and of more than 30 books, and recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize, which is considered as the “Nobel Prize for humanists” (Pellauer 2007, Dosse 2008). Born in 1913 in Valence, France, orphaned in 1915 when his mother died and his father was killed soon thereafter in the Battle of the Marne, Ricoeur was reared by his paternal grandparents and an unmarried aunt in Rennes. He studied philosophy first at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne. After succeeding in his aggregation examination, he studied in Germany until the outbreak of World War II. Soon after being drafted into the French army in 1940, he was captured and spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Germany. Together with his colleague Mikel Dufrenne, he taught philosophy to other prisoners in the camp and did so well that the French government agreed to grant degrees to the students following their release at war’s end. While he was imprisoned, he translated Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologishen Philosophie by Edmund Hussel to French (in the margins of the original book because of a lack of paper). After the war, he completed his doctorate and was appointed lecturer in the history of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. He remained there until 1956, when he was appointed to the chair of general philosophy at the Sorbonne. His life was threatened during the Algerian War because of the stand he took against it. In 1967, he joined the faculty of the new University of Paris at Nanterre. From 1954 on, Ricoeur also taught regularly in the United States at Haverford, Columbia, and Yale. In 1967, Ricoeur was named to teach at the University of Chicago and held this position until 1992. One of the main reasons for his departure to the States is the so-called bin story in 1968 in Nanterre. Ricoeur then served as a Dean and was assaulted by a student who dumped a wastepaper basket on his head in the aftermath of the student riots in Paris. He endured a number of vicious verbal attacks by French intellectuals who did not share his points of view, something which never influenced his viewpoints as a philosopher. He lost his son Olivier, who committed suicide, and also his beloved wife Simone. He died in 2005.

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Ricoeur’s core philosophical principles Ricoeur’s philosophical scope is extremely wide for the simple reason that over a career of more than 60 years he addressed topics such as ontology, anthropology, phenomenology, hermeneutics, philosophy of action, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, narrative theory, critical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of law, biblical hermeneutics, to name some but not all. His philosophy is characterized by its interdisciplinarity, which explains why he influenced many thinkers in various fields. The importance of his thought has lasted after the steady decline of deconstruction and in the wake of postmodern radical skepticism. His way of philosophizing could be described as a heuristic (rather than absolute) rationalism in its reconstitution of reality (Valdes, 2006, 643). The grounding principle of Ricoeur’s philosophy, which reconciles the rich and varied paths of his tremendous work, is the belief that there is an irreducible difference between persons and things. Unlike things, persons can engage in free, thoughtful action (Pellauer, 2016). Anyhow, Ricoeur never accepted any version of a substance dualism in the person that the Cartesian cogito or the Kantian transcendental subject would require. His philosophical anthropology focuses on the capacities of the will rather than on the capacities of mind or reason (Pellauer, 2016). In this sense, his philosophical project diverged in important ways from Enlightenment accounts of the self, which, following Descartes, locate selfhood in a self-transparent rational faculty. Ricoeur took very seriously the post-Enlightenment critique of transparent reason initiated by Nietzsche. The main endeavour is therefore to create conditions in which it is possible for truth to emerge from reality, knowing that we are surrounded by postmodern irony (Hall, 2007). Thus, how can we still believe in hope, the good, and trust? Ricoeur’s anthropology clearly focuses on the “capable human being”, and investigates the fundamental capabilities and vulnerabilities that human beings display in the activities that make up their lives. The central node of his philosophical approach is the possibility of understanding the self as an agent responsible for its actions, knowing that Ricoeur consistently rejects any claim that the self is immediately transparent to or fully master of itself. Self-knowledge only comes through mediations which are made of our relation to the world and our life with and among others in that world. That is why agency represents the structure of Ricoeur’s account of the self. He does not dissolve the question of the self into either the force exercised by will or to the force that is exercised on the will (Hall, 2007). Human persons are acting agents, but they are also beings who strive to make sense of their existence (Hall, 2007). The structure of Ricoeur’s account of agency can therefore be characterized by the capability that exists at the point of convergence between the voluntary and the involuntary structures of will and action (Hall, 2007, 25). For Ricoeur, the self is essentially embodied. It is, on the one hand, both made possible and constituted by its material and cultural situation. But, on the other hand, it is in principle always capable of initiative, of inaugurating something new. More importantly, the self is what answers the question: “Who?” Who spoke? Who did this? Who said this? Who is this? Ricoeur’s reflections take its point of departure in the Aristotelian view that action always aims at some good. More specifically, its ultimate aim is to be a constituent in a “‘good life’ with and for others in just institutions” (Ricoeur, 1992, 262). For a good life, one must have associates with and for whom one acts. Furthermore, societal institutions, particularly political institutions, set the context for action and significantly affect its efficacy. For a good life, we aim to have institutions that meet our sense of justice in the obligations they impose and the privileges and opportunities they grant (Ricoeur, 1992, 180). But then, how to understand good life, knowing that it requires forging links between individual and societal/institutional levels?

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His distinction between ethics and morality, which are often used interchangeably, is crucial to that extent. In his usage, ethics deals with the domain of that which is taken to belong to a good human life. It is concerned with the overall aim of a life of action. Morality refers to the expression of this aim in terms of norms that are regarded as somehow obligatory. Moral norms are taken to be universal and to exercise some constraint on conduct. In standard terminology, ethics is teleologically and morality is deontologically oriented (Pellauer, 2016). For Ricoeur, these orientations are complementary, not incompatible. At the base of both ethical and moral reflection are two fundamental capabilities described in Ricoeur’s anthropology, namely action and imputation (Pellauer, 2016). Ricoeur’s philosophy addresses many issues related to consumption studies. First because he is one of the major thinkers of identity and provided a theoretical frame (which will be further explained later on in this chapter) that could help anyone interested in relations between self and consumption to understand how individuals and groups use consumption to build, strengthen, and modify their self without altering it. This understanding would go well beyond the classic “extended self ” vision. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s philosophy is based on the importance of language and of the narrative process. Through the understanding of what a text really is, he opens fascinating methodological and philosophical perspectives for an improved connection between consumption and the idea of textual production and narrative identity. Those are the issues to which we shall now turn.

Starting with the text What is a text? This is the preliminary question that dominates Ricoeur’s investigation (Ricoeur, 1991). At first glance, a text is any discourse fixed by writing. Unlike speech in which a speaker presents a “real” world to an interlocuter, the text represents an imaginary world because of gaps in the text’s references, which ultimately must be filled by the reader. The author also becomes less distinct because the author of the text is constituted by the text rather than being self-designated and immediately identifiable as in speech. This distancing of the author from the text necessitates both explanation and interpretation in order to derive meaning from a text. Structuralists claim that meaning is revealed through the structure of a text or, more precisely, by analyzing the logic of operations which interconnect the relations between lower and higher units of language and the actants and actions within the narrative of the text (Ricoeur, 1981, 155). Text, in a sense, then is closed; it is both worldless and authorless. But Ricoeur claims that explaining the structure of a closed text does not totally reveal the meaning of a text. Nor does it constitute reading. Reading is made possible because texts open onto other things. This linguistic turn can be understood as a turn to inwardness if one takes language not simply as a vector of ideas to achieve communication but as a means of self-reflexivity. This idea contradicts the dominant approach in the late 1960s, as illustrated by structuralism and authors like Foucault and Derrida. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault, who is at this time at the peak of his influence, dismisses all referentiality on discourse. Language, he pretends, is a self-sustaining system in which words have no necessary relation to things. Humanity is therefore locked into a madhouse with massive diachronic shifts between alternative epistemes (Valdes, 2006, 644). At about the same time, Derrida questions the creative power of discourse, therefore denying referentiality to a poetic discourse. Ricoeur addresses Derrida’s White Mythology (1974) in The Rule of Metaphor: “[Derrida’s] perplexing tactic has proven to be

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only one episode of deconstruction that always consists in destroying metaphorical discourse by reduction to aporias”. How to escape this aporias is one of the major tasks of The Rule of the Metaphor. First the proposition that, like coins, metaphors wear out and, in the effacement that follows, drift towards idealization. Second, he rejects opposition of operations, as for example, syntax and semantics, or figurative usage and literal usage (Valdes, 2006, 645). In an appendix to the revised edition of The Rule of the Metaphor, Ricoeur gives an important explanation: The kind of hermeneutics which I now favour starts from the subjective intention of the author. This objective meaning is not something hidden behind the text. Rather, it is a requirement addressed to the reader. The interpretation accordingly is a kind of “obedience to this injunction starting from the text”. (Ricoeur, 1978) Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is directed to what the encounter between text and reader opens up, what the engagement discloses. He thus establishes a poststructural response to Derrida and Foucault.

Language as self-mediation The main conviction of Ricoeur is that language makes the self transparent to itself. That is why Ricoeur is famous for bringing the theory of hermeneutics into phenomenology: for him, the very aim of phenomenology is achieved through a detour towards hermeneutics. The study of that which appears becomes relevant and meaningful because that which presents itself to me, the phenomenon, calls for an interpretation. Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology is a sustained analysis of the phenomenon as quintessentially textual (Masong, 2012). Human existence becomes meaningful in discourse, that is, in the language that is spoken or uttered. Language is not just a system of signifier and signified. It needs to actualize itself in the event of discourse by realizing the linguistic competence inherent in human nature. It clearly means that the very meaning and constitution of human existence is linguistic and that reality becomes textuality. In other words, all forms of mediations are mediations of and by the text. For Ricoeur, the text is the bridge between the subjectivity of the self and the objectivity of the world. For him, the linguistic turn is not just anthropological or hermeneutic; rather, it is textual. But this is only possible if one decenters textuality from the author of the text and toward the reader and interpreter (Masong, 2012). What results from this decentering is that language becomes less of a vehicle for thought (of the speaker or author) and more of a disclosing force to bring reality to light (for the reader or interpreter) (Masong, 2012). Therefore, a phenomenology of human existence is a phenomenology of reading because that which presents itself, presents itself as needing interpretation. Ricoeur attempts to deconstruct the binary opposition between explanation and interpretation. He calls for a kind of transaction between understanding and interpretation which is crucial in his hermeneutic project. Explanation, he pretends, is thought to be borrowed from the natural sciences and is a central tool of positivism. Interpretation, on the other hand, as the main form of understanding, is thought to be specific to the human sciences and responsible for the division between the two sciences. Ricoeur explains, however, that they are not opposites but rather have a complementary and reciprocal relationship and they might be ultimately reconciled through

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reading. Interpretation is thus both a scientific and philosophical practice. To read is . . . to conjoin a new discourse to the discourse of the text (Ricoeur, 1981, 158). Interpretation can be understood as an appropriation in various senses. In one sense, the ultimate outcome of interpreting a text is self-understanding (Ricoeur, 1981, 158). In other sense, through interpretation, we make “one’s own what was initially alien” (Ricoeur, 1981, 159). In other words, interpretation overcomes cultural distance by allowing us to understand the world as well as the self. Thus, the subject of a text then is the world and the reader him-/herself. Meaning is derived with a “realization of the discourse of the reading subject” and the culture around them (Ricoeur, 1981, 159). Reading thus appears as the recovery of meaning (Ricoeur, 1981, 161). Interpretation does not reveal a so-called presumed intention of the author/writer, but instead the text’s intention. In other words, “reading [in turn] is the concrete act in which the destiny of the text is fulfilled. It is at the very heart of reading that explanation and interpretation are indefinitely opposed and reconciled” (Ricoeur, 1981, 164). And that is the reason why metaphor is the central problem of hermeneutics in the sense metaphor has the extraordinary power of “redescribing reality”.

Metaphor and the linguistic imagination Ricoeur tries to show that language can extend itself to its very limits forever discovering new resonances within itself. Beyond the political and epistemological imagination, there exists a linguistic imagination which generates and regenerates meaning through the living power of metaphoricity (Ricoeur, 1978). The meaning of a metaphor is dependent on the context as well as on associations with commonplaces and cultural rules as well as semantic and syntactic rules. To understand new metaphors, we construct a network of interactions by directing our attention to the entire semantic event, which is constituted by intersecting semantic fields (Ricoeur, 1981, 174). We construct meaning of text in a similar way and the interpretation of text (as well as of a metaphor) is a dialectic of guessing and validating. The texts speak of possible worlds and of possible ways of orienting oneself in these worlds. To interpret means to open one’s self to those possible worlds which texts discloses. Ricoeur strongly believes in the ability of the hermeneutic circle to make what is alien in a text familiar. Standing in front of a text means I do not project my own beliefs and prejudices onto the text; instead I “let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of the understanding which I have of my self ” (Ricoeur, 1981, 178). That is why interpretation is ontological in this sense. And the role of the metaphor is crucial in this respect. Essentially, what he aims to do is demonstrate that the explanation of metaphor contributes to the interpretation of the whole text. And metaphor is not only in rhetoric. It is also in poetics. Metaphor is more than a trope; it is an impertinent predication. It is defined by Ricoeur as the pertinence within the impertinence. Creativity in metaphor within the category of poetics creates reality for the reader and also transforms the reader. In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur argues that there is a linguistic productive imagination that generates and regenerates meaning through the power of metaphoricity to state things in new ways. Fresh metaphors, metaphors that have not been reduced to the commonplace, reveal a new way of seeing their referents. They creatively transform language and they are not merely rhetorical ornaments. In a similar manner, acts of narrating create new plots and characters, thereby also producing new meanings. The transfer of meaning in metaphor is exemplified in what Ricoeur refers to as “seeing as that frees language

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and unfolds its inherent disclosive freedom towards creativity” (Ricoeur, 1978). This aspect of “seeing as” of metaphor highlights the figurative character of language, and by extension, the figurative character of the whole of reality (Masong, 2012). Living metaphors are the ones that disclose and recreate reality by structuring and organizing it. It is quite clear that the metaphorization of language becomes the metaphorization of being itself. “Seeing as” founds reality as “being as”, as Ricoeur himself summarizes, “Metaphor is living not only to the extent that it vivifies a constituted language. Metaphor is living by virtue of the fact that it introduces the spark of imagination into a ‘thinking more’ at the conceptual level” (Ricoeur, 1978). Thus, how is it possible to reconcile fiction and praxis? In the Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur introduces the concept of split-reference which is the founding principle of postdeconstruction hermeneutics. He distinguishes two worlds, one which is fictional because it is projected by the work (the world of the work) and the other one which is a world of praxis in which we live, knowing that these two worlds are intertwined. The world of the fictional work can only be constituted insofar as the reader has a world of praxis from which to draw the necessary assumptions that fill out the fictional discourse (Valdes, 1991, 2006). On the other hand, the reader displays his/her actions so that the actual world is the world of praxis. Reading a poetic text is a decisive intersection between the world of the work and the world of praxis, and it is through this engagement that there is a transfer from the fictional world to the real world. A word which is read is caught up in a tension between the two worlds. By the eradication of the structuralist distinction between the inside and the outside of the text-dichotomy, Ricoeur reinserts the world of the text in the world of praxis, fully recognizing that not everything is a text and that all texts belong to the same culture (Valdes, 2006). In ontological terms, a text does not start with an author but with a reader who responds to the demands of the text and, in so doing, makes the textual world through a cycle of creation and re-creation. The configuration of the text is thus a mediation between the individual and the community of readers to which the reader belongs (Valdes, 2006).

The narrative and dialectic dimension of identity Humans do not make up meaning ex nihilo. Ricoeur’s argument is that existence is meaningfully configured via the mediation of narratives. He argues for a version of the human subject in which personal identity is not fully stable or self-transparent, but is coherent and not self-alienated. Ricoeur assumes that the subject emerges essentially through narrative self-relationship and that the self builds itself through constant acts of active (re-) interpretations. This is the idea of narrative identity in the sense of a personal or communal identity expressed and even constituted through the narrative that speaks of it. Narrative refers to the way humans experience time, in terms of the way one understand one’s future potentialities, as well as the way one mentally organizes one’s sense of the past. Identity can only be envisaged throughout one’s entire life and humans tend to carry out “emplotment” – as we draw together disparate past events into a meaningful whole, by establishing causal and meaningful connections between them (Ricoeur, 1992, 2005). These attributions of causation, where other human subjects are involved, necessarily involve moral responsibility. To be more precise, Ricoeur argues that no narrative is ethically neutral.

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In one of his fundamental works, Oneself as Another , Paul Ricoeur puts forward a model and definition of identity which articulates two dimensions. A subject’s identity is necessarily linked to a difference (having an identity means being different from others) and to permanence (keeping an identity presupposes continuity in time and space). It’s largely on the second that he insists by developing the idea that the “permanence” slope of identity must be understood as a dialectic between two drivers, between two forces: first an inertial force of acquired values, postures, and habits that grow to reproduce signs that ensure recognition by others and enter the topic in the social and code, and the other, a force that pulls towards the full realization of itself, a life project. In other words, identity is constituted by an inextricable tie between selfsameness and a self-constancy. Following the distinction in Latin between idem and ipse , Ricoeur holds that the self ’s idem- identity is that which gives the self, among other things, its spatiotemporal sameness. Its ipse -identity is what accounts for its unique ability to initiate something new and imputable to a self, be it oneself or another, as agent. Without both sorts of identity there is no self. The self has both an idem -identity and an ipse -identity. A comprehensive account of any genuine action must express the way it is related to both of these orders. Self-constancy and loyalty to oneself are the key ethical drivers of any personal identity for Ricoeur, even though this may lead to breakage, denial, and abandonment of provisions that only seemed to persist indefinitely. It is by keeping one’s word that the subject demonstrates an ability to stay true to his commitments despite changes that could affect them. This is what he calls self-constancy, which corresponds to a higher form of identity that makes the subject someone that others can count on and vice versa.

References Derrida, Jacques, (1974), “White Mythology : Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” New Literary History, 6(1) 5–74. Dosse, François, (2008), Paul Ricoeur: Les sens d’une vie (1913–2005), new edition, Paris: La Découverte. Hall, David, (2007), Paul Ricoeur and the Poetic Imperative: The Creative Tension between Love and Justice, Albany: State University of New York Press. Masong, Kenneth, (2012), Metaphor, Poiesis and Hermeneutical Ontology: Paul Ricoeur and the Turn to Language, Pan Pacific Journal of Philosophy, Education and Management, 1 (1), (https://philpapers.org/ archive/masmpa-4.pdf ). Pellauer, David, (2007), Ricoeur: A Guide for the Perplexed, New York: Continuum. Pellauer, David, (2016), Ricoeur, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ ricoeur/). Ricoeur, Paul, (1978), The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and S. J. John Costello, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, (1975). ———, (1981), Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———, (1984–88), Time and Narrative, 3 vols., trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1983–85). ———, (1991), From Text to Action. Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, (1986). ———, (1992), Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, (1990).

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———, (2005), The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, (2004). Valdes, Mario J. (ed.), (1991), Reflection & Imagination. A Ricoeur Reader, Hertfordhsire: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Valdes, Mario J., (2006), “Paul Ricoeur” in Lawrence Kritzman (ed.), The Columbia History of TwentiethCentury French Thought, New York, Colombia University Press, p. 647.

17 HABERMAS: REIGNITING ENLIGHTENMENT REASON Jeff B. Murray

Introduction Jürgen Habermas was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1929. He is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading intellectuals. A sociologist and philosopher by training, Habermas leads the second generation of critical theorists, picking up where the Frankfurt School left off. In a 1981 article published in the New German Critique entitled Modernity versus Postmodernity, Habermas asks the question that drives his theoretical agenda: “Should we try to hold on to the intentions of the enlightenment, feeble as they may be, or should we declare the entire project of modernity a lost cause?” (p. 9). Later in the article, Habermas states, “The project of modernity has not yet been fulfilled” (p. 12). Note that Habermas refers to enlightenment reason and modernity as a project. Enlightenment reason has emancipatory potential, promoting a deeper understanding of the world and of the self, moral progress, the justice of institutions, and even the happiness of human beings (Habermas 1981). Yet, the 20th century has shattered this optimism. So here is the question: can the potential of enlightenment reason be reignited?

The public sphere At the heart of Habermas’s project is to understand the social conditions that unite reason with resistance. The Frankfurt School ended with the first generation of critical theorists pessimistically concluding that enlightenment reason ends up repressing humanity in new and unpredictable ways. What appears to be the key to freedom and emancipation is actually a new trap, and there is no way out. The dominating logic of capital and market exchange value turns reason into an instrument for means-end rationality, privileging natural scientific and technologically exploitable forms of knowing. Habermas’s (1962/1989) first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, is an attempt to understand the cultural circumstances needed for critique and why these circumstances might become overshadowed by instrumental rationality. Habermas begins The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989) by explaining that the cultural circumstances of the 18th century led to civic rights guaranteeing freedom of

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association and expression. This, when combined with a free press, gave rise to a public sphere that created opportunities for private citizens to gain perspective through unconstrained, freeflowing discussion between equals. Think of coffee shops and pubs with the daily newspaper tacked to the walls. Family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and citizens meet in the morning for coffee, and in the afternoon for a pint. Here, current events are debated without power struggles, hidden agendas, or strategic initiatives; one meets, drinks, and shares opinions. For Habermas, unregulated arenas of public discourse are necessary in that the outcome is often a shared conception of the common good. This conception can then serve as a check on the powers of closed government. Without space and place for free expression, there is no cultural setting where the ideals of the historical enlightenment – liberty, equality, and justice – can be cultivated. Habermas believes that in the 19th and 20th centuries, the public sphere becomes stagemanaged by big corporations. This leads to a decline of the public sphere. In the following quote describing this process, we can also see the important influence of the first generation critical theorists, particularly Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964): When the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public; rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption, and the web of public communication unraveled into acts of individuated reception, however uniform in mode. (Habermas 1962/1989, p. 161) Habermas concludes The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989) with the hope that the idea of an authentic public sphere might re-emerge. Believing that big corporations or social systems invade the public sphere, eclipsing the potential for free-flowing debate and communication, is a key theme that continues through Habermas’s project. By suggesting that instrumental rationality is situated in social systems and open communication resides in an ideal public realm, Habermas is able to combine very different theoretical traditions. This brings us to Habermas’s most important contribution to social theory.

Habermas’s social ontology The Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987) develops many of the initial ideas Habermas began in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989). Volume I (1984) is entitled Reason and the Rationalization of Society. In this Volume (1984), Habermas sets the stage with a conceptual argument that moves away from the Marxist orientation developed by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists. His challenge is to show that instrumental rationality is not the inevitable consequence of enlightenment reason. To do this, Habermas (1984) shifts the argument from Marx to Mead. Marx emphasized the mode of production, work and labor, means and ends, and the opposition between subject and object – resulting in instrumental action. Mead, however, represents a very different theoretical tradition: symbolic interactionism. This tradition emphasizes intersubjectivity, communication, consensus formation, and the connections between subject and subject – resulting in communicative action. By emphasizing communicative action as a substructure, Habermas is able to both critique and complement Marxist theories. Keep in mind that Habermas is still trying to find a way of thinking that can fulfill the promise of enlightenment reason, reigniting the potential of

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modernity. It is communicative action that has the potential to forge a way of speaking and interacting that develops a consensus that can check the powers of social systems, whether they be governments, corporations, the military industrial complex, and so on. Note here that Habermas is also arguing with Kant – suggesting that reason is not located in the knowing subject, it is located in structures of interpersonal linguistic communication. In this way, Habermas reflects the theoretical era of his time, the linguistic turn. Volume II (1987) of The Theory of Communicative Action is entitled Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. In this volume, Habermas develops a social ontology which he then uses as a platform to critique instrumental action. Here, Habermas contends that modern societies comprise two basic spheres of sociality: lifeworld and system. Note that Volume II (1987) develops and refines many of the ideas originally proposed in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989). The public sphere is now referred to as the lifeworld and the decline of the public sphere is now explained in terms of the colonizing tendency of the social system. Habermas’s view of society allows him to bring together theoretical traditions that are not normally associated – specifically, the structural functionalism of Talcott Parsons and the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. It cannot be emphasized enough how important everyday life and its practices are to Habermas’s social theory. It is absolutely central. The academic reception of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989) made clear to Habermas that he needed a richer theoretical development of what he was calling the public sphere. Habermas found the ideas he was looking for in The Structures of the Life-World by Alfred Schutz (published as Schutz and Luckmann 1973, 1989). Schutz’s theory enabled Habermas to retain his initial ideas of the public sphere, and at the same time expand the concept to include the everyday condition of life, pregiven realities, experience, and human practice: Everyday life is that province of reality in which we encounter directly, as the condition of our life, natural and social givens as pregiven realities with which we must try to cope. We must act in the everyday life-world, if we wish to keep ourselves alive. We experience everyday life essentially as the province of human practice. (Schutz and Luckmann 1989, p. 1) Schutz’s (Schutz and Luckmann 1989) original notebooks, published in Volume 2 of The Structures of the Life-World as an appendix, are filled with information on the importance of communication for the lifeworld. One can find in these notes many ideas that are eventually used by Habermas when he refers to communicative action. Specifically, ideas related to how understanding is anticipated in the structure of communication: Communication presupposes that the interpretational scheme which the communicator relates and that which the addressee will relate to the communicative sign in question substantially coincide. (Schutz and Luckmann 1989, p. 260) Thus, the lifeworld and communicative action for Habermas are complementary concepts. The lifeworld is the context of background processes and unspoken presuppositions that allow communication and understanding. It is communicative action that has the potential to create a democratic process that leads to consensus and critique. Thus, Habermas is describing

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a form of communication that is useful in reigniting enlightenment ideals. In order to make this foundation clear, one can think about how it might appear from an ideal perspective. One of Habermas’s students, the American philosopher Thomas McCarthy, who translated Volumes I and II of The Theory of Communicative Action, explains that the ideal speech situation is the foundation from which one stands to criticize. The ideal speech situation is a form of symbolic interaction where actors speak in a way that facilitates understanding, communicates true intentions, shares a normative context, and is truthful. This type of communication creates intersubjectivity or consensus, necessary to democratically push against instrumental action and repression. If agreement is to be the product of a rational will, then the only permissible force is the unforced force of the better argument, and the only permissible motive is the cooperative search for truth. Thus the situation of discourse must be such as to exclude structural constraints on argumentative reasoning – whether these be open or latent, conscious or unconscious. It must be an ideal speech situation. (McCarthy 1978, p. 308) Although the ideal speech situation will never exist, Habermas, drawing on Schutz, argues that the very act of participating in a discourse involves the supposition that genuine consensus is possible and that it can be distinguished from false consensus. In this sense, it is an ideal, similar to religious, ethical, political, or artistic ideals, which we know to be incapable of complete realization but that is no less effective in shaping social life. It is important to add, that from Habermas’s perspective, there is only one society. When one views society from the inside looking out, or from the point of view of the participants, it is the lifeworld; when one views society from the outside looking in, as an observer, it is the social system. Habermas develops his understanding of social systems by studying structural functionalism, particularly the work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons. Parsons’ The Social System (1951) and The Structure of Social Action (1967) portray an organic analogy of society; explaining that different structures (organs) function interdependently to sustain, reproduce, and manage tensions between individual and collective units. Structural functionalism maintains order and social equilibrium. This theory is an extension of Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society (1933/1984) proposing that as societies become bigger and more complex in the wake of industrialization, the task of social integration becomes increasingly difficult. Under these conditions, social systems such as markets and state administration ease the burden that falls to communication and discourse – they help hold society together. Social systems are characterized by instrumental rationality and action. They emphasize a technical form of thinking that becomes divorced from everyday life. It is this form of instrumental rationality that Weber describes as an iron cage and is the subject of critique by the first generation critical theorists.

Colonization of the lifeworld When Habermas uses the word “decouple,” it is meant to refer to the breakdown of the dialectical tension between the lifeworld and the social system. From this perspective, since social systems are no longer connected to everyday life, they are no longer situated locally. This gives them the ability to detach from the lifeworld and cultivate influence and power

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that is mobile. In other words, Habermas is interested in how the social system has come to control, or colonize, the lifeworld. Basically, social systems rob the lifeworld of communicative action and it becomes more difficult to achieve the type of consensus necessary to critique the repressive forces of instrumental rationality. Communication becomes increasingly rigidified, fragmented, and distorted; the lifeworld itself becomes impoverished. Recall that it is the lifeworld that is more basic, this is where people solve the existential problems of everyday life, develop meaningful relationships, and have the opportunity to make culture their own. Habermas argues that as the domain of the lifeworld shrinks and instrumental action begins to dominate, social pathologies emerge. There are four related categories of these pathologies. The first is anomie; this concept is borrowed from Durkheim’s (1951) famous study of suicide. Durkheim (1951) describes anomie as a state of normlessness. Here, one feels detached from the world, unable to share in cultural symbols and meanings that socially integrate. For example, early coffeehouses thrived on political debate; patrons would gather to talk, read, write, entertain, pass the time, perform, and so on. Today, individuals sit by themselves, working on their laptops, not interacting, and struggling to connect digitally on Facebook. Constructing and living a meaningful narrative becomes more difficult; as continuity is lost, the self becomes fragmented. The second is disintegration. Integration, from a social systems perspective, is the regulation of the interrelationships of the component parts of the system. It also entails the management of functional imperatives. For Parsons’ (1951, 1967) structural functionalism, functional imperatives include adaptation, goal attainment, and pattern maintenance. However, from the perspective of the lifeworld, social bonds and friendships now become administered, removing the potential for deeper personal relationships – this lack of meaning is disintegrating. The third is alienation. This concept was borrowed from Marx and is often discussed in the context of the ideal speech community (see Scott 2012, pp. 165–166). When power, class, status, or other identity issues prevent an individual from fully participating in communicative action, they become isolated, estranged, or alienated from the discursive community, distorting speech. Distorted communication results in ideological dissemination rather than consensus formation. The last pathology discussed by Habermas is social instability. This phrase does not connote critique and conflict; instead, it refers to the lack of dialectical tension between the lifeworld and the social system. Both of these spheres of sociality are necessary in modern societies, however, the colonizing effect of the social system erodes the dialectical tension, which compromises resiliency and the struggle for meaning. Thus, from an academic perspective, second generation critical theorists focus on a theoretical critique of the process of colonization. The foundation from which they stand in making this critique is the ideal speech situation – an ideal form of communicative action, necessary for creating a consensus that can democratically fight against instrumental rationality and ultimately result in freedom, justice, equality, and liberty. When Habermas refers to modernity as a project, he is optimistically inferring that there are ways of preserving the lifeworld from the corroding effect of the system. In this way, second generation critical theorists have developed a negative critique in that it is a conceptual framework useful for diagnosing what is wrong with society. Similar to the first generation of critical theorists, articulating a clear agenda for action that can be embraced by progressive tendencies, or a positive critique, is more difficult. Articulating a positive critique entails identifying an agent or force that has the potential to preserve and enhance the lifeworld.

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A walk in Shanghai Although Habermas’s social ontology consists of theoretical categories that are difficult to bring to life empirically, I will try to do this with an intuitive example. A few years ago I had the good fortune of teaching an Executive MBA course in Shanghai, China. On the weekend I loved to explore the city on foot with long walks, usually resulting in me getting lost and taking a taxi back to my hotel. Beginning in 1979, China launched several economic reforms. The first cities participating in these free market economic experiments were Beijing in the north, Shanghai in the middle of the country, and Guangzhou in the south. On one Saturday morning I was walking a main street in downtown Shanghai. As a marketing professor, I was fascinated with how international retailers had taken over the local shops and markets. On this street alone I spotted Carrefour from France, Walmart from America, Tesco from the United Kingdom, and Metro AG from Germany. These retailers were welcoming, well designed for the Asian market, and overwhelming in their presence. I took the opportunity to do a little informal ethnographic work and stopped to interview some of the store employees and customers. As I was beginning to exit this particular street, I noticed something in the alleyway. This was a very thin street between two large buildings. This narrow strip of paved street was bursting with energy, a teeming local market selling fresh produce, live chickens, live seafood of various sorts, tall sugar cane, and a wide range of crafts. Vendors laid down a blanket to mark their spot on the road and displayed what they had to sell. I was so interested. I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures and saying hello to the locals. Suddenly I noticed that it got very quiet and everyone was looking at me with expressions of suspicious anger. One of the young men picked up a large sugar cane and started wielding it like a club, chasing me in a full sprint out of the alleyway. I realized at this point that I had entered a place where I was not welcome. I managed to run back to the main street without getting clobbered. When reflecting on this experience my thoughts would always return to Habermas’s social ontology. These global retailers (i.e., social systems) were able to uncouple from their original cultures, move to a different location on the other side of the world, and colonize public spaces in Shanghai. As their lifeworld became increasingly colonized, the local market where families and individuals would gather to interact and exchange goods was pushed to the margins, ending up in an alleyway. I was a symbol of this colonization, representing a new type of invasion, and therefore, was chased out. Although there are other plausible explanations for this experience, thinking about your everyday life theoretically facilitates and encourages a deeper understanding of the concepts.

Conclusion Those of us interested in critical marketing ask how we can create and establish a critical orientation in the field. However, maybe this is the wrong question. Instead, we should ask: in what way does marketing already embrace a critical orientation and how can the conceptual frameworks of critical theory be used to enhance the discipline? Marketing is replete with studies of how local markets are threatened by economic and administrative systems that have uncoupled from their local contexts. Does the loss of local markets and public spaces result in social pathologies that impact our cultural experience? Can progressive tendencies, acting on behalf of local communities, develop a course of social action that can

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rejuvenate and reignite the lifeworld? Habermas’s social theory is a well-developed orienting conceptual framework helpful for conceiving a research program that can respond to these important questions.

References Durkheim, Emile (1933/1984), The Division of Labor in Society, New York: The Free Press. Durkheim, Emile (1951), Suicide, New York: The Free Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1962/1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1981), “Modernity versus Postmodernity,” New German Critique, 22 (Winter), 3–14. Habermas, Jürgen (1984), The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1987), The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume II, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert (1964), One-Dimensional Man, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. McCarthy, Thomas (1978), The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Parsons, Talcott (1951), The Social System, New York: Routledge. Parsons, Talcott (1967), The Structure of Social Action, New York: The Free Press. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann (1973), The Structures of the Life-World, Volume 1, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Schutz, Alfred and Thomas Luckmann (1989), The Structures of the Life-World, Volume 2, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Scott, John (2012), Sociological Theory, Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

PART VI

Civilization and history

18 REMEMBERING WALTER BENJAMIN, OR THE DEATH OF THE LAST INTELLECTUAL Robert Kozinets

Remembering Walter Benjamin means remembering the story of Walter Benjamin’s death. Many things besides, to be certain there is no doubt. But, in contemporary scholarship regarding the meaning, works, and significance of this famous twentieth-century fin de siècle critic and cultural historian, mourning and bereavement of the man’s tragic and mysterious fate at the age of forty-eight prevail. As this blended sense of loss and significance must do in all great stories. Paintings of the long-dead, photographs in an old shoebox, Facebook memorializations. These are the sorts of topics that fascinated and would fascinate Walter Benjamin. Subjects wherein we the living remember and revive the dead, through our stories captured in particular forms. For Walter Benjamin’s work was about nothing if it was not about the relation between our memories and the material world. We exhale memory into media as naturally and easily as we do carbon dioxide, expelling and propelling it out into the social worlds surrounding us to create multitudes of ideas and things which live on. Our culture of bygone days, even more so our culture of social media moments, seems endlessly to reflect and facilitate these ancient fears of loss, these eternal battles against time and forgetting. These are the technologies that Walter Benjamin would be fascinated with apprehending and predicting, as he was with all the technologies of his time. Walter Benjamin was doubtlessly one of the world’s earlier technology theorists, fascinated with photography and its history. These are technologies of imagery which Walter Benjamin told us change the representation of reality. In his most famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he wrote that “the mode of human perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence” (Benjamin 1936/1973, p. 216). Here, Benjamin is laying out the basis for a theory of technoculture, one which is still largely to be developed. Such a theory would presume to tell us how our own phenomenological and cultural sense of the nature of human existence is filtered through the way our perceptions are altered by our technologies. How we see the world is transformed by how our various devices allow us to see the world. Such as, for instance, how the world of big data analysis and visualization is currently transforming our culture and our sense of ourselves. The emphasis on product introduction and consumption, on mechanization and reproduction, as well as on theories of the visual makes his work relevant to scholars throughout business schools, as a lesson not only

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in consumer culture understanding, but also most certainly applied brand management and theoretical thought. Death has a finality that theory, with all its tentatives and temporality, cannot hope to match. Death puts things like scholarship, criticism, and academic practice into perspective. In 1928, his friend Seigried Kracauer wrote that the kind of thinking Benjamin embodied “has fallen into oblivion” (Kracauer 1995 [1928], 264). But Walter Benjamin’s very essence was remembering the dead. He did it when he was alive. Obsessively and repeatedly. And others, many others, an entire cottage industry that cuts across art history, sociology, Jewish studies, women’s studies, visual studies, anthropology, and architecture, as well as marketing and consumer research, have dedicated themselves to preserving his ideas today, and through his ideas, his life, his concerns, and his image.

Why should we remember? Perhaps Walter Benjamin sought to keep memory and meaning and tradition alive because they are the key cultural energies that animate us as living embodied souls. Memory makes us human. Memory of the dead helps us live whole lives, connected in time to the past and to each other. Memory fuels the fires that burn at the roots of not only our humanity, because that word has had its meaning leeched out of it by being reproduced, over and over again, until it has became staid, stiff, and no longer cool, but also our humanness. The state of remembering what it means to be a human, by comparing and finding, emotionally and intellectually, the experience of the generalized other within the experience of the self, our self, our selves embroiled day to day in the pages of our own stories. This requires shared context. It requires shared meaning. But by reproducing and mass-producing something, over and over again, it becomes decontextualized. It thus loses its original set of meanings, which Benjamin perhaps meant by his term “aura” (perhaps, because the concept was never particularly clear in his writing, with its pellucid nature perhaps adding to its, and his, appeal). Aura is a strange weaving together of space, time, art, and artist. This leeching of meaning from our creations is just as Benjamin predicted in his work on reproduction. In a mechanical age, the reproduction of brands and images is also concerned with the reproduction of cultural meaning. Yet rarely is this connection connected, as it very much should be, to the loss of meaning that brands constantly suffer exactly because their original meaning has been stripped from them when they change contexts. Consider as an example of this fundamental principle the story of the world’s foremost soda pop brand. For only two years before he died, starting in 1886 in a small shop in Atlanta, Georgia, Dr. Pemberton sold the delicious and psychoactive pharmaceutical brew that became CocaCola. That particular substance in that particular context was filled to the brim with the full store of meaning of what became that particular brand. That is no longer true. Coca-Cola is a brand that has been milked and stretched, diluted and polluted ever since that time, according Benjamin’s theory of reproduction, which applies equally well to the mass marketing of brands. And yet, to stay with the example for one final point, we can see how Coke is recharged by remembering, as the history and spectacle of remembering that is the World of Coca-Cola museum, a “brand museum”, testifies (Hollenbeck, Peters, and Zinkhan 2008). Consider this point: Situating the Coca-Cola brand within history establishes local associations to its Southern heritage and to the broader American culture. In this way, the brand is localized

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because the brand museum surrounds consumers with objects, artifacts, and pictures that represent the South, Atlanta, and America. For instance, John discovered that “many of the street names in downtown Atlanta came from the founders of Coke.” Brand meaning was extended as John realized the extent to which the brand plays a role in Atlanta’s history. (Hollenbeck, Peters, and Zinkhan 2008, 344–345) All brands endure a similarly diminishing fate as soon as they leave their true homes, abandoning their origins for the big wide world of mass production and possible success. Unless they are regularly (re-)charged with the cultural energies from other great stories, such as inspirational narratives from Sports, Politics, The Media, and the Corporate Market Economy, they lose their own original charge and gradually – or drastically – dwindle in their particular potencies. Ultimately, each of our stories will be judged once they have been told.

Benjamin’s aura To some of his interpreters and memorializers, to think in this way is to actualize his spirit, manifest it, bring it from the page out, like religious people are supposed to do for Saints with Biblical readings. This is His Aura: the living presence of the Artist within the art. Or the Creator, godlike, within the Creation – a mystical thought indeed. In reading Benjamin, we can hear the voice of the mind of the man working. A brilliant mind. And we keep on hearing that voice afterwards. Remembering. Bringing back. Remembering. Interpreting. Changing the past into the present. Changing the future into the present. In those moments and for this time, as interpreters, we bring back Walter Benjamin from the dead. Not as a Zombie, but a Re-Animator. An Archetypal Intelligence that manifests Walter Benjamin’s voice and concerns. Beyond his thought and life, reading Benjamin re-animates the story of his persecution, self-sacrifice, his sad desolation and death. A demise which possibly led to the escape of many others. Through it, he comes back to us, rescuing us. For we can readily see how his huge body of very citable work might apply to the questions of consumer researchers and consumption sociologists. But even more inspirational to us, his work calls out to our humanity, from that tragic day on the 26th of September 1940, on the Spanish border town of Portbrou. Remembering Walter Benjamin, as I do in this short chapter, as the editors do by indexing him in this book, as you do now by reading these words “is to be in memory of a writer for whom the requirements of memory were passing and ineluctable – it is to be in memory of the fragile value of memory itself ” (Marcus and Nead 1993, vi). An expansive critique of ideology and on the perils of technology, Benjamin’s work is accompanied by equally brilliant visual representations of him in photographs of the day, for he loved the photographic portrait, the selfie of its day, the rediscovered portrait of the forgotten dead, and the séance of otherness that can follow the introspective contemplation of such nameless, storyless entities. He was fascinated with every type of camera or visualization machine of that day, and they captured this rumination. Evident in his photographs, wild hair in the darkness, chin in hand, cigarette in fingers, it is hard not to mention, even in a short piece about Benjamin, the photographs of him and how much they have been reproduced. Benjamin was indeed concerned with many things, but perhaps chief among them were “the historical and political consequences of technology; the relations between reproduction

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and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, visual and linguistic representation, and film and photography” (Cadava 1998, xix). Perhaps his most important work historically will turn out to be his theories on photography, which are already widely known for some things. My sense is that we will learn much more about those who interpreted Benjamin, interpreted him through the lens of his own death, as if in life he could not have had this meaning. Who he was lives through the page. It gains a type of new immortality, or a temporary one, jumping into another person’s mind. But it is not immortality that most of those who write about and analyze Benjamin are concerned with. They are concerned with death. “Photography,” says Cadava, “is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification. Even though it still remains to be thought, the essential relation between death and language flashes up before us in the photographic image” (Isenberg 2001, 138). What to make, then, of the selfie? Do we mourn through its transitory capture the loss of the moment, of our ever-diminishing youth? Or do we mourn something greater than ourselves, the loss of the past, the loss of old ways and traditions left behind, all around the world, the world recreating itself with much rare metals and electricity and radiation wavelengths. What of SnapChat then? Of YouTube? Of cosplay at ComicCon? Where fame is deep but instant, over quickly, what then? Where fame is spread like expensive butter, broadly but only superficially and only for short amounts of delicious savory time before it melts, how does one achieve fame, or at least some remembrance, without dying as Benjamin did? Is this even possible? History, Benjamin teaches us, is a form of photography; similarly, photography is a form of history. Is that form different for a printed digital image than one which remains etched just as physically onto your computer’s hard drive? Or how about stored on a remote “cloud”? What of these physical traces? They are gone as quickly as a software update that no longer reads their format. They disappear instantly, the moment there is a pulse or a flicker in the appropriate chambers. They are not more than real; they are less than real.

Still feasting Studying contemporary consumer culture means we must sample omnivorously and as much as can be stomached, heartily. We must fill ourselves to the brim with the scholarly minds whose aura we wish to awaken. The multifarious feasting we will do of the media is exactly what obsessed and held fascinated Benjamin for the last seven years of his life when he undertook the Arcades Project, his Work of Passages. Collecting observations, newspaper articles, drawings, quotations of scholars, photographs into an archive that is also a unique first personal analysis and interpretation, a remembering of the things of the past, interpreted in the present, to be interpreted in the future – of mind transcending time. Of memory defeating death. All of this cultural exposure leads to one thing: fandom. Fandom, which Benjamin called the “collector’s impulse”, emphasizing its obsessive qualities, a compulsion and itch so strong it can be scratched for decades. Benjamin himself was a talented historical garbologist and tireless recycler of other’s texts. He loved to remember others: to this was he driven. He “may well be preserved as one of the great icons of twentieth-century intellectual life; he may indeed be considered, as Susan Sontag once called him, the “Last Intellectual’” (Isenberg 2001, 124). He was very much a consumer culture theorist in the current ethnographic sense. His Passages work would be particularly at home in the retail field, with those who study outdoor markets, or brand fests, or spectacular theme stores, or rodeos, or flea markets.

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During the plane ride upon which I wrote this chapter, I also watched The Hateful Eight. The movie was described to me by my son as “Classic Tarantino” which I took to mean full of homages to the past and period-genre specific looks and motifs and costumes. It was indeed a contemporary re-staging of a sporadically popular movie form, The Western, as Pulp Fiction was to classic crime stories, or Inglorious Bastards was to WWII movies. Over my shoulder I saw another movie I’d remembered seeing. Jurassic World. The remake of a sequel to a motion picture about a time when they revived an entirely other geological era, another time, saved from the past by ancient mosquitoes encased in amber. And, on yet another seat back screen played Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The franchise reawakens in Disney’s hands, for the first time since the fairly disastrous prequels. The relation of the 2015 Star Wars reincarnation to the article which I wrote for the Journal of Marketing with the team of Stephen Brown and John Sherry should be apparent to any who know why I was asked to write this chapter. In that work, topically focused on “retro marketing”, we used Walter Benjamin’s ideas to examine Star Wars: A Phantom Menace, which had come out around the time we were writing. What we found were more celebrations of the past, and narratives, stories about the past, situated in particular places (which we homagistically called “arcadia”), stories told by real people, with authentic auras, stories that were fueled by cultural tensions, by irresolvable antinomious paradoxes. George Steiner (1993) called Walter Benjamin the remembrancer. And it is this notion of seeing consumer culture through the lens of remembrance and forgetting, being forgotten then being remembered again, that informs our understanding of much of what goes on in consumer culture – the endless revival, recycling, and updating of genres, periods, stories, and styles. “Benjamin was fascinated by marketing, obsolete objects, abandoned possessions, superseded technologies, long-forgotten fads, and the remarkable fact that new ideas often come wrapped in old packaging” (Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry 2003, 21). Benjamin imbues our understanding of this modernizing of the old, or old motifs about time. Benjamin tells us how to read these time- and style-related aspects of contemporary consumer culture, something we see very clearly in fashion, in design, including car design, and certainly in music, motion pictures, television, and books. Style and fashion, for instance, jolt from one retro movement to the other, ever-introducing familiar newness and reinterpreting the past. We notice fad, fashion, linkages to the past whenever we listen to Walter Benjamin’s aura. These linkages to fad, fashion, and technology make him highly relevant to consumer and market scholars throughout many disciplines. As students of consumer culture, Benjamin’s work heeds us to be utterly mindful about the ghosts of the past that haunt the products of today and tomorrow. Who will speak in praise of consumer products that are old? Consumer rituals that are gone? Old advertising slogans, characters, personifications, and campaigns that are forgotten? Who will learn about them? Who will revive them? Will you be the one to bear the brand’s history, to update its story, to make it current and present and now and marketable and lead it forward to the future? And what of long-forgotten theorists and theories in marketing and consumer research? Who remembers them? Who drags their rotting corpses up from underground, and performs upon them dark acts of theoretical necromancy? What depths have we abandoned in this instant age of technological consumer capitalism? What remains of the past but an afterimage? What has vanished completely from consumer culture, never to return? Benjamin implores us from his unmarked grave, his coward’s and

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hero’s death, not to forget about the past in consumer culture. Not just to notice it. To discuss it. To critique it. To find out about your culture and your self through it. What of our things? Our first few cell phones? Where are they? Our early computers? In the attic, or the basement? What about our practices, the way we used to talk on the phone? The way we used to use tight abbreviations in telegraphy? What about the way I learned to write in the strange glyphic “graffiti” language so that my Palm 3 PDA could recognize my handwriting with almost perfect precision. Those skills still exist in me, latent, now that my Palm 3 is no longer my compansion. These things. These people. These practices. These times. They all are on passages. From being brought to life or revived. To being used. To being forgotten. To being remembered. To being forgotten and remembered again. Like Walter Benjamin, we ourselves, what we care about, and our whole culture is on the edge of being forgotten, and then remembered again. Who are we, in this maelstrom of time? Are we only tossed about in it, or do we stop it to look, to try to understand, to hear what is there? We listen to the sound, and it sounds so familiar. The instrumentation and the voice changes, but the aura of Walter Benjamin tells us, his image in our mind, his voice in our head, the song remains the same.

References Benjamin, Walter (1936/1973). Illuminations. London: Fontana. Brown, S., R.V. Kozinets and J.F. Sherry, Jr. (2003), “Teaching Old Brands New Tricks: Retro Branding and the Revival of Brand Meaning,” Journal of Marketing, 67 (7), 19–33. Cadava, E. (1998), Words of Light, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hollenbeck, C.R., C. Peters and G.M. Zinkhan (2008), “Retail Spectacles and Brand Meaning: Insights from a Brand Museum Case Study,” Journal of Retailing, 84 (3), 334–353. Isenberg, N. (2001), “The Work of Walter Benjamin in the Age of Information,” New German Critique, 83 (Spring–Summer), 119–150. Kracauer, S. (1995 [1928]), “On the Writings of Walter Benjamin,” in The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. T.Y. Levin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 259–266. Marcus, L. and L. Nead (1993), “Editorial,” New Formations, 20 (Summer), vi. Steiner, G. (1993), “The Remembrancer,” Times Literary Supplement, 8 (October), 38.

19 NORBERT ELIAS: FIGURATIONS AND CONSUMPTION Robin Canniford

Imagine you are transported back to the 15th century. Aside from some difficulties with language, you will encounter stark differences in behaviour and emotional conduct. At a festive meal, someone spits on the table. Someone else takes a bone from the communal bowl, chews it, and then puts it back in the bowl. Nobody looks concerned. After dinner your party goes outside to burn some cats. Your new friends take pleasure in the howls of pain. At the end of the evening, you notice a pool of urine on the stairs. There is already someone in your bed. He fidgets all night. It is clear from history (these practices are drawn from the Medieval and early modern etiquette texts that inspired Norbert Elias’ early work) that behaviours we consider distasteful, shameful, or disgusting have not always been regarded so. What causes changes in behaviour and feelings over time? What social forces order and maintain interpersonal and embodied conduct, and associated emotional responses? These are questions that Elias considered through his development of figurational sociology. Born in Breslau, Elias (1897–1990) served in the German Army during the 1914–18 War, and worked in a factory before beginning studies in medicine and philosophy, turning to sociology at the University of Heidelberg, and later Frankfurt. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933, to Paris and then to London, where he resumed work at the LSE. As a German national, Elias was imprisoned in 1940, but released in 1941 whereupon he worked in intelligence, as well as giving classes in sociology and economics. Over the course of this same period his father had died and his mother was killed in Auschwitz. Elias was granted a lectureship at the University of Leicester in 1954 and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana in 1962. During a tumultuous life, he developed an oeuvre that encompasses key contributions to historical sociology, and the sociological study of bodies, knowledge, and sport. Such are the limits of this chapter that I will concentrate on three general aspects of his project apposite to consumer-cultural research.

Figurations (a sociology of process) The concept of figurations is at the core of Elias’ work in theorising society as networks of reciprocally oriented people, and the shifting balances of power that characterise these networks (Elias 2000, p. 482). Elias is best known for The Civilising Process (2000[1939]), his

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two-volume analysis of the history of behaviour and the formation of nation-states in which long-term developments of individual conduct are explained as emerging within the changing figurations of late-Medieval and early modern Europe. In particular, Elias describes the increasingly complex ordering of secular upper-class life in France and Germany and corresponding changes in etiquette that accompany this shift. Elias is concerned with long-term trends, and a key trend driving the European civilizing process are changes in arrangements of land ownership. Specifically, long-standing practices of distributing land to vassals or as inheritance are, little by little, replaced with monetary payments (Elias 2000). This reverses a trend that had spread ownership and power amongst ever more landowners. As such, numerous small, and relatively independent social units become increasingly connected and centred round sovereign monarchs. In the course of these changes monarchs, in addition to owning greater areas of land, begin also to assume monopoly control of two further power practices: violence and taxation (cf. Weber 2004[1919]). These qualities engender increasingly pacified, urban societies in which specialised social functions and monetary economies proliferate. Having established these contextual conditions, Elias describes how people experience mounting levels of mutual reliance within increasingly complex figurations. In particular, the numerous feudal rulers who had previously acted relatively independently, become progressively more interdependent, their lives intertwined with contemporaries at the courts of sovereign monarchs (Elias 1983). No longer able to freely apply warlike, violent acts to further their interests, court subjects began to rely instead on discursive, symbolic forms of violence (cf. Bourdieu 1984). Elias discerns the development of these practices in the various etiquette texts published during this period. These texts reveal changes in attitudes towards embodied conducts of nose-blowing, spitting, eating, bedroom behaviour, relations between the sexes, and aggression. With these various examples, Elias demonstrates a trend away from spontaneous expressions and conduct, and towards increasing levels of self-restraint in embodied and interpersonal life. Over time, these self-restraints are bolstered by feelings of shame and embarrassment associated with failures to obey etiquette. This is to say that the desire to avoid negative emotions encourages and maintains personal foresight. In time, these codes are internalised by subjects who adopt them as a ‘second nature’ habitus. This long-term perspective of the shaping of habitus within the changing social and economic conditions of early European nation-states establishes Elias’ key impact on social theory: a connection between the macro-historical ‘reorganisation of human relationships’ (sociogenesis) and corresponding changes in the psychological characteristics of individual ‘conduct and feelings’ (psychogenesis) (2000, p. 366). In making this connection, Elias views concepts of superego, habitus and identity neither as stable individual traits, nor as effects of unchanging discourses or structural orders. Rather, practices in everyday life are attributes of mutually interdependent people, socialised to embody codes and standards that are achieved and reproduced over long periods. This is not to say that variations in conduct will not occur. Indeed, it is clear that the kinds of behaviour recalled at the beginning of this chapter would now be considered unacceptable in most societies. With respect to the process of increasing restraints on behaviour, Elias (2000) illustrates how, during early modernity, elite groups responded to increasingly equal balances of power with respect to emerging bourgeois classes. In order to maintain distinction, the upper echelons of society exercised mounting levels of self-restraint and complex patterns of manners that engendered new varieties of symbolic social differentiation (cf. Bourdieu 1984).

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In refusing to separate individual conduct from wider figurational webs, Elias elides problems of structure/agency that haunt classical sociological theory, and is able to account for change without viewing subjects as either voluntaristic monads, or as epiphenomena of reified structures/discourses (see Burkitt 2008; Elias 2000; Dunning and Hughes 2012). In respect of these potentials, Elias’ theory represents one of sociology’s grandest narratives. Indeed, Elias viewed the civilising process as a continuing phenomenon that establishes change in a predictable manner in all societies. However, with respect to the quality of changes Elias describes as civilising, it would be a mistake to assume these are teleological or universal (2000, p. 135). Elias is careful to make both his emic claims – observations on historical conceptions of being civil (e.g. Elias 2000, p. 87); and his etic claims – those theoretical observations of long-term trends towards social interdependency and self-restraint (2000, p. 365) in relation to specific historical time-spaces. At the emic level, he notes how expressions and descriptions of manners diverge across contexts (Elias 1983, 1996). At the etic level, his conceptions of the civilising process have afforded continued examination of different forms of habitus that develop in different contexts (e.g. Elias 1983, 1996; Elias and Dunning 2008; Mennell 1985, 2007; Dolan 2009).

(Re)embodying consumption What has the changing habitus of Medieval and early modern courtiers got to do with modern consumer culture? In developing his concern with the arrangement of power and habitus in early modernity, Elias understands the manner in which social practices are constructed within broad-scale figurations and maintained as tacit psychic and embodied knowledge. His long-view of shifting social interdependencies and habituated self-restraints encourages us to look beyond present-oriented thinking and analysis (Goudsblom 1977) and consider instead the emotional and embodied practices of everyday life as inter-generationally instituted amongst multiple classes via manifold social forces. Dolan (2009 p. 722) follows this path to explain what shapes the meaning, morality, and politics concerning living standards and norms of luxury in Ireland between the late 19th century and the 1980s. In this view, changing standards of consumption reflect broader figurational developments that are neither planned by any one social group, nor reducible to singular discursive logics, or to capitalism per se. Rather, the practices that constitute consumption, and interpretations that follow, are unintended consequences that stem from changes in land ownership, transnational agrarian markets, imagined national identity, and balances of power between classes. In addition to the historical work of tracing broad interdependency networks that lead to particular consumer cultures, Elias’ ability to connect individual and organisational levels of analysis opens territory to explore the historical-cultural foundations of consumer embodiment and affective experiences. At times such phenomena have been considered as individual traits, or cultural universals. Elias however affirms how ‘“human nature” has a history’ (Quilley and Loyal 2004, p. 6). Bradshaw and Canniford (2010) make this move to explain that the common aversion to the smell, sight, or even talk of bodily excretions is not an expression of a universal or unchanging human nature. Nor are these effects of rational aversions to unhygienic matter. Indeed, Elias notes how ‘motivation from social consideration existed long before motivation from scientific insight’ (2000, p. 134). Rather, aversion to excremental material is motivated by affective conditioning, produced over centuries and normalised as one facet of class-based distinction. This perspective is important because

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our conditioned avoidance of even speaking about excreta engenders an impediment to public-policy engagement in problems of sanitation. At a general level, this example illustrates that Elias’ work can help to clarify subconscious, affective aversions that intervene in the conscious rational choices generally considered to constitute policy-making, particularly with respect to bodily matters (e.g. menstruation and excreta), interpersonal conduct, or emotional and sexual propriety. It follows from Elias’ view on the mutual construction of organisations and habitus, that figurational work rejects dualistic conceptions of the body as a biological given for individualised investigations, and consumption as the natural location for cultural modes of analysis. Elias’ historical perspective views the body as culturally and historically malleable, an emotional sensorium that is shaped within changing figurations. More specifically, the biologically inherited body and senses are trained and sensitised during long-term processes, which may include consumption experiences. Hence, only by considering the wider cultural contexts of the body can consumer researchers understand the sensual consumer and vice versa (Canniford et al. 2017; Falk 1994). At a more general level, in making no simple distinctions between individual/embodied and organisational/societal levels of analysis, Elias offers concepts to understand agency and intention without resorting to theories of power and action as reduced to individual conduct. Rather, Elias offers consumer researchers a set of tools that place emphasis on power as an outcome of interconnectedness of people within figurations. In this sense, Elias offers theory of relational agency that predates developments of similar concepts offered by ANT and assemblage theories. Put simply, figurations always harbour the multiple intentions of interconnected parties that play-out consequences not intended by any single party (Elias 1984). This means that although figurations are almost always characterised by unequal power relations between those involved (Elias and Scotson 1994; Luedicke 2015), increasingly interdependent societies give rise to situations in which outcomes are less likely to stem from one person’s or group’s intentions alone (Elias 1984). In elaborating this model of the quality of action and intention, however, Elias’ emphasis is quite different to many early ANT analyses that arguably concentrate on objects at the expense of humans. Latour’s (1990) analysis of how hotel keys ‘act’ to ensure they’re not taken away, for instance, overlooks human factors such as etiquette governing the return of someone else’s property, as if humans play out an “intelligible ‘script’, determined ‘logically’ by the characteristics of the actor-network” (Newton 2007, p. 32). Indeed, important sites for theoretical development remain in terms of understanding the redevelopment of human embodiment within networks or figurations featuring animals, new technologies, celebrity culture, and emergent political ideologies.

Histories of excitement Civilising processes are neither linear in their development nor simple in expression. At times, tendencies towards self-regulation and manners appear to reverse, engendering a freer play of embodiment (Sinclair 2016). Such instances have been considered as decivilising shifts where breakdowns of dense, functionally specialised figurations release subjects from expectations of etiquette, foresight, and physical passivity (Quilley and Loyal 2004). More often, however, the re-emergence of freer expressions can be seen to reflect

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‘informalisations’ (Wouters 1986), apparent reversals of etiquette and self-regulation that are able to occur because of the advanced nature of civilising. Here the pacified social habitus has become so ingrained that temporary contradictions do little to disrupt the complex social orders of late modern life, thus partially freeing people from codes of self-restraint embodied as ‘etiquette’. Elias revealed some such complexities of civilising in his work on sport and recreation. By considering the roots of sports in unruly and often brutal folk games, he illustrated contexts where extreme violence and cruelty were givens (Elias and Dunning 2008; Elias 2000, p. 171), and where pleasures could spill over into full-blown riots and revolts (Elias and Dunning 2008; see also Foucault 1995). Within the broader schemes of civilising processes, it is unsurprising that the free expression and aggressive conduct of these early leisure activities – even a feature of early cricket (Malcolm 2002) – are gradually replaced by more standardised, rulegoverned, and less brutal forms. If games have been subject to civilising processes, however, they retain at least something of their prototypes. This is to say that the more real conflicts of folk games have been replaced by events that replicate the excitement of the past as mimetic violence that serves desires to ‘let off steam’, and offers pleasurable tensions and spontaneous emotional experiences that ameliorate the predictability of pacified and regulated societies (Elias and Dunning 2008). In consumer research, this ‘controlled decontrolling of emotions’ (Elias and Dunning 2008, p. 27) occurs at sites of consumption where the restraints of workaday conduct are exchanged for restorative practices of pleasure or aggression (Goulding et al. 2009). Such instances are seen to reinforce broader civilising processes by offering specific time-spaces for controlled periods of emotional conflict and outbursts, without threat to social order more generally. Indeed, rules of interpersonal contact maintain these experiences as mimetic excitements rather than the free for all that often characterised earlier forms of leisure (Sinclair and Dolan 2015). Again, however, within general tendencies towards civil, pacified forms of leisure it is necessary to seek out more nuanced contextual variations. In respect of violence in leisure for example, Dolan and Connolly (2013) explain how sports-related aggression is motivated and expressed differently over time due to changing social solidarities and interdependencies. Between the early 20th century and the 1950s, local crowds’ attacks against players are replaced by aggression directed at referees. Later, these attacks are replaced by individual spectator violence against officials. As with forms of embodied conduct considered earlier, the public policy implications of this perspective are valuable. If violence is to be understood, or managed, then it is necessary to carefully trace the causes, targets, and social purposes of aggression. At a more general level, this possibility to explain the complex historical development of emotions and embodied activity should encourage consumer researchers to seek out variations in the constitution of what might ostensibly look like the same activity, community, or practice. Put simply, consumption events fulfil different forms, functions, and experiences over time depending on the figurations in which they feature, a characteristic that should encourage scholars to link micro-perspectives on specific forms of conduct within macro-perspectives that consider longterm context (Askegaard and Linnet 2011; Sinclair 2016). Indeed, without extended perspectives sensitive to both macro-ordering influences and micro levels of individual conduct, consumption practices, activities, and experiences risk being represented as unchanging expressions, where in reality they harbour far more complex social histories, and malleable purposes.

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Conclusion Elias offers an elegant set of theories that unite traditional concerns of social psychology and micro-sociology with macro-historical analysis; a foundation on which to develop theory in which body, emotion, and a variety of scales of institutions are connected; and an analytical starting point that transcends structure-agency or mind-body dualisms. Perhaps more uniquely, however, Elias provides tools to reflexively locate the concerns of contextualised fieldwork within the careful study of longer-term patterns of cultural, political, and geographic change. It is this emphasis on understanding power and practice as emerging during long-term historical shifts and trends that should establish Elias’ most important and enduring potential with respect to future marketing and consumer research scholarship. Thanks to Stephen Dunne and Paddy Dolan.

References Askegaard, S., & Linnet, J. (2011) Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory. Marketing Theory, 11(4), 381–404. Bourdieu, P. (1984[1979]) Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bradshaw, A., & Canniford, R. (2010) Excremental theory development. Journal of Consumer Behaviour, 9(2), 102–112. Burkitt, I. (2008) Social selves: Theories of self and society. London: Sage. Canniford, R., Riach, K., & Hill, T. (2017) Nosenography. Marketing Theory (online first). Dolan, P. (2009) Figurational dynamics and parliamentary discourses of living standards in Ireland. British Journal of Sociology, 60(4), 721–739. Dolan, P., & Connolly, J. (2013) Emotions, violence and social belonging: An Eliasian analysis of sports spectatorship. Sociology, 48(2), 284–299. Dunning, E., & Hughes, J. (2012) Norbert Elias and modern sociology: Knowledge, interdependence, power, process. London: Bloomsbury. Elias, N. (1983[1969]) The court society. New York: Pantheon Books. Elias, N. (1984[1970]) What is sociology? New York: Columbia University Press. Elias, N. (1996[1989]) The Germans, trans. E. Dunning and S. Mennell. New York: Colombia University Press. Elias, N. (2000[1939]) The civilising process, Vols. 1 & 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Elias, N., & Dunning, E. (eds.) (2008) Quest for excitement: Sport and leisure in the civilising process. Dublin: UCD Press. Elias, N., & Scotson, J.L. (1994[1965]) The established and the outsiders. London: Sage. Falk, P. (1994) The consuming body. London: Sage. Foucault, M. (1995[1975]) Discipline and punish. New York: Vintage. Goudsblom, J. (1977) Sociology in the balance: A critical essay. Oxford: Blackwell. Goulding, C., Shankar, A., Elliott, R., & Canniford, R. (2009) The marketplace management of illicit pleasure. Journal of Consumer Research, 35(5), 759–771. Latour, B. (1990) Technology is society made durable. The Sociological Review, 38(S1), 103–131. Luedicke, M. (2015) Indigenes’ responses to immigrants’ consumer acculturation: A relational configuration analysis. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(1), 109–129. Malcolm, D. (2002) Cricket and civilizing processes: A response to Stokvis. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 37(1), 37–57. Mennell, S. (1985) All manner of foods. Oxford: Blackwell. Mennell, S. (2007) The American civilizing process. London: Polity. Newton, T. (2007) Nature and sociology. London: Routledge.

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Quilley, S., & Loyal, S. (2004) “Towards a ‘central theory’: The scope and relevance of the sociology of Norbert Elias”, in S. Loyal and S. Quilley The Sociology of Norbert Elias, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1–22. Sinclair, G. (2016) Involvement and detachment. Journal of Macromarketing, 36(1), 27–40. Sinclair, G., & Dolan, P. (2015) Heavy metal figurations. Marketing Theory, 15(3), 423–441. Weber, Max (2004 [1919]). The Vocation Lectures. Cambridge: Hackett. Wouters, C. (1986) Formalization and informalization: Changing tension balances in civilizing processes. Theory, Culture and Society, 3(2), 1–18.

20 BRAUDEL’S NOTIONS OF TIME, CAPITALISM AND MARKET Eminegül Karababa

Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was a French historian and one of the leading scholars of the Annales School, which established a new paradigm in the history discipline during the early twentieth century. Two of his best-known works, which influenced both history and social science scholarship in the twentieth century, are discussed in this chapter in relation to their relevance and possible contributions to the field of Consumer Culture Theory (CCT). The first of these is a two-volume work, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, which is Braudel’s doctoral thesis, supervised by Lucien Febvre, the founder of the Annales School. The thesis was later published and became a landmark in Annales scholarship. In this work, Braudel introduces a new spatial-temporal understanding of the notion of socio-historic context. His second work, with which consumer researchers are more familiar, is a three-volume work entitled Civilization and Capitalism, which delineates the historical development of capitalism from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In this chapter, I will first delineate the scholarly context, which influenced Braudel’s research and contributions. Then, I will introduce Braudel’s works and their relevance to consumer research in the areas of time, context, and the development of capitalism.

Braudel and the Annales School In 1929, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded the journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (Hunt, 1986) and challenged the established ways of doing history (Hunt, 1986; Huppert, 2006). The historiography during early twentieth century had been mainly descriptive and positivist in approach, and aimed to explain historical formations as a result of either chronologically formed causal links between events or actions of leading figures in society (Huppert, 2006). However, the Annales approach, influenced by French structuralism, assumes that history or society develops by various factors or structures external to and partly independent of human activity, and that the aim of historical investigation is to reveal these structures or factors (Trevor-Roper, 1972). In other words, the Annalistes focused on delineating the circumstances in which human activities become possible and conceivable, rather than describing these activities objectively as right or wrong.

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Braudel’s scholarship developed in a specific intellectual context. His doctoral supervisor Febvre was a leftist who was part of the French avant-garde circle (Huppert, 2006). The journal functioned in a similar way to cafés or salons where scholars who were opposed to official culture could unite and experiment with a novel way of writing history for the twentieth century. For Febvre, this new way of doing history was intended to focus on the issues of the current day and to address the needs of the present. Although other leftist historians of the early twentieth century who were opposed to fascism – which was influential at that time – adopted Marxist theory, Annales School historians differentiated themselves by aiming to develop a new approach, independent of the Marxist perspective of class struggle and economic determinism. For example, Febvre studied the class struggle between a declining aristocracy and a rising merchant class in France, but his analyses differed from those of Marx by including conflicts of ideas and feelings in addition to the economic conflict between rival classes (Burke, 2015). The emphasis placed on the social aspect by the Annales School, as a response to Marxist economic determinism, was later criticised because of its social determinism (Hunt, 1986). The social determinism of the Annales School sprang from their aim to grasp the totality of a historical period or society. By breaking the boundaries between the social sciences and humanities, and combining theories and methods from other disciplines such as geography, economics, demographics, anthropology, linguistics, law and sociology, the Annalistes aimed to reveal the functioning of a community or a social system in total (Forster, 1978; Green and Troup, 2012; Hunt, 1986). For the first time in the academic discipline of history, issues such as sexuality, climate and death became subjects of scrutiny (Huppert, 2006). The aim of this new way of doing history was to grasp the totality of the society or community in every sense, rather than just focusing on politics. For example, Braudel’s (1995a, b) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World is an example of total history presenting a total understanding of the Mediterranean through three contextual levels: 1) slowly changing characteristics, such as geography, climate, agriculture, cities, trade, transportation, population and institutional structures; 2) the organisation of societies, such as social classes, knowledge and belief systems, money and price fluctuations, administrative and market structures; and 3) an event-level analysis, concerning, for example, the accession or demise of kings, information on religious leaders, or specific games of diplomacy. Total history creates a unified general understanding of society that is specific to a period, focusing on structures that show continuity. Considering the current poststructuralist perspective of CCT scholarship, total history can be complemented with approaches that examine discontinuities or changes. Although earlier Annales historians were accused of focusing on the early modern West to understand the modernisation processes of Western societies in their totality, the Annalistes later produced extremely valuable studies on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East which were frequently published in the journal. Especially after World War II, fascism was no longer an important social problem, and the journal turned its attention to the two main social problems of the day: Western colonialism and population growth. This led to the journal focusing on the Third World, which gave the publication its global appeal. Historical demography also emerged as a new field within the Annales School, and statistics became an important methodological tool during the 1960s and 1970s for the Annalistes; indeed, they were criticised for their obsession with quantitative methods (Huppert, 2006). The global appeal of the Annales School reveals itself in the Braudel’s (1992c) world economy notion, which analyses the interactions of different cities or regions, ranging from Europe to the Middle East, Asia and Africa, rather than focusing on the state or the nation as the unit of analysis. By demonstrating

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inequalities at the interregional level, the comparative perspective of Braudel is in line with the centre–periphery perspective of World Systems Analysis.

Braudel’s concept of time In the social sciences, time is generally conceptualised as flowing in a linear fashion, accumulating from seconds to years. Braudel introduced a novel conceptualisation of context by defining multiple layers of time, flowing at different paces, at different levels, from the macro-structural level to the everyday level of events (Braudel, 1982; Braudel 1995a, b). His conceptualisation of three layers of time or temporalities are called longue durée, moyen durée or conjunctures, and histoire événementielle or event history (Braudel, 1982). CCT research calls for more emphasis on establishing well-defined relationships between the macro-social and the micro-individual everyday life experience levels of contexts (Askegaard and Linnet, 2011). For CCT research, Braudel’s spatio-temporal contextualisation can be useful by providing a richer understanding of the conditions under which consumption and market phenomena take place. Longue durée is the first layer of temporality which refers to macro structures, moving at a very slow pace, such as a century long or even more than that. Changes in these structures and their influences on social life are imperceptible for human beings; they are conceptualised as continuities. Braudel’s (1982) notion of structure differs from that of other social scientists by emphasising its unchanging nature over long periods. By “structure”, social researchers mean an organisation, a series of coherent and fairly fixed series of relationships between realities and social masses. For us historians, a structure is of course a construct . . . but over and above that it is a reality which time uses and abuses over long periods. (Braudel, 1982, 31) Braudel’s strong structuralist perspective can be reinterpreted in CCT research and may be combined with individual agency at the level of practice. Geological structures or climates surrounding our environment, long-term economic systems such as mercantilism, or collective systems of meaning which the Annalistes call mentalities are examples of the long-term structures that shape or hinder human activity but cannot reveal themselves. Studying the relationship between these slowly changing structures and consumption or market phenomena will produce an investigation of the contextual embeddedness and a richer understanding through conceptualisation of context. In the first volume of The Mediterranean, Braudel (1995a) argues that depending on the temporalities of different structures, the boundaries of a spatiality – in his case, the Mediterranean region – can be drawn differently. A layperson can only identify the shores of the Mediterranean as the boundaries of the region. However, the operation of social, economic, and cultural structures define multiple boundaries for the Mediterranean region depending on how structures form. For example, the historical geological formation of the Mediterranean – such as peninsulas, plateaus, plains, and mountains, which were formed through centuries as material structures – shape the social and economic conditions of the region. Consumption and market phenomena develop under these material, social, and economic structures, which are continuously interacting with each other. For example, snow trades developed from mountainous parts of the region towards the plains and shores where the climate was getting warmer. In addition, under this structure in Italy, ice cream, a refreshing new product, began to be sold by pedlars.

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So the region is defined not only by its shores but also by the trade which binds the supply and demand to snow. Therefore, for Braudel, the Mediterranean includes the region from England to Russia, the Middle East, Africa, and even passing the deserts to Asia. CCT research problematises the notion of the region as a unit of analysis in understanding consumption patterns as a challenge to the globe or the nation (Chelekis and Figueiredo, 2015). Braudel’s multilayer analysis of spatio-temporal structures, including geography, climate, demographics and shared knowledge systems, can provide a framework for identifying the boundaries of a region. CCT research has recently been interested in the notion of materiality (Borgerson, 2005). Rather than limiting materiality to the micro level, such as an individual’s body or objects of consumption, it is interesting to broaden studies to include these slowly changing material structures, and constructions or reconstructions of the consumption items or practices under these structures. In particular, sustainability studies provide an interesting opportunity to utilise the Braudelian concept of longue durée in order to understand how current consumption practices and policies are embedded under these material structures. Technology and modern-day industrialism which aim to control nature have a role in the shaping of geological structures and climates. CCT researchers can reinterpret this structuralist perspective and can also introduce the agency of individuals in the shaping of these structures. De Landa (1997) utilises Braudel’s notion of longue durée in explaining urban development and the formation of social institutions such as bureaucracy or markets and city life that are embedded in the topological character of the city. The medium term, or conjunctures, is the second level of temporality, in which the changes have a perceptible rhythm of 10- to 50-year cycles. Braudel (1995a) identifies this level of temporality as social history. Price fluctuations, population changes, trade patterns and economic cycles are examples of this level of temporality. In CCT research, we generally assume that today’s consumption is embedded in the neoliberal order. However, under neoliberalism, there are many political, economic and demographic structures oscillating with a shorter time span and constituting everyday consumption. For example, from 2008 onwards most of the research conducted in the field on US consumption took place during the economic recession, but the recession was only rarely considered as a conjuncture for interpretation. Lastly, Braudel puts forward the notion of histoire événementielle, or event history, which focuses on the everyday facts, which are unique but are shaped by the slowly changing structures and conjunctures. To attain a higher level of understanding, for Braudel (1992a) facts should be linked with the structures defined in multiple temporal layers. However, event history was the least important one for the Annales perspective.

Capitalism and markets In Civilization and Capitalism, Braudel (1992a, b, c) introduced the process of the early modern development of capitalism. The three volumes focus on consumption, distribution, and production, in turn. Although contemporary historiography did not consider topics concerning everyday life, the first volume of the series was about material life or material civilisation, and mostly about consumption. His description of material civilisation alternated between facts and abstractions. “He swept away the traditional categories of ‘agriculture’, ‘trade’, and ‘industry’, and looked instead at people and things, ‘everything mankind makes or uses’: food, clothes, housing, tools, money, towns and so on” (Burke, 2015, 53). Braudel (1992b) explains these consumption patterns as structures because they are learned, accepted, and repeated in the society.

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He establishes links between consumption patterns as structures, and other structures such as social rank and mobility, demographic changes, urbanisation, and institutional structures such as the state or the law. In the second volume Braudel (1992b) focuses on the market, or economic life, which is calculated and exists as systems of rules. Braudel’s approach is to combine and contrast the economic, social and anthropological perspectives, and the historical data to reach an abstraction of the early modern market, i.e. the rules of exchange in the market, focusing on different instruments of exchange, such as pedlars, bazaars, warehouses, dealers, tradesmen, merchants and stock markets. Braudel (1992a, b, c) recognises that different types of exchange, such as barter and money exchange, always co-exist in the market, because historical development is not simply linear and progressive. He is more interested in the conditions under which capitalist process form. For him, market economy is the necessary but insufficient condition for capitalism to develop. His third volume concerns the delineation of the process of capitalism. For capitalism to develop, Braudel (1992c) identifies another important and essential condition: world trade, which is the only means to high profits. In this volume Braudel criticizes the Marxist perspective of class struggle between the bourgeois and proletariat as providing only a limited explanation of the capitalist process. He argues that the international level of the division of labour creates inequality at the macro level, making some parts of the world centres that accumulate wealth, and other parts the periphery. So the centre–periphery model used by Braudel is nevertheless compatible with a Marxist approach at a macro level. Significantly, rather than looking at a single factor, Braudel considers a total history perspective in order to delineate the process of capitalism, including economics, politics, society, and culture. Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1991) close reading of the Civilization and Capitalism also uncovers Braudel’s notion of capitalism which is contrary to the alternatives developed by classic liberalism and classic Marxism. Braudel’s first layer of economic activity is the material life which contains ordinary everyday productive activities and consumption. The second layer is where market transactions of smaller scale businesses take place. For Braudel, at this level competition and free market economy exists. The third zone is the zone of the capitalist which is far from competition and free markets but characterized by monopoly. The zone of capitalist is the “anti-market” for Braudel, just the opposite of the market; not competitive, not liberating or not free. For him the concept of market is truly competitive where supply and demand determines the price. Unlike the alternative views on capitalism, Braudel argues that it is not at all about specialization. Capitalists are flexible, continuously switching their investments, networks, and skills. Capitalists such as big multinational companies, large state enterprises or finance capital monopolize production and trade of finance. Braudel includes the two roles of the state in explaining the relationship between these three layers of economic activity. It is both regulating the market to achieve competition and consumer protection and also operating as a guarantor for the capitalist. Braudel argues that there is always a tension between the monopolist who takes the support of the guarantor state and the actors like labor or small business owners seeking support of the regulator state as the protector of competition. The question Wallerstein (1991) poses is about the possible trends which shape the transformation of this historically constituted capitalist system. For CCT researchers this “Upside Down” perspective of capitalism resonates with CCT research focusing on market formation practices, consumer resistances, entrepreneur consumers, citizen-consumers.

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Conclusion This short essay has aimed to introduce Fernand Braudel, a socio-economic historian of the twentieth century and a member of the French Annales School. The conceptualisation of time and context put forward by this structuralist historian is valuable for CCT scholarship in terms of understanding macro-level structures and establishing links between them. His approach to understanding how capitalism developed in the early modern period is also valuable. His total history approach shows that the understanding of a multiplicity of structures, institutions, and events, operating at economic, social, political and cultural levels on the global scale of interactions, is necessary to grasp the whole process. Although his research received much criticism from those who considered it untrustworthy and his approach was challenged due to his focus on continuities, nevertheless Braudel’s perspective provides a useful framework for viewing the complexity of the capitalist process and for recognising the numerous categories operating in this process.

References Askegaard, Søren and Jeppe Trolle Linnet (2011) “Towards an Epistemology of Consumer Culture Theory: Phenomenology and the Context of Context”, Marketing Theory, 11 (4), 381–404. Borgerson, Janet (2005) “Materiality, Agency, and the Constitution of Consuming Subjects: Insights for Consumer Research”, in Advances in Consumer Research, Vol. 32, ed. Geeta Menon and Akshay R. Rao, Duluth, MN: Association for Consumer Research, 439–43. Braudel, Fernand (1982) On History, tr. Sarah Matthews, London: University of Chicago Press. Braudel, Fernand (1992a) Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Structure of Everyday Life, Vol. 1, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand (1992b) Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Wheels of Commerce, Vol. 2, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand (1992c) Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century: The Perspective of the World, Vol. 3, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand (1995a) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. 1, tr. Siân Reynolds, London: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand (1995b) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. 2, tr. Siân Reynolds, London: University of California Press. Burke, Peter (2015) The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929–2014, Cambridge: Polity. Chelekis, Jessica A. and Bernardo Figueiredo (2015) “Regions and Archipelagos of Consumer Culture: A Reflexive Approach to Analytical Scales and Boundaries”, Marketing Theory, 15 (3), 321–345. De Landa, Manuel (1997) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books. Forster, Robert (1978) “Achievements of the Annales School”, Journal of Economic History, 38 (1), 58–76. Green, Anna and Kathleen Troup (2012) The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in History and Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hunt, Lynn (1986) “French History in the Last Twenty Years: The Rise and Fall of the Annales Paradigm”, Journal of Contemporary History: Twentieth Anniversary Issue, 21 (2), 209–24. Huppert, George (2006) “The Annales Experiment”, in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley, New York: Routledge, 873–88. Trevor-Roper, Hugh Redwald (1972) “Fernand Braudel, the Annales and the Mediterranean”, Journal of Modern History, 44 (4), 468–79. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1991) “Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down” Journal of Modern History, 63 (2), 354–61.

PART VII

The language of commodities

21 SHOPPING WITH CHARLES PEIRCE: FROM SIGN MEANING TO SIGN DEGENERACY IN THE MARKETPLACE Kent Grayson

In 1959, Sidney Levy published “Symbols for Sale,” an article that described a new perspective on the buying and selling process. “People buy things,” Levy wrote, “not only for what they can do, but also for what they can mean” (p. 118). That notion has had a lasting influence on not only consumer culture research but also the entire field of marketing (College of Business at Illinois 2016). Today, it is hard to find research on consumer behavior that does not at least implicitly assume some of the key arguments in “Symbols for Sale” – for example, that products are “psychological things” and that consumers sometimes focus less on product function and more on how a product’s meaning fits their identity goals. Given the broad influence of “Symbols for Sale,” and considering what we now know about the symbols people prefer and why they prefer them, it might be easy to conclude that Levy’s call to study marketplace meaning has been largely answered. However, while much has been learned about the “what” and the “why” of marketplace meaning over the past 60 years, we know less about the “how.” How do symbols work, and how can they be for sale? The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) provides some answers to these questions. Peirce (pronounced “purse”) helped found the discipline of semiotics, which focuses on the study of signs and meaning. Peirce describes semiotics as “the general physiology of signs” (de Waal 2013, p. 74) – a definition that casts semioticians as biologists of representation seeking to document and understand the anatomy of signification. Because few other founding thinkers in semiotics shared Peirce’s deep interest in the mechanics of meaning, his work is especially well-suited for shedding light on how signs work and what this means for symbols in the marketplace. Consumer researchers have given some attention to Peirce’s semiotic thinking, and I reference several examples throughout this chapter. But there is much more to discover and apply. My aim is to introduce Peirce’s thinking in a way that will not only acquaint newcomers with his frameworks but also provide a foundation for building on how Peirce has been applied in consumer research. Readers delving into Peirce for the first time often find his writings to be opaque. One contributing factor is terminology. Peirce coined arcane-sounding terms and often used familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. A second factor is that his ideas about semiotics evolved during his

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life. So in some ways, it matters whether a researcher is referencing something Peirce wrote in 1867 or in 1903. A third factor is the cross-disciplinary nature of his thinking. Peirce viewed semiotics as central to the connections among many academic perspectives (e.g., logic, psychology, metaphysics), and his writings often engage multiple perspectives. As a result of these factors, it is easy to feel that Peirce’s work cannot be adequately understood without significant multidisciplinary exposure, years of philosophical training, and hard work. Admittedly, many Peirce purists – and undoubtedly Peirce himself – would endorse this impression. Nonetheless, many of the nuanced adjustments that Peirce made to his framework over time are more consequential for philosophical investigations than for consumer research, and there is much evidence that social theorists can effectively apply his ideas without getting overly mired in his terms or needing to fully assimilate all their far-reaching implications. So despite appearances to the contrary, acquiring a working understanding of Peirce is no more difficult (but also no less) than developing a working understanding of the other thinkers discussed in this volume. I hope this chapter is a useful bridge for those who want to give Peirce a try.

Peirce’s three categories of being In our everyday lives, we often take for granted that things exist. Yet the nature of existence is complex and mysterious, and an important role of philosophy is to investigate and understand it. Such investigations fall under the umbrella of metaphysics. One approach that philosophers take to metaphysical inquiry is to analyze existence at a sufficiently abstract level so that it can be characterized using a manageable number of basic categories. Understanding Peirce’s categories is a necessary detour for this chapter because they provide an important conceptual foundation for his semiotic model. Peirce argued that our experience of what is “present to our minds” can be usefully described using three categories: Firstness (i.e., qualitative possibility), Secondness (i.e., actual fact), and Thirdness (i.e., generality) (CP, 1.23).1 Following Peirce’s lead (CP, 1.24), I will make the anachronistic yet pedagogically helpful choice of starting with Secondness. Secondness is the experience of an individual fact; it refers to a single object or event in time (CP 6.374– 375). It is the part of experience that makes us feel as if something is “happening then and there” (CP, 1.24). Secondness makes us feel physically connected with a specific something in the real world. It is a sense of “resistance,” where we are “bumping up against hard fact” (CP 1.324). However, the bumping does not have to be the result of brute force. Secondness includes the process by which an inanimate object (like a product on a shelf) registers on our senses when we walk down a grocery aisle. Pure Secondness is difficult to pin down because as soon as we experience the here and now, it becomes a memory and/or we naturally categorize it as part of a more general class of things, not just an individual thing (CP 6.374). The closest one might come to experiencing pure Secondness is via the kind of religious meditation encouraged by, for example, Zen Buddhism, where adherents strive to be fully “present in the moment” (Hanh 2013). To understand Firstness, or “qualitative possibility,” it is helpful to start with Peirce’s assertion that Firstness is “predominant in feeling” (CP, 1.302). By “feeling,” Peirce means sensations such as colors, smells, and sounds (Peirce 1955 [1940], p. 80). However, the color blue on a department store package or the smell of jasmine in shampoo is not pure Firstness because those sensations are experienced at a particular time and place. Firstness is “the qualities themselves,” separated from the here and now and from whatever individual objects may have these

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qualities. As Peirce explained, seeing a red object is an occurrence (and therefore involves Secondness), but the sensation of redness “is not in itself an occurrence; . . . it is a mere may-be” (CP, 1.304). Without manifestation in the real world as Secondness, feelings are merely possible sensations that we might (or might not) feel. And because the sensations we experience are always linked to something in the here and now, we never experience pure Firstness. The closest we might come is when we emerge “half asleep” (CP, 1.310) from a slumber and get a sense, for example, of just a color sensation with no connection to the real world. As Atkin (2016, p. 231) explains, there are also “elements of our experience which involve synthesis or connection.” This is Thirdness, which Peirce often refers to as the experience of “laws” or “habits.” Thirdness focuses on generality – the commonalities we perceive among certain things in the world (Wilson 2012). Imagine your senses pick up some data. From this, you believe that an entity separate from you is coming toward you (Secondness). You know that the entity has qualities like color, texture, and size (Firstness). Thirdness is the experience of or understanding that the thing coming toward you is a member of a category you are familiar with – say, a cat – and whose behaviors you feel you understand and can predict. Rorty (1961, pp. 202–203) offers several examples of different ways we might refer to this experience of Thirdness: [O]ne might explain what makes a batch of sense data a cat by saying either that it means a cat to somebody, or that somebody intends to take it to be a case, or that somebody follows a rule in terms of which it represents a cat, or that somebody has a habit of saying “cat” when he encounters it, or that somebody expects the usual laws describing the behavior of such sense data to hold.

Peirce’s tripartite model of meaning Whereas Peirce’s three categories of being (Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness) provide a structure for characterizing the nature of what we experience, his semiotic model provides a framework for understanding the mechanics of how we perceive and understand this experience. To account for the mechanics of meaning, Peirce identified each moving part, described each part’s function, and gave each part and function a name. Table 21.1 lists most of the parts and functions I discuss in this chapter and provides a foundation for comparing and contrasting them. Peirce’s model has three elements: the sign (the thing doing the representing), the object

TABLE 21.1 Signs

Each part of a sign can be related to: A sign can be: A sign can be related to its object due to: A sign’s interpretant can represent the sign as a sign of: Adapted from de Waal (2013).

Firstness

Secondness

Thirdness

a qualitative possibility (qualisign) likeness (icon)

an actual thing (sinsign)

a general law or regularity (legisign) convention (symbol)

possibility (rheme)

causality or physical contact (index) actuality (dicent)

generality (argument)

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(what the sign represents), and the interpretant (how the sign is experienced by the perceiver). He saw these three elements as dynamically interacting with one another; accordingly, they are often diagrammed as a triangle, with each element connected to the other two [for additional discussion of the tripartite model, see Christensen and Askegaard (2001) and Mick (1986)].

The sign A sign is “something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity” (CP, 2.228). To a particular consumer, a brand (sign) may stand for a company, or a product (sign) may stand for strength. Peirce’s anatomy of the sign includes two perspectives. The first perspective divides the sign into “material qualities” and “imputed qualities.” Consider a sign in the window of a store that reads “Sale.” For some consumers in some contexts, the color of ink used to write the word “Sale” is not part of what allows the word to represent the discounts they are likely to find in the store (MS 213).2 Peirce refers to these nonsemiotic characteristics as “material qualities” of the sign – qualities that are “independent of its meaning” (MS 213). There are also what Peirce called “imputed qualities” (MS 212), which allow a sign to serve its “representative function” (CP, 5.290). The representative function is the part of a sign that conveys meaning – “that character of a thing by virtue of which . . . it may stand in place of another thing” (CP, 1.564). Consider a sign in a Chinese shop that reads “Happy New Year” (in Chinese characters). The color of the ink is likely to be red because red is culturally recognized to represent happiness and good fortune and is therefore displayed liberally during the New Year. In this context, the color red conveys meaning to Chinese consumers, and it is therefore not a material quality of the sign but is responsible for its imputed qualities. To refer to this part of a sign, Peirce used the term “representamen.” He occasionally emphasized that the representamen is only part of the total sign (e.g., CP, 1.540), but he also frequently used the term “representamen” as a synonym for sign (e.g., CP, 2.274). Peirce’s second perspective on the anatomy of signs characterized signs in relation to his three categories of experience. As de Waal (2013, p. 187) explains, this characterization answers the question “What is the sign like when looked at in isolation?” •

•

•

A qualisign is strongly associated with Firstness. It is “any quality in so far as it is a sign” (CP, 2.254). An example of a qualisign is the color of red that is currently associated with the Coca-Cola brand. This is a qualitative sensation that, in certain contexts, signifies Coca-Cola. A sinsign is strongly associated with Secondness and “is an actual existent thing or event which is a sign” (CP, 2.245). (The “sin” in sinsign refers to “being only once,” as in “single” [CP, 2.245].) Imagine standing in a Thai convenience store and seeing a bag of Tao Ke Noi seaweed snack on the shelf. The picture on that particular bag in that particular store at that particular time is a sinsign – it represents a snack that you can buy and eat at that moment. A bag of seaweed snacks cannot be perceived to exist without also having qualities (Firstness), so a sinsign necessarily “involves a qualisign, or rather, several qualisigns” (CP, 2.245). A legisign is strongly associated with generality or habit (Thirdness). Peirce described it as “a law that is a sign” (CP, 2.246). By “law,” Peirce meant any regularity that a person feels she or he can rely on. For example, if every hotel in a hotel chain has a color scheme or

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type of furniture, this can be a sign of the hotel’s brand image or its promise of predictability. This general law or habit could not be a sign without the individual instances of hotels (Secondness) having the same design, so “every legisign requires sinsigns” (CP, 2.246).

The object Peirce’s model of meaning also includes the object, or the “something” for which the sign stands. When a brand stands for a company, the company is the object; when a product stands for strength, strength is the object. Peirce’s inclusion of an object in his signification model is a distinguishing feature relative to the model offered by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, another founder of semiotics [for a more thorough comparison of the two models, see Grayson and Shulman (2000); Mick and Oswald (2006); and Short (2007), Chapter 1].

The interpretant The third element of Peirce’s model of meaning is the interpretant, or the “mental effect” of the sign on the perceiver (CP, 1.564), particularly as the effect relates to the object. Peirce sometimes called it the “interpretant sign” (e.g., CP 8.332) because he considered it a sign in the mind of a person that represents the object (but in a different way than the original sign did). A consumer sees a brand, which prompts an image in the consumer’s mind of the company behind the brand. That image is the interpretant. Interestingly, it is also a sign that can create another mental effect on the perceiver (another interpretant, perhaps about the company’s charitable reputation). One can imagine an endless process in which each interpretant becomes a sign, which in turn has its own mental effect, and so on. Although this imagined process (which Peirce called “infinite semiosis”) has some intuitive appeal, it does not stand up well to philosophical scrutiny, and over time Peirce de-emphasized it in his work (see Atkin 2016 for a helpful discussion). When Peirce considered interpretants as the mental effect of signs, he classified them in terms of how they make us think or feel in relation to the object. His classification approach again relied on the three categories of experience. •

•

Sometimes, when we encounter a sign, the mental effect is merely a feeling, or the sense of a possible object. Peirce referred to such signs as rhemes: “a sign which is understood to represent its object in its characters merely” (CP, 2.252). Imagine seeing a beloved brand from childhood and getting a general feeling of comfort. Here, the brand is “understood to represent” your childhood, but primarily childhood “in its characters” or qualities. Because a rheme is associated with Firstness (possibility), scholars also sometimes refer to rhemes as signs that represent “a possible object” (e.g., Feibleman 1969, p. 92). If, while driving on a highway, you see something that vaguely resembles yellow arches in the distance, you may sense a possible McDonald’s that exists down the road. When the mental effect of a sign gives a sense of individual fact or actual existence, Peirce referred to this as a dicisign. A brand displayed on a particular restaurant’s window may indicate that the ingredients for a particular sandwich are in fact available at that location. In this case, the brand is a dicisign.

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When a sign evokes a sense of generality, law, or habit, it is an argument. A franchise agreement is an argument insofar as it represents the kind of experience that, by law, customers should expect to find at (say) a restaurant that is part of a particular chain.

Relationship between sign and object Peirce’s model of meaning also identified three ways the sign can be perceived to be connected with the object and (yes again) each corresponds to one of Peirce’s categories of being: •

•

•

One connection relates primarily to Firstness. It is a sense that the sign and object are connected because they each evoke similar sensations. This perceived connection makes the sign an icon. Imagine a jar label with a drawing that evokes sensations similar to those you get when looking at strawberries. The image is an icon, presumably representing the fruit used to make the jam inside. Another connection, which relates primarily to Secondness, is a sense that the sign and object have a physical or causal relationship. This connection makes the sign an index. You may notice that a brand of jam features jars that are irregular and not perfectly similar to one another. Due to a perceived indexical relationship, you may interpret these imperfections (sign) to indicate that the jars were made by an artisan glassblower (the object), not via a factory manufacturing process. A third connection, which relates to Thirdness, is a sense that the sign and object are related due to convention, habit, or rules. This makes the sign a symbol. The word “boysenberry” on a jam jar helps us understand what is likely to be inside. This is thanks to the rules and norms of English, and not because the word looks like a boysenberry or has a physical connection with boysenberries.

Of all aspects of Peirce’s semiotic framework, consumer researchers have paid the most attention to the perceived connection between object and sign (icon, index, symbol), using either an explicit Peircian perspective (e.g., Epp and Price 2010; Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011; Grayson and Martinec 2004; Schembri, Merrilees, and Kristiansen 2010) or Peircian concepts and terms (e.g., Beverland and Farrelly 2010; Bradford 2009; Corciolani 2014). Much less attention (if any) has been given to the different types of signs (qualisign, sinsign, legisign) or the different ways a sign can have a mental effect on a perceiver (rheme, dicisign, argument). Thus, there is opportunity to use these foundational concepts to shed new light on how marketers manage signs in the marketplace and how consumers experience them.

Sign permutations So – a sign can be a qualisign, sinsign, or legisign; it can be perceived as having an iconic, indexical, or symbolic association with its object; and it can prompt an interpretant that is more associated with possibility (rheme), actuality (dicent), or generality (argument). This 3 × 3 × 3 conceptual structure yields multiple permutations of sign experiences. Imagine walking into a new fast-food restaurant that uses a novel approach to taking orders and delivering food. On the wall is a diagram of the restaurant’s interior (with cartoon customers) showing how and where customers should proceed in the restaurant. To the extent you

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think the diagram refers to the way things are done at the restaurant, it is a legisign. To the extent you think the diagram represents the way things are done via similarity (it resembles the restaurant’s counter, tables, and customers), it has an iconic relationship with its object. To the extent that the mental effect of the diagram is that you understand it to represent the possible qualitative character of the ordering process, the sign is a rheme. In this case, the diagram is a rhematic iconic legisign. At various points throughout his work, Peirce spent time identifying and discussing all possible sign permutations. These permutations add significant complexity to his framework and, as Atkin (2016, p. 147) writes, their utility “is rather an open question, and even Peirce shows a tendency to treat it as a matter of simply tracing out the full implications of his account of signs.” It is therefore unclear whether the added complexity of applying sign permutations is worth the insights they might produce regarding signs in the marketplace.

Sign degeneracy Peirce was a philosophical realist. He believed that a world exists that is separate and independent of our mind and that we perceive it in imperfect but helpful ways (e.g., Mayorga 2007). Peirce also believed that the perception of reality is inevitably a semiotic process composed of three elements (sign, object, interpretant). Thus, our access to everything, including reality, is never direct; it is understood only via signs (Christensen and Askegaard 2001). Imagine you are in a grocery store and come across a display of mangoes. Semiotically speaking, what happens? Light from the mangoes hits your eyes, a chemical and electrical reaction occurs in your body, and this results in what Peirce calls a percept – raw data that comes through the senses. This chemical and electrical reaction is different from the actual mango, but for you at this moment, it becomes sign of a real-world object. In response, you draw from your previous experiences with similar percepts and form a mental image (interpretant) of what you call a mango. Yet, when we see a mango, we do not feel we are having a semiotic experience. Due to past effective encounters with mango sign-percepts, we have developed sufficient fluency with these percepts that we instead feel that we are experiencing a direct, nonsemiotic encounter with a real mango in the real world. The triadic relationship among the mango-object, the mango-sign, and the mango-interpretant has become collapsed or overlooked, and we believe that the picture in our mind’s eye (the mango-interpretant) is a mirror image of what the mango-object really looks like. Peirce uses the adjective “degenerate” to refer to signs where parts of the semiotic triad appear to collapse, “deteriorate” (Buczyńska-Garewicz 1979), or become “suppressed” (Merrell 1995). Merrell (1995), who writes engagingly about sign degeneracy, refers to perceptions like the mango experience as a type of degeneracy called “iconization” (see also Grayson 1998), where almost every element of the semiotic model is perceived to be absent. Another example of iconization is when an object appears to come out of the movie screen in a 3-D theater, and audience members duck to avoid it (Merrell 1995, p. 129). Merrell (1995) identifies a second kind of degeneracy (indexicalization), and Gorlée (1990), from a slightly different perspective, identifies several more. Peirce viewed degeneracy as an important and necessary aspect of human life, but his framework also highlights its illusionary quality. If you were to tell Peirce that you saw a mango

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at the grocery store, his reply might be: “You saw nothing in the least like that. You saw an image. There was no subject or predicate in it. It was just one unseparated image, not resembling a proposition in the smallest particular. It instigated you to your judgment” (CP 1.538). For Peirce, people do not “see” mangoes. They see signs of objects, which they take to mean real mangoes. Degenerate signs are interesting because they highlight how semiotics – and our semiotic understanding of the world – are governed by what Peirce called “habit” (e.g., CP 5.400, Buchler 1955 [1940]). Through repeated exposure to signs, we develop habitual responses that prove useful. Over time, this habitualization – what Merrell (1995) calls “automization” – conditions us to shortcut the symbolic process. We receive a mango percept in the store, we automatically decide it is a mango, and we put it in our cart. However, imagine reaching for a mango in a fruit bowl at a friend’s house, only to find that the bowl is ornamental and the fruit is plastic. This may break the iconization habit and make us conscious that mango-signs (at least at our friend’s house) are not always mangoes. Peirce’s conception of habit converges in some ways with the notion of a “learned response” from operant conditioning (Moxley 2003) and, in other ways, is similar to Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” (Kjaerholm 2013).

Conclusion Before publishing “Symbols for Sale,” Sidney Levy coauthored “The Product and the Brand” (Gardner and Levy 1955), an article often credited with introducing the idea of a brand image. The article emphasizes that a brand name “is a complex symbol that represents a variety of ideas and attributes” (Gardner and Levy 1955, p. 35). Consumer researchers have made great progress understanding those ideas and attributes. Peirce’s ideas provide us with a semiotic framework for instead examining how a symbol comes to represent ideas and attributes. There are significant opportunities to build on work already published on the perceived relationship between sign and object (icons, indexes, and symbols). There is also potential to apply some currently lesser-known aspects of Peirce’s semiotic model, including the nature of signs (qualisign, sinsign, legisign), the nature of the interpretants they prompt (via rhemes, dicisigns, and arguments), and the role of degeneracy.

Notes 1 “CP” refers to Hartshorne and Weiss’s collection Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; the number refers to the volume, followed by the paragraph and/or section. 2 “MS” refers to the Indiana University collection Peirce, Charles Sanders (1982–2000), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vols. 1–6, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, followed by the reference number.

References Atkin, Albert (2016), Peirce, London, UK: Routledge. Beverland, Michael B. and Francis J. Farrelly (2010), “The Quest for Authenticity in Consumption: Consumers’ Purposive Choice of Authentic Cues to Shape Experienced Outcomes,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (5) (February), 838–56.

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Bradford, Tonya Williams (2009), “Intergenerationally Gifted Asset Dispositions,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (June), 93–111. Buchler, Justus (1955 [1940]), “Introduction,” in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler, New York, NY: Dover Publications, ix–xvi. Buczyńska-Garewicz, Hanna (1979), “The Degenerate Sign,” in Semiotics Unfolding: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Vol. 1, ed. Tasso Borbé, New York, NY: Mouton Publishers, 43–50. Christensen, Lars Thøger and Søren Askegaard (2001), “Corporate Identity and Corporate Image Revisited: A Semiotic Perspective,” European Journal of Marketing, 35 (3), 292–315. College of Business at Illinois (2016), “Paul D. Converse Marketing Symposium: Previous Recipients,” www.business.illinois.edu/converse/previous.html. Corciolani, Matteo (2014), “How Do Authenticity Dramas Develop? An Analysis of Afterhours Fans’ Responses to the Band’s Participation in the Sanremo Music Festival,” Marketing Theory, 14 (2), 185–206. de Waal, Cornelis (2013), Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed, London, UK: Bloomsbury. Epp, Amber M. and Linda L. Price (2010), “The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation,” Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (February), 820–37. Feibleman, James K. (1969), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. Fernandez, Karen V. and John L. Lastovicka (2011), “Making Magic: Fetishes in Contemporary Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 38, 278–99. Gardner, Burleigh B. and Sidney J. Levy (1955), “The Product and the Brand,” Harvard Business Review, 33 (March–April), 33–9. Gorlée, Dinda L. (1990), “Degeneracy: A Reading of Peirce’s Writing,” Semiotica, 81 (1/2), 71–92. Grayson, Kent (1998), “The Icons of Consumer Research: Using Signs to Represent Consumers’ Reality,” in Representing Consumers, ed. Barbara Stern, New York, NY: Routledge, 27–43. Grayson, Kent and Radan Martinec (2004), “Consumer Perceptions of Iconicity and Indexicality and Their Influence on Assessments of Authentic Market Offerings,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (September), 296–312. Grayson, Kent and David Shulman (2000), “Indexicality and the Verification Function of Irreplaceable Possessions: A Semiotic Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research, 27 (June), 17–30. Hanh, Thich Nhat (2013), Peace of Mind: Becoming Fully Present, Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press. Kjaerholm, Lars (2013), “Ground, Self, Sign: The Semiotic Theories of Charles Sanders Peirce and Their Applications in Social Anthropology,” in Philosophy and Anthropology, ed. Ananta Kumar Giri and John Clammer, New York, NY: Anthem Press, 185–200. Levy, Sidney J. (1959), “Symbols for Sale,” Harvard Business Review, 37 (4), 117–124. Mayorga, Roas Maria Perez-Teran (2007), From Realism to “Realicism”: The Metaphysics of Charles Sanders Peirce, New York, NY: Lexington Books. Merrell, Floyd (1995), Semiosis in the Postmodern Age, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Mick, David Glen (1986), “Consumer Research and Semiotics: Exploring the Morphology of Signs, Symbols, and Significance,” Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (September), 196–213. Mick, David Glen and Laura R. Oswald (2006), “The Semiotic Paradigm on Meaning in the Marketplace,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing, ed. Russell W. Belk, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 31–45. Moxley, Roy A. (2003), “Pragmatic Selectionism: The Philosophy of Behavior Analysis,” The Behavior Analyst Today, 4 (3), 289–305. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931), The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1955 [1940]), Philosophical Writings of Peirce, New York, NY: Dover Publications. Peirce, Charles Sanders (1982–2000), Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Vols. 1–6, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Rorty, Richard (1961), “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” The Philosophical Review, 70 (2) (April), 197–223. Schembri, Sharon, Bill Merrilees, and Stine Kristiansen (2010), “Brand Consumption and Narrative of the Self,” Psychology & Marketing, 27 (6), 623–38. Short, Thomas Lloyd (2007), Peirce’s Theory of Signs, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Aaron (2012), “The Perception of Generals,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 48 (2) (Spring), 169–90.

22 ROLAND BARTHES: THE (ANTI-)STRUCTURALIST Luca M. Visconti

French essayist, linguist, literary critic, and semiotician, Roland Barthes (1915–1980) is hard to pigeonhole. His boundless curiosity for disparate life and speculative domains translates into a heterogeneous corpus of works, which covers art, fashion, language and writing, literature, love, myths, music, philosophy, photography, semiotics, and sport. His critique to the traditional notion of authorship (1967 [2002]) – a position positing the need to connect a text to its writer in order to interpret it – makes using Barthes’ biography to approach his intellectual production particularly sensitive. Barthes is sharp on the point when he says that the writer is not a text’s ‘author’ but a text’s ‘scriptor’. In doing so, he ratifies the ‘death of the author’ and the beginning of the modern writer’s era. The scriptor “is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate” (p. 221). The scriptor’s role is hence that of assembling pre-existing texts (i.e. citations) in a novel manner and of empowering the reader. Since there is no ‘Author-God’, a text has no theological meaning; “nothing has to be deciphered” (p. 223). Studying the tie between Barthes’ life and work is thus possible only by treating Barthes as a text. This is actually what he also undertakes in one of his latest works, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975 [1977]). “It is certainly when I divulge my private life that I expose myself most: not by the risk of ‘scandal,’ but because then I present my image-system in its strongest consistency” (p. 82). By discussing himself in the third person, Barthes transforms a biography into a critical essay, a detached and fragmented reflection about his work punctuated with episodes from his life. Among the many examples, the fact he has never engaged in a durable love affair – whether accidentally or intentionally, we do not learn from the book – stimulates evaluation of different forms of human relations (i.e. exclusive, generalized, or privileged relationships; p. 66). The personal becomes impersonal. Through writing, biographic episodes are turned into autonomous texts. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes cannot be taken as a traditional biography nor can biographical elements in it be used to interpret Barthes’ intellectual production. This book remains however quite telling on Barthes’ life and vision. Fatherless – Louis Barthes, a naval officer, died one year after Roland Barthes’ birth – he ironically comments on his condition as a “great

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Oedipal frustration!” (p. 45). The central figure to him is that of the mother, Henriette Binger, whom he describes as the mother, the woman of his life, and his daughter – at least during her late illness. Quite a passionate traveler (Egypt, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Romania, Switzerland, and the United States), he reaches the pick of his professional success in 1977 by obtaining a chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, Paris. The same year his mother passes away. The event is particularly destabilizing, and stimulates the writing of his last major work, Camera Lucida (1980 [1981]). This is how Barthes presents his mourning: For what I have lost is not a Figure (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable. I could live without the Mother (as we all do, sooner or later); but what life remained would be absolutely and entirely unqualifiable (without quality). (p. 75) This essay, which is built upon a few photographs portraying the mother, constitutes at the same time a reflection on photography as much as a consideration on the illusions of images and on the relationship between subjectivity and society in meaning attribution. Central to understanding Barthes’ life and work is the relationship with the French bourgeoisie. Born from a family of notaries, but grown up in a context of material limitations, the bourgeois art de vivre has always fascinated Barthes. It inflames his hedonic attitude and stimulates him to cultivate several cultural interests quite popular in that social class: piano, reading, singing, theatre, watercolor drawings, etc. At the same time, Barthes never identifies with the French bourgeoisie. As his literary critique confirms, his work has been meant to dismantle the bourgeois consciousness, while sharing part of the bourgeois lifestyle that provides him with the comfort and ‘ease’ he needs (1975 [1977], p. 46). This explains why Barthes has never aimed to ‘destroy’ the French bourgeoisie but to simply ‘decompose’ it (p. 63). In his words, this is the ‘contract’ he symbolically signs with that class. A contract that makes him escape from the equally abhorred opposites of living the life of an “egoist” or that of a “saint” (p. 59). Easily bored, inward excited, and vulnerable – both emotionally and in the body, especially during his early years troubled by several episodes of tuberculosis – Barthes has always addressed his work as his form of liberation. To his work, and its possible implications for consumer and marketing research, the following paragraphs are dedicated.

Literary critic: orgiastic gestalt and liberated meanings Entering Roland Barthes’ universe is like plunging into a multi-sensorial space, an augmented reality, a Windows-like world. Artworks, drawings, field notes, images, texts, and subtexts are mixed together to create a magmatic-enriched system of meanings in which “The text does not “gloss” the images, which do not “illustrate” the text” (1970 [1984], p. xi). Pure Gestalt, where the whole is other than the single parts making it. An apparent chaos that invites the reader to look for the organizing structure. And an interesting illustration of Barthes’ endless juggling between structuralism and post-structuralism (Culler 2002). In his writings, links and ‘hyperlinks’ are everywhere. They connect a specific text to other Barthes’ texts (or life moments) as well as to the work of other intellectuals and to empirical evidence, which Barthes qualifies as “violent” and ultimately “outrageous” for the “self-evidence” it prompts (1975 [1977], p. 85).

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Since his earliest works in the 1940s, Barthes’ writing is not only peculiar for the variety of expressive forms it entails but also for its specific (anti-)structure. Instead of an organic text, Barthes privileges fragmented writing. The way fragments of texts, and of texts and other media, are brought together responds to a principle of parataxis, which implies absence of any word indicating coordination and subordination among fragments. For example, in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977 [1978]), his speculation about love does not follow an outspoken logic (e.g. different themes) or chronology (e.g. different love stages). Instead, it becomes a dictionary of love, which proceeds from the notion of absence (‘to be engulfed’) to that of vouloir-saisir (‘will to possess’). Each fragment is a significant text per se, and the set of all fragments is a second text, “which is the relief (remainder and asperity) of the first” (1975 [1977], p. 93). Like in a Schumann’s or a Webern’s musical composition – two of Barthes’ very favorite composers – fragments can be (re-)organized to provide an overarching meaning or, at least, an aesthetic appraisal to the reader as well as to the writer. Notably, fragmented writing responds to a plurality of functions. First, Barthes himself admits preference for writing ‘beginnings’. As he argues (1975 [1977], p. 188), writing is possible as long as “desire” moves the writer. By breaking up the text, beginnings are multiplied all together with the pleasure they bring to the writer (1973 [1975]). Second, fragmentation responds to aesthetic needs. Art has been central in Barthes’ life, including his love for the arts (e.g. literature, music, and theatre) as much as his appreciation for the bourgeois art de vivre (1975 [1977]). Barthes posits that classical art was built upon the ability of integrating a system of detached (i.e. fragmented) elements, which the artist did not mean to make realistic but altered to maximize their expressiveness (1975 [1977], p. 68). His production recreates such classic ‘detachment’ and looks for an equivalent art of writing, which he obtains by conceiving writing in musical and/or pictorial form. As we read in the posthumous collection Album. Inédits, Correspondances et Varia (2015), his preference for an ‘elliptic’ form of writing does not respond to a scientific need but to a different value system, that of art. Third, Barthes observes that writing and style are not only expression of creativity but also of social conventions (1953), which he qualifies as ‘doxa’ (1953 [1967]). In order to liberate a text from its stylistic conventions, new forms of writing have to be undertaken. He finds inspiration for fragmented writing from Japanese haikus, which help liberate the text from Western stylistic conventions. Fourth, Barthes’ work on and through language is not meant to pursue truth or to reproduce reality. Central to his research is the impact a text has on the reader (1975 [1977], p. 90), that is, the expressivity of the text, which consists in its hedonic (e.g. delight, pleasure) and transformational effects (e.g. activation of critical thinking, catharsis, and transgression of conventions). By looking critically at his writing style in Mythologies (1957 [1972]), his subsequent works have explored forms of ‘neutral writing’ – what Barthes defines as the “paradoxa” (1953 [1967], pp. 54–55). A new form of rhetoric that should prompt the reader’s view on the text by avoiding any ultimate theory prompted by the author. Overall, the heterogeneity and fragmentation of Barthes’ writing can be regarded as a “wrestling match” that is in itself “a series of fragments, a sum of spectacles” providing “shortcircuiting” (1975 [1977], p. 93) and “jouissance” (pp. 111–112). Though meticulously elaborated, these fragments provide the illusion of spontaneous explosions, a mix of orgiastic pleasure (for the cathartic, the revealed, the unpredicted) and gestaltic appraisal of human In-der-Welt-sein (Heidegger 1927 [1962]). Fragments are also paradoxical – in Barthes’ acceptation – and help liberate a text’s meanings beyond superimposed theoretical schemas.

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Consumer and marketing studies can profit extensively from Barthes’ literary critic. On the one hand, the form of his writing per se may inspire the way marketing scholars present their theoretical contributions as well as how they represent consumers and markets. Regardless of the nature of the data grounding marketing research, and of the epistemology supporting data analysis and interpretation, representation of consumers and markets is always narrative (Stern 1998). It entails narratives of the people being researched as much as narratives of the “life-world structures” in which people act (Thompson 1998). It also entails narratives of the audience to whom such representations are directed, I add. Barthes’ quest for paradoxical writing is thus relevant to exploring new forms of marketing representations in line with the aspiration of neutral writing. From Barthes’ perspective, however, neutral writing is not meant to boost a text’s scientific value but to limit the writer’s presence and thus allow for a more germane interaction of the text with its reader. On the other hand, Barthes’ literary critic is also inspiring for its substance. Reflections on the pleasure arising from a text (1973 [1975]) are key to all research dealing with hedonic consumption (since Hirschman and Holbrook’s 1982 seminal study). Considerations about the cathartic effects of writing resonate with the transformative effects of academic work (Mick et al. 2012). Ellipsis and parataxis help illuminate a gestaltic approach to brand management (Diamond et al. 2009) and social media, which have profoundly questioned notions of consistency, control, and power on a text-as-communication. Fragmented writing can also prove beneficial to advertising theory, for example in the contemporary realm of communication across customer touchpoints, and for works dealing with narrative transportation. From a higher degree level, fragmented world representations find correspondence in the superposition of commercial symbols in today’s markets, in the complexity to reconstitute links in the big data ocean, and in the relentless acceleration of (consumer) life.

Objects as revelatory microcosms Barthes’ work is all about precision, exactness. And meticulous details. It starts from the way words are used, “cut off, so to speak, at the root” (1975 [1977], p. 85). It continues with the expansion of objects populating Barthes’ mundane life. Each object is a potentially powerful signifier (de Saussure 1916 [1986]), which can be inspected both subjectively and from the viewpoint of the cultural society it belongs to. Each object has its own story to tell as much as the stories it stimulates to the viewer (i.e. stories to receive). From this standpoint, the centrality of Proust in Barthes’ work is quite straightforward. One of the first authors he comes to know during his high school years (1930–1934), Proust will remain a cornerstone all along his life. As Barthes says, Proust is a “primordial image-hoard of childhood” (1975 [1977], p. 6) and a symbolic measure for his lifetime: “I was beginning to walk, Proust was still alive, finishing À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” (p. 23). The interest in objects-as-signifiers is rich and articulated. Rarely, Barthes looks at objects without questioning their deeper meaning, that is, without connecting them to the ‘signified’ (de Saussure 1916 [1986]). This happens however in Empire of Signs (1970 [1984]), a relatively stand-alone work stimulated by his travels to Japan. The fact of not having adequate understanding of the Japanese culture leaves Barthes speechless in front of a plethora of new signs, whose fascination and mystery are unprecedented. Liberated from their signified, these objects are pure objects; these signs are pure signs existing for their own merit. Implications are countless. First, the ‘empire of signs’ allows for an exploration of the signifier beyond the signified.

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Such exploration has a lot in common with Barthes’ abovementioned search for neutrality in language as well as with his denial for a writer’s authorship (i.e. a writer’s ability to represent the truth in his text). As much as a text stands for itself, so does an object. Second, a system of signs alienated from their transcendental signified allows to “undo our own reality” (p. 6). The specificities of Japanese language when contrasted to French are so evident to cast “suspicion on the very ideology of our speech” (p. 8). Third, when the signifiers are liberated from the signified – a signified that typically grants the corresponding signifier its own individual uniqueness – we can more easily move from the pleasure of encountering a “singularity” to the illumination of identifying the overarching “type” that several singularities share (p. 96): their common structure. More frequently, however, Barthes’ work is an attempt of connecting signifiers to signifieds. This is typical of Barthes directing attention to signs grounded in the Western cultural society. Such signs reveal different degrees of meanings, from the more literal and outspoken, to the more implicit and reflexive. As he notices, A good part of our intellectual work consists in casting suspicion on any statement by revealing the disposition of its degrees. . . . All we need to do is change the focus of a remark, of a performance, of a body, in order to reverse altogether the enjoyment we might have taken in it, the meaning we might have given it. There is an erotic, an aesthetic of the second degree. (1975 [1977], p. 66) Mythologies (1957 [1972]) is one of the most notable examples of Barthes’ demystification practice. Contextualized in a deep analysis of the Western cultural society, this collection unpacks the profound meanings of some of our contemporary myths, as diverse as plastic, red wine, striptease, toys, or wrestling matches. In a much more focalized and sorrowful manner, Camera Lucida (1980 [1981]) is another example of the kind. This essay offers a vivid exploration of Photography moving from Barthes’ ‘Winter Garden photo’ – a picture of his mother as a child portrayed in her winter garden. This photo is the spur to meditate about life and reality, death and resurrection. And about the role of Photography in front of such existential and metaphysical questions. Implications for consumer and marketing research are various. Attention given to the nudity of objects, beyond the meanings people attribute to them, is crucial for works dealing with practice theory, which also gives objects primacy back in front of the people using them (Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny 2001). Attention paid to the idiosyncratic meanings of objects in a given culture or for a given person can inspire research on material culture and the cultural biography of objects (Gosden and Marshall 1999). It can also be tied to the long-standing tradition of studies dealing with consumer identity (projects). Attention for the different degrees of meaning in objects can be beneficial to cultural branding research (Holt 2004).

Structuralism and post-structuralism For his legacy to de Saussure, Barthes is often addressed as one of the fathers of (French) structuralism. Motivations are certainly to be found in his work in semiology and literary criticism (Culler 2002). An Introduction to a Structural Analysis of Narrative (1966 [1975]) brings linguistic

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to a higher degree level by shifting attention from the single sentence to the structure of discourse. A narrative’s structural elements are then identified in intrinsic and recurrent units building up narratives across time and cultures: ‘functions’, ‘actions’, and ‘narrations’. Mythologies (1957 [1972]) is also considered another example of structuralism. In this case, however, myths’ structure does not derive from myths’ internal properties but from a society’s prior discourses contributing to engender such myths. A socio-constructivist approach, so to say, to structure emergence. In the best case, qualifying Barthes as structuralist is limiting his heritage. Like saying that Picasso’s contribution to the art history can be summed up in his ‘Blue Period’ (1901– 1904). In the worst case, this qualification is simply inappropriate. Several reasons confirm that Barthes is a structuralist and a post-structuralist (Culler 2002; Rao 2013). First, Barthes’ interest in structure does not correspond to a need for spotting out universal invariants in objects and situations. There is no truth to tell; no theological message to convey (1967 [2002]). Barthes’ world is not a world of predictions. The very human need of attributing meaning to objects and events stands behind his interest in structure. And meanings are never eternally or universally given. S/Z (1973 [1990]) is telling on Barthes’ relation with (post-)structuralism. By dissecting Balzac’s Sarrasine novel, he identifies five codes structuring it. Notably, these codes are not meant to say what the novel means, but how it comes to mean something to the reader. In other words, structuralism helps unveil the logics of meaning construction, whereas the process of meaning attribution remains inevitably personal. Second, Barthes’ shows distaste for superimposed meanings. As he writes by addressing himself in the third person, “he never makes explicit (never defines) the notions which seem most necessary to him and which he constantly makes use of (constantly subsumed under a word)” (1975 [1977], p. 73). Third, Barthes champions the reader while vigorously arguing against authorship (1967 [2002]). His corpus should not be taken as a single writer’s production. Each work, instead, has to live alone and to talk per se. As Culler (2002, p. 4) observes, “When his projects flourish, they do so without him and despite him.” Fourth, in Barthes’ work there is much more indeterminacy than structure. As Barthes says, his work is not ‘utopic’ but ‘atopic’. Utopia implies direction, since it implies change from a determined status quo for a preferable new state. Atopia is a “drifting habitation” (1975 [1977], p. 49), way more unpredictable and undetermined. Fragmentation of the text, heterogeneity of the media that build up a text, preference for beginnings – since conclusions are authoritative – and his inescapable attraction for intellectual ‘infatuations’ are all additional evidences of the equally strong role that post-structuralism plays in Barthes’ life and work. Not to mention that the distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism may be questionable per se (Lewis 1982). Consumer and marketing research well resonate with Barthes’ (post-)structuralism, in particular for studies oriented to the exploration of the macro forces concurring in market functioning and consumption practices. Emerging streams dealing with market system dynamics (Giesler and Fischer 2017) and taste regime construction (Arsel and Bean 2013) are some notable examples. All research adopting a (neo-)institutional framework to market and consumption analysis is also highly consistent with Barthes’ vision. Analysis of the narrative structure and codes supporting meaning attribution is then foundational to communication research and to works focusing on narrative transportation. We learn enormously from Barthes’ intellectual production. We also learn to unlearn. We are warned about writing. We are invited to listen and be readers. We remember how quest for

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pleasure can paradoxically lead to meditation and moderation. By rediscovering the pleasure of writing (and reading), we could even limit some of the miseries tormenting our times (1975 [1977], p. 81): The pleasure of writing, of producing, makes itself felt on all sides; but the circuit being commercial, free production remains clogged, hysterical, and somehow bewildered; most of the time, the texts and the performances proceed where there is no demand for them; they encounter, unfortunately for them, “relations” and not friends, still less partners; so that this kind of collective ejaculation of writing, in which one might see the Utopian scene of a free society (in which pleasure would circulate without the intermediary of money), reverts today to the apocalypse.

References Arsel, Zeynep, and Jonathan Bean (2013), “Taste Regimes and Market-Mediated Practice,” Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (5): 899–917. Barthes, Roland (1953 [1967]), Writing Degree Zero [original title, Le Degré Zéro de l’Ecriture], New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1957 [1972]), Mythologies [original title, Mythologies], New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1966 [1975]), “An Introduction to a Structural Analysis of Narrative,” New Literary History, 6 (2): 237–272. Barthes, Roland (1967 [2002]), “The Death of the Author” [original title, La Mort de l’Auteur], in David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (Eds.), The Book History Reader [originally published in Le Bruyssement de la Langue: Essais Critiques IV, pp. 61–67], London: Routledge, 221–224. Barthes, Roland (1970 [1984]), Empire of Signs [original title, L’Empire des Signes], New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthes, Roland (1973 [1975]), The Pleasure of the Text [original title, Le Plaisir du Texte], New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1973 [1990]), S/Z [original title, S/Z], Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Barthes, Roland (1975 [1977]), Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes [original title, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes], Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Barthes, Roland (1977 [1978]), A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments [original title, Fragments d’un Discours Amoureaux], New York, NY: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland (1980 [1981]), Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography [original title, La Chambre Claire. Note sur la Photographie], New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Barthes, Roland (2015), Album. Inédits, Correspondances et Varia, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Culler, Jonathan (2002), Barthes: A Very Short Introduction, New York, NY: Oxford University Press. de Saussure, Ferdinand (1916 [1986]), Course in General Linguistics [original title, Course de Linguistique Générale], Peru, IL: Open Court. Diamond, Nina, John F. Sherry Jr., Albert M. Muniz Jr., Mary Ann McGrath, Robert V. Kozinets, and Stefania Borghini (2009), “American Girl and the Brand Gestalt: Closing the Loop on Sociocultural Branding Research,” Journal of Marketing, 73 (3): 118–134. Giesler, Markus and Eileen Fischer (2017), “Market System Dynamics,” Marketing Theory, 17 (1): 3–8, doi:10.1177/1470593116657908. Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall (1999), “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology, 31 (2): 169–178. Heidegger, Martin (1927 [1962]), Being and Time [original title, Sein und Zeit], New York, NY: Harper & Row. Hirschman, Elizabeth C., and Morris B. Holbrook (1982), “Hedonic Consumption: Emerging Concepts, Methods and Oropositions,” Journal of Marketing, 46 (3): 92–101.

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Holt, Douglas B. (2004), How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding, Brighton, MA: Harvard Business Press. Lewis, Phillip (1982), “The Post-Structuralist Condition,” Diacritics, 12 (1): 2–24. Mick, David Glen, Simone Pettigrew, Cornelia Connie Pechmann, and Julie L. Ozanne (Eds.) (2012), Transformative Consumer Research for Personal and Collective Well-Being, New York, NY: Routledge. Rao, Divya R. (2013), “Arguable Distinction between Barthes’ Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” Working paper, Edinburh, University of Edinburgh. Schatzki, Theodore R., Karin Knorr-Cetina, and Eike Von Savigny (Eds.) (2001), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Stern, Barbara B. (Ed.) (1998), Representing Consumers:Voices,Views, and Visions, London: Routledge. Thompson, Craig (1998), “Living the Text of Everyday Life: A Hermeneutic Perspective on the Relationship between Consumer Stories and Life-World Structures,” in Barbara B. Stern (Ed.), Representing Consumers:Voices,Views, and Visions, London: Routledge, 127–155.

23 JEAN BAUDRILLARD: THE NIETZSCHE OF OUR TIMES(?) Per Østergaard (with a little help from his friends)1

A few bibliographical elements might help to understand both the context of Baudrillard’s thoughts and his intellectual trajectory. Born 1929, Jean Baudrillard is often seen as a guru of postmodern theory (Kellner, 2000). He was the first member of his family to pursue an advanced education, which led to a rupture between him and his family and his cultural milieu. He was originally a Germanist who first translated works of Berthold Brecht and Sigmund Freud. He then entered the Nanterre University in Paris in 1966 where he became assistant to Henri Lefebvre. Simultaneously, he became very impressed by the semiological analyses of Roland Barthes. His first book, The System of Objects, is in fact his dissertation and its analytical framework is highly inspired by Barthes’ analysis of, for example, semiotic structures in fashion. Several layers may be outlined in his intellectual trajectory, knowing that they are not strictly chronological. One layer in Baudrillard’s legacy, predominant in the early work, is mainly influenced by the Frankfurt School as well as by sociological and semiological works. In this first stream of research, Baudrillard is mainly concerned with an archaeology of consumer society (Baudrillard, 1998) and he analyses the proliferation of signs and questions the concept of value in a way which remains in line with a kind a Marxian axiology, albeit with one crucial difference. He is highly critical of the historical materialist legacy in Marxism, since it neglects the fundamental nature of the human being as what Ernst Cassirer called an animal symbolicum (Baudrillard, 1975). Where the Marxian axiology is clear, however, is in that the commodification process becomes a totalizing social process that permeates social life. In line with the Frankfurt School, he argues that the processes of homogenization, alienation and exploitation constitute a process of reification, in which objects come to dominate subjects, thereby robbing people of their human qualities and capacities. Through reification, human beings become dominated by things (see Kellner, 2000, 315). A second layer in Baudrillard’s legacy adds a local political dimension, in the sense that he engages in a critical dialogue with the French left in the 1980s. This is the period when he writes The Beaubourg Effect and Forget Foucault, endeavours which resulted in a very strong isolation within the French intellectual community. This is also the time when Baudrillard becomes heavily interested in American popular culture and starts publishing his Cool Memories. This

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turn results in a third layer of Baudrillard’s legacy; one where he is increasingly aphoristic and modifies his style of argumentation. He becomes increasingly concerned with the idea of simulation and of simulacra and defends the idea that fiction has become stronger than reality. This paradigm shift made him the most prominent representative of the postmodern frame of thought – although he himself refrained from qualifying himself as postmodernist. These two latter parts of Baudrillard’s legacy have had as consequence that to date Baudrillard, who is considered a leading thinker in most countries, is not subject to much intellectual gratitude and recognition in his home country.

Exchange as an ontology of social life For Baudrillard, consumer society is a fundamentally new type of society because the ontological constitution of society has changed over the last 500 years. Consequently, it is essential to study this history. One basic assumption is that exchange works as the ontology of society and human life and Baudrillard’s first task is to propose an archaeology of exchange. What he terms “symbolic exchange” plays the same vital role in Baudrillard’s thought as the accursed share for Georges Bataille. As explained by Jantzen (Chapter 31, this volume), Bataille argues that the economy as we know it, based on accumulation, savings, rationality – the so called restricted economy – is only part of a more general economy which would include all types of exchanges, notably waste, violence, sacrifice and death. Symbolic exchange, for Baudrillard has a similar status – an anthropological concept that defies the utility, rationality and valorization schemes – use value, exchange value and, in contemporary consumer society sign value – proposed by economics. It is the exchange that is irreducible to market logics but nevertheless, or actually therefore, fundamental for the constitution of the social. Symbolic exchange, as well as the accursed share, refer to the expenditures, to wasteful types of behaviour that serve no other purpose but themselves – the feast, excesses, non-reproductive sexual activity. And it is exactly their non-reduction to a useful purpose that makes them able to be constitutive of society, since society as a consequence of these wasteful activities is non-intended. The human universe that does not allow for symbolic exchange is an impoverished one, and that is for Baudrillard (as well as for Bataille) ultimately the problem with capitalism – that accumulation and not expenditure is the ultimate driving force. Symbolic exchange is based on unquestioned obligation and reciprocity. This concept, which remains very allusive, is central in Baudrillard’s thought. It is a broadening out of the field of obligatory exchanges of the same kind: from simple exchanges in conversation to sacred sacrifices, and the exchanges between the living and the dead. Theses exchanges are not based on use values, and they stand in marked contrast to market exchange mediated by money values. Referring to the cultures analyzed by Lévi-Strauss and Mauss, Baudrillard claims that the exchange processes are founded in magic and/or religion. Symbolic exchange thus defies valorization and thereby the Maussian logic of reciprocity is conceived by Baudrillard as a kind of reversibility which annuls power, a reversibility to be found in the fundamental dualism of the world. In other words, symbolic exchange implies the possibility of a gift that cannot be returned and therefore a fundamental form of power. That which cannot be exchanged forms a singularity and cannot be absorbed into the system. Baudrillard notes that modern societies are based on a different kind of exchange, commodity exchange, and modern cultures are similarly structured in a different way reflecting the way structural value permeates beyond the community. That is why symbolic exchange continues

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to haunt modern societies and it continues to be the fundamental formation, the radical base of things (Gane, 1993).

The structural law of value It might not be exaggerated to claim that the concept of symbolic exchange can be compared to Marx’s notion of communism (Gane, cit. in Smith, 2010, 211). Baudrillard’s conception of value and its fate differs from Marx’s. From the perspective of symbolic exchange, Baudrillard sees Marx’s critique of political economy caught in the mirror of production from which “the human species comes to consciousness” (Baudrillard, 1975, 19). In Marxian thought, the imaginary, through which an objective world emerges and through which man recognizes himself objectively is determined solely by production “which is assigned to him as the ultimate dimension of value and meaning” (Baudrillard, 1988, 58). For Marx, the additional dimension of exchange value, above use value, is what defines the commodity. Unlike use value, exchange value is marked by the relativity of its form. The value form thus expresses an underlying substance, which Marx calls “a congelation of homogeneous human labour” (Marx, 1954, 46). Marx privileged the role of use value as “the horizon and finality of the system of exchangevalues” (Baudrillard, 1993, 6), failing to detect that use value is subject to the same equivalence as exchange value, and mistakenly “maintaining use value as the category of incomparability” (Baudrillard, 1981, 134) when it is merely the alibi of exchange value and subject to the same law of equivalence. That is why Baudrillard turns to linguistics’ powerful insights to propose an alternative theory of value. In Saussurian terms, value means (1) the functional property for a linguistic sign to refer to something and (2) to a structural system of differentiation terms capable of allowing such references in the first place. Just as the commodity law of value is a law of equivalences, . . . it equally designates . . . equivalence in the configuration of the sign, where one signifier and one signified facilitate the regulated exchange of a referential content. (Baudrillard, 1993, 8) presiding over a dialectic between the sign and the real. But Baudrillard claims that a revolution has put an end to this classical economics of value in the sense “referential value is annihilated, giving the structural play of value the upper hand” (Baudrillard, 1993, 6). And this is the structural revolution of value, which means that “from now on, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real”. And the consequence is of course that “the real has died of the shock of value acquiring this fantastic autonomy” (Baudrillard, 1993, 7).

From seduction to simulacra The process of mastering the universe of these autonomous signs is what Baudrillard calls seduction. He locates seduction at the center of his thoughts and relates it to such terms as production, obscenity, power, reversibility, play and of course symbolic exchange. In keeping with the etymological origin of seduction – from the Latin se-ducere, ‘to take aside, to divert from one’s path’ (Baudrillard, 1990, 22) – he gives seduction an explicitly spatial inflection rather than a sexual connotation. This deflection is exemplified in the sign that differs and defers reference, the sign which is devoid of meaning. As Baudrillard puts it, “only signs without

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referents, empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs, absorb us” (Baudrillard, 1990, 74). Seduction is a referential concept and to be seduced is to be drawn towards something that constantly eludes and to lose ourselves on its surface. As an ex-centric and ex-static enigma misplaced ‘at the center of things’, seduction not only diverts them from their ‘right’ and ‘proper’ path, but it also makes them curve in on themselves, spiralling towards the non-sense whence they came, and the ‘superficial abyss’ into which everything of value ultimately plunges (Smith, 2010, 187). Seduction is a fatal attraction, it leads nowhere other than astray: “the destiny of signs is to be torn form their destination, deviated, displaced, diverted, recuperated, seduced” (Baudrillard, 1998, 80). And everything else is an illusion – from the Latin il-ludere, ‘in play, against play’. That is why there is an absolute proximity of the play of seduction in Baudrillard and the play of différance and dissemination in Derrida. This leads of course to the central notion of simulacrum, which is explored throughout his oeuvre. Once again, the word derives from the Latin simulare meaning to ‘make like’ or simulate and is usually understood as constituting a problem for reason and thinking because it raises the issue of falsity and untruth. Needless to say, Baudrillard totally rejects this Platonic understanding of simulacra. Influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Pierre Klossowski, he instead understands simulacra not as false images, but as that which “hides the truth’s non-existence” (Baudrillard, 1988, 35). That is why in this sense, the simulacrum is true.

The three orders of simulacra For Baudrillard, the so-called primitive cultures are characterized by an immediate meaning of life and a stable and reciprocal social order. In symbolic exchange . . . the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that is sealed between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. (Baudrillard, 1981, 64) Anyhow, Baudrillard seeks to understand the repudiation of symbolic exchange through the erection of the laws of value (Smith, 2010, 196). The signifier is then considered as form rather than content and produces the effect of the real or referent as mirage, alibi or simulation. For Baudrillard, the ‘real’ is “only the simulacrum of the symbolic, its form reduced and intercepted by the sign” (Baudrillard, 1981, 162). As he illustrates in Symbolic Exchange and Death, symbolic exchange means a symbolic order which is structured by three orders of Simulacra. The first order dominates from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. It is based on the natural law of value and is characterized by the counterfeit. For the first time the sign breaks free from the reciprocal obligation between castes, clans, social systems that marked the feudal society. Instead the sign begins to refer to some external reality (e.g., the trompe l’œil). Whereas in the medieval Christian universe the cultural reference was placed outside the culture itself, in the Bible, in the Renaissance the cultural reference is within the culture, since it is man himself who installs the idea of reason and nature. Hereby, the essence of the cultural reference has changed fundamentally. When the absolute character of the reference disappears, a reciprocal reference is simulated and the sign becomes a simulacrum: a truth concealing that there is no truth. In the order of imitation, reason is the simulacrum that guarantees the reference.

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This has of course political consequences in the sense Hobbes (1588–1679) and Rousseau (1712–78) attempted to establish a social pact either based on the re-introduction of an absolute monarch or a social contract. In both cases, imitation of either the king as simulacrum or a natural condition is the grounding political principle. This observation is related to the era Foucault defines as “The Classical Age” in The Order of Things. The second order, which dominates through the industrial era, is based on the market law of value and is characterized by production. The order of production is Baudrillard’s term for the new cultural condition of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism is viewed as a semiotic system with its own logic, requiring completely new conditions for cultural representation and reference. Formerly, production was focused on creating use value, but now exchange value becomes central. The logic of exchange value affects the cultural condition, and the objects subsumed under this value are detached from their original social setting and a new meaning can be attached to the object. The exchange value is based on a general equivalent in market relations and the exchange of commodities is viewed in terms of economic exchange value. Industrially produced or ‘serial’ signs exist without symbolic obligations. The third order, which dominates consumer society and is governed by the ‘structural law of value’, is characterized by simulation. What Baudrillard claims is that these three orders of simulacra are in fact devices of social control and power structures which produce specific social relations based on binary disjunctions (Smith, 2010, 197). Whereas the first order establishes the notion of the ‘real’, the second order is distinctive and abolishes the notion of originality through the infinite series of industrial production. The cultural condition succeeding the order of production where the signs have lost their original referent, knowing that no culture can operate with free-floating signs. There is an underlying structure that connects the referents to the detached signs. The goods provided by production no longer refer to the use value or to the exchange value, but to a sign value which is “produced” by a program, determined by a code. This process is termed a model for simulation and marketing could be such a model.

Why is there nothing rather than something? The main idea is that simulation is always connected to the real and that the real is connected to the conditions around symbolic exchange. But since the decline of the symbolic exchange, the real has been simulated. That is why Simulation (with a capital S) is for Baudrillard a kind of hypothesis. It can be viewed as an analytical tool, an epistemological and political statement. The aim of simulation is not to do away with reality, but on the contrary to realize it, to make it real. Simulation in this sense is not a form of illusion, but opposed to illusion, a way of getting rid of the fundamental illusionality of the world. (Butler, 1999, 24) The structural law of value enables the limitless reproducibility of signs from pre-existing models. The dull industrial repetitive signs lose the magic from the first order and become echoless, functional and efficient, haunted by the gradual loss of difference between copy and original due to the assembly line. The signs connected to commodities have lost the last reference to anything ‘original’, and that is why it can be said that the sign was liberated. What are the political consequences of such a statement? In In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

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(1978/1983b), Baudrillard develops the idea that the state and ‘the system’ want to know everything about the ‘masses’. Needless to say that opinion polls and market research is developed for that purpose. But if we assume, with Mary Douglas, that consumers don’t really know what they want, it becomes clear that individuals therefore answer what they think ‘the system’ wants to know. This clearly illustrates the fact that Simulation is the process occurring when the real returning into reality in a simulated form and that this process is guided by the code. Both the state and ‘the system’ to eliminate or control what could be left of the symbolic exchange. The third order allows a ‘perfected’ degree of control through “prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and indeterminate mutation” (1993, 60). That is why the test is everywhere the fundamental social form of control, which works by infinitely dividing practices and responses . . . the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the cycles of the question/answer . . . the total neutralisation of signifiers by the code . . . test and referenda are . . . perfect forms of simulation: the question induces the answer, it is designated in advance (Baudrillard, 1993, 62). The idea of test belongs to the second order and the assembly line. Everything should be reduced to stable, equivalent oppositions to fit ‘the system’. We are thus tested to decode meaning in terms of the code. The code itself, a meta-principle, is not decoded because it sets the terms for possible decoding. That is why it can be said that opinion polls do not ‘capture’ meaning or opinion, they simulate it; they do not replace a lived, meaningful reality with an image of it, they simulate something that is not, and never was, there. This is where Baudrillard draws on a famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges to say that in cartographic terms, the second order of simulacra can be seen as an attempt to produce the perfect map representing a territory. But in the third order, the map precedes the territory: A precession of simulacra. The new territory produced based on the map and the code is Baudrillard’s desert of the real’. As models precede ‘reality’, they precede conflicts, contradiction, debate. The ‘real’ was that of which it is possible to provide an equivalent reproduction; the hyper-real is that which is always already reproduced from a model (Baudrillard, 1993, 73). It means that ultimately the customer has no role in the symbolic exchange. Similarly to Foucault, Baudrillard does look back in his genealogy of consumption, but in contrast to Foucault, only to use this knowledge to understand the present or the future. The past is lost forever! This is why Forget Foucault points out a tremendous epistemological difference. Whereas Foucault wants to criticize certain discourses by analyzing their history (medicine, psychiatry, sexuality, etc.), Baudrillard wants to do the same by analyzing the present. For Baudrillard, Foucault is a seducer who is writing about bygone phenomena as if they were still important and powerful. Foucault writes a history of representation, whereas Baudrillard writes a history of simulation. Baudrillard’s genealogy of the consumption society through the order of simulacra can be seen as the establishment of a new ontology of our cultural understanding. Why, in concluding, is it meaningful to qualify Baudrillard as the Nietzsche of our times? This can be rooted in three observations. First of all, it is because, like Nietzsche, he expresses much of his philosophy not (just) through a systematic discursive and reason-based argumentation but in particular in the later works through literary aphorisms and autobiographical commentaries. Secondly, like Nietzsche, Baudrillard is the philosopher of suspicion of modern reason and illusion as a fundamental condition of humankind. Finally, they share (together with Foucault) a dislike for system building, both explicitly qualifying the idea of using their thoughts for ‘reasoned systemic theorizing’ as erroneous. For Baudrillard, this would be overestimating reality. He ultimately reverts the founding philosophical question – ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ – to its contrary:‘why is there nothing rather than something?’

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Note 1 Aged only 57 years, Per Østergaard died suddenly while the chapters of this book were still in process. He did not leave a draft manuscript, but this chapter is based on his lectures in the Consumption Theory – a Canon of Classics seminars. The content of these lecture notes has been selected and reworked by the editors in order for his thoughts to be present in the volume.

References Baudrillard, Jean (1975), The Mirror of Production, St. Louis: Telos Press [1973]. Baudrillard, Jean (1981), For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St. Louis: Telos Press [1973]. Baudrillard, Jean (1983), In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, New York: Semiotext(e) [1978]. Baudrillard, Jean (1988), The Ecstasy of Communication, New York: Semiotext(e). Baudrillard, Jean (1990), Seduction, New York: McMillan [1979]. Baudrillard, Jean (1993), Symbolic Exchange and Death, London: Sage [1976]. Baudrillard, Jean (1996), The System of Objects, London: Verso [1968]. Baudrillard, Jean (1998), The Consumer Society, Paris: Gallimard [1970]. Baudrillard, Jean (2001), Impossible Exchange, London: Verso [1999]. Butler, Rex (1999), Jean Baudrillard: The Defense of the Real, London and Thousand Oaks: Sage. Gane, Mike (ed.) (1993), Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, London: Routledge. Kellner, Douglas (2000), Jean Baudrillard in Ritzer, Georges (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Major Contemporary Social Theorists, Oxford: Blackwell, 310–32. Marx, Karl (1954), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol 1., London: Lawrence & Wishart. Smith, Richard (ed.) (2010), The Baudrillard Dictionary, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

24 BRUNO LATOUR: PHILOSOPHER OF TOGETHERNESS IN ACTION Domen Bajde

Latourian thought has been seeping into consumer research for decades (Kavanagh 1994). Recently, the seepage has grown into a torrent of research carried out under banners such as actor–network theory (ANT) and assemblage theory (Canniford and Bajde 2015). Similar to the slippery crossbreeds conjured by Latour to challenge dogmatic conceptions of science, technology and society, Latour is himself a slick, Janus-faced writer. A master of witty prose and gritty ethnography speaking to the fundamental challenges of our liminal times, and an occasional victim to his self-indulgent witticism and caricatures of the universe (Restivo 2011). A philosopher turns anthropologist, turns sociologist, returns to philosopher. Many in one, one in many. Latour’s work has inspired researchers across a broad spectrum of sciences and disciplines. His influence has been all the more profound in the fields and streams of research he pioneered himself, such as Science and Technology studies. His ideas have been just as instrumental in dethroning objectivist dogmas, as they have been in saving (de)constructivism from its ideocentric and anthropocentric tendencies. Unsurprisingly, Latour’s double-barrel critiques attracted ire from both camps, as he was found to be too objectivist for the constructivist camp and too relativist for the objectivists. Latour, the founder of new disciplines and forever a foundling in the eyes of the Disciplined. At the risk of producing another tortuous caricature, we will approach Latour as a philosopher of ‘togetherness in action’ (TIA). TIA, as in, nothing gets done alone by single independent actors. TIA, as in, togetherness takes work and is always in the making, never complete. After unpicking this makeshift ‘handle’ to Latour’s vast opus (i.e., 146 articles, 14 books and counting), I turn attention to Latour’s more recent work on modes of existence.

Togetherness in action: nothing gets done alone Latour’s first major work, co-authored with sociologist Steve Woolgar, was Laboratory Life, an ethnographic investigation and sociological reflection on scientific practices in the infamous Salk Institute. This seminal work, in what later became known as the field of Science and Technology studies, challenged dogmatic conceptions of science. In Laboratory Life, and his

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later works, such as Science in Action (1987) and The Pasteurization of France (1988), Latour challenges idealistic portrayals of science as the objective unveiling of ‘facts’ (i.e., direct, transparent representations of nature). This idealized notion of Science (labelled with a capital ‘S’) is contrasted to ‘science in action’ (small ‘s’), science as practiced. Latour’s ‘praxeology of science’ also challenges the idealized notion of the lone Scientist, the knowledge subject, who singlehandedly discovers facts. This fictional actor is dethroned by a colourful band of actants who include other humans, various material objects, technologies and devices jointly enacting science. It is only when material-semiotic assemblages of actants align and interact (i.e., act together), that the stormy trials and tribulations of knowledge production can be weathered and ultimately become forgotten (‘blackboxed’ in ANT terminology), so that we are left with undisputed facts (i.e., Science) and ingenious fact-finders (i.e., Scientists). In practice, instead of straight, transparent lines of communication between Nature (referent) and Science (representation), one finds a convoluted cacophony of bacteria, lab assistants, petri dishes, institute directors, measuring equipment, research drafts, conference reviewers, etc. Accordingly, doing science entails working in, and working out, a symphonic orchestra of actants (an ‘actor network’ in ANT terms). It is only ‘after the fact’ that the conductor, the composer, or the lead violins get all the credit for the magical performance, and the remaining actants are forgotten, or punctualized (another ANT term) as mere tools passively conveying the will of their conductor. Life, in science or otherwise, is of course not all melody. The path to Science is noisy and treacherous. In Laboratory Life, Latour refers to science as an agonistic field, suffused with ambition, conflict and calamity. Yet, in contrast to other sociological accounts of science, he does not stop at observing the skirmishes of human actors, but draws particular attention to the often forgotten work of mundane, nonhuman actants. As in his subsequent critiques of anthropocentric sociology (Latour 1992, 2005), he asks: Where are the missing masses [of nonhumans]? Ignoring them will likely produce lopsided accounts of actor networks. According to the ‘principle of generalized symmetry’, the flow of action cannot be comprehensively traced if humans and nonhumans are not equally considered as potential candidates for action (Latour 1999). That is not to say that there is no difference between humans and nonhumans, or that objects act of their own accord. Nobody/nothing does (Latour 1984)! Rather, it suggests that action is always distributed across multiple actants, some human, some not, some more skilled and some less so (Latour 1992). As a result, interpretations of Latourian ‘flat ontology’ as a metaphysical claim that humans and nonhumans are equal miss the point. The notion of flat ontology is a methodological principle inviting researchers to suspend presumptions of self-evident hierarchies (e.g., superiority of humans over nonhumans, superstructure over infrastructure), so that they can then proceed to trace the production of hierarchies and asymmetries in respective local networks (i.e., unravel the ongoing ‘ontological politics’). The confusion is partly owed to Latour’s reluctance to separate questions of ontology (What exists?) from questions of epistemology (How can we know?). Latourian pragmatist-processual philosophy denies pregiven elements that exist in/by themselves (Bajde 2013). Existence is always tied to local processes of relation through mutual transformation (i.e., ‘translation’ in ANT terms). For example, science does not study preexistent Nature (or Society), but rather brings it into (varied forms of ) existence through material-semiotic practices that simultaneously give shape to Science itself. Put differently, Science is performative in the double sense of enacting ‘external’ realities (i.e., realities of Nature) and being ‘externally’ enacted itself (i.e., Science is not made of the scientific alone).

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Togetherness born of action: power to Latour There is more to Latourian thought than the maxims of agential plurality and generalized symmetry. Thinking with Latour and his offspring theories such as ANT goes beyond mapping who and what acts, or showing that materiality matters and that nothing is pure (Latour 1993). Even my clumsy TIA ‘handle’ has a double meaning. ‘Togetherness in action’ can refer to acting together (i.e., collective action), but also to togetherness ‘in the making’, that is, to togetherness born of action. Like the two-faced Janus simultaneously looking backward and forward, Latour insists that we consider both the contribution of diverse actants (i.e., how nothing get’s done alone) and the action needed to hold the actants together, or breaking them apart. Put differently, achieving or breaking togetherness requires considerable work. Returning to the earlier example, science does not unveil a hidden, preexistent reality, but rather constructs a reality capable of resisting objections of others. The strength of scientists and their facts, the strength of any actor or any reality, is linked to the number and solidity of associations enrolled and stabilized through continuous trials of strength (Mialet 2012). To study action thus implies studying network building, studying the production of stability and irreversibility (e.g., stable facts, predictable actors). Power and knowledge are thus not resources one can simply possess or exercise, but rather an effect achieved by building associations: (W)hen an actor simply has power, nothing happens and s/he is powerless. When, on the other hand, an actor exerts power, it is others who perform the action. . . . What makes the difference between ‘power in potentia’ and ‘power in actu’? The actions of others. (Latour 1984, 264) Once again, we find Latour replacing an essentialist conception of power ‘in potentia’ (i.e., a self-standing potentiality to be discharged at the owner’s convenience) with a distributed, processual understanding of power ‘in actu’. Similar to Foucauld, Latour (1984) suggests that domination is not a situation-transcending cause (i.e., a root-essence), but rather a situational effect of collective action. He argues that while essentialist conceptions of power conveniently summarize the consequences of action, they do little to explain what holds collective action in place. (How does it get to be done?) Power is never simply an inner force to be diffused through and onto others. ‘Power having’ predicates on ‘association making’ through ongoing translation, wherein actors do not passively convey a preexistent energy, but rather actively transform it, link it or cut it from others. To paraphrase Latour (1984), his translation model of power sidesteps the illusions of inherent power people think they have when they are ‘obeyed’. Instead, the translation model reminds us that power is always made of the will of others, that is, power predicates on enrolling multiple, heterogeneous actors. It is born of mutual transformation of self and other. In sum, while issues of power are rarely discussed explicitly by Latour, his work is hardly apolitical or supportive of any pregiven form of power arrangement. Instead, it opens valuable paths for exploring the collective action required to sustain the illusion of ‘single-handed’, self-evident power. It can also help dispel broad-stroked, tautological explanations of power and social order, and inspire critical reflection on the performativity of power ‘theories’ (Latour 1984). Likewise, Latourian theories of power are not innocent. For one, they tend to frame ‘ontological politics’ in the rhetoric of antagonism, struggle, (trials of) strength and network expansion, arguably, promoting a Machiavellian ethos of ‘associate or perish’. On the

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other hand, Latour’s work repeatedly points out the value of ‘unseen’ Others, actants whose contribution remains unrecognized, and consistently calls for peaceful coexistence of Nature and Society, of Science and Politics (Latour 2009). While in his earlier work he pursues this aim by establishing a single, unitary register (i.e., ANT) for unravelling the constitution of science, technology and society, his later work considers multiple “regimes of enunciation” (Latour 2013).

Multiple modes of Latour The network metaphor allowed Latour to translate semiotic ideas of relationality and actantial configuration (borrowed from structuralist such as Greimas) beyond the realm of immaterial signs and narratives (Akrich and Latour 1992). It provided a way to sidestep the disciplinary biases that turn a blind eye to certain types of actants, or downplay their contribution by approaching them as passive media, instead of transformative intermediaries (Latour 2005). In addition to subverting entrenched actor-hierarchies, the network metaphor discourages the researcher from appealing to infra-structures hidden below or super-structures hidden above the surface reality (Bajde 2013). In ANT, the network is the only reality, the only register. A register of immense expansiveness and mobility that spans across prevalent divides and dualisms, allowing the researcher to study local productions of ontology, rather than impose a preexistent one. It was the actor-network approach that allowed Latour (1993) to proclaim that, if modernity is to be defined as a project of establishing distinct domains of (pure) Science, Nature, Society, Politics, Religion, etc., then ‘We have never been modern’. If anything, according to Latour (1993), modernity can be characterized by hybridized practices of purificiation (Canniford and Shankar 2013) rather than existence of pure domains. In his recent work on Modes of existence, Latour (2013) turns his attention to the limitations of the actor network approach. Unlike in his past reflections where ANT was berated for not going far enough (Latour 1999), Latour now outlines the problems associated with moving along the single path of network tracing. He fears that what is compromised by adopting a unified-register of ANT is the ability to appreciate the specific features of different networks and the values that circulate across them. His suggestion is to complement the ‘network mode’ with additional modes corresponding to the ‘regional ontologies’ of modern domains, such as science, politics, law and religion. Latour (2013) describes this as a shift from his previously ‘negative’ examination of the Moderns in We Have Never Been Modern to a ‘positive’ accounting of modern modes of existence. This move marks a curious reversal for a philosopher who once upon a time set out to dispel illusory modern divides and regimens (Latour 1993). Two decades down the line, Latour argues that the real challenge is no longer only to trace associations and networks in order to expand the notion of society and social (as in Reassembling the Social), but to decipher the different types of connections that provide those networks with their “specific tonalities” (Latour 2013, 36). A generous reader would argue that is not so much a reversal as it is a continuation of Latour’s (and ANT’s) devotion to study the production of varied local ontologies. This time, by means of comparative analysis of relatively stable, coexistent ‘regional ontologies’, such as the ontology of science, politics and law. A less generous reader might detect a philosophical implosion. Latour, the radical anti-essentialist now setting off to chart the essence of essential modern institutions.

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One suspects that charges of impurity or inconsistence would not trouble Latour too much, nor seriously thwart his ambitions to reform the Moderns. More scathing to the selfproclaimed empiricist philosopher could be the charge that as his writing moves onto a metaphysical plane, it becomes progressively divorced from the social and political realities of life (Restivo 2011). Should Latour’s work be translated as a definitive theory of Modernity, one is inclined to agree with Restivo’s apprehension. On the other hand, it is hard to disagree with Latour’s observation that at some point, ceaselessly pointing to the heterogeneity and hybridity of networks comprising the modern world becomes a boring surprise. Perhaps the time is ripe to sharpen our ears to the particular tunes of philharmonic Modernity. Afterall, is that not what Latour has been doing all along, tracing the Moderns’ pursuits of their beloved ‘harmonia’ (i.e., literally: means of joining, settled government and order)?

References Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour (1992). A summary of a convenient vocabulary for the semiotics of human and nonhuman assemblies. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. W.E. Bijker and J. Law, 259–264. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bajde, Domen (2013). Consumer culture theory (re) visits actor–network theory: Flattening consumption studies. Marketing Theory, 13(2): 227–242. Canniford, Robin, and Domen Bajde (2015). Assembling Consumption: Researching Actors, Networks and Markets. London: Routledge. Canniford, Robin, and Avi Shankar (2013). Purifying practices: How consumers assemble romantic experiences of nature. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(5): 1051–1069. Kavanagh, Donncha (1994). Hunt versus Anderson: Round 16. European Journal of Marketing, 28(3): 26–41. Latour, Bruno (1984). The powers of association. The Sociological Review, 32: 264–280. Latour, Bruno (1987). Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1988). The Pasteurization of France. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1992). Where are the missing masses? The sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. W.E. Bijker and J. Law, 225–258, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (1999). On recalling ANT. The Sociological Review, 47(1): 15–25. Latour, Bruno (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno (2009). Politics of Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar (1979). Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mialet, Hélène (2012). Where would STS be without Latour? What would be missing? Social Studies of Science, 42(3): 456–461. Restivo, Sal (2011). Bruno Latour. In The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists: Classical Social Theorists, ed. G. Ritzer and J. Stepnisky, Volume 1, 520–540, Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

PART VIII

Power games

25 ADORNO, HORKHEIMER AND THE AUDACITY OF REASON Jeff B. Murray

Introduction If you were a Greek philosopher of astronomy in the 6th century BC, looking to the heavens, you would be certain that the Earth was the center of the universe. Clearly, the sun, moon, stars, and planets circle the Earth. In addition, the Earth does not seem to move – it feels solid, stable, and secure. If the senses are the primary source of empirical evidence, then this idea can be justified as a true knowledge claim. However, in this case, you would be wrong. What appears to be true actually is not. Nicolaus Copernicus, a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer, published De Revolutionibus in 1543, declaring that the sun is the center of our solar system. Together with the calculus of Johannes Kepler and the instrumentation of Galileo Galilei, Copernicus demonstrated that what appears to be true often is misleading or deceptive. At least part of the story of modernity is that truth is deep; simple sense experience cannot be trusted. For example, Sigmund Freud (1917/2009) argued that the unconscious plays an important role in the phenomenon of repression. Karl Marx (1867/1990) proposed that the key to understanding political economy was to understand the economic substructure consisting of the forces and relations of production. Truth lies beneath. In a very important essay entitled “What is Enlightenment,” Immanuel Kant (1784) states boldly, Dare to know! For Kant, it is Enlightenment reason that enabled these philosophers to move from appearance to reality. It was reason that empowered the scholar to look beneath. If the preceding example is multiplied a thousand times, leaving behind premodern-situated understandings for modernity, we can begin to understand the power of reason. Reason is emancipating.

From reason to instrumental rationality As philosophers and social theorists used reason to chip away at premodern understandings, society became dangerously vulnerable to new ways of thinking. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity (2000) suggests that when Enlightenment reason began to melt premodern social structures, the whole complex network of social relations became unstuck – bare and unprotected – impotent

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to resist the business-inspired criteria of rationality. Note that Bauman (2000) is referring to a type of reason that privileges natural scientific and technologically exploitable forms of knowing. Here, reason becomes an instrument for means-end thinking – the type of rationality that can push most effectively against premodern beliefs. Thus, we see the gradual rationalization of society. Sociologists, writing just after the industrial revolution, began to draw attention to the cultural consequences of this process. The most famous of these is Max Weber’s discussion in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930/2001). In Talcott Parson’s translation of this book, he describes how this process of rationalization traps individuals in systems based entirely on efficiency, rational calculation, and control. The famous metaphors iron cage and the polar night of icy darkness (Weber 1930/2001) are used to awaken an emotional and intuitive feel for this process. What started out as something emancipatory – Enlightenment reason – ended up repressive in a new way. Instrumental rationality entraps. Around the time that Max Weber was writing his most famous book, Economy and Society (1922), a group of very talented social theorists was beginning to meet at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, asking the question: what went wrong with Enlightenment reason? Why did a way of thinking designed to unleash human potential end up repressing us in new ways? Is there a way of reigniting the emancipatory power of reason? This group of theorists, united around these questions, initiated and founded the Institut für Sozialforschung, commonly known as the Frankfurt School. The German social theorist Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was appointed professor of social philosophy in 1930 and also officially became the first director of the institute. At this time, Theodor Adorno had just finished his degree and was appointed as a lecturer in philosophy. Together with the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm, and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, the group set out to conceive a new philosophy of society. The stage is set.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno In his inaugural lecture in January 1931, Professor Horkheimer began to clarify a conceptual framework, which would later become known as Critical Theory. (When critical theory is capitalized it generally refers only to the work of the Frankfurt School, when the lower case is used it refers to the critical tradition more generally. Given that my discussion in this chapter is relevant for the critical tradition more generally, I will use the lower case.) For Horkheimer and his colleagues, this would be an ongoing project. In fact, toward the end of his career, he wrote one of his most celebrated essays entitled Traditional and Critical Theory (1972). Given that no one sets out to write a non-critical theory, what is the difference between these two types of theorizing? What is critical theory? Given the interdisciplinary nature of the Frankfurt School, summarizing critical theory is challenging. There are at least three strategies used to clarify this conceptual architecture. The first is historical. This is the strategy used by Martin Jay (1973) in The Dialectical Imagination. This book was Jay’s dissertation while completing a Ph.D. at Harvard in history; it covers the history of the Frankfurt School from 1923–1950. This book is considered a primary source given that individuals such as Leo Lowenthal helped Jay by providing personal letters and documents for his research. Although Jay’s research focuses on a detailed history, the key concepts, their relationship, and the explanatory power of critical theory are discussed in context. The second strategy is philosophical. This was the strategy used by Jeff B. Murray and Julie L. Ozanne in their 1991 Journal of Consumer Research article entitled “The Critical Imagination:

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Emancipatory Interests in Consumer Research.” Here, the ontology, axiology, and epistemology of critical theory is compared and contrasted with what Habermas (1971, pp. 302–303) refers to as the empirical-analytic and historical-hermeneutic sciences. In other words, how does a critical approach differ from positivism and interpretivism? Finally, the third strategy is normative. This strategy illuminates ways that critical theory is distinct from traditional theory. Horkheimer (1972) suggests that critical theory is distinct in at least three ways. First, given that all social theories are ultimately based on political interests, motivations, and sentiments, critical theory makes this explicit. Second, by revealing social contradictions, critical theory becomes a progressive force, stimulating social change. And third, critical theory has an imaginative, or reflective, function rendering the status quo a historical construction, and, therefore, is something that can be changed. Considering that these three distinctions are related and intertwined, I would suggest that the normative structure of critical theory consists of four key elements: interdisciplinary, reflective, dialectical, and critical. Understanding the way Horkheimer and Adorno use these concepts to create a critical theory provides a clear introduction to the Frankfurt School.

The normative structure of critical theory Critical theory is interdisciplinary. Members of the Frankfurt School believed that traditional theory was inadequate for explaining the developments of capitalism in the 1930s and 1940s. Critical of both capitalism and soviet socialism, their writings explored alternative paths to social development. Believing that society was multifaceted, a range of perspectives and disciplines were necessary to understand cultural life. By combining a variety of approaches, they were able to shape a more comprehensive understanding of cultural phenomena. Perspectives included a critique of positivism, existentialism, Marxism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and various philosophies from the Continental tradition. Their common horizon was German idealism, particularly Hegel’s philosophy emphasizing the dialectic and contradictions as a force for change. Critical theory is reflective. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that theoretical discourse is the effect or outcome of a deeper, implicit foundation. In this sense, the structure of theory consists of a superstructure and substructure. The superstructure is what the theorist reads – the words on the page. The substructure creates a foundation and is the driving force for theoretical arguments. It includes, at the base, political interests and sentiments, which eventually give rise to ontological, axiological, and epistemological assumptions. There is likewise no theory of society, even that of the sociologists concerned with general laws, that does not contain political motivations, and the truth of these must be decided not in supposedly neutral reflection but in personal thought and action, in concrete historical activity. (Horkheimer 1972, p. 222) Thus, critical theorists must read deeply, understanding how the theoretical substructure is influencing the theorist; in what way do the political interests and motivations of the theorist implicitly influence the writing of theory? Again, returning to the introduction of this essay, truth lies beneath. In addition, critical theorists must work to better understand everyday cultural life by observing it through the conceptual lattice of the theory. The veracity of theory

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is considered by asking, “Who benefits from these ideas? Who suffers? How should society be organized? How did we arrive at this place? Which theoretical orientation are my actions consistent with? Which set of theoretical ideas explain best my narrative at this moment in history?” These types of questions help to shed light on what it means to have a reflective theoretical sensibility. Critical theory is dialectical. Horkheimer and Adorno used this phrase in at least three different ways in their social theories. First, it describes a theory of social change. This theory proposes that small imperceptible quantitative changes culminate over a period of time resulting in dramatic qualitative changes. For example, the worldwide economic recession of 2008 began decades earlier with decisions that gradually impacted the economy in seemingly innocent ways. Decisions included actions by financial firms, consumers, and regulatory agencies including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages, breakdowns in corporate governance, and excessive borrowing by households and Wall Street. These are examples of small quantitative changes that eventually resulted in a single qualitative change: the startling 2008 recession. A metaphor that is often used to describe this theory is bringing water to a boil. The water increases degree-by-degree, imperceptible quantitative changes, until a single degree suddenly and unexpectedly turns the water to steam, a qualitative change. Second, critical theorists often combine the word dialectical with the word materialism. Dialectical materialism is a phrase used by critical theorists to push against the historical materialism and economic determinism of orthodox Marxism. Dialectical materialism connotes a dialogue between a substructure that has been expanded to include the culture industries and the superstructure of everyday life. Here, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School are asserting that social theory should reveal how the culture industries influence our day-to-day awareness and consciousness. Finally, the word dialectical is used philosophically to discuss the role of theory in understanding the world. This is a philosophy of science issue engaging the Popper/Wittgenstein debate. Theory is neither an open window to the world nor simply a language game. Theoretical discourse helps the theorist to better understand social phenomena and the concrete connection to the world helps refine theoretical concepts. There is an interplay or dialogue between the world and the words used to understand it. For instance, theories explaining social structure help the theorist understand and interpret social phenomena with greater clarity, and engagement with the concrete empirical world helps refine theoretical concepts pertaining to social structure. Thus, theoretical categories and concepts are improved and refined over time by engaging with the world. Critical theory is critical. This phrase, on the surface, appears redundant. However, Horkheimer and Adorno did not use this phrase generally. They meant something specific by it. The everyday world appears fixed, ordinary, and natural. If social structures and institutions support relations of domination, then this also appears normal. Living with this situation of repression for long periods of time ensures that these relations become habitual – the common routines of an established society. It is the job of the critical theorist to render what appears to be fixed and natural into something that was created on the basis of political interests, a historical construction that benefits a specific group. In this way, myth is turned to history and social institutions become alterable projects. For Horkheimer, it is ideology that shores up social institutions. In Ideology: An Introduction (2007), Terry Eagleton describes 16 different ways the concept of ideology has been used in the social sciences. The way the concept is used largely depends on whether it is understood as a sociological or epistemological theoretical category. When used sociologically, ideology consists of values, norms, beliefs, meanings, symbols, and

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customs. It is conceived of as a common framework or worldview. When used epistemologically, ideology refers to true and false cognition (Eagleton 2007), appearance versus reality. Here, it is ideology that masks social relations as historical constructions, making them appear natural. Thus, it is ideology that sustains and legitimates the power of the dominant group, which helps them maintain control of social relations and social reproduction. For Horkheimer and Adorno, there are two moments of critique. The first is negative. A negative critique is diagnostic; this is the theoretical project of unmasking ideology and revealing changeable social structures. The second is positive. A positive critique is remedial; this is the theoretical project of identifying the subject position of progressive tendencies and asking the question, how can repressive social structures be changed? Thus, although Horkheimer and Adorno used the phrase “critical theory” in many different contexts and ways, we can suggest that it differs from traditional theory in at least four ways: it is interdisciplinary, reflective, dialectical, and critical. Most argue that the critical theorists avoided definitions completely, positioning critical theory between theoretical traditions. For example, critical theory stands in the tension between dialectical materialism or a neoMarxist interpretation of society and a neo-Weberian conflict theory (Morrow and Brown 1994). Donna Haraway (1997), in Modest Witness, suggests that critical theory differs from traditional theory in that it is evaluative, public, multi-actor, multi-agenda, oriented to equality and heterogeneous well-being. This emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and well-being is something that has now become the focal point for the Transformative Consumer Research group in consumer research. In an article also exploring the normative structure of critical theory, Murray and Ozanne (2006) propose that six reference points characterize this tradition. These include: normative, domination, history, reflection, dialectic, and imagination. These authors are using the word normative in the sense that critical theory unites the empirical analysis of what is with normative theorizing about what ought to be. Murray and Ozanne (2006) refer to three types of domination: first, social relations that emerge from social hierarchy and external exploitation – for example, the outsourcing of work to Asian factories and the extraction of workers’ surplus value as a form of external exploitation (p. 47). Second, when individuals internalize subordinate social relations, this is experienced as taken-for-granted, or natural. This is referring to the role of ideology from an epistemological perspective as discussed previously. Finally, the third form of domination discussed by Murray and Ozanne (2006) is the emotional control that arises from superstition, cynicism, fear, or fundamentalism. This third form returns to the role of Enlightenment reason in the emancipatory project. Murray and Ozanne’s (2006) explanation of the other reference points – history, reflection, and dialectic – is similar to my discussion in this chapter. Given the positive role of critique, Murray and Ozanne (2006) emphasize the key role of imagination. Critical theory is a normative theory that prompts reflection on domination restoring a sense of history and the dialectical imagination (p. 50).

The culture industries and the end of reason As an exercise, let us imagine two radical social theorists embarking upon movie going in the 1940s Hollywood era. This was the time of MGM, Paramount, and 20th Century Fox. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman were starring in Casablanca. James Stewart and Donna Reed were the leads in A Wonderful Life. Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine were acting in Hitchcock’s movie, Rebecca. Herein lies the interesting question: Did Horkheimer and Adorno go to these movies?

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California in the 1940s was a unique context, serving as a cultural backdrop for two of the greatest books emerging from the Frankfurt School. The first book is One-Dimensional Man, written by Horkheimer and Adorno’s colleague, Herbert Marcuse (1964). This book is important because it represents a clear emphasis on the culture industries. Marcuse’s interpretation of his experience in California was that popular culture in America created the conditions for people to find comfort and identity in consumption. Ultimately, a preoccupation with acquisition diverts attention away from the passivity and alienation associated with the social conditions of the time. As a result of alienation, dissatisfaction deepens, leading to more consumption, and so on. This lack of critical consciousness creates one-dimensionality, a unified code that becomes naturalized, compelling people to conform. The second book is the key text of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (1947/2002). In this book, Horkheimer and Adorno return to the original motivating questions, what went wrong with Enlightenment reason? Why did a way of thinking designed to unleash human potential end up repressing us in new ways? Is there a way of reigniting the emancipatory power of reason? The purpose of the enlightenment was to erase myth and dogma and fulfill the promise of progress, reason, and order. Horkheimer and Adorno pessimistically conclude that the Enlightenment’s orientation toward rational thought created a new form of domination. In other words, they decided that the type of reason that has the most potential to emancipate ends up repressing us in new unpredictable ways. We are trapped and there is no passage.

Conclusion This condition of being trapped, with no passage to emancipation, ends the first chapter of critical theory. Horkheimer and Adorno continue to work creatively and eventually return to Germany. Theorists working as part of this first chapter, the Frankfurt School, influenced the course and tenor of the social sciences around the world. One of Adorno’s research assistants, Jürgen Habermas, who has had a front row seat, observing and reflecting carefully as critical theory unfolded, reflects: Are we really trapped? Is there no passage? Habermas believes that what appears to be a no-way-out bind might actually be a flaw in their reasoning. He begins by suggesting that modernity is an unfinished project. The trick is to work with the dynamic of modernity, not against it. In other words, Habermas feels that we have made progress; we should not sacrifice the gains, increases in knowledge and technology, economic benefits, and the expansion of individual freedom. His first major work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society (1962/1989) is a direct response to the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. In this book, Habermas begins to work through his ideas. Thus begins the second chapter in critical theory.

References Bauman, Zygmunt (2000), Liquid Modernity, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc. Copernicus, Nicolaus (1543), On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres, Great Minds Series (1995), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Eagleton, Terry (2007), Ideology: An Introduction, New York: Verso. Freud, Sigmund (1917/2009), A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Mansfield Center, CT: Martino Publishing.

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Habermas, Jürgen (1962/1989), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1971), Knowledge and Human Interests, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Haraway, Donna (1997), Modest Witness, New York: Routledge. Horkheimer, Max (1972), “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1986), New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 188–243. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1947/2002), Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jay, Martin (1973), The Dialectical Imagination, New York: Little Brown & Co. Kant, Immanuel (1784), “Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?,” in Practical Philosophy (1996), Ed. Mary J. Gregor, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 11–22. Marcuse, Herbert (1964), One-Dimensional Man, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marx, Karl (1867/1990), Capital, Volume One, New York: Penguin Books. Morrow, Raymond A. and David D. Brown (1994), Critical Theory and Methodology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Murray, Jeff B. and Julie L. Ozanne (1991), “The Critical Imagination: Emancipatory Interests in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 18 (September), 129–144. Murray, Jeff B. and Julie L. Ozanne (2006), “Rethinking the Critical Imagination,” in Handbook of Qualitative Methods in Marketing, Ed. Russell W. Belk, London: Edward Elgar Publishers, 46–55. Weber, Max (1922), Economy and Society, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, New edition (1978). Weber, Max (1930/2001), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in Routledge Classics in 2001, New York: Routledge.

26 PIERRE BOURDIEU: LUMINARY OR ELITIST? CAPITAL AND THE PROJECT OF CONSUMPTION Christina Goulding

The French philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was one of the leading figures in contemporary sociology until his death in 2002 at the age of 72. A graduate of the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, where he studied philosophy alongside Louis Althusser, his passion shifted to sociology after he was drafted into the army to serve in Algeria at the height of the liberation war (1956–1962). During this time he conducted ethnographic and statistical studies of colonial transformation influenced by the stucturalism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. On his return to Paris he became Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales where in 1968 he founded a research center which brought together a team of intellectuals concerned with issues of social power and social inequality. One of his main preoccupations was the development of theories which could bridge the gap between structuralist objectivism and constructionist subjectivism (Ollion 2012). Bourdieu was certainly prolific in his work and ideas, and by the time of his death he had authored thirty books and over 300 articles on subjects spanning art, ritual, kinship, power, social class, social structure, science, the intellectual, and language. The aim of this chapter therefore is not to attempt to offer a comprehensive review of his work, but rather to focus on those theories and concepts germane to consumer culture. In particular, the focus is on those that are most evident in the growing body of work that feature Bourdieu’s theories either as the main unit of investigation, or draw upon distinct Bourdieussian concepts to illustrate problems concerned with social structures, taste, aesthetics, cultural capital, habitus, and symbolic violence. Bourdieu’s best known work is possibly his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1984/1979) which has influenced a wide array of disciplines within the social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, the arts, cultural and media studies, and increasingly, consumer culture. Intrinsically, Bourdieu’s work should be read as a political exercise; as an analysis of the structures of power, division, and inequality that permeate and stratify society. Accordingly, “The struggle over classification is a fundamental dimension of class struggle. The power to impose and inculcate a vision of divisions, that is the power to make visible and explicit social divisions that are implicit, is political power par excellence” (Bourdieu 1989, p. 23). Of great importance to Bourdieu was the connection of his theoretical ideas with that of empirical

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research, and his work can be seen as a sociology of culture, or as he would define it, a ‘theory of practice’ (Bourdieu 1977).

Distinction Taste: In his book Distinction Bourdieu develops theories of social stratification based largely on the aesthetics of ‘taste’. Accordingly, taste “functions as a sort of social orientation, a ‘sense of one’s place’, guiding the occupants of a given social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which benefit the occupants of that position” (Bourdieu 1984/1979, p. 466). The acquisition of recognized ‘legitimate’ taste is based on membership of a network of social links and relationships which are used to retain or reach a particular social position and remain in a position of dominance (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Vaitkiene and Stankevič 2011). Taste therefore defines who is a member of one distinct social class/group and who is not. These dispositions are learnt in childhood and condition the individual in terms of behaviors that are appropriate to their social group, whilst learning an aversion to those that are not. Accordingly, each individual occupies a position in a multidimensional social space where he or she is defined not only by membership of a certain social class, but by every kind of capital he or she possesses. Capital: Important to Bourdieu’s thinking is the presentation of one’s aesthetic dispositions, or tastes, to the world. For Bourdieu taste is something that is learnt largely through family membership and is dependent on the possession of various forms of capital, including economic, social, and cultural capital. “Economic capital describes material property, income and the security that financial income brings” (Bourdieu 1983, 1984). Social capital includes those resources that spring from social networks; from relationships that people have either been born into or have developed over the life-course and which can be relied upon in times of need (Bourdieu 1983). These might take the form of an ‘old boy’s network’ such as those fostered through, for example, the British public school system, or the Ivy League fraternity and sorority houses of the US university system whose ex-members are reputed to dominate congress. But, it is cultural capital that is the main conveyor of taste and social position. Cultural capital can exist in three forms. First, it can exist in the embodied state. Most of the properties of cultural capital can be deduced from the fact that in its fundamental state, it is linked to the body and is based on self-improvement at personal cost (Bourdieu 1986). Unlike economic capital, embodied capital cannot be transferred or gifted; it is personal and the result of effort and self-investment. It may be expressed in voice, tone, or accent; in the clothes one wears; and even in how one carries oneself. This embodied, or incorporated cultural capital, may comprise the cultural skills of a person mainly gained through socialization within the family as in the case of having and displaying correct table manners. It may even be signaled through body shape. For example, according to Bourdieu (1984/1979) those from the lower classes will choose food that is heavy and fattening thus forsaking the “ethic of sobriety for the sake of slimness, which is most recognized at the highest levels of social hierarchy” (p. 79). Second, cultural capital may exist in the objectified state. This takes the form of cultural goods such as precious artworks, for example paintings and sculptures, books, dictionaries, instruments, antiques, and so on. But, “whereas economic capital is expressed through consuming goods and activities of material scarcity, cultural capital is expressed through consuming via scarce aesthetic and interactional styles that are consecrated by cultural elites” (Holt 1997, p. 98).

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Third, cultural capital can exist in the institutional state, which is a form of objectification which must be set apart from the other two. This is the result of academic certificates and qualifications which confer “entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee” (Bourdieu 1986, p. 84). Bourdieu (1984) also introduced the concepts of “capital volume”, or the weighted sum of the three types of capital, and the “compression of capitals” which is usually the composition of cultural and economic capital. It is the difference in the composition of the three capitals which results in different lifestyles and ultimately marks the differences between the classes (Blasius and Muhlichen 2010, p. 73). Those tastes that do not conform to the dominant classes’ (dominant class fractions) definition of taste are seen as inferior and capable of provoking feelings of disgust and horror. Bordieu provides numerous examples of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste including taste in furniture (primarily the store versus the antique shop), dinner party etiquette, choice of food, personal appearance, newspapers, artistic appreciation, and leisure activities which define the boundaries of class membership. Habitus: Closely linked to the development of the various forms of capital is the notion of habitus. Habitus can be defined as a system of dispositions (lasting, acquired schemes of perception, thought, and action) that the individual agent develops as a response to the objective conditions he or she encounters. Accordingly, agents from the same social class usually have relatively homogonous habitus because of similar formative socialization experiences. These may include the quality and degree of education and the inculcation into particular types of aesthetic appreciation, such as classical music, dance, and proficiency in music and musical instruments. These cultural activities, largely associated with the middle classes, will differ from those of the lower classes and will form the expectations and perceptions of each class accordingly because their respective habitus has been formed accordingly (Rey 2004). As a result, the perceptions and taken for granted assumptions of how the world operates give rise to a doxic situation where the social world is perceived as natural, taken for granted and even commonsensical. Doxa arises from ingrained and often unconscious beliefs and values which are taken as self evident universals. In turn, such beliefs inform an agent’s actions and thoughts within a particular field. Doxa tends to favor the particular social arrangement of the field, thus privileging the dominant and taking their position of dominance as self-evident and universally favorable. Field: Bourdieu conceptualizes the social world as divided into a series of hierarchically nested fields. The activities that take place within these fields are usually centered around the competition of social actors vying to occupy the dominant position within a particular field. A field is a setting in which agents and their social positions are located. The position of each particular agent in the field is a result of interaction between the specific rules of the field (or the rules of the game); the agent’s habitus; and the agent’s capital (social, economic, and cultural). “By identifying key fields within a particular social space, Bourdieu theorizes interconnections between different areas of endeavor, and the degree to which they are autonomous of each other” (Hesmondhalgh 2006, p. 212). Specific fields are, however, only relatively autonomous. Moreover, capital may be transferable from one field to another. Therefore those who occupy a dominant position in one field may be able to transfer capital to another field. Rey (2004) provides the example of an MBA graduate from Harvard who has a high level of institutional capital, which he/she may transfer into the field of economic capital through securing a high paid job. This in turn may transfer into other fields, such as the accumulation of cultural capital through the acquisition of aesthetic

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objects. Such capital transference enables “elites and affiliated institutions to perform better in the economic and political fields and thus to dominate the social world” (Rey 2004, p. 333). Whilst fields do interact with each other most are subordinate to the larger fields of power (Bourdieu 1984). The major fields that Bourdieu writes about are the economic and political fields, and a composite of the two, which he calls the ‘field of power’; the educational field; the intellectual field; and various cultural fields, including the literary field, the artistic field, the scientific field and the religious field. (Hesmondhalgh 2006, pp. 212–3) However, within these fields, Holt (1998) suggests that consumption is a particular status game that must be analyzed in isolation rather than looked at in the same way as work, religion, education, or politics. As Rey (2004, p. 336) argues: consumers’ tastes, needs and interests have direct and profound influence on the structure of any marketplace and the kinds and qualities of goods available therein. . . . For Bourdieu, the key to understanding the social world and human practice lies, therefore in an analysis of this ‘obscure and double relation’, which operates chiefly in accordance with an economic logic of supply and demand. Symbolic Violence: One of the main aims of Bourdieu’s work was to explain the mechanisms by which positions of domination and power are perpetuated in the social world. Power, however, is only rarely exercised as overt physical force, and Bourdieu seeks to specify in theoretical terms the processes that restrain, order, and reproduce positions of power through cultural mechanisms as averse to force or overt control (Rey 2004). As Jenkins (1992, p. 104) (cited in Rey 2004, p. 338) argues: “Symbolic violence is the imposition of systems of symbolism and meaning (i.e. culture) upon groups or classes in such a way that they are experienced as legitimate.” For example, the gentle but firm reminder that you are not part of the club conveyed in the condescending sneer of a wine waiter at the mispronunciation of a particular wine, or even worse, ordering the wrong wine to go with the dish. Or, the lottery winner’s overt display of newly acquired wealth amongst the country set which is seen as nouveau and vulgar and thus a barrier to entry into that particular field. In this case economic capital is not transferable into other fields without the required cultural or social capital, and thus acts as a form of symbolic violence of exclusion.

Critiques of Bourdieu’s work Whilst Bourdieu’s work remains highly influential and significant, he is not without his critics. To begin with Hesmondhalgh (2006) challenges Bourdieu’s focus on culture and cultural production and the rather strict binary divisions between the fields of high culture – the world of esoteric art and literature – and low or mass popular culture. In the process other cultural forms that have emerged over the last fifty years, such as mass communication technology, television, and the media, are largely ignored or limited to the confines of television journalism and its relationship to other forms of journalism. Hesmondhalgh (2006) situates his analysis in the field of cultural production and points to the limitations of Bourdieu’s work in the broader

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field of cultural production and consumption in terms of the interaction of fields and dominant space. Indeed he suggests that: For all its strengths, however, Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural production has important limitations when it comes to analyzing contemporary cultural production. It is simply astonishing how little Bourdieu has to say about large-scale, ‘heteronomous’ commercial cultural production, given not only its enormous social cultural importance in the contemporary world, but also its significance in determining the conditions in the sub-field in which he is clearly much more interested, restricted production. (p. 217) Moreover, as Holt (1998) points out: “Historical changes are also draining the symbolic potency of objectified cultural capital. The postmodern condition is characterized by the breakdown of the hierarchies distinguishing legitimate (or high) culture from mass (or low) culture” (Holt 1998, p. 5). Today, many of the distinguishing traits of mass culture such as seriality and mass reproduction, have now become central concerns of the art world, and many popular cultural forms from comic books to celebrities to television programs are produced and consumed using increasingly complex and esoteric formal lexicons that parallel modern art. (Holt 1998, p. 5) In effect it is becoming more apparent that the dichotomous relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms of consumption and the need to maintain the distinctive fields of production and consumption of such forms of capital do not necessarily need to exist in opposition. On the contrary, “there is little evidence supporting the contention that the reproductive consequences of culture are weakened when dominated tastes oppose the dominant” (Holt 1997, p. 95). And, as Hesmondhalgh (p. 218) points out: “Such talk of ‘the highest human product’ has been deeply unfashionable in Anglo-American media and cultural studies; indeed British cultural studies was partly built upon a critique of a ‘culture and civilization’ tradition where such judgments were central.” Transferability has been a further source of debate and, in particular, the society(ies) that Bourdieu was writing about. Central to this is the fact that Bourdieu based many of his ideas of taste on Parisian intellectual society of the 1960s, a unique period in history which has gone, and is possibly less evident today, even in Paris. Moreover, even if it were still the case, it is unlikely that such strict ideals of ‘cultural consumption’ and ‘taste’ would transfer to societies with different socio-historical settings where people define elite taste differently and not always through the consumption of fine arts and literature (Holt 1998). However, to date, most of the work employed at transferring Bourdieu’s theories outside of his native country has been limited to the United States and to some extent Canada (Kane 2003), although more recent work has started to emerge in more diverse contexts (see for example Drumwright and Kamal’s (2016) application of Bourdieu’s theories to advertising agencies in the Middle East and North Africa). “These comparisons suggest that while the dynamics of boundary formation may transcend a particular social setting, the nature of the boundary may vary across cultures” (Kane p. 405).

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Regardless of these temporal and cultural limitations Bourdieu’s work continues to serve as a critical frame of analysis of structural divisions in society. And, even though these limitations are explicated clearly, the significance of Bourdieu’s work is still championed albeit in a more contemporary form (see for example Holt 1997, 1998). On a final note, Bourdieu’s work is generally considered to be theoretically dense, a point he himself refers to in his essays (see for example Bourdieu 1989; 1986/2011). However, there are a number of texts that offer a more accessible insight into the key contributions (see for example Wacquant 2006; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Holt 1997, 1998). And for those specifically interested in cultural production, Bourdieu (1983) The Field of Cultural Production and Bourdieu (1996) The Rules of Art offer a detailed and critical analysis of the subject.

References Blasius, Jorg, and Andreas Muhlichen. (2010). ‘Identifying Audience Segments Applying the “Social Space” Approach’, Poetics, 38, 69–89. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1996). The Rules of Art, Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1989). ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory, 7, (1), 14–25. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1986/2011). ‘The Forms of Capital’, in Imre, Szeman and Timothy, Kaposy (eds), Cultural Theory: An Anthology, Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 83–95. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1984/1979). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1983). The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Loic, Wacquant. (1992). An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Drumwright, Minette, and Sara Kamal. (2016). ‘Habitus, Doxa, and Ethics: Insights from Advertising in Emerging Markets in the Middle East and North Africa’, Consumption, Markets, 19, (2), 172–205. Hesmondhalgh, David. (2006). ‘Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production’, Media, Culture and Society, 28, (2), 211–231. Holt, Douglas. (1997). ‘Distinction in America? Recovering Bourdieu’s Theory of Tastes from Its Critics’, Poetics, 25, 93–120. Holt, Douglas. (1998). ‘Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?’, Journal of Consumer Research, 25, (June), 1–25. Jenkins, Richard. (1992). Pierre Bourdieu, London: Routledge. Kane, Danielle. (2003). ‘Distinction Worldwide? Bourdieu’s Theory of Taste in International Context’, Poetics, 31, 403–421. Ollion, Ettiene. (2012). ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, Oxford Bibliographies, at www.oxfordbibliographies.com/ view/document/obo-978019 [last accessed 27/01/2016]. Rey, Terry. (2004). ‘Marketing the Goods of Salvation: Bourdieu on Religion’, Religion, 34, (4), 331–343. Vaitkiene, Rimgail, and Inga, Stankevič. (2011). ‘Improving the Interaction between Business and Consumers’, Socialiniai Mokslai, 72, (2), 24–34. Wacquant, Loic. (2006). ‘Pierre Bourdieu’, in Stones, Rob (ed), Key Sociological Thinkers, 2nd Edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 261–277.

27 PRODUCING FOUCAULDIANS: CONSUMER CULTURE THEORY AND THE ANALYTICS OF POWER Craig J. Thompson

I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write. (Foucault 1972, 17)

Let us begin with a paradox. In the social sciences, and the subfield of Consumer Culture Theory (Arnould and Thompson 2005), references to Foucauldian analyses, Foucauldian perspectives, or descriptions of Foucault as a canonical theorist of power abound (Fırat and Venkatesh 1995; Shankar, Cherrier, and Canniford 2006). Adhering to his own argument that discourses are never innocent but produce relations of dominance and subjugation, however, Foucault consistently disavowed any effort to canonize his writings as a regime of truth (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). What are we to make of this paradoxical state of affairs? Has Foucault been horrifically misunderstood and misused by CCT scholars (among many others)? Or perhaps alternatively, could Foucault’s protestations be a necessary element of the discursive apparatus that produces Foucauldian consumer culture researchers? To quote Foucault (1978, 86), “power is tolerable only on the condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.” While Foucauldian discourses have been widely deployed as a conceptual framework for analyzing relations of power that circulate throughout consumer culture (see for example Thompson 2004; Varman, Skålén, and Belk 2012; Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008), they also incite predilections toward certain lines of questioning, logics of interpretation, and, ultimately, researcher/subject positions. Accordingly, this chapter entertains the conceit of summarizing Foucault’s canonical texts, and their evolution over the course of his intellectual career, in order to analyze how his analytics of power hails consumer culture researchers to recognize themselves as Foucauldians.

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The order of Foucault Foucault’s oeuvre is characterized by three discernible phases: his archaeology of knowledge period (1961–1968); his genealogical turn (1969–1979); and, a third nexus of writings exploring the technologies of self and practices of ethical self-governance (1980–1984) (Collier 2009; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Paras 2006). These phases respectively emphasize distinctive questions related to the knowledge/truth axis (archaeology), the power/knowledge axis (genealogy), and the ethics/aesthetics axis (the technology of the self) (Best and Kellner 1991). Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge works addresses how social actors are constructed as objects of knowledge within scientific regimes of truth. His genealogical studies investigate how social actors are constructed as particular kinds of subjects through discursive interpellations, practices of subjectification, strategies of problematization and normalization, technologies of discipline, and administrative and moral classifications. Foucault’s writings on the technology of the self theorize how social actors constitute themselves as ethical subjects through the exercise of personal liberty within fields of power. Despite some noteworthy points of disjuncture, Foucault’s different analytic orientations are traversed by Nietzschean motifs. Foucault’s archeological analyses invoke Nietzsche’s antipathy toward grand explanatory schemes that reduce sociohistoric changes to a transcendent, teleological process. His genealogical work rearticulates Nietzsche’s deep-seated suspicion toward ideals of rational progress – seeing them as placating justifications for the will to power/ knowledge and its subjugating effects. Through the technology of the self, Foucault derives a historically grounded model of ethical self-governance that echoes Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch who defies the stifling morality of bureaucratic orders that would inscribe identities in a stable and manageable grid of discursive categories. Foucault (1977) readily acknowledged that Nietzsche provided considerable inspiration for his conceptions of power and his subsequent conceptions of ethics as an “aesthetics of existence”; that is, practices of self-mastery directed toward the goal of leading a beautiful life (Foucault 1983, 236–237). In a parallel fashion, this Nietzschean subtext, I shall argue, is integral to the enduring capacity of Foucault’s canonized discourses to produce researcher identities.

Archaeology Foucault’s (1970, 1972) archaeological arguments explicitly rebuked historical accounts, which depict the development of human knowledge as steadily advancing toward an ideal of objective, settled knowledge. Foucault instead proposed that discursive constructions of knowledge were situated in largely discontinuous historical epistemes: a conceptualization that resembled Kuhn’s (1962) broader definition of a paradigm. To illustrate, in the classical episteme, the presumed role of “man”1 was to discern a divinely wrought order through the application of mathematics, principles of rationality, and scientific classifications. In the modern era, “man” was ascribed a far more proactive role in the construction of knowledge and, in turn, also became an object of knowledge. The modern age, hence, marked the genesis of the social sciences and further generated a series of cultural contradictions that Foucault characterized as the analytics of finitude; for example, “man’s” formerly taken-for-granted status as a transparent medium of knowledge was problematized. Accordingly, it become reasonable, and indeed

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unavoidable, to ask if representational distortions (i.e., the prison house of language) or unconscious biases impeded scientists (and humanity in general) from comprehending important truths (see Foucault 1970). Adapting the structuralist tenet that cultural systems are organized by rule-governed relationships among signifiers, Foucault explicated the rules of intelligibility through which discursive formations constituted objects of knowledge (e.g., bodies, illnesses, normal and abnormal subjectivities) (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). For example, Foucault (1965) detailed how an enlightenment era understanding of madness was constructed through an oppositional contrast to reason and which, in turn, was codified as a system of clinical classifications that mobilized a massive internment of those diagnosed as being mad. Such discursive regimes structure expert statements, normative interpretations, judgments of legitimacy, and, more broadly, perceptions of social life and the material world. Foucault’s archaeological analyses recognized that systems of discourses also generated hierarchical social relationships (such as those between the physician and patient) and coercive practices (e.g., segregating those classified as deviant from those deemed to be normal). Furthermore, Foucault’s studies of the asylum (1965) and the medical clinic (1975) also suggested that these discursive systems were shaped by broader societal transformations. For example, Foucault (1975) discussed how the late 18th century turn toward more credentialed (and rigorously trained) medical professionals and the democratization of medical services – which situated the newly constituted “medical gaze” in accessible public clinics – were responses to a complex series of sociocultural changes precipitated by the French Revolution. Nonetheless, Foucault’s archaeological studies cast these historical influences and institutional effects to the realm of the non-discursive where they remained a tertiary concern. This structuralist logic subsumed relations of power, and their subjectifying and subjugating effects, to the properties of formalized linguistic relations and categorical distinctions. Reformulating his project as a genealogical analysis, Foucault brought these ensembles of power relations and their generative consequences to the analytic foreground (e.g., Foucault and Deleuze 1977).

Genealogy Foucault’s genealogical phase did not offer a theory of power per se but, rather, an analytics of power (Foucault 1979). That is, it articulated a nexus of questions, concepts, and principles that could be used to analyze relations of power in their productive, mobile, and dispersed forms. For Foucault (1980, 194–195), power relations organized (and circulated across) loosely coupled, hierarchically organized constellations of heterogeneous actors, discourses, institutional practices, and material resources which he characterized as the dispositif: What I’m trying to pick out with this term is, firstly, a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid. Such are the elements of the apparatus. The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements. Rather than being a top-down force or a centralized resource that an institutional actor possesses, power circulates throughout a given dispositif, producing a more or less coordinated

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network of relations (Foucault 1979). The dispositif situates human actions in space and time; organizes bodies in relation to architectural designs, communication modalities, forms of observation and monitoring; divides and classifies both spatially and through administrative systems; and produces identities through discursive interpellations – creating subjects “who are subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to [their] own identit[ies] by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to” (Foucault 1982, 781). In Foucault’s genealogical analyses, discourses are now one component of the power relations that forge contextually specific alignments among institutional structures and practices, subject positions, material conditions, and larger historical processes. For example, Foucault argued that the emergence of the industrialized nation-state precipitated an urgent need for a more self-disciplined and efficient workforce. This transformation, in turn, rendered the management of populations, and the enhancement of their health and productivity (in both the economic and conjugal sense) as a political (and moral) priority of government (Foucault 1979, 2008). Furthermore, the bio-political management of populations necessitated a diverse array of problematizing and normalizing practices whereby specific clusters of behaviors were coded as expressions of deviant subjectivities that were to be re-inscribed in the sphere of normality through disciplinary interventions. Relations of power forge mutable interlinkages among the authorities who enforce normalizing standards, the subjects who are the targets of disciplining interventions, the material and discursive resources that support these institutional hierarchies, and the countervailing practices of resistance through which subordinated subjects challenge imposed strategies of normalization. In this regard, Foucault (1978, 95) cryptically proclaimed that “where there is power, there is resistance” or as he subsequently elaborated, power engenders a plurality of mobile, transitory resistances. From this perspective, relations of power are messy ensembles that encompass incongruities and incompatibilities among their various elements; historically entrenched discourses and practices that contradict prevailing institutional logics; recalcitrant bodies and desires that defy normalizing mandates; and social actors who may mobilize around a designated deviant identity in order to claim rights that would otherwise be denied to them. In addressing the relationships between power and resistance, however, Foucault explicitly rejected the (Utopian) idea that acts of resistance enable social actors to attain freedom from power. Rather, resistant practices that displace one regime of power resituate subjectivities in a different nexus of power relations, such as when consumers seek to contest the medicoadministrative discourses of scientific medicine – and its construction of the degenerative body – by deploying the discourses and practices of alternative medicine (and its promise of regeneration through a holistic alignment of mind-body) (c.f., Thompson 2003, 2004, 2005). And in some cases, practices of resistance function in a manner analogous to an inoculation, enabling prevailing power structures to assume a more robust form. For example, many leading hospitals and medical schools have co-opted the marketplace challenge of alternative medicine by creating centers for integrative medicine, whose hybrid treatments – such as acupuncture coupled with conventional pharmaceutical therapies – promise consumers the proverbial best of both worlds. In conjunction with these economic and institutional reconfigurations, the discourses of alternative medicine, and now integrative medicine, are also specific inflections of broader neoliberal discourses that hail individuals to pursue personal optimization and entrepreneurial self-development; to regard the exercise of consumer choice as a potent expression of personal

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liberty; and last but not least, to accept, as a self-evident truth, that marketplace competition should be the ultimate adjudicator of public policy questions and debates (c.f., Giesler and Veresiu 2014; Yngfalk 2016; Zwick and Ozalp 2011). While practices of resistance may indeed materially alter particular hierarchical relations of power (such as those which align patient, physician, diagnostic categories, and legitimate treatment options), they can also conceal that such contestations are movements across different spaces embedded in a larger, contextualizing dispositif, such as neoliberal subjectification.

The technology of the self The production of resistant identities, and their ambivalent consequences, is quite germane to Foucault’s late career interest in the technologies of the self. Reflecting on his genealogical studies, Foucault stated that he “may have insisted too much on the technology of domination and power” (1988, 19) at the expense of understanding “how individuals actively construct themselves within systems of power” (Foucault 1994, 11). Whereas Foucault had discussed agency as a countervailing reaction to the imposition of power, his technology of the self writings argue that acts of self-creation can exhibit an affirmative quality that is not merely a refusal of domination. Rather, social actors can freely choose to undertake particular technologies of the self because they offer a means to lead an aesthetically rewarding life. Accordingly, Foucault also refers to the technologies of the self as “arts of living” (Paras 2006, 124). As an aesthetic enterprise, these modes of self-construction do not embody absolute moral virtues – that is, representing a deep truth that should anchor one’s identity or be an impetus for proselytization – nor are they identity practices that mandate an abiding commitment, as in the manner of someone who devoutly follows a set of sacrosanct religious principles (see McAlexander et al. 2014). For Foucault, the art of living is a continuous process of personal redefinition, which is pursued through the cultivation of new experiences and aesthetic expressions of identity and valued for the freedom (and pleasures) they afford. Rather than asserting claims to moral or aesthetic superiority (or seeking to regulate which technologies of the self are granted social legitimacy), those engaging in these ethical-aesthetic practices promote a nonjudgmental cultural plurality that would sustain near limitless opportunities for self-renewal (Foucault 1983, 1988).

Summary Foucault’s analytics of power incorporates two key analytic tenets from his archaeological phase – researchers should attend to the systemic relations among statements in a given discursive regime and second, analyze how these discursive relations produce knowledge and truth claims, rather than judging whether such statements offer more or less accurate representations of an objective reality. However, genealogy attends to the localized relations of power (i.e., the microphysics of power) that operate within institutional fields and further seeks to locate these power relations within a constellation of sociohistorical discourses that are inflected through these institutional practices, struggles, and subject positions (Foucault 1978, 1979). Whereas the archaeology of knowledge’s structuralist precepts are now seen as too sociohistorically abstract, and, quite frankly out of intellectual fashion, to have significant cachet in the contemporary social sciences (even among the perennially late adopter field of CCT), genealogy is almost perfectly attuned to an intellectual epoch marked by the rise of identity politics, a

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postcolonial sensitivity to the power relations encoded in historical narratives, and a pervasive distrust of formal institutions. While many aspects of Foucault’s preceding genealogical logic can be discerned in his writings on technology of the self (Foucault 1988, 2008), the emphasis on agentic self-constitution and ethical relations to others does present a qualitatively different analytic logic from his archeological and genealogical frameworks. In these latter career works, the self remains a fraught and contingent achievement as social actors struggle to constitute a non-dominated (and non-dominating) agency in networks of omnipresent power relations. Thus, the technology of the self stands in contradistinction to the egocentric view of agency that is prevalent in much of consumer psychology and the phenomenologically oriented quarters of CCT research (see Askegaard and Linnet 2011) and where a core sense of self is taken to be the existential foundation of meaningful consumption experiences (c.f., Belk 1988).

On the ironic seductions of genealogy Why has Foucauldian discourse so effectively functioned as an academic “art of living” for so many consumer culture researchers? To use the parlance of Delueze, Foucault’s analytics of power is a machine for subverting orthodox views, delineating contradictory relations, and discerning the operation of power manifest in seemingly benign or objective discourses. To be a Foucauldian is to speak from the position of an ironist who continually calls into question the conventional wisdom and who is never shy to highlight the paradoxes, ellipses, elisions, inconsistencies, and forms of marginalization that are propagated through dominant discourses and belief systems. Do you believe that the shift from brutal public executions – culminating in the crimson crescendo of the drawn and quartered body – toward scientific methods of rehabilitation represents a progressive civilizing change in the administration of justice?; well surprise, modern penal discipline has provided a template for a new form of power that saturates and disciplines the body politic in ways that are far more omnipresent and exacting than archaic methods of corporeal retribution (Foucault 1979). Do you believe that the Victorian era, with its extensive codes of sexual prohibitions and normalizing standards, constituted a repressive regime that alienated humanity from its natural, life affirming, authenticating sexuality?; then think again, Victorian era discourses were the birth of modern sexuality, providing an eruption of discourses for talking about, experiencing, classifying sex both as a series of optimizable practices and as the essence of one’s identity. Do you believe that marketing’s turn toward value cocreation has fomented a munificent new age of mutually rewarding consumer-marketer collaborations?; au contraire, co-creation is merely the latest, most expedient means for capitalism to exploit labor, only now the target is consumers rather than paid workers (Zwick, Bonsu, and Darmody 2008). Do you believe that major social problems – ranging from climate change to poverty – can be resolved through the collective actions of responsibilized consumers and innovative market-based solutions; don’t believe the hype, responsibilizing discourses serve to perpetuate existing socioeconomic hierarchies and insulate the inequities precipitated by neoliberal policies from organized political challenges (Giesler and Veresiu 2014). But is there a point where Foucault’s genealogy will cease to be an iconoclastic challenge to conventional thought? If the legion of Foucauldian researchers reaches a critical mass, will Foucauldian analytics of power simply become another congealed intellectual orthodoxy? Should we heed Baudrillard’s (2007) polemical admonition to “forget Foucault”? For Baudrillard,

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Foucault’s hypostatized an anachronistic model of power that had been displaced by the order of simulation and which operates through processes of seduction (rather than domination and control). Hence, Foucault’s analytics of power is seductive precisely because it simulates a nostalgic ideal of critique and perpetuates a myth of “the real” that precludes the capitalist system – which now thrives on the rapid circulation of signs and the endless production of hyperrealities – from being pushed to its implosion point. But, perhaps there is another, less disputatious, reason for the enduring seductive allure of Foucauldian discourse. Foucault’s analytics of power presumes that unanticipated dangers and new forms of domination lurk in every “solution” and in every claim to a progressive advance: My point is not that everything is bad. My point is that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same thing as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So, my position leads not to apathy or enervation but to a hyper- and active pessimism. . . . I think the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger. (Foucault 1983, 231–232) To be a Foucauldian is to live in an intellectual world of perpetual risks and historical contingencies where every comforting idea, every problem-solving intervention, every secure knowledge claim, and every paradigmatically affirmed interpretation is to be treated with suspicion. The analytics of power is the indefatigable dramatic antagonist who upsets the stultifying complacency that results from the acceptance of naturalized beliefs, legitimated truth claims, and naturalized cultural practices. In confronting these dangers as they continuously reconfigure as new relations of power, one can take pleasure in the experience of being intellectually revitalized at every turn of this perpetual cycle. And thus hails Zarathustra. . . .

Note 1 The gender bias expressed in Foucault’s vernacular is indicative of his intellectual and cultural milieu. For further theoretical reflections on the androcentric nature of canonical discourses and the patriarchal ordering of canonical theorists, see Maclaran, Chapter 29 (2017, this volume).

References Arnould, Eric J. and Craig J. Thompson (2005), “Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (March), 868–82. Askegaard, Søren and Jeppe Trolle Linnet (2011), “Towards an Epistemology of Consumer Culture Theory: Phenomenology and the Context of Context,” Marketing Theory, 11 (4), 381–404. Baudrillard, Jean (2007), Forget Foucault, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e) (Original 1977). Belk, Russell (1988), “Possessions and the Extended Self,” Journal of Consumer Research, 15 (September), 139–168. Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner (1991), Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, New York: The Guilford Press. Collier, Stephen J. (2009), “Topologies of Power: Foucault’s Analysis of Political Government Beyond ‘Governmentality’,” Theory, Culture & Society, 26 (6), 78–108. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1983), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Fırat, A. Fuat and Alladi Venkatesh (1995), “Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption,” Journal of Consumer Research, 22 (December), 239–267.

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Foucault, Michel (1965), Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York: Random House (Original 1961). Foucault, Michel (1970), The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Random House (Original 1966). Foucault, Michel (1972), The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon (Original 1969). Foucault, Michel (1975), The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, New York: Random House (Original 1963). Foucault, Michel (1977), “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 139–164 (Original 1971). Foucault, Michel (1978), The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, New York: Vintage (Original 1976). Foucault, Michel (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage (Original 1975). Foucault, Michel (1980), “Confessions of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, New York: Pantheon, 194–228. Foucault, Michel (1982), “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, 8 (4), 777–795. Foucault, Michel (1983), “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Overview of Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd edition, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 229–252. Foucault, Michel (1988), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel (1994), “The Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984,” in The Final Foucault, eds. James Bernauer and David Rasmussen, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1–20. Foucault, Michel (2008), The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave (Original 1978–79). Foucault, Michel and Gilles Deleuze (1977), “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” in Language, Counter-Memory, and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 205–217. Giesler, Markus and Ela Veresiu (2014), “Creating the Responsible Consumer: Moralistic Governance Regimes and Consumer Subjectivity,” Journal of Consumer Research, 41 (3), 840–857. Kuhn, Thomas (1962), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Maclaran, Pauline (2017), “Judith Butler: Gender Performativity and Heterosexual Normativity,” in Canonical Authors in Consumption Theory, eds. Søren Askegaard and Benoît Heilbrunn, New York: Routledge, 227–233. McAlexander, James H., Beth Leavenworth Dufault, Diane M. Martin, and John W. Schouten (2014), “The Marketization of Religion: Field, Capital, and Consumer Identity,” Journal of Consumer Research, 41 (3), 858–875. Paras, Eric (2006), Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, New York: Other Press. Shankar, Avi, Hèléne Cherrier, and Robin Canniford (2006), “Consumer Empowerment: A Foucauldian Interpretation,” European Journal of Marketing, 40 (9/10), 1013–1030. Thompson, Craig J. (2003), “Natural Health’s Narratives of Healing and the Ideological Production of Consumer Resistance,” The Sociological Quarterly, 44 (Winter), 81–108. Thompson, Craig J. (2004), “Marketplace Mythology and Discourses of Power,” Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (1), 162–180. Thompson, Craig J. (2005), “Consumer Risk Perceptions in a Community of Reflexive Doubt,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (September), 235–248. Varman, Rohit, Per Skålén, and Russell W. Belk (2012), “Conflicts at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Profitability, Poverty Alleviation, and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 31 (1), 19–35.

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Yngfalk, Carl (2016), “Bio-Politicizing Consumption: Neo-Liberal Consumerism and Disembodiment in the Food Marketplace,” Consumption, Markets & Culture, 19 (3), 275–295. Zwick, Detlev, Sammy Bonsu, and Aron Darmody (2008), “Putting Consumers to Work: Co-Creation & New Marketing Governmentality,” Journal of Consumer Culture, 8 (2), 163–196. Zwick, Detlev and Yesim Ozalp (2011), “Flipping the Neighborhood: Biopolitical Marketing as Value Creation for Condos and Lofts,” in Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices, eds. Detlev Zwick and Julien Cayla, New York: Oxford University Press, 234–253.

28 DE CERTEAU: A THINKER OF THE EVERYDAY Véronique Cova and Nil Özçağlar-Toulouse

Michel de Certeau was born in the Savoie region in 1925 into a family that belonged to France’s provincial aristocracy. He received a strict Catholic upbringing, both in the home and in the religious schools he attended. At the age of 20, he obtained degrees in classics and in philosophy at the University of Grenoble. This dual curriculum, accompanied by seminars on the history of religion at the Collège de France, led to his early work on 17th-century mysticism. While completing his studies, Certeau began training to become a priest, and in 1950 entered the Society of Jesus. It is difficult to understand his writings without accounting for his schooling in Christianity, which influenced his perspective in both historical and anthropological terms and fuelled his desire to link tradition to modernity, past to present, narrated history to lived experience. One finds in the work of Certeau a veritable quest for mysticism in the everyday. In a radio interview, he commented: If we are to find God anywhere, it is not in some paradise, in some nebulous realm outside of history, but on the contrary in the everydayness of human relations or technical chores, in chance or in the encounters between desire and pain, that is where one finds a relationship with God. (in Dosse, 2002) So in an unusual way, Certeau remained faithful to the initial objective of the founder of his order: he made everyday life a land of mission, a place in which the divine spirit is received. As a historian, Certeau is recognised for his work on historic and contemporary Christianity and has become a key reference for his epistemological reflections on history. He depicted historic method as a triadic structure – a social space, scientific practices and writing – a position later shared by Paul Ricœur (2000). First of all, historiographical work takes place in a social space, just as consumer goods are produced in companies. Certeau called on historians to reflect also on the place of their fabrication of history, a place which allows some types of productions and disallows others. Second, history is a practice. Certeau emphasised the disparity between facts and texts, between a document and its construction, between what is supposed

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to be real and ways of telling it. Only the historian masters the construction of history, from establishing and classifying sources to putting them in writing. Lastly, as indicated in the title of his 1975 historic epistemology, history is writing (de Certeau 1975). As a thinker, Certeau combined the methods developed in history, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics and psychoanalysis. He was a “braconneur” of disciplinary fields. Despite the significant influence of the human and social sciences on his thinking, Christianity, both as a lived experience and an epistemological model, was for Certeau the key to interpreting contemporary culture. Finally, he offered us refined reflections on action theories and sought to “understand what the unpredictable has taught us about ourselves, that is to say what we have since become” (de Certeau and Giard, 1994, p. 10). His work may be understood in terms of the question: “how does one self-create?” The creativity of the individual is a key component in his texts. He wrote about how individuals escape what is expected of them and misappropriate objects, codes and uses. Everyday life became the locus of his observation. That which may seem anecdotal – repetitive gestures, routines such as meals, work, errands, reading, meetings or strolls around town – constituted a major focus of Certeau’s interest. For example, a simple purchase relates not only to the lived experience of individuals but also the broader systems of distribution. A single action can therefore be analysed using two approaches: the meaning of that action for the actor and its functions within the system. “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others” (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], p. XXXVI). An individual can always invent new activities and relate them to previously unknown objects. In contrast to Bourdieu, who reduced the restrictive relationships of everydayness to domination, Certeau saw in them the possibility of resistance. The individual’s use of “bricolage” and “détournement” (diversion) can act as a form of counter-power to resist the dominant ideology. The vocabulary chosen by Certeau often inherently points to forms of resistance against the authoritarian power of the social order: braconner, or “poaching” (occupying a space that is not one’s own), tactic (overcoming the omnipresence of the dominant order), la perruque, or “wig” (misappropriating time and materials for one’s own gain), etc. Schematically speaking, we can identify three major themes in his work that fuelled subsequent research on consumer culture: the centrality of creation, everyday strategies and tactics, and (re)appropriation and diversion.

Anonymous creation Michel de Certeau studied the inventiveness in everyday practices that helps individuals to escape what is expected of them and misappropriate objects, codes and uses. In 1974, he published La culture au pluriel (1974), a critique of erudite culture reserved for an elite minority. He argued in favour of a “disseminated proliferation” of anonymous creations. In contrast to a vision of ordinary man locked in a repetitive everyday life manipulated by commercial functions, Certeau saw cultural creation in the banality of everyday life and particularly in consumption. This led him to challenge the traditional opposition between production and consumption, through the creativity of the ordinary man. In L’Invention du quotidien (1990 [1980]), Certeau analysed practices and the “arts of doing” as responses to theories of the passive receiver. He showed that wanderings and inventiveness can be found within a system that has been imposed. Daily life is an invention through “a

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thousand different ways of poaching” since even the most banal actions are shot through with creativity. Certeau compared the acts of walking around town and speaking through what he called “pedestrian enunciations”. “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], p. 148). Urban movements actualise public space just as enunciations actualise language. If it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, trans-form or abandon spatial elements. (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], p. 149) Such pedestrian enunciations are acts of creation. Walkers transform each spatial signifier into something else. They create spaces where previously there was only geometry and topology. So in face of rationalised, expansionist and spectacular production, Certeau offered a vision of another form of production, described as “consumption”, one that is crafty, diffuse and silent but is everywhere and, above all, exists in the creativity of transforming how the products imposed by a dominant economic order are used. In opposition to the notion of “vigilance” developed by Michel Foucault, or that of “strategy” theorised by Pierre Bourdieu, Certeau posits the presence of a man without qualities, an ordinary man. He criticised Bourdieu for his “sententious ignorance” of the intelligent practices of social actors and his deliberate refusal to observe the greater variety of situations and acts. The “habitus” machine crushes “ethnographic specificities” and is transformed into a “mystical reality” (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], pp. 85 and 94). Certeau argued that Bourdieu reduced all practices to the mere manifestation of a habitus, while he saw in them anonymous creativity, an art of living in consumer society. Consumers are not only passive or docile, mired in sheep-like behaviour. In relation to Foucault, he discussed the idea that individuals and their actions remain in the grip of “panoptic” institutions which see without being seeing, controlling and disciplining them just as a prison is supposed to control and discipline prisoners. So in contrast to Foucault, Certeau advocated the use of “tactics” to form links of solidarity and resistance against institutional controls. This “anti-discipline” does not correspond to any deliberate rebellion, but rather is a type of discreet “invention”. The inventiveness of ordinary practices introduces a symbolic theatricality and creativity with which to unravel the surveillance mechanisms and external social determinations imposed on individuals.

Strategies and tactics Borrowing from the military lexicon, Certeau developed an interesting distinction between strategies and tactics. In the military world, strategy is the art of positioning one’s army before battle, while a tactic relates to how the army is directed during the assault. For Certeau, strategy is “the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment” (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], p. XLVI). He associates institutions that produce meaning

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with strategy. These are found in – or fight to conquer – the loci of power. Tactics, meanwhile, are any social action which a strategy cannot control. I call a “tactic,” on the other hand, a calculus which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a border-line distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. (de Certeau, 1990 [1980], p. XLVI) Certeau uses the generic term tactic for all processes through which meaning is twisted and recomposed by receivers, who necessarily have an asymmetrical relationship with institutions. By emphasising the distinction between tactic and strategy, he shows how all systems, even enclosed systems, have weaknesses: tactics play on these weaknesses, adding room for manoeuvre. Although a user may not be able to circumvent the constraints of a system, he can exploit them intelligently. While many critical authors refer to the homogenisation of consumption practices, the tactics studied by Certeau are a kind of escape hatch through which to avoid this mass consumption. The ordinary man is said to use many different ways of interpreting standardised products, tactics that constitute acts of resistance for the weak or disenfranchised. Certeau’s “arts of doing” are expressed first and foremost in one’s domestic space. Many everyday practices such as reading, speaking, cooking, moving around or organising one’s work are tactical-type acts. In these sequences of actions, innovation is just as important as tradition. These tactics include acts of appropriation and re-use, which constitute practices of economic diversion. Consumption presents opportunities for resistance, offering the consumer ways to manifest ruses, tactics and bricolages that run counter to the dominant order. Analysing the gap between intended practices and those actually observed points to the existence of two worlds, that of production and that of consumption, in which uses are perceived as inventive and creative practices. Here, to use something is to create everyday life. When applied to urban space, for example, this thesis led Certeau to the conclusion that it is above all residents – those “unknown artists” – that make a city what it is. He argued that heritage restoration policies ran the risk of turning urban spaces into museums. Places are no longer endowed with practices; they are withdrawn from their users, whose tastes are denied in order to be presented to observers. Certeau refused to see the individual as a mere consumer manipulated by the commercial system. He identified a certain room for manoeuvre in using products that allows the user to distance himself from the producer’s intentions. Through this process of diversion, the user slips through the cracks in this economic system to act in a way other than that dictated by its laws. He plays with the system and misappropriates it for his own personal usage. Certeau therefore suggested another vision of the user: not passive but creative in his ruses and tactics. He advocated a return to free choice and the freedom of practices.

(Re)appropriation and diversion In his Critique de la vie quotidienne (1947), Lefebvre was the first to introduce the concept of appropriation as a defining element of everyday life. Michel de Certeau followed in his path by suggesting that practices enable the reappropriation of the objects and spaces organised

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by the techniques of production. He identified diversion (“détournement”) among the “arts of doing”, those subtle ruses and resistance tactics through which users reappropriate uses in their own way (1980). Diversion is considered an inventive and creative practice that is close to bricolage. De Certeau (1980, p. 45) presented la perruque as a form of diversion in the workplace. This involves an employee using his working time and/or the company’s work tools to carry out tasks other than those for which he is paid. Under different names in different countries this phenomenon [la perruque] is becoming more and more general, even if managers penalize it or “turn a blind eye” on it in order not to know about it. Accused of stealing or turning material to his own ends and using the machines for his own profit, the worker who indulges in la perruque actually diverts time (not goods, since he uses only scraps) from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit. In the very place where the machine he must serve reigns supreme, he cunningly takes pleasure in finding a way to create gratuitous products whose sole purpose is to signify his own capabilities through his work and to confirm his solidarity with other workers or his family through spending his time in this way. With the complicity of other workers (who thus defeat the competition the factory tries to instill among them), he succeeds in “putting one over” on the established order on its home ground. La perruque is very much a de-proletarianising approach to work, as the work is free, not part of a commercial mindset, and contributes to a strong relational and social economy. It constitutes a misappropriation of proletarianising working time, and by indulging in la perruque the worker frees up time for himself. This work is also creative: although it is not an artistic practice as such, it nonetheless shares the “fashioned” nature of finished parts. Workers are recognised for their skill. As a practice, la perruque is also free of any profit-oriented objective and does not follow the logic of the commercial economy and ownership. Its only specificity is the know-how that manifests the singularity of the worker, whose gratuitous products are intended to “signify his own capabilities through his work”. This practice is part of the relational and social fabric of exchanges and solidarity (Cova, 2014). Usage necessarily relates to creativity. For Certeau, an object cannot exist independently of its user, and its usage is therefore never predefined. Each individual can therefore invent “his own path through the forest of imposed products” (1980, p. 148). Objects offer a thousand possibilities of appropriation and diversion to the user who is fundamentally a bricoleur. Certeau therefore subscribes to a vision of resistance reflected in a free individual combating the hegemony of institutions. Through reappropriation, he concentrates on ruses and poaching to counter the dominant order. Diversion is an act of creative resistance.

Conclusion The work of Michel de Certeau, and in particular the two volumes that make up L’Invention du quotidien (de Certeau 1980; de Certeau, Giard and Mayol 1980), has served as a toolbox for sociological and anthropological research on urban practices and mass culture, as well as

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consumer culture. He defined the way in which users shape tactics and combine rituals to construct a particular identity and representation of the world. Certeau introduced time and the dynamics of learning as key factors in the appropriation and stabilisation of uses through habits and routines. His texts emphasise the fundamentally unpredictable nature of consumers, who ceaselessly transform and misappropriate the services and technologies proposed to them in ways which companies did not necessarily anticipate. With a focus on history, action and the conscience of individuals, Certeau heralded the human and social sciences of the 1980s (singular pragmatism and the return of the subject). At work behind the laws of the market, reproduction or individual interest, he reintroduced the mindset of gift-giving, desire and imagination (Cova, 2014). His analysis of everyday life considerably influenced research on practices. He is cited in many publications, not only in research on consumer culture but also on information systems (uses and learning technologies), management and strategy (diversion and perruque practices among employees).

References Cova, V. (2014), Lefebvre et de Certeau – La sociologie du quotidien. In: Rémy, E., Robert-Demontrond, P. (éds.), Regards croisés sur la consommation. Tome 1 – Du fait social à la question du sujet. Caen: Editions EMS, 189–221. de Certeau, M. (1974), La culture au pluriel, Union Générale d’éditions, Paris [Culture in the Plural. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press, 1998]. de Certeau, M. (1975), L’écriture de l’histoire, Gallimard, Paris [The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. Columbia University Press, 1988]. de Certeau, M. (1990 [1980]), L’Invention du quotidien, tome 1.: Arts de faire, Gallimard, Paris (nouvelle éd. 1990) [The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press, 1984]. de Certeau, M. et Giard, L. (1994), La Prise de parole et autres écrits politiques, Collection Points Essais, Seuil, Paris [The Capture of Speech and Other Political Writings. Translated by Tom Conley. University of Minnesota Press, 1998]. de Certeau, M., Giard, L. et Mayol, P., (1980), L’invention du quotidien, tome 2.: Habiter, cuisiner, Folio Essais, Gallimard (nouvelle éd. 1994). [The Practice of Everyday Life: Vol. 2, Living and Cooking. Translated by Timothy J. Tomasik. University of Minnesota Press, 1998]. Dosse, F. (2002), Michel de Certeau, le marcheur blessé, La Découverte, Paris. Lefebvre, H. (1947), Critique de la vie quotidienne, L’Arche, Paris. Ricœur, P. (2000), La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Editions du Seuil, Paris.

29 JUDITH BUTLER: GENDER PERFORMATIVITY AND HETEROSEXUAL HEGEMONY Pauline Maclaran

American philosopher and literary theorist, Judith Butler (1956–) is one of the leading thinkers in gender studies and her theories of gendered and sexed identity have had a long-lasting influence on this field and beyond. As the Maxine Elliot Professor in Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, her work also concerns language, politics, psychoanalysis, ethics, film and literary studies. It is for her ideas on gender, however, that she is best known, and she positions herself primarily as a feminist theorist (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). It is in relation to gender that her work (so far) has been most relevant to consumer research, and therefore, the focus of this chapter will be on this aspect of her work. Of Hungarian and Russian Jewish descent – the Nazis killed most members of her maternal grandmother’s family – Butler was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, attending Hebrew school where she was taught Jewish ethics and introduced to philosophy. This background was almost certainly the catalyst for her abiding interest in Jewish politics and she is well known for making frequent and vociferous critiques of Israel’s actions against Palestine. Studying philosophy at Yale University, she was awarded her Ph.D. in 1984, the topic of which was later published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Butler, 1987). In this work she draws on Hegel’s ideas of self and other to develop her initial ideas in relation to desire and “the subject”. A major intellectual influence is thus Hegelian dialectic enquiry that moves from thesis through antithesis to synthesis and round again to a new thesis in an ongoing process that never achieves, or even seeks, a final resolution. Rather enquiry is always part of a process and in a state of “becoming” with knowledge claims continually being refuted and substituted by alternatives. Butler espouses the open-ended nature of dialectical thinking and her arguments are unashamedly circular, often designed to raise more questions that she answers (Salih, 2002). Recognizing this rhetorical aspect makes reading Butler’s work less frustrating as one learns not to look for final answers. Indeed, in 1999 she came to the top of Philosophy and Literature’s “bad writers” list on account of her dense prose style. Apart from Hegel, other key influences have been Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigary and Gayle Rubin. These thinkers have all contributed to Butler’s unique combination of psychoanalytic, feminist and Marxist theory (Salih, 2002). It is important to

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acknowledge these intellectual roots because individual thinkers do not exist in isolation from other bodies of thought, each with their own histories and sociocultural influences. Feminists in particular have long been reluctant to single out key thinkers in the style of this present volume, preferring to regard knowledge development as more of a collective enterprise. In terms of Butler’s intellectual lineage, Foucault and Derrida contribute the discursive and socially constructed nature of the gendered and sexualized subject. She uses the word “discourse” in the Foucauldian sense of referring to the systems of thought around ideas, actions or beliefs and how these create particular subject positions and power relations (i.e. Foucault, 1972). Derrida’s concept of différance is crucial to the formation of her ideas with its implication that meaning rests on what is absent rather than that which is present and that words are caught up in chains of signification. Freud and Lacan add the psychoanalytic dimensions of desire in relation to ego/subject formation (see also Butler, 1997, The Psychic Life of Power where she brings Foucault and Freud together to re-read psychoanalysis through Foucault and vice versa). Feminist thought also plays a crucial role in Butler’s work and particularly the idea of “woman” as a term-in-process (Butler 1986). Simone de Beauvoir, famously highlights the term’s instability when she writes “one is not born but rather one becomes woman” in The Second Sex’s critique of patriarchy (de Beauvoir, 1949). Here de Beauvoir exposes the social, political and religious structures that create woman as “other”, structures that also maintain her position of inferiority to man. Building on this rationale, another key influence on Butler, lesbian feminist Monique Wittig (1980) argues “lesbians are not women”. In so doing she challenges the taken-for-granted nature of a heterosexual system where the biological differentiation of men and women functions to validate what Wittig terms “the heterosexual contract” and women’s inferior status. It is from these intellectual roots, then, that Butler develops her theories of gender, first in Gender Trouble (1990) and second in Bodies That Matter (1993). These works have had a huge impact on feminist theory and queer theory in particular, debunking as they do the idea of a fixed or stable gendered subject, and showing how discourse constructs gender identities. One of Butler’s central arguments is that gender is not something we “have” but rather something we “do”, “an ongoing discursive practice” that is open to “intervention and resignification” (Butler, 1990, p. 33). Based on these principles she develops her theory of performativity whereby gender identity is constructed by performing (and repeating) specific acts within a culture. Following Foucault (1977), she argues that there is no pre-existing subject, but rather that performance, in its ongoing reiteration of norms, constitutes the subject, a subject that is continually produced and reproduced in discourse. Butler moves on from Foucault, however, in her insistence on the significance of embodied doings, as practices that are embedded in specific historical and cultural discourses. In this way identity is “performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results” (Butler, 1990, p. 25). Thus, for Butler, the “forced repetition” of previous doings is how they become naturalized as sociocultural codes and norms. This naturalization also determines who is judged a subject worthy of recognition and who is excluded (Willig, 2012; for further debates on Butler’s idea of recognition see Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Gender is, thus, a learned judgement to act within what Butler (1990) describes in Gender Trouble as “the heteronormative matrix”. Anthropologist Gayle Rubin argues heteronormativity creates a sex hierarchy whereby moral judgements are made, with opposite sex desire considered good and same sex desire seen as bad or even deviant (Rubin,

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1993). A heteronormative society views the biological categories of male and female as strict binaries that normalize particular societal expectations of sex, gender and desire (Chatzidakis, 2015). The heteronormative matrix is the sense-making process by which gender identity is understood in heteronormative societies. The matrix is held together by the three axes of male/female, masculine/feminine and opposite-sex desire which are viewed as “natural” and, therefore, “normal”. Thus, this matrix renders intelligible the behaviours of feminine women who desire men, and masculine men who desire women. Other behaviours that fall outside of the matrix can only be understood in relation to the matrix and assessed in terms of the “norms” it presents. So men who desire men or women who desire women will be assumed to be women trapped in male bodies or vice versa (Chambers, 2007). According to Butler heteronormativity sustains itself through discourse that is embedded in various institutional and cultural practices that go unquestioned in our daily lives. Heteronormativity can of course be disrupted and Butler emphasizes how gender and sex do not have to match. Because heterosexual norms become naturalized through repetition in these ways, they can be subverted through challenging this repetition and appropriating it in ways that deconstruct the aforementioned matrix (Butler, 1990). For example, males can perform femininity and females can perform masculinity. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and David Bowie have played with gender roles in a norm-deviating way that challenges traditional binary divisions of sex, gender and sexuality. Butler singles out the drag queen, citing the disruptive potential of his gender parody as a way to resist existing power structures and normative cultural expectations. According to Butler, the drag queen exposes gender as a cultural code that can be imitated: “drag is subversive to the extent that it reflects on the imitative structure by which hegemonic gender is itself produced and disputes heterosexuality’s claim on naturalness and originality” (Butler, 1993). This observation is not without its critiques and the drag queen motif has proved a controversial, albeit enduring figure of Butler’s work. In putting forward a male-oriented version of women that emphasizes surface aesthetics like make-up, hair, shoes and clothing, some feminists argue that drag actually reinforces existing hierarchies of desire rather than subverting them. However, in discussing the example of drag, Butler’s thesis is more about how gender is naturalized and thus becomes intelligible, rather than how it can be most effectively subverted. Certainly Butler’s arguments in Gender Trouble have often been misunderstood, especially on account of her contention that biological sex is also a social construction subsumed by gender. This has been sometimes taken to mean that there is no sex, only gender and that because gender is performative it is a choice, something you can take out of the closet and decide on a daily basis (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). Part of this misinterpretation is confusion between performativity and performance. As Butler clarifies in Bodies That Matter, performativity is about resignification and ritualistic repetition that contests the very idea of the subject presumed in the concept of performance (Butler, 1993; Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). Performativity is not choice as Butler is at pains to emphasize: “Performativity has to do with repetition, very often the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms. . . . This is not freedom but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in” (interview with Liz Kotz, 1992). Neither is subversion easy but non-conformist sexual acts disturb or make “trouble” for the heterosexual matrix and their proliferation disrupts gender norms over time (Segal, 1999).

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In response to various criticisms, however, for ignoring the body and materiality in Gender Trouble, Butler later admitted to overriding too quickly the category of sex (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). Consequently, Bodies That Matter develops this theme, and in it Butler is more focused on how the sexed body is materialized through regulatory discourses. She does not deny that there are biological differences but queries which particular discursive and institutional conditions lead to certain biological differences being highlighted as important indicators of sex. For example, women’s bodies are often differentiated in discourse through their capacity to be impregnated and Butler asks “why is it pregnancy by which that body gets defined?” (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994, p. 33). Agreeing with Wittig, she believes that discourses of reproduction govern the ways in which we think about sex and enforce particular norms against which we are continually measured. So, for example, if a young woman cannot get pregnant or chooses not to have children, she will struggle with these regulating sexual norms that may bring a sense of failure or feelings of inadequacy. For Butler and Wittig the imposition of such norms is not neutral, but rather it makes “sex” a political category (Butler, Osbourne and Segal, 1994). Butler also revises her thoughts on the heterosexual matrix in Bodies That Matter, fearing the term “matrix” too totalizing and fixed in its meaning. Now she prefers the term “heterosexual hegemony” to convey malleability and infer greater potential for questioning and rearticulation of norms. In this vein, she extends her thinking around subversive repetition, weighing up the many complex ways that resignifications can occur to challenge traditional gender binaries at a more political level, one that moves away from an emphasis on parody and the infamous drag queen. The political nature of subversion and resignification are also issues she pursues even more fully in Undoing Gender (2004), when she takes a more activist stance in documenting the sociopolitical implications of transgender and transsexuality as well as gay marriage and different types of kinship. In consumer research, apart from an early study that cites Butler’s notion of “racial privilege” in relation to genetic essentialism and reproductive technology (Valerius, 1997) and Schroeder and Borgerson’s various overviews of her philosophy (Schroeder and Borgerson, 2003, 2004), the main emphasis on Butler has been with regard to her theory of performativity. This has been across a range of studies that broadly understand consumption as a way of obtaining the cultural resources through which gender identities are performed (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007). Often the focus has been in relation to how consumption can be used to subvert the repetition of gender norms: Stokes (1998) explores twentieth century queer practices in relation to literature and film; Kates (2003) looks at the subversive potential of lesbian and gay gender performances at the Mardi Gras festival; and Goulding and Saren (2009) reveal how costumes worn by the goth subculture deliberately blur masculine and feminine codes. Other consumer researchers use Butler’s theory of performativity to look at shifting discourses around contemporary masculinities (Schroeder and Zwick, 2004; Brownlie and Hewer, 2007) and femininities (Martin, Schouten and McAlexander, 2006; Stevens, Cappellini and Smith, 2015; Tuncay Zayer et al., 2012). Sometimes this is in conjunction with other theories such as art criticism (e.g. Schroeder and Borgerson, 1998) and theorists such as Bourdieu (e.g. Thompson and Üstüner, 2015). Butler also enables a more critical lens on certain more mainstream consumption phenomena. For example, Valtonen (2013) has very insightfully drawn on performativity to show how the category of “little women” is sustained through a range of material, social and sensory practices that are taken for granted in everyday interactions. In a similar vein, Joy, Belk and

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Bhardwaj (2015) poignantly demonstrate how Indian women are constructed in discourse as being inferior to men and this leads to a precarity – across the class/caste system – where women have to exist in a culture that condones sexual violence against them. Most often the work cited above has appeared in Consumption, Markets & Culture, an interdisiciplinary journal, rather than in more mainstream consumer research journals. A recent paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Thompson and Üstüner (2015) represents a major breakthrough in this respect, using as it does a Butlerian lens to look at resignifying practices in women’s roller derby. Whereas scholars have previously tended to look at more micro/mesolevel aspects of marketplace performance – such as the cultural scripts followed or social dramas enacted – Thompson and Üstüner use Butler’s work to enable a more macro-level analysis of how existing social hierarchies and power relations impact marketplace performances and vice versa. The market-mediated gender resignifications these authors highlight in relation to roller derby include gender-bending juxtapositions such as physical aggression mixed with flirtatiousness and displays of playful eroticism. This embodied resistance to gendered norms performs a type of “ideological edgework” that brings reflexive awareness to “derby grrrls”, and their fans, of the ideological constraints naturalized in their everyday lives. Accordingly, Butler’s work holds much potential to enable consumer researchers to set phenomena observed at micro/meso levels, within broader ideological structures and to, thus, satisfy Askegaard and Linnet’s (2011) call for more attention to the “context of context”. For example, Butler’s conception of heterosexual hegemony could shed more light on Fischer, Otnes and Tuncay’s (2007) already perceptive study of women using assisted reproductive technologies to pursue biological motherhood. The discourses these authors identify in relation to women’s persistent attempts to become mothers (in the face of many obstacles and emotional traumas) are performative of heteronormativity. This recognition helps understand these women’s identity struggles from a more critical perspective. Future research in this area could use Butler to look at how ART can subvert (or not) heterosexual hegemony by allowing for more non-traditional parenting, particularly among the LBGT community. The preceding is but one example and there are many other areas at the juncture of gender and consumer research where Butler – alone or in conjunction with other theorists – can shed more light on the role of consumer culture in reinforcing or subverting wider sociocultural structures. Using a Butlerian lens would enable consumer research scholars to move beyond the celebratory aspects of marketplace culture and look more deeply at processes of inclusion and exclusion that underpin social inequality. In this respect, there is much potential to develop theories around intersecting aspects of identity not only in relation to sex, gender and sexuality, but also across other sociocultural and biological categories such as race, class, ethnicity, caste and ability. These aspects resonate more strongly with her latest work that consumer researchers have yet to incorporate and that extends her theory of performativity to look at precarity and the need for solidarity (Butler, 2015).

References Askegaard, S. and Linnet, J. T. (2011). Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: Phenomenology and the context of context. Marketing Theory, 11(4) pp. 381–404. Brownlie, D. and Hewer, P. (2007). Prime beef cuts: Culinary images for thinking ‘men’. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 10(3) pp. 229–250. Butler, J. (1986). Sex and gender in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. Yale French Studies, 72 pp. 35–41.

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Butler, J. (1987). Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (1997). The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, J., Osbourne, P. and Segal, L. (1994). Gender as performance: An interview with Judith Butler. Radical Philosophy, 67(summer) pp. 32–39. Chambers, S. A. (2007). An incalculable effect: Subversions of heteronormativity. Political Studies, 55 pp. 656–679. Chatzidakis, A. (2015). Heteronormative resistance through and to consumption. Working Paper. London: Royal Holloway. De Beauvoir, S. (2010 [1949]). The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books. Fischer, E., Otnes, C. C. and Tuncay, L. (2007). Pursuing parenthood: Integrating cultural and cognitive perspectives on persistent goal striving. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(December) pp. 425–440. Foucault, M. (1972). Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Fraser, N. and Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition: A Politicophilosophical Exchange. London: Verso. Goulding, C. and Saren, M. (2009). Performing identity: An analysis of gender expressions at the Whitby goth festival. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 12(1) pp. 27–46. Joy, A., Belk, R. and Bhardwaj, R. (2015). Judith Butler on performativity and precarity: Exploratory thoughts on gender and violence in India. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(15/16) pp. 1739–1745. Kates, S. M. (2003). Producing and consuming gendered representations: An interpretation of the Sydney gay and lesbian Mardi Gras. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 6(1) pp. 5–22. Kotz, E. (1992). The body you want: Liz Kotz interviews Judith Butler. Artforum, 31(3) pp. 82–89. Martin, D. M., Schouten, J. W. and McAlexander, J. H. (2006). Claiming the throttle: Multiple femininities in a hyper-masculine subculture. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 9(3) pp. 171–205. Rubin, G. (1993). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. S. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, pp. 3–43, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Salih, S. (2002). Judith Butler. London: Routledge. Schroeder, J. E. and Borgerson, J. L. (1998). Marketing images of gender: A visual analysis. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 2(2) pp. 161–201. Schroeder, J. E. and Borgerson, J. L. (2003). Identity and iteration: Marketing images and the constitution of consuming subjects. Paper presented at the Critical Management Studies Conference, Lancaster University, UK. Schroeder, J. E. and Borgerson, J. L. (2004). Judith Butler, gender theorist: Philosophical and phenomenological insights into marketing and consumer behavior. In L. Scott and C. Thompson (Eds.), Gender, Marketing and Consumer Behavior, Volume 7, pp. 1–7, Madison, WI: Association for Consumer Research. Schroeder, J. E. and Zwick. D. (2004). Mirrors of masculinity: Representation and identity in advertising images. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 7(1) pp. 21–52. Segal, L. (1999). Why Feminism? Cambridge: Polity Press. Stevens, L., Cappellini, B. and Smith, G. (2015). Nigellissima: A study of glamour, performativity, and embodiment. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(5–6) pp. 1–22. Stokes, P. (1998). Consuming desires: Performing gender in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando, Neil Jordan’s the crying game and sally potter’s Orlando. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 1(4) pp. 347–353.

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Thompson, C. J. and Üstüner, T. (2015). Women skating on the edge: Marketplace performances as ideological edgework. Journal of Consumer Research, 42(2) pp. 235–265. Tuncay Zayer, L., Sredl, K., Parmentier, M.-A. and Coleman, C. (2012). Consumption and gender identity in popular media: Discourses of domesticity, authenticity, and sexuality. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 15(4) pp. 333–357. Valerius, K. (1997). Genetic essentialism: Race, class and the politics of reproduction. Consumption, Markets & Culture, 1(3) pp. 229–247. Valtonen, A. (2013). Height matters: Practicing consumer agency, gender, and body politics. Consumption, Markets and Culture, 16(2) pp. 196–221. Willig, R. (2012). Recognition and critique: An interview with Judith Butler. Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13(1) pp. 139–144. Wittig, M. (1980). The Straight Mind and Other Essays. New York: Harvester/Wheatsheaf.

PART IX

The imaginary and humanity

30 FREUD THE SCIENTIST? John Desmond

Consider the situation of the recently arrived extra-terrestrial who (to follow the Hollywood script), while waiting in the White House to meet the President, is offered the choice between browsing forty years of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) or a selection of episodes from the TV series Mad Men. Irrespective of the aesthetics, which source would provide the most information on the human nature that s/he or it was about to encounter? From the former, particularly material published before the millennium, s/he would learn that humans generally behave as rational machines, engaging in relationships with things they call products, from which they derive meaning and satisfaction. From the latter, s/he would become acquainted with Don Draper, “the man who could read symbols but couldn’t read himself ” (Nussbaum, 2013) and the “cabinet of horrors . . . (the) little secrets of desire, greed or envy that are kept locked up” by civilization (Sennett, 1978: 5). Given that there is scarce reference in JCR for that kind of thing (never mind the rest of the marketing canon) it is no wonder that a straw poll of marketing academics conducted at a recent marketing conference suggests that they might endorse the former choice, as they consider Freud archaic, irrelevant and unseemly. Freud’s ideas retain their capacity to shock. In teaching situations, students, supposedly hardened to pornography by easy access to social media, are nonetheless horrified when the penny drops; “you mean I loved my mother sexually – that’s disgusting!” Ironic, given Western culture is supposedly saturated with “Freudian” understandings of sexuality and death, this is doubly so when one considers that such caricatures can act as a barrier to engagement with Freud’s actual work. The comments made by academics are no less misplaced, as despite its limitations, Freud’s (1923) structural model provides a sophisticated account of the human subject, which is the equal of any alternative existing today and certainly better than the misguided cognitive approach that prevailed until recently in the social sciences and in marketing. Freud also provides concepts to aid potential understanding of the motivations why the marketing academy acted for so long to sideline discussion of topics considered beyond the pale, such as the unconscious. Sigmund Freud published hundreds of works over a career spanning sixty-three years, starting as a neuroscientist (Freud, 1895) and ending as the father of psychoanalysis. While acknowledging that observation is fundamental to science, Freud later abandoned a strictly scientific

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approach to understanding the psyche, when from necessity, his speculations roved far beyond its limit of description (Freud, 1914: 69). In any case his idea of science was indebted to the ancients and quite different to the narrow empirical studies and models that pass for science today. As a fellow “statesman of the soul” (Galluci, 2000), Plato not only inspired Freud’s most profound theoretical ideas on desire, sexuality and death, but also his reasoning, which unfolds in a manner closer to the dialectic than to the bare facts of modern scientific enquiry – as if there ever could be bare facts. Freud’s informed speculation yields a wealth of insight on topics such as the unconscious, drives, libido, dreams, denial, transference, slips of the tongue, neurosis, psychosis, sexuality, love, narcissism, sadism, identification, projection and death to name a few, many of which continue to inspire discussion and impassioned debate today. One of the reasons why many of these insights stand up to the test of time is because they are built on solid foundations. For instance, Freud’s theory of the unconscious whilst having unique elements, was not plucked from thin air, but inspired among others, by the ideas of Plato, Augustine, Spinoza, Liebniz, Wordsworth, Schopenhauer and Janet. Freud’s approach is dynamic in several senses, not only by positing a dynamic unconscious, but also in relation to theory, where he developed two broad approaches, comprising the earlier topographical theory and the later structural theory, to understanding the inner workings of the mind. Whilst Freud’s work can be difficult and dense, employing arcane language (more Strachey’s fault than Freud’s) and moving rapidly from one concept to another, the manner by which his reasoning unfolds is often illuminating and sometimes astounding in its brilliance. For instance in one of the papers published in this earlier period on narcissism Freud (1914) describes paranoia, libido, object-choice and repression, whilst also finding room to have a tilt at Jung. His discussion of love in the paper is fascinating in its description, not as a dewy-eyed infatuation, nor as an idealized form of agape, but rather as investment of free psychic energy, or libido, into objects, of which the first object is the self. He posits that it is from the narcissism and love of the self that all subsequent engagement with others proceeds, which sometimes fails and turns back on itself. This is the ultimate origin of the psychic energy described by Belk (1988) in his celebrated paper on the extended self, where he explains how the self extends by means of the binding or investment of free energy into objects. That element of Belk’s thesis, which is suggestive of the existence of a core self is critiqued by Ahuvia (2005), who argues to the contrary, that the postmodern self is empty, being akin to a black hole. In the light of Freud’s (1914) earlier contribution it is perplexing that his work is not mentioned in these heavily cited papers. Freud’s synthetic argument can reconcile Ahuvia (2005) and Belk’s (1988) within his scheme by positing a two-way process, whereby in the normal course of development the self invests energy into other objects, but when this proves unsatisfactory, energy empties from external objects back into the self. Freud describes the empty self-formation as narcissistic, being inverted as energy is emptied out of objects in the external world to flow back into the self. Some of Freud’s speculations on death have been introduced to marketing through the back door by Terror Management Theorists who have subjected them to the rigours of scientific method. His argument that the ego acts as a shield to defend humans from raw experience (Freud, 1923) was taken up by Ernest Becker (1973), who influenced Terror Management Theorists to investigate the human capacity to deny death (Greenberg et al., 1990). This research programme has yielded interesting results which confirm that individuals react defensively in line with conservative cultural values when they are unconsciously primed with images of mortality. However it proceeds in the typically narrow furrow, hard on fact and

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largely bereft of theory, that is expected of research in psychology today. One might surmise that from his experience as an analyst, Freud took such observed effects as obvious and relatively trivial. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (Freud, 1920), he had already speculatively moved beyond this to propose the existence of a drive for all organisms to restore an earlier state of things (ibid.: 310), otherwise known as the death drive. Rejected by Karl Abraham, Freud’s speculation of the death drive informs Melanie Klein’s explanation of infantile aggression and Jacques Lacan’s concept of jousisance and inspired countless authors, filmmakers and artists who have since sought to explore the role played by excessive desire in human experience. From the preceding discussion there exists a tension between the extent to which a construct is theoretically useful and its empirical verification. Freud’s writing consists of a peculiar mixture of speculation, open discussion and dogmatism. Given his early scientific interest one wonders would Freud be a scientist today? Freud the scientist would no doubt be dismayed by the proliferation of different schools of psychoanalysis, whose founders saw no problem in redefining existing concepts to their own ends or in coining new ones and by the lack of an evidence base. The scientist would also no doubt feel vindicated by developments in nonconscious processing; “Freud’s model of the unconscious as the primary guiding influence over daily life, even today, is more specific and detailed than any to be found in contemporary cognitive or social psychology” (Bargh & Morsella, 2008). This is praise indeed given that John Bargh pioneered the re-kindling of more recent academic interest in the unconscious. Freud’s theory of the unconscious developed in two stages. In the early topographical work, Freud (1915) distinguishes the preconscious, where unconscious processes can be summoned to consciousness, from the unconscious proper. Unconscious processes are further subdivided into the descriptive unconscious, comprising automatic routines, and a dynamic unconscious, which is involved in processes of denial and repression of material considered threatening. In his later structural model Freud differentiates primary processes, which operate in an unconstrained manner according to the demands of the “pleasure principle”, from those secondary processes which obey the “reality principle” whose role is to inhibit the action of the former in accordance with the demands of reality. Recent evidence from experimental research suggests that the associative machine (Kahneman, 2011) comprising the descriptive unconscious, is more powerful than Freud imagined it could be, playing a major role in quotidian acts of consumption. The only major difference between theorists seems to be based on whether this machine is inefficient, operating according to principles based on Bayesian estimation which humans are poor at, or efficient, being based on calculation of frequencies (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996). What of the dynamic unconscious? Freud surmises that the dynamic unconscious comprises a higher layer that is scaffolded onto the phylogenetically older descriptive unconscious (Solms & Panksepp, 2010: 151). Furthermore, he argues that higher-level processes involved in the dynamic unconscious can inhibit the actions of those occurring at a lower level. Brian Garvey (2007) offers a useful example based on the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion. Subjects are presented with two or three lines stacked one above the other in parallel, where the ends of each line consist either of an arrow shape, or alternatively an inverted arrow shape. When asked about the respective length of the lines, a regular observed effect is that individuals erroneously perceive the line with the inverted arrow extensions as longer than that with the arrow extensions. Daniel Kahneman following Fodor, speculates that this heuristic, which substitutes a 3D for a 2D image, evolved during the Pleistocene period (Kahneman, 2011: 27–28). However the idea that this forms part of a modular-specific genetic apparatus that evolved millions of years ago

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is disputed by McCauley & Henrich (2006) who cite evidence from Segall, Campbell & Herskovits (1966) that it is only those who are from “Western” cultures who are susceptible to the illusion. They argue instead that “Western” infants (perhaps better to say “urban”), who are constantly exposed to perspective, shaped by walls and corners, learn to read objects rendered in two dimensions as three-dimensional forms, as opposed to infants from cultures where such cues are lacking, who do not. This argument has obvious implications for the understanding of cultural influence and the limits to reflexive awareness in relation to one’s formation by culture. More importantly, from a Freudian perspective, this demonstrates the role played by inhibition of primary, by secondary, processes. Interestingly, even when subjects consciously recognize that the lines are of equal length, they persist in perceiving them as different. This means that in line with Freud’s understanding, humans possess the ability to retain mutually contradictory information in different brain systems, one conscious and the other unconscious, at the same time, while being unaware of the process at work in effecting this. Freud’s idea of a dynamic unconscious argues that secondary processes come into play to inhibit material that would provoke anxiety if accessed by consciousness. Whilst much is made today of the conception of the mind as an associative machine (Kahneman, 2011), Freud understood only too well the complex manner by which the mind also functions as dissociative, by shuffling signifiers and shunting them around, especially when their signifieds are threatening to the subject. Freud detects the operation of such processes in dreams, jokes and slips of the tongue. He offers as an example a girl who could not bring herself to venture into a shop on her own, although she experienced no difficulties when in the company of others. After therapy she recalled a scene when aged twelve, she walked into a shop where there were two male shop assistants, one of whom she had found attractive. She saw them laughing and fled the shop in panic. She recalled that this event marked the start of her phobia of going into shops alone. Eventually she retrieved the memory of an earlier event when, aged around eight, a shopkeeper had reached up under her dress and touched her sexually. At the time the incident did not have a sexual content as she was too young to make sense of what was going on, so she forgot all about it. Her therapist argued that the later event triggered the unconscious memory of the earlier scene because the shop assistants’ laughter formed a retrieval cue which reminded her of the grimace of the shopkeeper when he was touching her through her clothes, together with the fear that the assistants would repeat the earlier assault which is now understood sexually. As it is unconscious, the memory of the first scene is not experienced as a memory but relived as a new experience and hence repeated not remembered. The two scenes are linked by the repetition of two elements, laughter and clothes combined with a sexual feeling. The girl now suddenly understands, or rather feels, the sexual meaning of the first scene, although she is transferring this meaning to the second one. Being repeated four years later, albeit disguised, the earlier scene belatedly gains its sexual meaning and traumatic effect. (Freud, 1895, 354, 356) The preceding provides a brief and crude glimpse into one or two of Freud’s key ideas. Like the work of all those of genius, there is no substitute for reading him in the original. There are several ideas relevant to marketing which must perforce be passed over here. For instance, while the paper by Solms & Panksepp (2010) argues that Freud’s reasoning is compatible with

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neuroscientific findings, what sparks the imagination is their foregrounding the embodied nature of subjectivity in Freud’s explanation. Thus one is a body that experiences warmth, cold, pleasure and pain (the id), one has a body image comprising a mental projection that integrates and stabilizes otherwise fleeting representations which one represents to oneself and to others and turns this over as an object in the mind (the ego). Theoretically, this offers the opportunity to develop a non-Cartesian way of theorizing the body in its role as subject and object. Interestingly they also offer evidence that contrary to Freud, the “id” is conscious. Alongside papers such as this the recent revival of interest in psychoanalysis in the marketing academy must be recognized, which has particularly engaged cultural theorists. One hopes that before long these ideas will be recognized as important by the marketing mainstream. Who knows, if our extra-terrestrial were to visit Earth in twenty years time and read JCR . . .whatever, one can have one’s dreams!

References Ahuvia, A. C. (2005) Beyond the extended self: Loved objects and consumers’ identity narratives. Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 32: 171–184. Bargh, J. A. & E. Morsella (2008) The unconscious mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 3(1): 73–79. Becker. E. (1973) The denial of death. New York: Free Press. Belk, Russell W. (1988). Possessions and the extended self. Journal of Consumer Research, vol. 15(2): 139–168. Cosmides, L. & J. Tooby (1996) Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgement under uncertainty. Cognition, vol. 58: 1–73. Fodor, J. A. (1983) The modularity of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Freud, S. (1895) Project for a scientific psychology. Standard Edition, vol. 1: 281–397. Freud, S. (1914) On narcissism; an introduction. In James Strachey (trans.), Angela Richards (ed.) (1991) On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis, The Penguin Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 59–99. Freud, S. (1915) The unconscious. In James Strachey (trans.), Angela Richards (ed.) (1991) On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth, Penguin, pp. 190–193. Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the pleasure principle. In James Strachey (trans.), Angela Richards (ed.) (1991) On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis, The Penguin Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 270–339. Freud, S. (1923) The ego and the id. In James Strachey (trans.), Angela Richards (ed.) (1991) On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis, The Penguin Freud Library, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 350–401. Galluci, G. M. (2000) Freud and Plato: Statesmen of the soul. Xlibris. Garvey, B. (2007) Quasi beliefs and crazy beliefs: Subdoxastic states and the “Special Characteristics” of the unconscious. In Christian Kerslake and Ray Brassier (eds.) Origins and ends of the mind: Philosophical essays on psychoanalysis, Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 37–58. Greenberg, J., S. Solomon, M. Veeder, T. Pyszczynski, A. Rosenblatt, S. Kirkland & D. Lyon (1990) Evidence for terror management theory II: The effects of mortality salience on reactions to those who threaten or bolster the cultural worldview. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 58(2): 308–318. Kahneman, D. (2011) Thinking, fast and slow. London: Penguin. McCauley, R. N. & J. Henrich (2006) Susceptibility to the Muller-Lyer illusion, theory neutral observation and the diachronic penetrability of the visual input system. Philosophical Psychology, vol. 19(1): 1–23. Nussbaum, M. (2013) Faking it. “Mad Men’s” Don Draper’s problem. The New Yorker, May 20th.

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Segall, M., D. Campbell & M. J. Herskovits (1966) The influence of culture on visual perception. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. Sennett, R. (1978). The Fall of Public Man. On the Social Psychology of Capitalism. New York: Vintage Books. Solms, M. & J. Panksepp (2010) The “id” knows more than the “ego” admits: Neuropsychoanalytic and primal consciousness perspectives on the interface between affective and cognitive neuroscience. Brain Sciences, vol. 2: 2, 147–175.

31 THE CONSUMER AS SOVEREIGN: THE GENERAL ECONOMY OF GEORGES BATAILLE Christian Jantzen

A marginal thinker Georges Bataille (1897–1962) could rightly be characterized as a marginal thinker. A librarian by day and a libertine at night, he lacked a formal academic education. During his lifetime his fame as a writer rested on a number of infamous pornographic novels, most notably his L’histoire de l’œil (Bataille, 2001). His scholarship had only a small audience in his native country, France, compared to the following he was to gain posthumously both at home and abroad. This scholarship was based on quite diverse sources: i.e. the philosophies of Nietzsche and Hegel, the sociology of Durkheim and his school (especially Marcel Mauss), Marx, the writings of de Sade. In the 1920s he operated at the fringes of the artistic avant-garde in an uneasy relationship with the then dominant surrealist movement from which he was expelled in 1929 (Surya, 2002). In the 1930s he was active in various political movements at the left wing of and in opposition to established Marxist parties. During the interwar decades his interest in such various fields as religion, society, politics, art and prehistory unfolded in small circles of equally marginalized but seminal French intellectuals like Maurice Blanchot, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Jacques Lacan and Michel Leiris. During the war, his thinking, previously scattered in numerous articles in journals he often edited himself, was presented more comprehensively in a trilogy, the Summa Atheologica, which are partially autobiographical (e.g. Bataille, 1988). In the post-war era he would present his thinking in a more scholarly fashion in a number of important books on religion, economics and eroticism (e.g. Bataille, 1987, 1991a, 1991b, 1992). In these years, at the apex of the existentialist wave, Sartre ‘officially’ denounced him as a new mystic badly in need of psychoanalysis (Sartre, 1947, 174) thus cementing his marginality. Despite spanning many disciplines, having been published in very diverse outlets over a period of four decades and relying on a plethora of sources of inspiration the writings of Georges Bataille are remarkably cohesive (Hewson & Coelen, 2016, 2). The main theme is how to revive a passion for communality in a society characterized by rationality, utility and individuality (Falasca-Zamponi, 2016, 40). Key words used throughout his oeuvre relate to this theme. ‘Sacred’ are those activities that bond people in and through collective acts of festivals, rituals and myths. Such value is brought about by ‘sacrifice’, i.e. the “production of sacred

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things” through squandering (Bataille, 1985a, 127). This form of production is highly affective. But it is also destructive. It destroys utility, upsets normality, and is irrational from an ordinary point of view. It is waste, excess, ‘expenditure’ of useful value. The diagnosis on which this theme is based is in line with classical sociology. The “anomie” or lack of communality in modern societies leading to normlessness was a main concern for Durkheim (1951). And Weber (2002) had pointed out how modernity’s process of rationalization had trapped individuals in an “iron cage” of efficiency, calculation and control. But contrary to these sources of inspiration the leitmotiv of Bataille’s early writings is explicitly political. And contributing to his marginality in the intellectual climate of his times is, apropos Sartre’s derogative characterization, this political fervour by which this agenda is pursued, his paradoxical way of arguing, and the tone of his writings often oscillating between almost orgasmic jubilation and angry outrage. His anger is directed against the bourgeoisie who has subverted communality by privatizing the cycles of economic exchange. By spending “for itself, and within itself ”, this class lacks generosity and nobility (Bataille, 1985a, 124). Contrary to the aristocracy, it deprives the other classes of passionate celebrations in the form of shared spectacles and hence erodes the coherence of society. Revolution in Bataille’s perspective is the restoration of passion: not the reversal of roles, but orgiastic excess in the form of a public bloodshed. Bataille’s political agenda was one of passionate politics. This was precisely what fascism seemed to offer in the 1930s. This movement’s cult of violence, its mobilization of mass energies and its ideology of corporatism stressing the unity of the nation tapped into a similar vein by turning politics into a spectacle. But this was, as pinpointed cogently by Bataille (1985b) as well as Benjamin (2008), a trap. Passions were not unleashed for their own sake, i.e. in ecstasy, but in a highly staged and controlled form for the sake of the State, the Party and its Leader. Bataille’s agenda was thus to reinstall passion as the foundation of social life without falling prey to the lures of fascism.

Beyond classical economics Georges Bataille explicitly challenged established conceptions of economy and society. Tellingly, his opus magnum, The accursed share (1991a, 1991b), was presented as a contribution to political economy. In this work, of which only the first volume was published during his lifetime (with very poor sales rates), he elaborated his concept of a general economy in an attempt to transcend the prevailing understanding of economy. The importance of this manoeuvre is that Bataille pointed at consumption as the fundamental principle in life. Expenditure, excess and squandering are not regrettable defects disturbing the cycles of production. Narrowing economics down to a focus on production therefore implies, according to Bataille, disregarding aspects like luxury, cults, games, arts, non-reproductive sexual activities, in short: all forms of consumption which have no end beyond themselves. Bataille labels such a reduction the restricted economy because it confines the scope of economy. The restricted economy is the domain of (neo)classical economics (e.g. Becker, 1996). It is a field of utility, rationality and productivity where the role of consumption is secondary to production. Consumption is reduced to acts of acquisition: i.e. “instrumental decision[s] of what to buy according to the utility of available goods” (Sassatelli, 2007, 61). Acts of consumption as well as consumption as a whole are entirely rational as long as they serve productive ends, which is the basis for the wealth of nations (Smith, 1982). The purpose of consumption becomes production. Consumption reproduces the forces of production (labour) and is at the

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same time the point in the cycle of exchange where wealth is generated and accumulated, to be reinvested in new productivity (Weber, 2002). Bataille’s critique of this restricted perspective is that it is blind to the most appreciable aspects of life – i.e. pleasure – and that it cannot grasp the perhaps strongest motivating force of behaviour, i.e. passion. Pleasure is not about accumulation and utility. It is waste: wasting time, money or other resources without any other purpose (utility) than the activity itself. Passion is not about rational calculation. It is emotional, immediate and unpremeditated. Passion is spontaneous and is not guided by long-term planning (e.g. of investments). The general economy is thus a perspective that puts pleasure and passion back into the equation. Or rather, loss, waste, squandering, excess, destruction – in short “expenditure” (Bataille, 1985a) or “the accursed share” (Bataille, 1991a, 1991b) – are claimed to be more fundamental to existence than the check and balances of production and consumption. When taking account of pleasure and passion any possibility of a calculable equation is lost. Bataille’s claim of a general economy implies that inutility, irrationality and non-productivity are of greater importance to life than utility, rationality and productivity. The difference between these two concepts of economy is furthermore illustrated by a set of distinctions. The restricted economy is dominated by production, whereas the general economy is dominated by consumption. Consumption is itself split into two parts: useful consumption, serving reproductive functions and hence reducible to the restricted economy, and useless consumption, destroying wealth accumulated during production and therefore transgressing the logic of accumulation. This non-productive consumption is “expenditure” (Bataille, 1985a, 118). The greater the loss implied in such acts, the more passion it evokes. Bataille supports his claim by various examples. Jewellery is one of them. From an instrumental point of few, jewels are useless. They are relatively rare and difficult to process, and therefore expensive. But precisely these circumstances make them very desirable and eagerly sought for, even though faux stones could easily substitute them (Bataille, 1985a, 119). Another example is Bataille’s reinterpretation of Mauss’ study of potlatch as pure expenditure: wealth is wasted in a duel where Indian chieftains challenge one another to give the greatest gift (Mauss, 1990). Whereas Mauss’ original analysis focusses on gift giving as a structure for creating social obligations by means of reciprocal exchange, Bataille stresses the exuberance implied in expenditure (Bataille, 1985a, 121 ff.). This overstretches Mauss’ argument somewhat (cf. Richardson, 1994, 77). The same goes for another of Bataille’s striking examples: human sacrifice amongst the Aztecs (Bataille, 1991a, 45 ff.). In stressing the festive character of these sacrifices and the willingness of the sacrificed to face death (the ultimate loss), Bataille appears to have given a far too positive picture of these events (Duverger, 1979; Richardson, 1994, 79 ff.). But what these two last examples also show, and why they are important to Bataille, is the collective nature of expenditure. Loss in the general economy is a communal event celebrated and enjoyed, mourned and suffered in public. These forms of expenditure generate social cohesion across the divides that otherwise keep a society’s groups apart. Bataille’s main argument for his claim of the primacy of expenditure over production is that societies organized according to the restricted economy continue to consume in an excessive manner. But such societies waste their wealth in secrecy, hidden from view and shamefully. Modern societies have shown to be capable of catastrophic waste: for example devastating wars of mass destruction waged by advanced technology, impersonal and out of view of the audience (cf. Baudrillard, 1995). Human sacrifices conducted in public have been replaced by massacres executed in

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remote places, its traces shamefully covered up (e.g. concentration camps). Beneath the surface of rationality uncontrollable irrational forces continue to rage. This also applies to individuals. In capitalist societies exuberance has been privatized: Luxury has become an exclusively private property to be “displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with depressing and boring conventions” (Bataille, 1985a, 124). It is not to be collectively celebrated. The pleasures of its exuberance are disguised as investments or treated as tokens of social identity, while the passions accompanying its acquisition are shamefully obscured. Expenditure has been repressed from modern life, but it returns to haunt modern individuals in all kinds of obsessive consumption patterns marking the obsessed as somebody out of control (e.g. overspending, obesity, gambling, addiction, shopaholism, shoplifting, etc.).

The accursed share and its interpreters The accursed share is that part of life which, banned from normality, nonetheless haunts ordinary life. There are two possible readings of this accursed share. And Bataille’s texts seem to waver between both. The first reading sees the principles of the general economy as operating outside the restricted economy. Expenditure, in this reading, is repressed by rationality but returns with a vengeance. By giving numerous examples of this principle, Bataille leaves the impression that this principle is somehow identifiable. In the final analysis, it can be captured by a number of distinctive structural features. It is itself a restricted economy (cf. Bennington, 1995). This seems to be the kind of reading preferred by the perhaps most famous postmodern interpreter of Bataille’s general economy, the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in one of his major works, Symbolic exchange and death (Baudrillard, 1993). This book recycles the Bataillean reading of Mauss and relies heavily on Bataille’s notions of excess, transgression and sacrifice. It is a critique of bourgeois capitalism, based on the exchange value of goods, and of the Marxist critique of capitalism, which is characterized as petit bourgeois in favouring the use value of goods. Capitalism as well as Marxism is caught in an instrumental rationality, in the restricted economy focussing on the utility of labour, planning, savings and investments. Following Bataille’s emphasis on abundance and expenditure as the core motivations in human nature, those economies and ideologies that are based on utility are characterized as ‘unnatural’ and hence inhumane. “Symbolic exchange” in Baudrillard’s sense then is a pre-modern logic of excess and waste, which leads the author to endorse sacrifice and death in the same vein as Bataille’s longing for a passionate revolution. Modernity is contrasted with its ‘real’ opposites: i.e. the aristocratic world of sumptuary abundance or primitive worlds of potlatch and excessive waste. In his later works, Baudrillard would revise this stance and opt for a postmodern position where the very notion of reality, “the real”, has been dissolved in a hyper-real world of cool, passionless simulations (e.g. Baudrillard, 1994). The other reading of the accursed share sees the general economy as operating inside the restricted one – and vice versa. In this reading there is no “outside” or “inside”: i.e. no clear distinctions or identifiable opposites (cf. Noys, 2000). We are not either passionate or impassionate, accumulating or spending. These positions are instantly reversible, just like relaxation can revert to boredom and boredom to excitement. There is always something “other” at play in what appears to be a stable state. Bataille addressed this otherness by calling it the “nonlogical” or “nonexplainable difference” (Bataille, 1985a, 129, 1985b, 141). It is difference that

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disturbs any identity without replacing it with some new identity. It is the act without any other purpose than acting: e.g. a revolution for the sole sake of passionate eruption, unforeseeable, uncontrollable and hence unidentifiable. This difference comes from nowhere, because it was always already there. It can only be circumscribed by paradoxes: “Real life, composed of all sorts of expenditure, knows nothing of purely productive expenditure; in actuality, it knows nothing of purely nonproductive expenditure either” (Bataille, 1991a, 12). Accumulation and expenditure, production and consumption, identity and non-identity (otherness) are mixed up and implied in one another. Bataille’s posthumous fame rests for a large part on such a poststructuralist or deconstructionist reading of otherness (Derrida, 1998). This otherness “concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate” into a stable identity (Bataille, 1985b, 140). In Derrida’s terms this is différance (Derrida, 1982). “Différance” is a deliberate misspelling of the French noun difference derived from the verb differer, which means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. Derrida’s pinpointing of the interconnection between difference and deferral in the genesis of meaning opens for a deconstruction of the order of things. Otherness is not external to meaning. It resides in the interstices of meaning, deferring meaning by being not-meaning: not yet or not any more, non-sense. Underneath the surface of regularity and routines there are repressed options and nascent possibilities. There are cracks, tensions and contradictions – otherness is inherent in what appears to be similar and well known. This otherness is “not-knowledge” (Bataille, 1988). It is radically non-identical and belongs to the sacred realm, which cannot be grasped by rational concepts. Otherness is thus marked by a radical uncertainty, which is both highly attractive and profoundly repulsive. Exposing oneself to this uncertainty implies giving up control and losing one’s fixed identity. It is waste, expenditure: a transgression of one’s ordinary existence. The effect of this transgression is sovereignty, that existential moment in which subjective freedom is consummated while at the same time all tokens of subjective identity (e.g. labour, wealth) are annulled: “Sovereignty is NOTHING” (Bataille, 1991b, 256), which echoes Nietzsche’s brand of nihilism. Sovereignty is loss, a passionate slip into non-identity, out of control. This is a very different concept of sovereignty than the one in neoclassical economy, where the sovereign consumer is the self-directed maker of decisions in control of the situation.

Re-centring marginality During his lifetime, Georges Bataille operated in the margins of the dominating intellectual movements in France: ignored, derided or forgotten. This, though, would change dramatically soon after his death. The rediscovery of his writings has been seminal for the development of both post-structuralism and postmodernism. His approach to political economy thus sat the agenda for the new intellectual currents in France during the 1960s and 1970s. This political economy of Georges Bataille is not based on market exchange and productivity. On the contrary, it deals with aspects that seem marginal to these classical core issues: passion, exuberance, generosity and communality, loss and waste, pleasure and anxiety. Furthermore this thinking asserts that these aspects are seminal for existence and as such should be at the core of economy. Bataille was thus one of the first social thinkers to point at the pivotal role of luxury, expenditure and excessive consumption in social life. Even though he is not frequently quoted in consumer research, his thinking is central for understanding the longings consumption is based on and how consumer society (mal)

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functions. Consumption is instrumental for identity-creation. The self is extended to objects mirroring its user’s identity. And consumption styles classify consumers as belonging to different groups, thus defining social identities. In these two cases consumption serves a purpose beyond itself. But Bataille’s concept of sovereignty points at different longings. Consumers also want to lose their fixed identities. Being absorbed by sumptuary experiences turns consumption into its own end. Consumer pleasures are generated when the instrumental purpose of consumption is forgotten – or lost. In consumer practices involving festivals, games and events social boundaries are transgressed and ‘forgotten’. The real significance of Bataille for consumer research is therefore threefold. Firstly, he reminds us that the longings of consumption are not only about the acquisition and maintenance of objects and identities, but also about the loss of such properties and qualities. This, secondly, implies that the sovereign consumer is not the rational homo oeconomicus of (neo-)classical economy. Bataille would view such a consumer as a mere slave of the bourgeois economy. The sovereign in Bataille’s perspective would be a passionate agent immersed in consumption. Thirdly, Bataille points to the frequently forgotten fact that consumption is more than an individual act and not just a social one. It is also a genuinely communal event. In some respects the market place has become ever more Bataillean. Goods are increasingly sold not for what they do, not even for what they mean, but for how they feel – and for how we feel while consuming them. Bataille could be read as a forecaster of the highly aestheticized postmodern market, where symbols are free floating and companies’ survival depends on their ability to create emotional bonds with their customers. Such an ecstatic form of capitalism has put exuberant consumption at public display (cf. Goux, 1998). But it remains a travesty of the general economy as long as its wasteful destruction of the ecosystem is furtively kept from view and as long as obsessive forms of behaviour (obesity, shopaholics etc.) are treated as mere individual defects and not as social defects stemming from a lack of communality.

References Bataille, Georges (1985a [1933]). The notion of expenditure. In: Allan Stoekl (Ed.), Visions of excess: Selected writings 1927–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (116–129). Bataille, Georges (1985b [1933]). The psychological structure of fascism. In: Allan Stoekl (Ed.), Visions of excess: Selected writings 1927–1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (137–160). Bataille, Georges (1987 [1957]). Eroticism. London: Marion Boyars. Bataille, Georges (1988 [1943]). Inner experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bataille, Georges (1991a [1949]). The accursed share: An essay on general economy: Volume I: Consumption. New York: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges (1991b [1976]). The accursed share: An essay on general economy: Volume II: The history of eroticism & volume III: Sovereignty. New York: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges (1992 [1948]). Theory of religion. New York: Zone Books. Bataille, Georges (2001 [1928]). Story of the eye. London: Penguin. Baudrillard, Jean (1993 [1976]). Symbolic exchange and death. London: Sage. Baudrillard, Jean (1994 [1981]). Simulacra and simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1995 [1991]). The Gulf War did not take place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Becker, Gary S. (1996). Accounting for tastes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Benjamin, Walter (2008 [1936]). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bennington, Geoffrey (1995). Introduction to economics 1: Because the world is round. In: Carolyn B. Gill (Ed.), Bataille: Writing the sacred. London: Routledge. (46–57).

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Derrida, Jacques (1982 [1972]). Margins of philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1998 [1967]). From restricted to general economy: A Hegelianism without reserve. In: Fred Botting & Scott Wilson (Eds.), Bataille: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell. (102–138). Durkheim, Émil (1951 [1897]). Suicide: A study in sociology. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Duverger, Christian (1979). La fleur létale. Economie du sacrifice aztèque. Paris: Seuil. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta (2016). Sociology and ethnography. In: Mark Hewson & Marcus Coelen (Eds.), Georges Bataille: Key concepts. London: Routledge. (38–49). Goux, Jean-Joseph (1998 [1990]). General economics and postmodern capitalism. In: Fred Botting & Scott Wilson (Eds.), Bataille: A critical reader. Oxford: Blackwell. (196–213). Hewson, Mark & Marcus Coelen (2016). Introduction. In: Mark Hewson & Marcus Coelen (Eds.), Georges Bataille: Key concepts. London: Routledge. (1–22). Mauss, Marcel (1990 [1923]). The gift. London: Routledge. Noys, Benjamin (2000). Georges Bataille: A critical introduction. London: Pluto Press. Richardson, Michael (1994). Georges Bataille. Abingdon & New York: Routledge Sartre, Jean-Paul (1947). Un nouveau mystique. In: Situations I. Paris: Gallimard. (172–213). Sassatelli, Roberta (2007). Consumer culture: History, theory and politics. London: Sage. Smith, Adam (1982 [1776]). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. London: Penguin. Surya, Michel (2002 [1992]). Georges Bataille: An intellectual biography. London: Verso. Weber, Max (2002 [1904]). The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism: And other writings. London: Penguin.

32 EDGAR MORIN: THE UNIDUALITY OF THE MAGICAL AND THE REAL Søren Askegaard

Tracer une ligne de démarcation entre la magie et la rationalité est donc loin d’être évident. Edgar Morin, 1996

There is generally no shortage of usage of French social theorists in consumer research in general and in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) in particular. Numerous are the references to members of the “great generation” of the last half of the 20th century with Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Foucault as the possibly most prevailing, but references to Lévi-Strauss, Sartre, de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari and others are at least somewhat familiar to most scholars in the CCT tradition. All their differences unspoken (and those are profound and many), they have mainly been brought to the foreground in order to challenge the logicalempiricist and analytical traditions within consumer research. On the local French scene, there is however one voice which has hardly reached into the Anglo-Saxon realm. This is the voice of Edgar Morin (1921–). Nevertheless, as we shall see, he was a pioneer in analyzing and understanding the role of the imaginary in the emerging mass consumer culture of the post-WWII period. In several books he has reflected on the significant relation between his personal history and his work. An early motherless child, he was a French resistant, initially an active communist based on his fight for social justice but turned against the party very early due to its dogmatic rigidity and the revelation of the horrors of Stalinism. Remaining an avid defender of social justice and complex thinking, he has been a highly active public intellectual in France (not least in Le Monde) as a critical voice against all kinds of dogmatism. From a cynical perspective, one might argue that if more than fifty books and a similar number of years as a public figure in France is not enough to provide a basis for some foreign attention, it is possibly due to a too local perspective to be really pertinent abroad – or worse even, a sign of insignificance and lack of quality in the thinking. But the oblivion is truly constrained to the Anglo-Saxon academic world. Morin’s work is highly revered in the Latin-speaking countries in Europe and in the Americas – Latin America is host both to the “Multiversidad Edgar Morin” in Mexico and to a network of “multiversities” consecrated to promoting Morin’s ideas about a

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complexity-based rather than analytically reductionist approach to science. Thus, even more than his fellow compatriots just mentioned, his whole work is formulated as a critique of an analytical tradition, which may explain why his work has not been immediately embraced by the Anglo-Saxon world. Trained as a sociologist and deeply interested in anthropology he has used his interest in systems theory and cybernetics to venture into other disciplines such as the sciences of biology and physics. Indeed, one of his life projects is to fight the reductionism and incomprehension that, according to Morin’s own logic, has resulted from the mutilation of knowledge embedded in a too heavy-handed compartmentalization and fragmentation into different disciplinary subjects. Morin has insisted in the role of the imaginary, of myth and of magic for a profound anthropological understanding of humanity as such as well as human practices and ideas. Indeed, as we shall see, one of Morin’s suggestions is to conceive of the world in what he calls conceptual unidualities, mutually constitutive but also antagonistic parts. One of the most central ones is the uniduality of human thought and knowledge as being always simultaneously empirical/rational/logical and symbolic/mythological/magical.

Morin, the sociologist One might argue that Morin’s work always has been primarily sociological, in the sense that even the most adventurous digressions into physics and biology represent an attempt to develop an understanding of what constitutes the human life world, the center of which is the concept of society. On the other hand, sociology in the more disciplinary sense of the word takes up only a part of Morin’s oeuvre. This said, and his writing being so prolific, even his contributions within “sociology proper”, i.e. the analysis of contemporary social phenomena, is large enough to form a production that most social science scholars would have to envy. Various phenomena like post-WWII Germany, the decline of social cohesion in an increasingly rigidified USSR or the (myth of) the city of New York and the sociology of the May 1968 revolt in Paris have been the target of Morin’s sociological curiosity. In this context, I shall discuss briefly three of his more sociological works in order to draw some general lessons from these for the field of consumer research. In L’esprit du temps (1962, vol 2. 1976, new edition 2008), Morin takes up the legacy of the Frankfurt School theorizations of the rise of the contemporary mass culture, which he qualifies as a colonization of the spirit and of the imaginary – a colonization not generated by political powers but by commercial and mediatized powers. Morin, however, paints a more nuanced portrait of the mass-culture and the cultural industry. He underlines how it simultaneously produces the conditions for standardization and conformity but also a democratization of insights into or potential for artistic creation and unfolding fantasy. He thereby demonstrates how a certain complex interaction between forces of an industrialized standardizing and monopolizing logic is counteracted by forces of innovation, competition and independence. The discussion unfolds around a number of themes that characterize the “spirit of the (contemporary) age” such as the star system (re-evoked from Morin’s earlier analysis of the institution of the cinema and the star system (Morin 1956, 1957), youth as a value, the feminization of mass culture, and globalization (!) but also the changing imaginary of more anthropological human phenomena such as love and eros/eroticism and “happiness”. A thoroughgoing motif is how all these as well as other cultural phenomena become embedded in a consumer culture

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logic characterized by not only the consumption of objects and events of mass culture but just as much as consumption of one’s own existence. As such, Morin’s book is related to both Boorstin’s (1962) contemporaneous cultural critique of the “pseudo-events” of mass culture and Baudrillard, who later in the decade sought to disentangle the logics of consumer culture (Baudrillard 1968, 1970). However, the most important thing to underline is that Morin’s goal is not merely to deliver a cultural critique of the trivial and banal forms of mass culture. It represents an attempt to grasp both the systemic logic between culture production and modern capitalism but also how both this system and its products is formed by and forming the human imaginary and that this forming, beyond a simple alienation also represents a profound humanness – the stuff that dreams are made of. As Morin underlines, if mass culture is filled with nonsense, it is exactly because humanity is filled with it, not only in a negative but also a positive way: Nonsense, no doubt! Nonsense from which the serious sociologist turns away in disgust, which is why no one has yet dared to study the stars. But our scholars betray their frivolity in their refusal to take nonsense seriously. Nonsense is also what is most profound in man. Behind the star system there is not only the “stupidity” of fanatics, the lack of invention of screenwriters, the commercial chicanery of producers. There is the world’s heart and there is love, another kind of nonsense, another profound humanity. (Morin 2005 [1957/1972], p. 87, emphasis in original) This quote illustrates Morin’s potential as a bridge-building theorist in the current debate between the CCT scholars and the colleagues (notably in Britain), representing a critical marketing tradition (see Thompson, Arnould & Giesler 2013; Fitchett, Patsiaouras & Davies 2014; Askegaard 2014). The analysis of contemporary consumer culture is self-mutilating if it cannot grasp the “both-and” logic pertaining to the “nonsensical” nature of consumption of the imaginary and the imaginary of consumption. Another sociological work that can be evoked to make a point for contemporary consumer culture theorizing in terms of avoiding reductionist explanatory frameworks is Morin’s profound analysis of the process of modernization in a small village community in Brittany in the Westernmost part of France (Morin 1967). As indicated in the description of the book, this work represents a pluridisciplinary investigation of a small community transformation by its entry in the “planetary era” of the last half of the 20th century. The analysis is centered around the end of agriculture as the dominant sphere in local production and economy, the clash and conflict between a religious and a republican view on social cohesion, the emancipation of women and the revolting mores and norms of an emerging youth culture. Not unlike Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, the analysis highlights the big changes embedded in the seemingly small and innocent alterations in local social organization, institutional set-up and daily practices, underlining how looks on nature, on the world, on society and on the individual form a complex universe of meanings that undergo a profound crisis and transformation. The book is witness to the richness of a pluridisciplinary approach to the understanding of social change, simultaneously paying due to history, modernity, religion, secularism, the economic and the imaginary (and the imaginary of the economic). A third contribution within sociology proper is another pluridisciplinary work, the analysis of a rumor (with no apparent real reference) that emerged in the French city of Orléans in May 1969. The final report (Morin 1969), although published in Morin’s name, is the outcome of

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a team effort. The rumor that proliferated was that young (white) girls of Orléans had fallen victims to slave trade. They were allegedly drugged in testing rooms in downtown clothing stores (the rumor pertained first to one, then to two, then finally six stores), before being taken to caves underneath the shops and, during the night, shipped off to serve as sex slaves in exotic destinations. Significantly, all the store owners were Jewish, but this fact is not part of the circulating rumor. So the rumor recaptures (almost immediately) a number of both anti-Semitic and anti-racist discourses in France and links it to a general Western myth of white slavery. Morin and his colleagues trace both the history behind this specific type of rumor (not the first of its kind neither in France nor outside) and the incubation, propagation and metastasis of the current version, as well as the more general myths and anti-myths surrounding it with support and incredulity. In these days and age of “alternative facts”, the analysis is a powerful reminder of the complex functioning of social, personal and mediated communication and its interplay. Furthermore, one of the central conclusions is the significance of the “event”, the fact that a single fantasmatic production of a narrative can produce a long chain of consequences. Similarly to Morin’s (Morin, Lefort & Castoriadis 2008 [1968/1988]) analysis of the events during the student revolt in Paris in May 1968, La rumeur d’Orléans thereby contributes to cementing the role of the imaginary in a contemporary sociology as well as the particular set “principles for a sociology of the present” published as a postface in the book. Here Morin is advocating for sociology as a “phenomeno-logy”, not in the philosophical sense of the term, but referring to the study of social phenomena in their historical, social, political, geographical, psychological, economic (etc.) being, in respect of the complexity of as well as the observed social “facts” as elaborated theorizing. This is exactly what CCT should strive to do. Another central principle in Morin’s sociology of the present is the attention to the “event”, the single act or phenomenon that disrupts systemic equilibria and produces some kind of modification or change. Some young girl in a catholic dorm in Orléans and her phantasm about white slavery produced (created/constituted) an event (in a series of events) in the case of this particular rumor. Moreover, it is necessary to pay particular attention to the significance of temporality and the confluence of events that makes it impossible to predict how a system reacts to disruptions. The event thereby contributes to questioning even multi-causal and multi-rational explanatory frameworks for social and institutional change and provides a foundation for a fundamental critique of social prediction.

Morin, the anthropologist Morin demonstrates a respect for the complex and intricate unfolding of social phenomena and his general interest in the imaginary as a central element in the definition of humanity. He thereby reflects a curiosity about broader anthropological issues apparent already in his early reflections on death (Morin 1951) and the modern mythology of the cinema (Morin 1956). This curiosity led him to return to an investigation of the being and becoming of the anthropos. Inspired by both cybernetic studies of complex phenomena, by the theory of auto-poietic systems formulated around 1970 by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and by other new insights in biology and evolution in the works of notably Jacques Monod and Henri Laborit, Morin (1973) published what remains his most fundamental work in terms of an attempt to define “humanity”. The general purpose of the book is, similarly to the sociological work, to fight against a reductionist perspective on what constitutes humanity. The book argues against on the one hand a biologistic reductionism that neglects cultural,

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communicative and imaginary dimensions of humanity or – one is inclined to add in order to link this insight to more contemporary discussions on the centrality of evolution for social and psychological phenomena – reduces cultural forms to reflect simple evolutionary advantages. On the other hand, he accuses anthropology (and the cultural sciences in general) for neglecting the fact that humans are not only cultural but also biological beings. Human nature and human culture are not “separate layers” of human existence but mutually constitutive. Homo sapiens is not separate from nature, and a lot of what had been considered specific to humanity – sociality, the use of tools, symbolic communication, and rites – have since long been revealed by ethologists and zoologists as part of other species’ behavior. Human order is not in opposition to natural (dis)order; disorder is a fundamental and constitutive element in the formation of humanity. In other words, humanity is both deeply orderly and disorderly and this double nature cannot be reduced to the “angelic” and “devilish” side of the human being – they are each others’ constituents and presuppositions. It is important to underline, however, how Morin’s argument differs in a significant way from most contemporary, evolutionary perspectives (e.g. Heinrich 2016; Miller 2001). Culture, while the single most useful tool for survival – “the human is a cultural animal by nature and a natural animal by culture”, Morin argues – cannot be reduced to an evolutionary logic. The simplicity of such an evolutionary process of selection is defied by the myriad of human forms of myth and magic produced in the human social system. Culture, myth and magic must be conceived as ways of filling the increased gap between a reflexive and self-conscious mind and the world’s phenomena as understood and interpreted and acted upon by individuals and societies, and while these cannot directly defy evolutionary principles over longer periods of time, they can also not be conceived as mere results of “natural selection”. Instead, we must think “evolution” of humanness through a complex interaction between the human genetic system, the surrounding ecosystem(s), the cerebral system and a given society and its culture, all of which are developing and developed by human praxis. Instead of the age-old distinction between nature and culture, between individual and society, it is more useful to consider every human from the angle of the trinity species-individual-society, where none can be reduced to the other. In other words, the ideas promoted by Morin are the ideas of a human animal, a natural (but not naturally given!) society, and a bio-cultural evolution. The world of representations of archaic societies, which for the human species is the same as saying a world of culture, becomes accessible for us through the graves and the paintings, Morin argues. They refer to a new world of cultural order, but also bear witness to the simultaneous emergence of a fundamental disorder, anxiety, “superstition” and hope (of life after death, of being able to communicate through the representative doppelgänger of the prey). Myth and magic are first and foremost means of addressing this emerging bio-social orderand-disorder. They of course represent a fundamental introduction of error in the human life because they generate reflexive types of praxis rather than acts relying blindly on instincts. But without this source error, no cultural evolution and thus no emergence of Homo sapiens can take place; hence, Morin argues, the human is an animal gifted with madness. Behind the reassuring name of Sapiens, Morin writes, the true face of the human being appears. It is an animal of hubris, of strong and unstable feelings, an animal that invents demons and chimera and who is always caught in the dilemma of deciding what is real and what is unreal; an animal that is ecstatic, loving and violent; who knows death without being able to believe in it, an animal of delirium and pleasure, myth, magic and illusions. And since we, Morin concludes, by madness understand the combination of illusion,

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exaggeration, instability, hesitance between real and unreal, subjective and objective, error and disorder, a more correct denomination for the human species might be homo demens – or as he admits, at least homo sapiens demens. Far from being handicapped by its own madness, however, we must understand the accomplishments of humanity (for better and for worse) in exactly this light. In consumer research, we are yet to see the emergence of such an integrative view on biology and culture. The attempts to advance a biological/evolutionary psychology perspective in marketing and consumer research, in particular by Griskevicius and varying coauthors (see, e.g., Kenrick & Griskevicius 2013), are far from attaining this goal since such perspectives remain caught in the implied assumption that all behavior is goal-oriented and are consequences of psychological adjustments framed by natural selection. Instead, it seems like a “natural” embrace – excuse the pun – for scholars interested in consumer culture to try to advance such a complex anthropology in its circle. I would like to conclude these reflections with a profound call to scholars interested in consumption to engage in the unraveling of a non-reductionist thinking of the antagonistic, complementary and concurrent biological and cultural constitution of humanity.

Morin, the epistemologist It would be mutilating to provide a presentation of Morin’s legacy without mentioning, at least in brief, his search for a scienza nuova (this part of Morin’s legacy, unlike the others, is partially accessible in English (Morin 2008; see also Kofman 1996)). He unfolds this quest notably in his opus major, the six volumes of La Méthode. In the two first volumes (Morin 1977, 1980), he applies the perspective of complex, open systems he used to discuss the evolution of human society in Le paradigme perdu on the physical world and the biological world respectively. This he does in order to provide a general foundation for his real concern – the discussion of the complexity of the human knowledge (Morin 1986, 1991) and human societies (2001, 2004). We have already evoked briefly the relationship between Morin’s epistemology and the development of knowledge within Consumer Culture Theory elsewhere (Askegaard & Linnet 2011), and a slightly lengthier introduction to this is already available in French (Brunel 2015). It is noteworthy that Morin with this work aims at the establishment of a certain unity of science. However, instead of the logical-empiricist goal of analytical and logical reductionism that has served as an unattainable goal for much social science, Morin’s unity of science is based on principles of self-organization and complexity in physical, biological and anthropological systems. Morin himself highlights three principles that characterize a complex epistemology: the principle of dialogic, the principle of recursiveness and the hologrammatic principle (Morin 1986). The dialogical principle states that complementary, concurrent and antagonistic instances taken together are necessary for the formation of complex organized phenomena. The relation between order and disorder or sapiens and demens evoked earlier are examples of dialogics. The principle of recursiveness is drawn from physics, notably from the instability of dissipative structures as analyzed by Nobel laureate Ilya Progogine. It refers to a process, conditioned by an influx of some kind of energy and/or matter, where the elements can be both cause and effects, such that the final states in the process are necessary for the generation of the initial stages. This principle adds a key element of uncertainty and indeterminacy to the regulatory retroaction known from cybernetics and is crucial for understanding the

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fundamental openness and unpredictability of social systems. Finally, the hologrammatic principle refers to a system with a complex relation between part and whole, where the whole is included in each part, which at the same time is included in the whole. A key example for understanding this is the genetic content of each cell which carries in it the genetic information necessary to form the whole. In this sense, the part will carry more or less ability to reconstruct the whole. Morin finds that this principle also is valid for complex social systems. Obviously not in the sense that any lost social system can be regenerated, but the rebuilding of societies, either after destruction or migration bear witness to the idea that we as social individuals are in this sense hologrammatic. “I am in the world which is in me”, as Morin has stated on several occasions. The consumer research interest in such an epistemology is first and foremost the acknowledgment of what Morin would call the uniduality of concepts. It is an approach that encourages us to think not in terms of analytic division but in terms of holistic complexity, without regenerating to the short circuit of not being able to say anything because matters are too complex. As we have seen, it is a way of thinking of the human being as biological and cultural without reducing one to the other, it is a way of seeing that sapiens and demens, reason and madness, order and disorder are not just opposites but mutually constitutive and included in each other. This is significant since language itself is unidual: we are locked in by what opens the world, and our world is opened by that which locks us in. For example, it generates an ability to see not the opposition between the rational and the magic but their mutual dependence and their deep ingraining in the formation of the human subject. In terms of the how human knowledge is constituted Morin (1986) argues that it emerges through an interrelated set of dialogics such as (among others) distinction and relation, analysis and synthesis, individualization and generalization, deduction and induction, explanation and comprehension (Verstehen in Weberian terms), verification and imagination, and as already evoked the rational/empirical/logical and the symbolic/mythical/magical (see also Askegaard & Linnet 2011). This represents a significant addition to the paradigmatic debate both within the Consumer Culture Theory subfield of consumer research (e.g. Brunel 2015) and within consumer research as a whole. It may allow us to see complementarity where we used to see only difference.

Conclusion Beyond such epistemological reflections, Morin’s thought represents an opening to consider consumption and consumer culture from its dual and paradoxical role in two central global issues that we as short-term passengers on our small planet have to deal with: global sustainability and global inequality. This is exactly the lesson Morin is trying to help us draw from his epistemological reflections on complexity. Morin, in addition to an impressive set of autobiographical and auto-critical writings, has used the later part of his authorship to apply his complexity-based notions on humanity, knowledge and society to discuss the implications of such a perspective on global politics and eco-systems and on pedagogical and didactical principles for generating the knowledge necessary for navigating complexity and the overwhelming planetary issues that confront humanity. Morin thereby has revealed himself as a profound humanist with a critical eye to humanity, and an optimist with deep respect for the complexity of the dangers facing us on a small, literally wonder-full planet, our Homeland Earth (Morin & Kern 1999).

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References Askegaard, S. (2014). Consumer culture theory: Neo-liberalism’s ‘useful idiots’? Marketing Theory, 14(4), 507–511. Askegaard, S. & Linnet, J. (2011). Towards an epistemology of consumer culture theory: Phenomenology and the context of context. Marketing Theory, 11(4), 381–404. Baudrillard, J. (1968). Le système des objets. Paris: Gallimard. Baudrillard, J. (1970). La société de consommation. Paris: Gallimard. Boorstin, Daniel (1962). The Image or What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Random House. Brunel, O. (2015). Edgar Morin et la théorie de la complexité. In E. Rémy & P. Robert-Demontrond, eds., Regards croisés sur la consommation. Tome 2 – Des structures au retour de l’acteur. Cormelles-le-Royal: Editions EMS, 265–286. Fitchett, J. A., Patsiaouras, G., & Davies, A. (2014). Myth and ideology in consumer culture theory. Marketing Theory, 14(4), 495–506. Heinrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species and Making Us Smarter. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kenrick, D. T. & Griskevicius, V. (2013). The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think. New York: Basic Books. Kofman, M. (1996). Edgar Morin. From Big Brother to Fraternity. London: Pluto Press. Miller, G. (2001). The Mating Mind. New York: Anchor Books. Morin, E. (1951/1970). L’homme et la mort. Paris: Seuil (réédition 1970). Morin, E. (1956). Le cinema ou l’Homme imaginaire. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Morin, E. (1962). L’èsprit du temps. Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle. Morin, E. (1967). Commune en France. La métamorphose de Plodémet. Paris: Fayard. Morin, E. (1969). La rumeur d'Orléans. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1973). Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1977). La méthode 1: La nature de la nature. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1980). La méthode 2: La vie de la vie. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1986). La méthode 3: La connaissance de la connaissance. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1991). La méthode 4: Les idées. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (1996). Rationalité et rationalisation. Cahiers de l'OCHA. Paris: OCHA, 5 (Pensée magique et alimentation aujourd'hui, Claude Fischler, dir.), 2 p. Morin, E. (2001). La méthode 5: L’humanité de l’humanité. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (2004). La méthode 6: L’éthique. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (2005 [1957/1972]). The Stars. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morin, E. (2008). On Complexity. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Morin, E., Lefort, C., & Castoriadis, C. (2008 [1968/1988]). Mai 68, la brèche suivi par Vingt ans aprés. Paris: Fayard. Morin, E. & Kern, A. B. (1993/1999). Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium. New York: Hampton Press. Thompson, C. J., Arnould, E., & Giesler, M. (2013). Discursivity, difference, and disruption: Genealogical reflections on the consumer culture theory heteroglossia. Marketing Theory, 13(2), 149–174.

33 BEYOND REDUCTIONISM, CONSTRUCTIVISM AND ARBITRARY SAMPLING IN CONSUMER RESEARCH THANKS TO CASTORIADIS Dominique Bouchet

One cannot help but wonder how such an in-depth and broad-ranging thesis as that of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) can be squeezed into a publication that is meant to be of a skin-deep nature. How can we take advantage of – and make a contribution to – the dissemination opportunity that we have been afforded by this compilation without simultaneously amplifying the general trend towards superficiality that is, quite rightly, the very objective of Castoriadis’ analysis and criticism? This was the very first question I put to myself. However, merely showing how important it is to make this interrogation and to attempt to show that we cannot just make do with a vague résumé of such a complex work does constitute a response worthy of Castoriadis himself. This brief overview will not seek to help those who take classes much as others might fill their shopping baskets. It is not a matter of providing short-cuts and a basket of quotes to copy and paste; rather will I try to highlight the new perspective that Castoriadis’ work opens for us.

A work that is not to be consumed Castoriadis’ work lies within the realm of anti-consumerism. It can only be truly understood and made use of by not treating it as a mere consumer product, but by looking at how it came about and how it holds together. Indeed is this not the case for all truly analytical work? Yet Castoriadis’ work is so prolific, encyclopedic and interdisciplinary that many would be tempted to just dip into it at random and pick out a feather to stick in their cap. It is better to underline some of the central, recurrent and dynamic principles of his contributions. I do say “principles” because, even if these are also the themes running through his work, Castoriadis studies and presents them as principles in terms of both society and the individuals who go to make up society. Castoriadis was not interested in who sells what to whomever wants to buy it. Nor did he care whether production or consumption should take theoretical or political preference. He delved much more deeply than that – to the level where production and consumption can be thought of as manifestations of dynamic principles. He was interested in the inseparable nature of the relationship between the social and the psychological and how it evolves or

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might evolve. In his view the question is not whether or not one should take an interest in some abstract demand or in the actual concrete behaviour of consumers. What matters is not to be distracted by representations, but rather to understand them. It was not a question, for him, of highlighting some structural determinism that might be at work in society: Castoriadis insists on the fact that a principle does not necessarily have to be directed or polarised. According to him it was much more important to understand more fully and to liberate the creative potential of human societies in a world where so many factors are working to transform modern, democratic society – which was supposed to gain control of itself and to be the master of its fate – into a self-referencing consumer society within which creativity is hamstrung and wherein long-wave, in-depth change is hidden below short-wave surface shimmers. Castoriadis can show anyone who is truly interested in how modern consumer society, in all its many forms and at its various levels – global, local, individual and collective – works to get beyond the reductionism, constructivism and arbitrary sampling that seems to suffice for so many researchers and institutions in this field. Perhaps the reader will be kind enough to allow me to put forward the following metaphor. Plunging seriously into the work of Castoriadis does not only mean that one can see underwater, it means that one learns how to swim. In fact the very manner in which he approaches and analyses his subject matter drives us to train ourselves rigorously, in depth and in the most interdisciplinary way possible to observe, analyse, understand and take action in today’s world. The mere fact – as we will see in greater detail later – that he brings together social history and psyche-soma (in other words the mode of living together and personal affects) encourages us to clearly distinguish between our own motivations and ambitions and scientific and political ideals; and this brings to the fore the inevitable political impact of what we do. Castoriadis reveals the importance of the distinctions and theoretical assumptions that inform the way in which we consider social phenomena and their evolution. He helps us to see through the outrageous simplifications, which so many scientific analyses and political proposals are rooted in. He also helps us to think about our own motivations and their interaction with society. I thought it of interest to underline the extent to which referring to Castoriadis’ theoretical and analytical work brings his readers to consider their own place in the consumerist society, which is the subject of his work. To put it another way, the route that a reader of Castoriadis follows raises his or her awareness; it makes us accountable. What Castoriadis incites the researcher to do, in a practical way, is, first and foremost, not to add to the self-referential literature, which is not only self-referential but also merely self-serving. And indeed such contributions would mean precisely meekly taking on board the system of consumption, which we are supposedly seeking to analyse and understand.

Concepts that do not help to simplify relationships and things Castoriadis does not make use of reductive concepts such as values, needs, norms and roles. Notwithstanding this, such concepts are useful for shedding light on certain fundamental nuances in social relationships. Quite a few former students will recall how these concepts helped them to observe consumer behaviour in particular. However, if we limit ourselves to this and we assume that these concepts are basic building blocks, we fail to see that, by highlighting a few nuances, we cover up yet more fundamental ones. Here is a striking example of this: how can we tell the difference between fundamental “values” and superficial ones? In

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other words: what are these so-called values themselves based upon? How do we think about this issue? What is imagination? What is the imaginary order? Is there a world within the imaginary world we produce that is more fundamental or more radical than another one? What, within these different imaginary worlds, is linked up? How can such an imaginary configuration evolve? We are not talking about a configuration like that of the solar system here; the laws of physics do not apply in this context. Still the image of a configuration is more useful that one of strata. Castoriadis did not seek to highlight determinisms, necessities or functions. He staunchly defended the view that, even though any society leans on an underlying natural stratum, one which has to be reckoned with, but it is not mirrored in it: “It does not reproduce or reflect this organization, is not determined by it in any way; instead, society finds in it a series of conditions, supports and stimuli, stops and obstacles” (Castoriadis 1975:319, 1987 (1975):234) Every society develops an image of all this, an image which “makes use in each case of the rational lines of what is given, but arranges them according to and subordinates them to significations which themselves do not belong to the rational order (nor, moreover, to a positive irrational order) but to the imaginary” (Castoriadis 1975:208, 1987 (1975):149). This world of social significations should not be considered as an unreal copy of a real world; neither should it be thought of as formed by that which is “expressible” in concepts and individual representations; nor should it be thought of as a system of relations added onto subjects and objects which themselves exist in and of themselves. Thus, a society defines its own universe of discourse. And each society creates a different one, “since each institution of society establishes what, for the society in question, is and is not, what is relevant and what is not, the weight, the value, the ‘translation’ of what is relevant – and the ‘response’ that correspond to this” (Castoriadis 1975:320, 1987 (1975):234). Castoriadis points out that history is impossible and inconceivable outside of the productive or creative imagination, outside of what he calls “the radical imaginary as this is manifested indissolubly in both the historical doing and in the constitution before any explicit rationality, of a universe of significations” (Castoriadis 1975:204, 1987 (1975):146). It is this institution of significations . . . which, for each society, posits what is and what is not, what has worth and what does not, and how, in what way is or is not does or does not have worth that which can actually be or have worth. This is what establishes the conditions and the common orientations of the doable and the representable, and in this holds together, in advance and by construction, so to speak, the indefinite and essentially open multitude of individuals, acts, objects, functions, institutions in the second-order and customary sense of the term, which in each case, concretely, constitutes a society. (Castoriadis 1975:492, 1998 (1975):368–369)

Paying attention to the social imaginary of consumer society This is what was of interest to Castoriadis in the current consumer society. Whatever is laid down as norms, roles or needs constitutes every bit as much a manifestation of what is deemed to be of importance as it is of that which is not deemed important. Since modern society sees itself as reasonable and in control of its various resources, it is appropriate to look at the

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processes of selection, substitution and interlinking of these various elements, whether they are currently thought to be of importance or not. In other words, according to Castoriadis, it is social creativity, creative imagination, liberation or domination by the imaginary order that should arouse our interest and not economic growth or the development of new consumer goods. In order to do this, we need to recognise the importance of the radical imaginary in society and to be able to tell the difference between various facets of creativity and the imaginary order therein. This is especially the case within our own society; we see ourselves as being or wanting to be in full possession of our means and resources, yet we should try and look at what robs us of even greater mastery and creativity. Castoriadis shows us that at the heart of our society lies a reductive sort of imaginary order. In his words: The economy in the broadest sense (from production to consumption) passes for the most perfect expression of the rationality of capitalism and of modern societies. But it is the economy that exhibits most strikingly the domination of the imaginary at every level – precisely because it claims to be entirely and exhaustively rational. (Castoriadis 1975:219, 1987 (1975):156) From Castoriadis’ standpoint the study of the society and the cultures of consumerism requires us to pay close attention to both old and new modes of development and inhibition of creativity and their relationships with modes of living together and representing that which is possible. Reading Castoriadis we see that very often research into the society – and cultures – of consumption have too much in common with the exegeses of the holy scriptures, which reigned supreme in pre-modern societies and which were thought to originate from outwith those societies. Castoriadis highlights the incompatibility that we still find within modern societies: they wish for autonomy (auto-nomos = creating one’s own norms), yet creativity within them appears to be monopolised by a set of “norms” that is increasingly removed from a conscious investigation of social cohesion. According to Castoriadis it is, however, the case that forms of activity and their representations in the various human groupings are not rooted mainly in the material conditions of existence at a given point in history, but – as we saw – in a radical imaginary order pertaining to any given society, which enables it to organise its world and its culture. Selections, combinations, interpretations and projections over time are an integral part of human culture. Castoriadis puts forward the idea that the most interesting aspect of the evolution and comprehension of cultural variation – and thereby, for instance, different types of consumerism – is not so much what we can see in practice, but rather the basis of such behaviour in the world of the imaginary.

Understanding the reality of the imaginary order in order to take cognisance of and to influence reality In this way Castoriadis throws light on the importance of the imagination and of the imaginary order within all societies and the domination of imagination by a certain type of imaginary order in our consumer society. This is not trivial because imagination remained suppressed by sociological and philosophical traditions. It is as though reason refuses to analyse itself and to face up its hidden, unknown foundations. Castoriadis, however, did dare to deal directly with the limits and

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foundations of reason. He pointed out the dead ends of rationalism, of determinism – whether of the Marxist vintage or not – and of Hegel’s logic. He showed that this clash was necessary, not only to push onwards with reason and comprehension, in as much as human nature allows it, but to broaden the field of what is possible and to heighten our autonomy. Thus, Castoriadis invoked the necessity of the imaginary order not only from a pure logical deductive reasoning but also from a practical active approach. He demonstrated the existence of the imaginary order both in the domain of reason and that of action. He called for both the comprehension and the practice of the imaginary order and highlights the fact that, even when it is neither understood in theoretical terms not appropriate in practice, the imaginary order lies at the heart of all rationality and passion, science and politics. Traditionally imagination was thought of as an ability to reproduce or, at best, to make combinations. Castoriadis, on the other hand, identifies the imaginary order as something that is fundamental both for each individual’s psyche and for society as a whole. The imaginary order is the potential for creating – and even of creating something ex nihilo. It is not a question of laying down what must emerge from the imaginary world, but rather of looking at its potential and of taking it seriously. Because only thus can a society that seeks to be modern (in other words: one that seeks to understand itself, to reform itself and to reconsider the way it operates) actually achieve this. To persist in being interested exclusively in the purported reality of things and their interrelationships amounts to letting oneself go to one’s own illusions, i.e. the illusions of a society that rationalises and of individuals who consume (and work-out or are out of work) whilst refusing to face up to their responsibility in the working-out of what will make sense in the future. If we go along with Castoriadis’ ideas, we come to see as terribly superficial, unreal and grim the prevailing interest for the way in which consumers seem to seek identity by emblazoning themselves with some trademark or other and for firms boasting about how they are at the cutting edge of innovation. Each and every one convinces themselves that they hold the key to individual and social development. But, as Castoriadis explains to us: Man is not this need which contains its “proper object” as its complement, a lock with its key (to be found or to be made). Man can exist only by defining himself in each case as a set of needs and corresponding objects, but he always outstrips these definitions – and, if he outstrips them (not only as a permanent possibility but in the effectivity of the historical movement), this is because they spring out of him, because he invents them (not arbitrarily, to be sure, for there is always nature, the minimum of coherence required by rationality, and previous history), and hence because he makes them by making things and by making himself, and because no rational, natural or historical definition allows us to establish them once and for all. (Castoriadis 1975:190, 1998(1975):135) Thus, the concept of needs here in this quote ends up turning into something radically different from what it usually refers to in the consumer behaviour literature, in which being able to distinguish between needs, wants, demand and expectations is often more than enough. Furthermore, following Castoriadis, I believe it even more important than picking out the lack of nuances of such a conceptual apparatus, to reveal a glaring addiction to the univocal and the referential, to simplification and generalisation. Thus even the much more suitable concept of

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desire would lead many an economist or manager, like sociologists or psychologists, to not only define clearly as a concept, but also to identify exactly what it should refer to and which they often believe they could deal with better, provided they were given a precise and clear foundation. Such a wish emanates from their desire, and the lack of recognition of this fact reveals a clear misunderstanding of the specificity of human behaviour. With this misunderstanding humans are treated almost like they were plants: “Identify the seed and you will know what is most likely to occur and how to deal with it”. (Bouchet 2011)

A more accurate interpretation of reality including the vagueness that enhances creativity Rather than contributing to a pretence of social research, Castoriadis would recommend a serious enquiry into contemporary significations, into our social imaginary order. According to him, “the ultimate objective of social and historical research is the restitution and the analysis as far as possible, of these significations for each society under study” (1997, p. 84). Castoriadis’ work is a very original and radically different trans-disciplinary work that clearly shows that rationality as conceived up to our modern times remains incomplete and even mutilating as long as it does not seriously take into consideration its foundation and limits and has not integrated the radical imaginary order into its definition of reality; this is the case both at the level of the individual subject and of the social-historical order. Castoriadis is not only interested in contributing to a better understanding of human behaviour at the individual and collective level. He also believes that if humans are to master the consequences of their actions today for themselves and for the whole planet, they will have to take their imaginary significations much more seriously, instead of just making fun of them so to speak. In relation to social change and sustainable development, some readers might here come to think about the role of political institutions such as national governments and NGOs as opposed to their own roles as researchers or managers. Thus, I chose to end up this much-tooshort introduction with a longer quote which not only summarises some of the points made here, but also clarifies the difference between what Castoriadis refers to as instituting power and the political institutions that the media refer to every day. We cannot conceive such creation as the work of one or of a few individuals who might be designated by name, but only as that of the collective-anonymous imaginary, of the instituting imaginary, to which in this regard, we shall give the name instituting power. Such power can never be rendered fully explicit; it is exercised, for example, on account of the fact that every newborn baby in society has imposed upon it, via its socialization, a language. Now, a language is not only a language; it is a world. The new-born infant also has imposed upon it various forms of conduct and behaviour, feelings of attraction and repulsion, and so on. This instituting power, I said, can never be made fully explicit; it remains in large part hidden within the depths of society. At the same time, however, every society institutes, and cannot live without instituting, some kind of explicit power, which I relate to the notions of the political sphere in the neutral sense (le politique); in other words, it constitutes the instances or authorities capable, explicitly and effectively,

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of issuing sanctionable injunctions. Why is such a power necessary, why does it belong among the ultra-rare instances of social-historical universals? We can see why by noting straight off that every society must maintain itself, preserve itself, and defend itself. It is constantly being challenged, first of all, by the world in its very unfolding, the infraworld as it exists before being constructed by society. It is menaced by itself, by its own imaginary, which can rise up and challenge the institution as it already exists. It is also threatened by individual transgressions, a result of the fact that at the core of each human being is to be found a singular psyche, irreducible and indomitable. It is threatened, finally, until a new order arises, by the other societies. Also and above all, each society is immersed in a temporal dimension which itself cannot be mastered, a time-to-come that is to-be-made and to-be-done, in relation to which there are not only enormous uncertainties but also decisions that must be taken. (Castoriadis 1996:159–160, 1997:84–85)

To finish off, here are some possible research avenues inspired by the concept of the imaginary, as used by Castoriadis We could look at the evolution or changes in the imaginary world in our society, which some would refer to as neoliberal and others as capitalistic. We could also consider the fact that, in but a few generations (roughly speaking, from 1850 to 1950), the topic of consumption has taken on ever-greater importance at the expense of that of production, in the language of businessmen and politicians. Closer to home, neoliberal discussions are sprouting up all over the place and refer less and less to consumption and more and more to the entrepreneurial spirit. Everyone has to assess their performance, quantify their services performed – even in their leisure time. Everything has to be dealt with in entrepreneurial terms. We manage our time, our bodies and our relationships. Running, eating, shagging, training, educating, everything has to be conceived from the entrepreneur’s standpoint – far more than from that of the producer or consumer. We behave as if everyone must absolutely follow the same rules and as if the most heartfelt desire of every single person and every organisation were to constantly assess whatever they happen to be involved in. Drawing inspiration from Castoriadis and viewing any socially shared imagination as a dynamic configuration rather than as an ideology or a superstructure, might we not look into this replacement of earlier productive and mercantile references by current entrepreneurial references and fascinations? Just how far might we get in tracking forms and outcomes? Moreover, since Castoriadis invites us not only to think about social matters but also to take action within society, would it not be a good idea to think about what strings we could pull in order to trigger the wish to transform the world?

References Bouchet, Dominique. 2011. “Desire.” Pp. 440–4 in Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, Volume 1, edited by Dale Southerton. Los Angeles & London: Sage. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1975. L’institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Seuil. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987(1975). The imaginary institution of society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1996. “Imaginaire politique grec et moderne.” Pp. 159–82 in La montée de l’insignifiance. Les carrefours du labyrinthe IV. Paris: Seuil. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. “The Greek and the modern political imaginary.” Pp. 84–107 in World in fragments. Writings on politics, society, psychoanalysis, and the imagination, edited and translated by David Ames Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

34 ŽIŽEK: A PERVERT’S GUIDE TO THE LIBIDINAL NARCISSISTIC ECONOMY Alan Bradshaw

According to Slavoj Ž ižek, when we engage in everyday consumption, we wade through ideology. Ž ižek understands ideology not as top-down explicit political discourses, but as a subtle affair where everyday preferences and spontaneities are implicated in a libidinal and narcissistic economy. Ž ižek offers nuanced interpretation of consumerism that allows an expanded analysis of political economy infused by psychoanalytic insight and dialectical thought. He presents a reading of Lacan, alongside Hegel, to develop a highly idiosyncratic critical theory that is of relevance to consumer research. Epistemologically, Ž ižek accepts Lacan’s formula that the unconscious is structured as a language and therefore much of his gigantic oeuvre should be read as interpretation. Of course, Ž ižek has little interest in rational stipulation and is skeptical about the possibility of fully self-aware subjects – he would probably, were he to notice it, disregard Consumer Culture Theory’s preference for interviewing consumers – and instead focusses on the domain of irrational drives which are to be taken as the predominant perception of the unconscious. Ž ižek can be located within Lacan’s four major discourses: ‘the master’, the subject who speaks with absolute authority; ‘the hysteric’ who seeks to disrupt and resist the master’s authority; ‘the university’ where knowledge occupies the position of the speaking agent; and finally, ‘the pervert’, where the excluded symptomal point becomes the speaking position (see Dean, 2009:p. 79). So whilst much Consumer Culture Theory may be read as variances of the first three discourses, Ž ižek should be read as the pervert, which he sees as the proper political position for the radical analyst (hence his film titles: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and the Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, both of which provide user-friendly introductions to his method of perverted interpretation). Clearly, performing perversion is controversial and Ž ižek is, in no small part, defined by crude jokes and clownish chaos. Nevertheless for consumer research, where desire, daydream and fantasy are clearly central to consumer subjectivity, Ž ižek’s venture to voice the excluded libidinal unconscious offers a deeply relevant, if not exciting and terrifying, shift in subject position. To begin, we encounter the idea of consumption as the ideologically encoded site which holds the possibility of an authentic fulfilment of our true self (see arguments in Holt, 2002). In Ž ižek’s thought, the logic of consumerism transforms the possibility of achieving this

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authenticity into an injunction; something that we are obliged to realise and therefore an irresistible superego. This is a superego that tells us to do more, to be better and to realise our true self. But it also is a superego that we can only disappoint. This renders us, Ž ižek claims, as “a subject who is extremely narcissistic. Far from allowing him to float freely in his undisturbed balance, however, this narcissistic self-enclosure leaves the subject to the (not so) tender mercies of the superego injunction to enjoy” (Ž ižek, 2000:p. 368). For Ž ižek, consumers continue to obey the demand to pursue an enjoyment that they already know will elude them. And so, the critical marketing scholar who intervenes by telling a teenager that their enjoyment of an overpriced sneaker is actually a commodity fetish is embarrassingly naive. For Ž ižek, the teenager already knows this and has opted for the commodity fetish. But what choice did he really have? For Ž ižek the point when we accept the injunction is the point of our interpellation as consumers, but it is an interpellation that comes with a twist. It is not necessary for consumers to make naïve identifications with their objects of consumption, and to actually believe that the authentic fulfilment will be found in their next Coca-Cola. Rather ideology works when we continue to practice it because we do not believe it. It is as though we become duped consumers precisely at the moment that we are not duped. As he puts it: if there is an ideological experience at its purest, at its zero-level, then it occurs the moment we adopt an attitude of ironic distance, laughing at the follies in which we are ready to believe – it is at this moment of liberating laughter, when we look down on the absurdity of our faith, that we become pure subjects of ideology, that ideology exerts its strongest hold over us. (Ž iž ek, 2010a:p. 3) An example is the huge viewership of Rebecca Black’s terrible pop song Friday which allowed viewers, via their ironic appreciation, to both disavow yet nonetheless participate and revel in culture industry’s banal representations, complete with its enthusiastic embracement of clearly idiotic consumer pleasures (see Douglas Lain’s wonderful explanation of this phenomenon to his daughter, www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZDNhKBxgTw). In this case, the more obviously stupid is the representation, the more ironic the gaze, and in turn, the stronger the ideology. An important shift occurs in the movement between the superego and the big Other (from Freud to Lacan). Whereas the superego is an internalised psychical apparatus whose role in relation to the ego may be compared to that of a judge or a censor (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973:p. 435), the big Other operates as the symbolic order. For example, when we speak, Ž ižek argues, “we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded in our accepting and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions” (Ž ižek, 2006:p. 9). These rules and presuppositions include formal rules of language, about which we can achieve partial awareness; there are rules of conduct which inform the basic power relations between people, there are rules and meanings that we are ignorant of (but are haunted by) and finally “there are rules and meanings I know of, but must not be seen to know of – dirty or obscene innuendos that one passes over in silence in order to keep up the proper appearances” (p. 9). But from where does this idea of ‘proper appearances’ arise and why does it concern private discourse? The injunction comes, Ž ižek tells us, from the big Other who is like a reified single agent that always watches over us: “it exists only in so far as subjects act as if it exists”

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(p. 10) and it is sustained by our continuous activity. Therefore, crucially, whenever consumers exchange symbols “they do not simply interact with each other, but always also refer to the virtual big Other” (p. 11). The big Other, then, may be understood as a Godlike phantom who demands that we all consume in pursuit of pleasure and authentic self-actualisation. We do so, even though we know the demand to be false. So whilst consumption is often understood between the polls of direct use value (the benefits of good healthy food, the quality of a car) or the distinctive possibilities to impress our habitus (wearing expensive clothes to signal status), Ž ižek insists that we should understand both polls as mediated by our ironic investment (for the benefit of the big Other) in what we know to be the imaginary of pleasurable and meaningful experiences. The broader context of why ideology works this way is, Ž ižek (2009) argues, found in the collapse of the performative power of ruling ideology. Yet power continues its reproduction notwithstanding – “today, we only imagine that we do not ‘really believe’ in our ideology - in spite of this imaginary distance, we continue to practise it” (p. 3). Such double thinking produces disavowed behaviour which helps us to understand why, despite the growing non-belief in Western capitalism, ecological destruction, etc., these rejections arguably make things worse, not better. For example, consider the ‘Western Buddhists’ who claim to be cured of any beliefs and now accept social reality the way it is. For Ž ižek (2001:p. 15), the stance is a fetish and a case of post-ideological cynicism: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is – what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw. For Ž iž ek such forms of what he terms ‘Western Buddhism’, in which disavowal is assumed to be redemptive, are capitalism’s perfect ideological supplement. Accordingly Starbucks’ claims to offer us redemption from the sin of consuming Starbucks because they promise to donate a sum from each purchase to developing contexts, needs to be understood as ideology (Ž ižek, 2010b). For all its internal logic of disavowal, the gesture of buying coffee that promises to solve the problems created by buying coffee forms a perfect tautological erasure of real politics. Capitalism, therefore, often functions like a “chocolate laxative” (Ž iž ek, 2010b), in that it represents itself as the object of its own containment. Indeed much consumerism can be read as a tautological erasure as we endlessly shift between enjoying the hedonistic excesses as we give way to our desires, but also constantly practise sacrifice and self-discipline. It is this double bind of commodity fetishism, for Ž ižek, that constitutes much ideology and is inscribed into our social relations. A key pivot of Ž ižek’s theorising of consumer culture is the relationship between transgression and consumption. It is entirely a mistake, for Ž ižek, to imagine our current ideological condition as grounded in prohibition and discipline. It is the opposite: “in the generalised perversion of late capitalism, transgression itself is solicited, we are daily bombarded by gadgets and social forms which not only enable us to live with our perversions, but even directly conjure new perversions” (Ž ižek, 2001: p. 21). Consumer culture, therefore, comprises a libidinal economy in which the production of objects does not exist to meet or satisfy existing needs, but rather to create the needs they claim to satisfy – as he puts it “the publicity usually operates in such a way that the consumer ‘becomes aware of desires they were not even aware they

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possessed’” (p. 21). Interestingly, Ž ižek tells us that this productive libidinal energy pivots on an asymmetrical relationship between lack and excess; “although they are semblances which always fall short of the full jouissance, they are nonetheless experienced as excessive, as the surplus-enjoyment – in short, in them the ‘not enough’, the falling short coincides with the excess” (p. 23). Here, Ž ižek notes a general tendency within consumer culture for self-enclosure in the pursuit of narcissistic pleasures. Lacan used the term les lathouses to describe consumerist objectgadgets that captivate the libido with the promise of delivering excess pleasure, but which only reproduce the lack itself (see Ž ižek, 2012). Consequentially, the ‘libidinal economy’ (Ž ižek’s alternative term for consumer culture) gradually replaces relationships with human Others by their captivation with such objects. For example, in contrast to celebratory narratives of new social possibilities presented by the internet and social media, Ž ižek argues that the internet ushers a radical form of inauthentic communication that limits the possibility of collective meaning creation and understanding. This is because, he argues, there is a decline of ‘symbolic efficiency’ caused by the huge volume of data transmission, in which we cannot but reject much of the endless flows of information. In such a context, the promise of the internet to generate collectively shared co-produced meaning short-circuits. The actual form of engagement that emerges is best exemplified in a typical Ž ižek example – the Masturbathon (Ž ižek, 2009); an event where hundreds gather to masturbate simultaneously. According to Ž ižek the event presents a telling contradiction because the basis of the collective immersion is each individual’s narcissistic isolation, therefore the collective actively excludes “intersubjectivity proper”. As he (2010b:p. 25) puts it: Is the typical World Wide Web surfer today, sitting alone in front of a PC screen, not more and more a monad with no direct windows onto reality, encountering only virtual simulacra, and yet immersed more than ever into the global network, synchronously communicating with the entire globe? “Masturbathon,” which builds a collective out of individuals who are ready to share the solipsism of their own stupid enjoyment, is the form of sexuality which fits perfectly the cyberspace coordinates. This tendency correlates with a broader context of “toxic subjects”, where to be in the mere presence of the other is already to be exposed to excess; what is toxic is ultimately the Neighbour as such, the abyss of its desire and its obscene enjoyment. The ultimate aim of all rules governing interpersonal relations, then, is to quarantine or neutralise this toxic dimension, to reduce the Neighbour to a fellow man. (Ž ižek, 2010b:p. 46) At the extreme margins of what he terms “political correctness”, Ž ižek speculates that any excessive proximity can now become interpreted as violent aggression and he relates personal experiences of being accused of “visual rape” because he “looked a woman in the eye” in the United States, and also of “verbal rape”, for using a “dirty word” (Ž ižek, 2013:p. 84) (apparently Ž iž ek’s visits to the United States abound with such traumas). Ž iž ek believes that intertwining the very real forms of harassment, such as rape, with the narcissistic notion of the individual who experiences the close proximity of others as an intrusion, constitutes the ‘narcissistic economy’. Further examples include what he claims to be the ‘obsession’

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with passive smoking which he sees as a sublimated fear of co-presence with the Other as implicitly insidiously murderous. Similarly he notes the rise of asexual characters in films such as the Da Vinci Code, and, to his horror, Quantum of Solace was the first James Bond movie in which “Bond didn’t have sex with the Bond Girl. . . . Something weird is going on in Hollywood” (2013:p. 82). He observes the rise of online dating which alienates people from the possibility of falling in love because in the narcissistic economy “the idea of falling in love is considered to be something terrible” (2013:p. 81). This pattern of seeking to be “cocooned and safe”, he argues, over-determines consumption generally: “coffee without caffeine, alcohol-free beer, cigarettes without nicotine, even sex without sex . . . (in this paradox) any form of passionate attachment is seen as a threat in our narcissistic, solipsistic, and individualistic culture” (p. 83). This paradox is pursued into marketing, which Ž iž ek reads as the business of contriving the value of nothingness. For example, noting how there is an inverse relationship between the weight of a Hershey Bar and its price, Ž iž ek brings the tendency to its logical end point and concludes that Hershey will eventually sell a package with nothing in it “and this nothing will have a price which can be precisely determined” (2010a:p. 210). Ž iž ek interprets much marketing activity as a leveraging of this nothingness with brands like Nike – already very close to a totally emptied out site of production because its material production, marketing strategy, distribution, etc. are outsourced, leaving a formal legal corporation with few employees, few material assets and a financialised existence – approaching a sort of “‘nothing in itself ’ – nothing but the pure brand mark, the ‘empty’ Master-Signifier which connotes the cultural experience pertaining to a certain ‘life-style’” (p. 210). Clearly this ideal is impossible because ultimately an object will have to be sold to which this otherwise “pure brand” will be attached. However “the art,” for marketing he concludes, “is to find the limit point (the minimal positive content of a product and the maximum of the brand name) at which point the consumer is still prepared to buy” (p. 211). Potentially, Ž iž ek’s most forceful intervention into consumerism arrives in his discussions of ecological catastrophe. To be sure, we are ‘living in the end of times’ and Ž iž ek reads much of the attendant green consumerism as a type of pathetic bargaining with reality instead of a commitment to genuine transformation (Ž iž ek, 2010a). In this regard, any sustainability scholar who believes that they must simply inform consumers of the stark consequences of consumption or persuade them to change tact, is naïve because they are failing to acknowledge that this ideology functions in such a way that it determines “what we have to know but have to pretend we do not know” (p. 4). Here, the ideology of consumer society is one in which the actuality of ecological destruction is rendered invisible. For Ž iž ek, the spectre is an “oppressive web of new regulations” (p. 4) and ideology is marshalled against this possibility. Therefore sustainability becomes an ideological narrative whose task is the political erasure of the possibility of, in real terms, limiting capital. This is a paradox; namely the key to the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such, but rather with breaking a particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production and it is this latter course that we have to pretend that we do not know. To that end, it is clear that the state political elites serve capital and will not control and regulate capital even now, when the survival of humanity is at stake. Instead, we see symbolic gestures – such as the recent Paris Agreement – which create the illusion of meaningful action. These gestures find parallels in consumer behaviour when we are invited to participate in partial solutions to absolute problems. That these partial solutions create the impression that real regulation is unnecessary, at least for now, is the core of their ideology, as is their function

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of making consumers the responsible agent. As Ž iž ek puts it, this is an “ideological trick”: “we are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspaper, etc. in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalised – it is not the entire organisation of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change” (2010b:p. 22). To conclude, Ž iž ek identifies a series of concrete problems to be found in our consumer culture – or libidinal and narcissistic economy. Critically, he resists accepting the ideology of consumer self-perception as an accurate reflection of contemporary society – arguably Ž iž ek should therefore be read as fundamentally contra-CCT – because such a viewpoint blurs key distinctions between capitalists and proletarians, or masters and slaves or indeed, between citizens and consumers. Ž iž ek wants us to instead recognise this articulation as the rhetorical toolbox of the Right and a continued playing out of a post-1968 appropriation of radical intervention. In the final analysis, then, his ‘unconscious is politics’ position might best be put to imagining how we might break the hold of the superego’s injunction to enjoy. As Ž iž ek put it (2010a:p. 74), how can we “include in the freedom to enjoy also the freedom not to enjoy, the freedom from enjoyment?”

References Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Durham: Duke University Press. Holt, Douglas. 2002. Why brands cause trouble. Journal of Consumer Research. Vol. 29(June):70–90. Laplanche, Jean & Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. 1973. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2000. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2001. On Belief. London: Routledge. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2006. How to Read Lacan. London: Granta. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2010a. Living in the End of Times. London: Verso. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2010b. Violence. London: Profile Books. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2012. The Year of Living Dangerously. London: Verso. Ž iž ek, Slavoj. 2013. Demanding the Impossible. London: Polity.

PART X

Postscript

35 TO ERR IS HUMAN: ON FAILING TO READ (AND FORGETTING TO REMEMBER) THE CLASSICS Stephen Brown

What we preserve of the books we read . . . is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion. Pierre Bayard (2007, 53)

True confessions On perusing the contents page of this learned volume and working my way down the list of leading thinkers, I reckon I’ve read the works of every single one. Granted, my reading is patchy in certain cases, largely confined to their best-known and most-cited publications. In other cases, if truth be told, I struggled to understand their alarmingly erudite arguments. However, that’s only to be expected when engaging with intellectual firepower of the highest calibre. All things considered, I think I’ve done reasonably well reading-wise. Diligence is my middle name. So much for the italicized names on the contents pages, the part pertaining to the contributors. When it comes to the subject matter of the chapters – the authorities not the authors, as it were – I’m less well equipped. Of the 34 founding fathers covered by this volume, I estimate that I’m well read in about seven of them, reasonably familiar with the works of twelve more, vaguely acquainted with another eight or so and woefully ignorant of the remainder. Some of the latter I attempted then promptly abandoned in despair. Some I’ve picked up with good intentions but never got beyond the back cover blurb. And some, to tell the God’s honest truth, I’ve never heard of before now.1 I’m conscious of course that more than a few of you may be appalled by this confession.2 In fairness, however, my unfamiliarity with the classics is hardly unusual. The dirty secret of academia is that we’re less well read than we pretend to be. Such is the outpouring of books and articles nowadays – to say nothing of social media and so on – it is almost impossible for any single scholar to keep abreast of their field.3 And filling in the gaps is a pipe dream for the most part. Who among us hasn’t bought a must-read book that never gets read? A Brief History of Time is a classic of the BISI (Bought It, Shelved It) genre, as is Finnegans Wake for literature lovers. The same principle applies in our own neck of the woods. I once bought Glas in a moment of Derridean delirium and its spine remains uncracked to this day.4 It sits,

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unmolested, alongside Écrits, One Thousand Plateaus and several exalted volumes by Ž ižek. All similarly unsullied. You should be ashamed of yourself! I hear some say. But should I? I bought the things, didn’t I? They’re sitting within arms’ reach, aren’t they? I’m absorbing their insights by osmosis, am I not? I might get round to reading them sometime soon . . . before too long . . . maybe next year, mightn’t I? They’re part of my extended self. Or should that be extended shelf? I’m no worse, surely, than the bestselling novelist Nicholson Baker, who once wrote a book about John Updike, America’s preeminent man of letters. In U & I, Baker informs us that John Updike was his childhood hero, a role model, the giant on whose shoulders he wanted to stand.5 Yet he also reveals that he’s read the tiniest fraction of Updike’s output and feels no shame whatsoever about the shortfall. On the contrary, it’s unavoidable (Baker 1991, 32): As with nearby friends we seldom see because their very proximity removes the passing need to drop by, so the living writer’s continuing productivity dulls any urgent feeling we might have about filling in our unread gaps in his oeuvre. What he’s saying is that we don’t have to have read everything in order to speak authoritatively on something or someone. Sampling theory doesn’t only apply to empirical research; it applies to background reading as well. I know this for a fact because I have written articles on Russ Belk and Morris Holbrook – to name but two – and although I have probably read more of their vast output than any other consumer researcher, I also know that much of my reading was redundant. I got everything I needed without reading everything.6 Reading the literature, in short, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. Doctoral students, in my experience, are especially susceptible to the completist mind-set. They feel they have to read everything that has ever been written on the subject of their thesis. That way madness lies, to say nothing of prevarication, procrastination and unnecessary delays in dissemination.

How to not to Alongside Nicholson Baker, another important advocate of abstinence is the French literary theorist Pierre Bayard. In his seemingly irreverent yet eminently sensible text How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, he notes that not-reading is the norm. Yes, there are social pressures to read to excess – especially in academia – and, moreover, to read closely, carefully, intensely, incessantly. Close reading, nonetheless, often obscures the big picture in can’t-see-the-woodfor-the-trees fashion. It is easier, Bayard (2007) says, to do justice to a work if you haven’t read it in its entirety, or even opened the thing. Skimming, leafing, perusing, browsing, flicking through and dipping into are perfectly acceptable forms of reading, albeit in order to preserve their dignity many scholars purport to be “speed reading”. This is just a fancy, self-serving expression that converts what is widely seen as a vice – not reading properly – into a virtue, a means of lording it over those of us with less cerebral bandwidth: Skimming books without actually reading them does not in any way prevent you from commentating on them. It’s even possible that this is the most efficient way to absorb books, respecting their inherent depth and richness without getting lost in the details. (Bayard 2007, 15)7

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More than that, Bayard indicates that not-reading is a multifaceted phenomenon. There is a spectrum of not-reading that includes: (1) books you don’t know, (2) books you have skimmed, (3) books you have heard of, (4) books you have forgotten. The most pertinent of these for present purposes is the final one.8 For all my failings on the classics front, I have read an awful lot of stuff by an awful lot of the scholars summarised herein, to say nothing of the summarisers. On more than a few occasions I have almost been reduced to tears trying to grasp what they’re going on about. But even the books and articles I’ve benefitted from most have faded over time. All I remember of, say, Morris Holbrook’s wondrous essay on Charlie Parker, Russ Belk’s brilliant riff on his Groucho glasses or John Sherry’s sublime chapter on postmodern consumer research is a warm feeling and a fragment or two of content. The same is true of Baudrillard’s Illusion of the End, Geertz’s Works and Lives and Benjamin’s epic Arcades project, which I well remember reading one Christmas while surrounded by several screaming children, all since grown up. Happy days. All of the above are within easy reach and there’s nothing to stop me renewing my acquaintance with them. Rereading is different from reading, however, because the reader has changed in the interim (see Russell and Levy 2012). And, in any event, the pile of books to be read for the first time usually precludes backpedalling. The forgetting process is important, nevertheless, since readers remember different things about an article or book. When this is added to the well-established fact – by reception theorists – that our initial readings of the same text often differ wildly, the scope for scholarly miscommunication is vast. Retention theory, if that is what it is, is a subject worthy of further investigation. For the meantime, it is sufficient to note that it too is a form of non-reading: Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. . . . When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. . . . We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. In the end we are left with falsified remnants of books, analogous to the screen memories discussed by Freud. (Bayard 2007, 47–48, 56)

Four-letter words Amusing though Bayard’s analysis of avoidance undoubtedly is, it fails to accommodate affect. If, fragmentary facts aside, the only thing that remains from a reading is an overall feeling about the book or article’s argument, then future research into not-reading should focus on experiential aspects of the practice. Accordingly, the following four-fold classification of encounters with the classics is tentatively suggested: OMG, LOL, WTF and FFS. OMG refers to works that bowl readers over, leaving them slack-jawed in astonishment and undying admiration for the author’s incredible insights. In my own case, Clifford Geertz is an OMG author, largely on account of his outstanding way with words. Whatever else he is, he’s a writer of the first rank. Friedrich Nietzsche also falls into this category, because his insights are

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delivered with such energy, such élan, such virtuosity, such vim. Mad Freddy, for me at any rate, is the philosophical equivalent of a schoolmasterly slap on the back of the head. Wake up, boy! Of all the OMGs I’ve experienced, though, Walter Benjamin stands alone. Not on account of his literary style, which can be gnomic and knotty, but for his sympathetic approach to popular culture and consumer behaviour. Walt’s essays on discarded possessions, decrepit shopping arcades and a vaguely remembered advertising campaign for Bullrich Salt are works of wonder (Box 35.1).9 Everything you need to know about WB is encapsulated in the fact that his most famous publication, The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction, originally contained an encomium to Mickey Mouse.

BOX 35.1

PASSAGES FROM WALTER BENJAMIN’S PASSAGES

Many years ago, on the streetcar, I saw a poster that, if things had their due in this world, would have found its admirers, historians, exegetes, and copyists just as surely as any great poem or painting. And, in fact, it was both at the same time. As is sometimes the case with very deep, unexpected impressions, however, the shock was too violent: the impression, if I may say so, struck with such force that it broke through the bottom of my consciousness and for years lay irrecoverable somewhere in the darkness. I knew only that it had something to do with “Bullrich Salt” and that the original warehouse for this seasoning was a small cellar on Flottwell Street, where for years I had circumvented the temptation to get out at this point and inquire about the poster. There I traveled on a colorless Sunday afternoon in that northern Moabit, a part of town that had already once appeared to me as though built by ghostly hands for just this time of day. That was when, four years ago, I had come to Lützow Street to pay customs duty, according to the weight of its enameled blocks of houses, on a china porcelain city which I had had sent from Rome. There were omens then along the way to signal the approach of a momentous afternoon. And, in fact, it ended with the story of the discovery of an arcade, a story that is too berlinisch to be told just now in this Parisian space of remembrance. Prior to this incident, however, I stood with my two beautiful companions in front of a miserable café, whose window display was enlivened by an arrangement of signboards. On one of these was the legend “Bullrich Salt.” It contained nothing else but the words; but around these written characters there was suddenly and effortlessly configured that desert landscape of the poster. I had it once more. Here is what it looked like. In the foreground, a horse-drawn wagon was advancing across the desert. It was loaded with sacks bearing the words “Bullrich Salt.” One of these sacks had a hole, from which the salt had already trickled a good distance on the ground. In the background of the desert landscape, two posts held a large sign with the words “Is the Best.” But what about the trace of salt down the desert trail? It formed letters, and these letters formed a word, the word “Bullrich Salt.” Was not the preestablished harmony of a Leibniz mere child’s play compared to this tightly orchestrated predestination in the desert? And didn’t that poster furnish an image for things that no one in this mortal life has yet experienced? An image of the everyday in Utopia? Source: Benjamin (1999, 173–174)

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LOL is a heightened version of OMG, where the arguments are so singular, so outlandish, so counterintuitive that helpless laughter is the only reasonable reaction. Karl Marx, as far as I am concerned, fits the bill to a T. I defy any reader of the Eighteenth Brumaire not to laugh out loud at Karl’s unrelenting invective. Ditto his description of the dancing chair in the celebrated commodity fetishism section of Capital. Jean Baudrillard is better yet, nothing less than the P.G. Wodehouse of postmodernism. It never ceases to amaze me that august academics take Baudrillard deadly seriously and, as often as not, castigate him for conceptual shortcomings. They fail to appreciate that he’s a spoofer. Hyperbole is his default mode of discourse. He makes the most outrageous statements in order to see if anyone will fall for them and whether sober-sided scholars will rise to the bait. Jacques Derrida is cut from a similar cloth, I suspect, but his writings leave me cold. Just as I find stand-up comedians like Stuart Lee and Jimmy Carr utterly unamusing, so too Frère Jacques does nothing for me personally. WTF pertains to predominantly negative reactions, our failure to connect with the content or communicator. At the same time, though, there’s an accompanying sense that the significance of the topic is such that it’s well worth persevering. We stick with it, in other words, and the outcome is a hard-won appreciation of the scholar concerned. Treat them mean to keep them keen is a tried and tested principle of seduction and, appropriately, it’s an approach that explains much of the allure of leading French intellectuals like Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Lyotard. Foucault, Barthes and Bourdieu aren’t quite as abstruse as the others, primarily on account of their empirical emphasis, but there’s no doubt that you have to fight for the right to party with Jean-Paul Sartre. The same is true of Anglophone postmodernists such as Paul de Man, Slavoj Ž ižek and, especially, Fredric Jameson, whose gigantic sentences – all grammatically correct, all with clauses and sub-clauses cemented into place – are almost unreadable until you realise that his semicolons are the key to comprehension. Would that the same could be said for the FFS category, where there are no redeeming features whatsoever. So much so that the book or article is cast aside in fury and recalled, not in tranquillity as William Wordsworth recommends, but with the rueful shake of the head reserved for time-wasters. I guess we all have academic blind spots and I’m no different. For me, the epitome of FFS is Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1990), though Greimas, Gramsci, Adorno, Habermas and, heaven help us, Homi K. Bhabha also rattle their shackles in my personal chamber of horrors. Gender Trouble takes the biscuit, though, and not because I’m an androcentric misogynist. I’ve read a fair amount of feminist scholarship from Faludi to Wolf and I even contributed a chapter to Catterall et al.’s (2000) Marketing and Feminism. Butler, however, is such an abysmal writer that I can’t bear to read her incomprehensible sentences and I can only assume that it’s the incomprehensibility that renders her deep and meaningful for other, less unforgiving, readers.10 But what do I know?

To ERR is human Crude as it is, our experiential reading and remembrance (ERR) typology can be applied beyond the confines of the classics. Canonical contributions to CCT can be conveniently categorised as well. Belk’s corpus has OMG written all over it, Holbrook is LOL and then some, WTF is Dominique Bouchet, whose bewilderingly brilliant contributions paved the way for marketing’s postmodern moment. And FFS, for me at least, is the diabolic duo Vargo and Lusch. Service-Dominant Logic, IMHO, is more than merely infernal, it occupies the ninth circle of conceptual hell alongside Wroe Alderson, Shelby Hunt and, yes, yours truly.

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My inclusion in the chamber of horrors has nothing to do with false modesty, nor is it a sneaky rhetorical manoeuvre to deflect criticism of this chapter (a pre-emptive self-strike, so to speak). I’m included because there is a fifth category in our ERR inventory. Namely, OHNO. Unlike FFS, WTF, LOL and OMG, though, OHNO isn’t an acronym. It is literally Oh No, the reaction of an author who makes the mistake of rereading their own papers, essays, books, etc. Akin to movie actors who hate to see themselves on screen, many scholars are embarrassed by their output. And some of us have much to be embarrassed about. We not only wonder what possessed us in the first place – did I really write that? – but would really rather forget about our mortifying moments of madness. Forgetting, like not-reading, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For every scholar who takes pride in their citation counts, there are several who sigh with relief when a publication remains uncited. Or so they pretend. All I can say is that I’ve done a lot of sighing in my time. Meanwhile my readers mutter FFS or something much worse. . . . In order to still the mutterers among you, let me conclude with four little lessons that you can take away from the foregoing thoughts out of season. First, it is impossible to read everything. You can only read a fraction of what’s been published. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Second, reading too much can be as bad for you as reading too little. Aim for Goldilocks’ “just right” sweet spot. If you find out where it is, BTW, please write and let me know. Third, don’t be intimidated by citeslingers, those whose learned articles are littered with names, big and small. They haven’t read them either or have forgotten what they didn’t quite grasp in the first place. Fourth, and most importantly, my books are still available from all good thrift shops, dump bins and used book stores, both online and off. I don’t expect you to read them, rest assured, but they fit neatly into the hand when you feel the need to fling something against a wall in frustration. There is no fun in deleting PDFs. You need to fling the real thing. Take your academic anguish out on me, mes amis.

Notes 1 I’ve checked them out on Wikipedia, needless to say, for the purposes of bluffing my way herein. 2 Those of you who know me will be appalled for a different reason. As someone who has never told the truth in his life, my use of the conjunction “to tell the god’s honest truth”, is not only reprehensible but sacrilegious. Here’s the thing, though: am I telling the truth about telling the truth, much less the god’s honest truth, let alone my recourse to Wikipedia, never mind my acquaintance with the intellectual authorities under consideration? I’ll only say, in all honesty, that my father was a Cretan. My only claim to fame, if truth be told, is that I was an exponent of post-truth before post-truth was popularised by President Trump. I’m a pre-post truth kinda guy. 3 Russ Belk possibly excepted. Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson too. John Sherry, CCT’s citemeister, as well. 4 Frère Jacques doesn’t feature in the present volume, admittedly. However, he’s probably here in spirit. Or hauntology, at any rate. If that remark means nothing to you, don’t worry. You’ll have forgotten it in no time. 5 Appropriately, Nicholson Baker has been given the self-same treatment by J.C. Hallman (2015), whose book B & Me does for Baker what Baker did for Updike. What goes around comes around. I haven’t read B & Me, BTW. 6 Or, in the words of the sainted Oscar Wilde (1891, 256) when commenting on criticism, “To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are sufficient if one

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has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine”. Never forget, Bayard (2007, 12–13) further observes, “non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that prevents you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught”. Space, sadly, does not permit detailed discussion of Bayard’s categories. The titles are self-explanatory, though. Check out his book (if you can find the time!). He makes his case very well. He also deals with experiential matters – after a fashion – by means of a system of symbols showing the extent of his knowledge about the books he cites (++, extremely positive opinion; +, positive opinion; –, negative opinion; – –, extremely negative opinion). Weird Walt’s Bullrich Salt story is so wonderful, IMHO, that I’ve decided to save you the trouble of tracking it down. As it pertains to forgetting, sort of, it’s pertinent to the present discussion. No? If you remember nothing else from this chapter, remember Bullrich. The rest is bullshit. I’m fully aware that I’ll come to regret this confession, which reminds me of the game of consequences in the comic campus novel Changing Places (Lodge 1975), where English Literature lecturers confess to gaps in their reading of the classics. The winner being the one who has not read the most iconic work of literature – War & Peace, Don Quixote, Ulysses or whatever. As the game progresses, one particularly competitive assistant professor, determined to win the contest at all costs, blurts out that he hasn’t read Hamlet. The shock around the table is palpable. He is subsequently invited to resign from his post and seek tenure elsewhere. It follows that if Gender Trouble is the Hamlet of CCT, then I’m in deep trouble. No change there then.

References Baker, Nicholson (1991), U & I. London: Granta. Bayard, Pierre (2007), How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read. London: Granta. Benjamin, Walter (1999), The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap. Butler, Judith (1990), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Catterall, Miriam, Pauline Maclaran and Lorna Stevens, eds, (2000), Marketing and Feminism: Current Issues and Research. London: Routledge. Hallman, J.C. (2015), B & Me. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lodge, David (1975), Changing Places. London: Penguin. Russell, Cristel A. and Sidney J. Levy (2012), “The Temporal and Focal Dynamics of Volitional Reconsumption: A Phenomenological Investigation of Repeated Hedonic Experiences,” Journal of Consumer Research, 39 (August), 341–359. Wilde, Oscar (1891), The Artist as Critic, www.online-literature.com/wilde/1305/ (accessed 01/12/16).

INDEX

absence 179, 281 accumulation 16–18, 20–21, 30, 186, 208, 245, 247 accursed share 186, 244–246 acquisition 6, 121, 204, 207–208, 244, 246, 248 actantial configuration 195 actants 129, 193–195 action 31, 43, 46–48, 50, 55, 61, 67, 71–73, 75, 94–98, 100, 128–129, 133, 136–140, 154, 192–194, 201, 208, 222, 224, 226, 239, 259, 262, 264, 270 action system 94–96, 98 actor-hierarchies 195 actor-network theory (ANT) 22, 154, 192–195 aesthetic enterprise 216 aesthetics 23, 91, 206–207, 213, 229, 237 aesthetics of taste 207 affective 95, 153–154, 244 agent/agentic choice 10, 98, 128, 133, 139, 208, 248, 266–267, 271 analytic/analytical 6, 15, 61, 67, 101, 156, 185, 189, 213–214, 216–217, 250–251, 255–256, 258–259 analytics of finitude 213 analytics of power 212, 214, 216–218 animism 84 anomie 117, 139, 244 anti-market 162 Apollonian 26 arbitrary 24, 258–259 archaeology of knowledge 213, 216 argument(s) 25, 30, 35, 37–38, 48, 65, 70, 72, 74, 113, 132, 136, 138, 167, 169, 172, 174, 201, 212–213, 227–229, 238, 240, 245, 254, 266, 275, 277, 279 art de vivre 178–179 asceticism 30

assemblage theory 154, 192 audience 101–106, 173, 180, 243, 245 aura 146–150 authority 29, 32, 36, 45, 266 banal 7, 223, 252, 267 behavior 4–6, 23, 25, 31, 33, 36–37, 47, 54, 56, 58, 63, 88, 94, 97, 115, 117, 123, 151–152, 167, 169, 186, 223, 245, 248, 254–255, 259, 261–263, 268, 270, 278 being 7–8, 22, 25, 46–47, 54, 120–124, 128, 132, 168–170, 172, 177–178, 185, 253–254, 256, 264 biases 80, 195, 214 big Other 267–268 biography 6, 71, 177, 181 bio-political/bio-politics 215 bodily techniques 49–50 body 19, 22, 44, 47–51, 74, 81, 94–96, 114, 124–125, 154, 156, 161, 173, 178, 181, 207, 215, 217, 230, 241 bourgeois society 135, 204 bricolage 91–92, 222, 225 bureaucracy 32, 161 capital 6, 15–22, 30, 64, 135, 162, 206–210, 270, 279 capitalism 6, 15–17, 19–22, 27, 29–31, 37, 70, 93, 96, 100, 149, 153, 158, 161–163, 186, 189, 200–201, 217, 246, 248, 252, 261, 268 capital volume 208 categorization 10 cathartic effects 180 CCT 5, 29–32, 54–58, 69, 71, 97–98, 120, 158–163, 212, 216–217, 250, 252–253, 279–281 centre–periphery model 162 ceremonial goods 82–83

284

Index

charismatic authority 32 Christianity 47, 74, 221–222 circulation 37, 44–46, 70–71, 80–84, 218 civilization 24, 143, 158, 161–162, 210, 237 classification(s) 43, 61–64, 72, 88–89, 171, 206, 213–214, 277 class struggle 159, 162, 206 clothes 88, 121, 124, 161, 207, 240, 268 codes 24, 61–65, 67, 82, 152, 155, 182, 217, 222, 228, 230 Collège de France 178, 221 colonization 104–105, 138–140, 251 commodification 185 commodities 16–18, 20–22, 65–67, 72, 101, 165, 189 commoditization 15, 22 communality 243–244, 247–248 communication 5, 64, 67, 88, 115, 129, 136–139, 180, 182, 193, 209, 215, 253–254, 269 community(-ies) 6, 16, 32–33, 36, 44, 74, 88, 132, 139–140, 155, 159, 185–186, 231, 252 complexity 70, 103, 163, 173, 180, 251, 253, 255–256 compression of capitals 208 conformity 251 conscience 58, 215, 226 consciousness 24–25, 48, 50, 90, 124–125, 178, 187, 202, 204, 239–240, 278 constraint(s) 70, 72, 79, 81, 87, 122, 129, 138, 224, 231 constructivism 192, 258–259 consumer culture 5–6, 10, 15–16, 19–22, 27, 29, 33, 37, 48–49, 51, 54, 70–75, 98, 100, 106, 115–117, 120, 146, 148–150, 153, 158, 167, 206, 212, 217, 222, 226, 231, 250–252, 255–256, 266, 268–269, 271 consumerism 27, 30, 100, 261, 266, 268, 270 consumer research 4–5, 22, 24–26, 32, 43–44, 50, 54–57, 59, 69, 98, 100, 104, 118, 120, 124, 146, 149, 155–156, 158, 167–168, 192, 200–201, 203, 227, 230–231, 237, 247–248, 250–251, 255–256, 258, 266, 277 consumption 3–10, 15–18, 20–23, 26–27, 31–35, 37–39, 41, 43, 48–49, 55–56, 58, 61–62, 64–67, 69, 71–75, 79–85, 91–92, 97–98, 100–101, 104–106, 113, 116–117, 121, 129, 136, 145, 147, 151, 153–155, 160–162, 180, 182, 190–191, 204, 206, 209–210, 217, 222–224, 230–231, 239, 244–248, 252, 255–256, 258–259, 261, 264, 266–268, 270 context(s) 5, 24, 28–29, 32, 38, 43, 48, 50–51, 58, 61, 63–66, 70–71, 73, 81, 113–117, 122, 128, 131, 137–140, 146, 153–155, 158–160, 163, 170, 178, 185, 200, 203–204, 210, 231, 251, 260, 268–269 contract/contractual 35–36, 45, 51, 178, 189, 228 contrast 51, 89, 214 convention(s) 65, 169, 172, 179, 246

corporation(s) 4, 27, 125, 136–137, 270 counterfeit 188 countergift(s) 44–45, 82–83 creation 54–55, 91, 116, 121, 132, 146–147, 222–223, 251, 263, 269 creative imagination 260–261 critical 6, 22, 25, 38, 56–57, 75, 135–136, 138–140, 177, 179, 194, 200–204, 211, 217, 224, 230–231, 250, 252, 256, 267 critical theory 22, 37, 91, 128, 140, 200–204, 266 critique(s) 5–6, 22, 35–36, 38, 45–47, 56, 58, 64, 70–74, 85, 90, 93, 97–98, 117, 122, 128, 135–139, 147, 150, 177–178, 187, 192–193, 201, 203, 206, 209–210, 218, 222, 224, 227–229, 245–246, 251–253 cross-disciplinary 115, 168 cultural artifact 49 cultural capital 206–208, 210 cultural contradictions 213 cultural energies 146–147 cultural order 72–73, 254 cultural patterns 96 cultural representation 189 cultural sociology 93, 97 culture 5–6, 8, 10, 23, 26–27, 49, 55–56, 58, 61–63, 65–67, 69–75, 81, 84–86, 88–90, 95, 97–98, 116–117, 131–132, 139, 145–146, 150, 154, 159, 162, 180–181, 185, 188–189, 204, 207, 209–210, 222, 225, 228, 231, 237, 240, 251–252, 254–255, 261, 270, 278 culture industries 202–204, 267 custom(s) 49, 72–73, 86, 203, 278 cybernetic hierarchy 94, 98 cybernetics 88, 251, 255 data analysis 145, 180 death 73, 105, 145–148, 150, 159, 177, 181, 186, 188, 206, 237–239, 245–247, 253–254 deconstruction 22, 73–74, 128, 130, 247 decouple 138 degenerative body 215 desire 20, 24, 46, 70, 104, 120, 122–124, 152, 179, 221, 226–229, 237–239, 263–264, 266, 269 dialectic 22, 114, 131–133, 187, 201, 203–204, 227, 238 dialectical 56, 138–139, 200–203, 227, 266 différance 188, 228, 247 discourse(s) 15, 22, 26, 33, 57, 64, 72–74, 129–132, 136, 138, 152–153, 179, 182, 190, 201–202, 212–218, 228–231, 253, 260, 266–267, 279 discursive interpellations 215 disenchantment 29, 31 disgust 27, 122, 208, 252 dispositif 214–216 dissemination 139, 188, 258, 276

Index

distinction 5, 36–37, 63, 65, 73–74, 85, 101, 104, 106, 129, 132–133, 152–153, 182, 206–207, 223–224, 254, 256 distribution 15–17, 46, 71, 81, 84, 95, 98, 161, 222, 270 dogmatism 239, 250 domination 50, 194, 202–204, 209, 216, 218, 222, 261 drives 75, 117, 135, 238, 259, 266 dualism 128, 186 dynamic unconscious 238–240 economic capital 207–209 economic determinism 159, 202 economic relations 90 economy 5–6, 13, 15–17, 21, 23, 27, 30–32, 34–38, 46, 65, 69–70, 72–75, 81–83, 85, 94–95, 98, 102–103, 147, 159, 162, 186–187, 199–200, 202, 225, 243–248, 252, 261, 266, 268–271 efficiency 31–32, 97, 200, 244, 269 ellipsis 180 emancipation 135, 204, 252 embeddedness 35–38, 98 embodied state 207 embodiment 70, 153–154 empirical analysis 203 empiricist 5, 196 enacting science 193 ends 31, 97, 136, 225, 239, 244 enlightenment 102, 128, 135–136, 138, 199–200, 203–204, 214 epistemology/epistemological 23, 54–55, 120, 131, 180, 189–190, 193, 201–203, 221–222, 255–256 equality 25, 27, 45, 136, 139, 203 equivalence 18, 187 eroticism 231, 243, 251 ethic/ethical 24, 30–31, 35, 56–57, 93, 96, 123, 129, 133, 138, 200, 207, 213, 217 ethnocentric 9 ethnography 55–58, 192 ethnological method 47, 50, 70 ethnology 43 event-level analysis 159 excess 26, 74, 244–246, 269, 276 exchange 10, 15–18, 36, 44–46, 70–71, 79, 81–83, 87, 92, 120, 123–124, 136, 140, 162, 186–190, 244–247, 268 exchange value 17–18, 135, 186–189, 246 existence 15, 18, 24–25, 27, 37, 48, 83, 90, 98, 123, 128, 130, 132, 145, 168, 171, 192–193, 195, 213, 224, 238–239, 245, 247, 252, 254, 261–262, 270 existentialism 201 expenditure 70, 186, 244–247 experiences 5, 45, 98, 100, 104, 123, 153–155, 172–173, 208, 216–217, 241, 248, 268–269

285

experimental science(s) 56, 79 exploitation 4, 19, 185, 203 expressive forms 179 extended self 122, 129, 238, 276 exuberance 245–247 facts 24, 43, 50, 81, 161, 193–194, 221, 238, 253, 277 fantasy 251, 266 fashion 64, 72, 86, 149, 160, 177, 185, 213, 216, 243, 276, 281 feminization 251 fetishism 15, 19–20, 22, 26, 268, 279 fiction 55, 124, 132, 149, 186 fictional actor 193 field 3–5, 10, 23, 26, 43, 54–55, 58, 61–62, 64, 79–80, 85–86, 88, 90, 114–115, 117, 140, 148, 158–159, 161, 167, 178, 186, 192–193, 208–211, 216, 227, 244, 251, 259, 262, 275 figuration(s) 51, 151–155 Firstness 168–172 flat ontology 193 fragmentation 179, 182, 251 Frankfurt School 10, 135–136, 185, 200–202, 204, 251 freedom 9, 22, 24–25, 27, 30, 32, 74, 91–92, 120, 122, 132, 135, 139, 204, 215–216, 224, 229, 247, 271 free market 35–36, 46, 140, 162 functionalism 72, 137–139 functions 43, 95–97, 152, 155, 169, 179, 182, 222, 245, 260 future 15, 17, 27, 30, 32, 54, 58, 104, 116, 122, 124, 132, 147–149, 156, 190, 231, 262, 277 Gemeinschaft/ Gesellschaft 32, 36, 95 gender 33, 50, 218, 227–231, 279, 281 gendered subject 228 genealogy 24–25, 27–28, 46, 190, 213–214, 216–217 general economy 186, 243–246, 248 generosity 44, 120, 123, 244, 247 genetic 230, 239, 254, 256 gestalt 101, 178 gift 10, 30, 36, 43–47, 51, 70–71, 82–83, 87, 116, 120, 123–124, 186, 245 giver(s) 44, 70–71, 87, 116 good life 20, 128 grammar 88, 96 habits 49, 133, 169, 226 habitus 49–50, 85, 152–155, 174, 206, 208, 223, 268 hedonic consumption 31, 180 hedonic/hedonism 30–31, 72, 104, 178–180 hermeneutics 56, 90, 128, 130–132 heterogeneity 179, 182, 196 heterosexual hegemony 227, 230–231 heterosexual matrix 229–230 high and low cultural form 210

286

Index

histoire événementielle 160–161 historical-hermeneutic 201 historiography 158, 161 history 4, 6, 9, 15, 17, 34, 43–44, 47, 56–57, 69, 73, 75, 86, 90, 102, 120, 127, 143, 145–149, 151–153, 158–163, 182, 186, 190, 200, 202–203, 210, 221–222, 226, 250, 252–253, 259–262, 275 hologrammatic principle 255–256 homo sapiens demens 254–255 hubris 26, 254 humans 8, 22, 24, 50, 73, 75, 94, 113–114, 120, 124, 132, 154, 193, 237–240, 254, 263 hyperlinks 178 icon 169, 172 iconic signs 172–173 iconization 173–174 ideal type(s) 31–32, 35–36, 97 idem 133 identity 4, 22, 33, 47–48, 64, 73–74, 84, 89–90, 111, 114–115, 118, 120–121, 123–124, 129, 132–133, 139, 152–153, 167, 181, 204, 215–217, 226–229, 231, 246–248, 262 ideology 6, 20–21, 35, 38, 55, 74–75, 147, 181, 202–203, 222, 244, 264, 266–268, 270–271 images 5, 26, 32, 117, 146, 148, 178, 188, 238 imagination 81, 105, 131–132, 200, 203, 226, 241, 256, 260–262, 264–265 index 169, 172 indexical signs 172 individuals/individuality 7–8, 16, 26–27, 44, 46–49, 71–72, 85, 91–92, 95–97, 113–115, 129, 139–140, 161, 190, 200, 203, 215–216, 222–223, 226, 238–239, 243–244, 246, 254, 256, 258, 260, 262–263, 269 industrial capitalism 29–30, 70 infrastructure(s) 88, 193, 195 inhibition 240, 261 institution 3–4, 17, 29, 31–32, 35, 44, 51, 58, 61–63, 81–84, 95–97, 101, 124, 128, 135, 156, 161, 163, 195, 202, 208–209, 214, 217, 223–225, 251, 259–260, 263–264 instrumental rationality 135–136, 138–139, 199–200, 246 interdisciplinary 55, 58, 93, 200–201, 203, 258–259 internalization 24 interpretant 169–173 interpretation 24–25, 38, 47, 55, 58, 68, 73, 89–90, 115, 117, 129–131, 148, 161, 180, 203–204, 212, 218, 263, 266 inutility 245 ipse 133 iron cage 30, 138, 200, 244 ironic investment 268 irrationality 24, 66, 245 jouissance 179, 269 judgement of taste 85

kinship 35–36, 45, 70, 72–73, 86–88, 103, 206, 230 labor 17–21, 32, 35, 44, 58, 69–70, 97, 121, 136, 138, 162, 187, 217, 244, 246–247 language 23, 25, 29, 43, 57, 62, 75, 79, 81–82, 87–90, 114–115, 117, 123, 128–132, 148, 150–151, 165, 177, 179, 181, 202, 206, 214, 223, 227, 238, 256, 263–264, 266–267 legisign 169–174 legitimacy/legitimation 4, 29, 32–33, 44, 102, 209–210, 214, 216 liberated meanings 178 liberation 24, 178, 206, 261 libido 238, 269 life passages 44 lifestyle(s) 55, 178, 208, 270 linguistics 9, 62, 87–88, 90, 159, 187, 222 linguistic turn 87–88, 129–130, 137 liquid modernity 199, 204 literary critique 178 literature 22–23, 67, 80, 101, 177, 179, 209–210, 227, 230, 259, 262, 275–276, 281 longue durée 38, 160–161 luxury 31, 153, 244, 246–247 magic/magical 43, 47, 51, 63, 81–85, 121, 125, 186, 189, 193, 250–251, 254, 256 management 139, 146, 180, 215, 226, 238 marginality 243–244, 247 market 3–6, 16–18, 20–21, 27, 34–38, 43, 46, 66, 71–72, 83, 102, 135–136, 140, 147, 149, 158–160, 162, 182, 186, 189–190, 226, 247–248 marketing 4–5, 20, 22, 24, 34, 38, 43, 55, 57–58, 72, 80, 83–85, 106, 116–117, 140, 146, 149, 156, 167, 178, 180–182, 189, 237–238, 240–241, 252, 255, 267, 270, 279 marketization 35 market law of value 189 market system(s) 35–37, 182 Marxist/Marxism 34, 69, 90, 136, 159, 162, 185, 201–202, 227, 243, 246, 262 mask 47, 212 master (the) 266 material culture(s) 6, 8, 10, 49, 65–66, 69, 83, 181 materiality 43, 49–50, 55, 161, 194, 230 maximization 4, 7, 17, 36, 95 McDonaldization 32 meaning 5–6, 10, 20, 22, 25–26, 31–32, 37, 43, 46, 54–56, 61–63, 65–66, 86, 88–92, 95–96, 100, 115, 129–132, 139, 145–148, 153, 160, 167, 169–172, 177–182, 187–190, 194, 209, 222–224, 228, 230, 237, 240, 247, 269 meaning structures 6, 61 means 17–21, 25, 31–32, 48, 50, 66–67, 91, 95, 102, 114, 129, 136, 162, 195–196, 216–217, 238, 245, 254, 261, 276, 281 mechanical age 146

Index

mediate/mediation 31, 132 meso-level 70, 231 metaphor 5–6, 58, 91, 129–132, 195, 202, 259 microcosms 180 micro-level 231 mimesis 148 mirror of production 187, 191 mobility 162, 195 modernity 15, 22, 31, 80, 84, 106, 135, 137, 139, 152–153, 195–196, 199, 204, 221, 246, 252 modernization 159, 252 money 18, 21, 45, 71, 102, 120–122, 159, 161–162, 183, 186, 245 morality 7, 23–25, 27, 84, 96, 123, 129, 153, 212–213 moral philosophy 128 morphology 63, 94 motivations 181, 201, 237, 246, 259 moyen durée 160 music 48, 91, 103, 149, 177, 179, 208 mythical 89–91, 256 mythology/mythologies 51, 86, 89, 129, 179, 181–182, 253 mytho-poetical 91 narcissism 238 narrative identity 129, 132 narratives 24, 88, 90, 92, 132, 147, 149, 153, 180, 182, 195, 217, 269 natives 80–81 naturalism 27 needs 16, 20, 37, 49, 65–66, 69, 74–75, 81, 84–85, 95, 103, 159, 179, 209, 259–260, 262, 268 neoliberalism 6, 15, 38, 161 network 50, 84, 131, 193–195, 199, 207, 215, 250, 267, 269 network expansion 194 neutrality 95, 181 newness 149 nonhumans 124, 193 normalization 213, 215 normative 45–46, 95–98, 102, 138, 201, 203, 214, 229 norms 35, 97, 102, 115, 129, 153, 172, 202, 228–231, 252, 259–261 nothingness 120, 122, 270 object 5, 8, 16, 22, 50, 75, 81–82, 84, 88, 92, 121–124, 136, 168–169, 171–174, 180–181, 188–189, 213, 225, 238, 241, 262, 268, 270 objectified state 207 obligations 44–45, 128, 189, 245 observation 5, 9, 79–80, 101, 189, 196, 215, 222, 229, 237 observer 80–81, 86, 115, 138 ontological politics 193–194 ontology 8, 51, 54, 128, 136–137, 140, 186, 190, 193, 195, 201

287

opportunities 31, 66, 71–72, 79, 128, 136, 174, 216, 224 organismic 94–98 orgasmic 244 orgiastic 178–179, 244 originality 189, 229 otherness 86, 147, 246–247 over-human 23, 27 paradigmatic 8, 54, 256 paradoxa 179 parataxis 179–180 participant observation 79–80 performativity 37, 67–68, 194, 227–231 persona 47–48 personality 30, 32, 94–98, 114 personality structure 30 persons 44–46, 70, 84, 88–89, 125, 128, 188 pervert (the) 266 phenomenal world 48 phenomenology 8, 67, 90, 120, 124, 128, 130, 137, 201, 218 philosophy 7–8, 15, 23–24, 26, 28, 43, 45–47, 63, 74, 79, 86, 113, 115–117, 120, 127–129, 151, 168, 177, 190, 193, 200–202, 206, 221–222, 227, 230 photographs/photography 145, 147–148, 177–178, 181 physiology of signs 167 pleasure 21, 27, 30, 104, 122, 151, 155, 179–181, 183, 218, 225, 239, 241, 245, 247, 254, 268–269 pleasure principle 239 poaching 8, 92, 222–223, 225 poiein 91 political economy 5–6, 13, 15–17, 23, 27, 35, 187, 199, 244, 247, 266 popular culture 185, 204, 209, 278 possessions 65, 70, 82, 121, 123–124, 149, 218, 278 posthumanism 120 postmodernity 7, 135 post-structuralism 178, 181–182, 247 potentia 194 potlatch 44–45, 51, 71, 123, 245–246 power 4, 6, 10, 19–20, 22, 28–29, 32, 44, 47, 66, 69–70, 94–95, 122, 129, 131, 136, 138–139, 151–154, 156, 180, 186–187, 189, 194, 197, 199–200, 203–204, 206, 209, 212–218, 222–224, 228–229, 231, 263–264, 267–268 power structures 6, 189, 215, 229 practices 4, 5–10, 23, 29–31, 33, 37, 47, 50, 55–58, 61–66, 70, 81–84, 89, 91, 100, 117, 131, 137, 146, 150–156, 160–162, 181–182, 190, 192–193, 195, 207, 209, 213–218, 221–226, 228–231, 248, 251–252, 261–262, 267, 277 practices of subjectification 213 preconscious 239 pre-market 36, 69 premodern social structures 199 present (sociology of) 253

288

Index

private 17, 114, 136, 177, 246, 267, 277 process 4, 8, 16, 20–21, 33, 35, 46, 58, 63, 67, 75, 83, 90–91, 97, 101, 104, 113–114, 116, 129, 136–137, 139, 151–153, 161–163, 167–168, 171–174, 182, 185, 187, 189–191, 200, 209, 213, 216, 224, 227, 229, 238, 240, 244–245, 252, 254–255, 277 production 5, 15–22, 31, 46, 65, 70–73, 79–84, 90–91, 95, 104, 129, 136, 147, 161–162, 177, 179, 182–183, 187, 189, 193–195, 199, 209–211, 216, 218, 222–225, 243–245, 247, 251–253, 258, 261, 264, 268, 270 productivity 21, 31, 70, 215, 244–245, 247, 276 prohibition(s) 87, 217, 268 project 3, 9, 61, 73, 75, 80, 87–88, 92, 118, 128, 130–131, 133, 135–136, 139, 148, 151, 195, 200, 203–204, 206, 214, 277 proletariat 162 property 17, 121, 154, 187, 207, 222, 246 psyche 238, 262, 264 psyche-soma 259 psychoanalysis 25, 81, 201, 222, 227–228, 237, 239, 241, 243 psychology 4, 23, 43, 47–48, 50, 74, 104, 115, 117, 120, 156, 168, 217, 239, 255 public 3, 33, 46–47, 51, 58, 64, 135–137, 140, 155, 203–204, 207, 214, 216–217, 223, 244–245, 248, 250 public sphere 135–137, 204 purchase 30, 72, 121–122, 222, 268 qualisign 169–170, 172, 174 racial privilege 230 radical imaginary 260–261, 263 rationality 31, 65, 72, 135–136, 138–139, 186, 199–200, 213, 243–246, 260–263 rationalization 31–32, 136, 200, 244 rational/legal authority 32 real 4, 16, 27, 47, 50, 79–80, 101, 121, 129, 132, 148–149, 155, 168–169, 173–174, 187–190, 195, 218, 222, 246–248, 250, 252, 254–255, 260, 268–270, 280 reality 7, 31, 35, 54, 58, 80, 85, 113, 116–117, 128, 130–132, 137, 145, 155, 160, 173, 178–179, 181, 186, 188–190, 194–195, 199, 203, 216, 223, 239, 246, 261–263, 268–270 reason 23–26, 28, 48–49, 69, 71, 73, 87, 90, 123, 128, 131, 135–137, 188, 190, 199–200, 203–204, 214, 218, 256, 261–262, 280 reciprocity 35–36, 44–45, 50, 70–71, 87, 124, 186 redistribution 36 reductionism 6, 251, 253, 255, 258–259 reenchantment 32 reflective 201–203 regime of power 215 regime of truth 212 regimes of enunciation 195

regulatory discourses 230 relationality 195 religion 30–31, 43, 55, 73, 80–81, 84, 96, 100–105, 128, 186, 195, 209, 221, 243, 252 remembrance 148–149, 278–279 reproducibility 189 reputation 45, 171 resignification 228–230 resources 5–6, 21, 30, 36, 61, 65, 70, 95, 124, 194, 207, 214–215, 230, 245, 260–261 restricted economy 186, 244–246 reversibility 186–187 rheme 169, 171–173 rites 71, 88, 90, 254 ritual(s)/ritual occasions 47–48, 55, 62–64, 71, 73, 83–84, 149, 206, 226, 243 role 3, 5–6, 8, 10, 22, 44, 47, 51, 55, 58, 64, 68, 75, 83, 87, 91, 95, 97–98, 100–105, 114–116, 121, 123–124, 131, 147, 161, 168, 174, 177, 181–182, 186–187, 190, 199, 202–203, 213, 228, 231, 239–241, 244, 247, 250–251, 253, 256, 263, 267, 276 role positions 95, 97 routine 66, 79 rules of intelligibility 214 rumor 252–253 sacred 33, 45–46, 63, 70, 72, 186, 243, 247 sacrifice(s) 10, 43, 47, 51, 186, 204, 243, 245–246, 268 science 6–8, 15, 24–27, 31, 43, 48, 50, 55–57, 63, 79, 88–89, 91, 93, 101–103, 105, 124, 158, 192–195, 202, 206, 237–238, 251, 255, 262 scienza nouva 255 scriptor 177 Secondness 168–172 seduction 187–188, 218, 279 self-control 30–31 self-governance 122, 213 selfhood 48, 74, 128 self-knowledge 128, 215 self/selves 16, 22–24, 44, 46–48, 50–51, 66–67, 113–118, 121–124, 127–133, 135, 139, 146, 150, 194, 208, 213, 216–217, 227, 238, 248, 266–268, 276 sexed body 230 sexualized subject 228 sign 83, 137, 167, 169–174, 186–189, 250, 278 sign degeneracy 173 signified 26, 130, 180–181, 187 signifier 130, 180–181, 187–188, 223 sign value 22, 186, 189 simulacra 186–190, 269 simulation 186, 188–190, 218 singularity 181, 186, 225 sinsign(s) 169–172, 174 social control 95, 189 social institutions 3, 51, 96, 161, 202 social policy studies 37

Index

social structure 44, 49, 93–95, 97–98, 202, 206 social systems 94, 96–97, 104–105, 136–140, 188, 256 sociology 4–5, 29, 31, 37, 43, 55, 63, 70, 87, 93–94, 98, 115, 118, 146, 151, 156, 159, 193, 206–207, 210, 243–244, 251–253 solidarity 27, 97, 223, 225, 231 soul 47, 124, 178, 238 sovereignty 10, 27, 247–248 speech 88, 90, 129, 138–139, 181, 223, 267 split-reference 132 star system 251–252 strategies of problematization 213 strategy 58, 200–201, 223–224, 226, 270 stratification 95, 207 structural law 187, 189 structural / structuralism 9, 43, 55, 61–63, 65, 67, 72, 86–91, 93–94, 98, 122, 129, 135–139, 152, 158, 178, 181–182, 186–187, 189, 204, 211, 219, 237–239, 246, 259 structure 10, 19, 30, 44, 49, 64, 70, 83, 89, 93–98, 101, 128–129, 137–138, 153, 160, 169, 172, 178–179, 181–182, 189, 201–203, 206, 209, 214, 221, 229, 245 subjects 48, 90, 92, 105, 132, 145, 152–154, 159, 185, 206, 213, 215, 227, 239–240, 251, 260, 266–267, 269 substance 8, 74, 89, 128, 146, 180, 187 substantivist 36–38 substructure 136, 199, 201–202 superstructure 90, 101, 193, 201–202, 264 symbolic anthropology 54 symbolic exchange 82, 186–190, 246 symbolic forms 79, 152 symbolic violence 45, 73, 206, 209 symbols 55, 61–64, 66–67, 83, 95, 114–117, 139, 167, 174, 180, 202, 237, 248, 268, 281 syntactic 90, 131 syntax 96, 130 system 5, 17, 21–22, 24, 35–38, 44–47, 50, 63–65, 67, 72–73, 75, 77, 80–83, 86–90, 92, 94–98, 100, 102–103, 105–106, 114, 122, 129–130, 137–139, 159, 162, 178–179, 181–182, 185–187, 189–190, 199, 207–208, 214, 218, 222–224, 228, 231, 251–254, 256, 259–260, 281 systems of thought 86, 228 tactics 72, 92, 222–226 taste 27, 31, 50, 64, 85, 182, 206–208, 210 techniques 44, 48–50, 62, 80, 225 technoculture 145 technology 57, 91, 117, 145, 147, 149, 161, 192, 195, 204, 209, 213, 216–217, 230, 245 technology of the self 213, 216–217 terror management 238 text 26, 44, 49–50, 71, 73, 87, 90, 129–132, 177–182, 204, 276–277 theatre 103, 178–179

289

theology 31 theorization 34–35, 37–38, 43 theory 3, 5–10, 22–23, 26, 29, 34, 36–38, 43, 45, 49–51, 54–58, 61–62, 65, 69, 71–72, 74–75, 80–81, 83–85, 88, 91, 93–95, 97–98, 100–101, 103, 105, 115–116, 120–121, 128, 130, 136–138, 140–141, 145–146, 152–154, 156, 158–159, 179–181, 185, 187, 192, 196, 200–204, 207, 212, 214, 227–228, 230–231, 238–239, 250–251, 253, 255–256, 266, 276–277 theory of practice 207 things 8, 16, 20, 22, 25, 44–46, 65–66, 70–74, 85, 87, 89–90, 92, 115, 121–124, 127–129, 131, 133, 145–148, 150, 161, 167–169, 173, 185, 187–189, 237, 239, 244, 247, 259, 262, 268, 275–278 Thirdness 168–170, 172 togetherness 192, 194 togetherness in action (TIA) 192, 194 topographical work 239 totemism 88–89 tradition 5, 8, 31, 54–57, 61–62, 64–65, 80, 89, 136, 146, 181, 200–201, 203, 210, 221, 224, 250–252 traditional authority 32 tragedy 26 transcendental 90, 113, 128, 181 transference 84, 209, 238 transfer of meaning 22, 131 transfers 44 transgressions 264 triad 120, 173 truth 88–90, 128, 138, 179, 181–182, 188, 199, 201, 212–213, 216, 218, 275, 280 unconscious 63, 88, 90, 138, 199, 208, 214, 237–240, 266, 271 universalist 35 unpredictability 256 upside down perspective 162 use value 186–189, 246, 268 utilitarian 27, 30, 45–46, 65, 71–72, 81–83 utility 4, 8, 35–37, 49–50, 65–67, 72–73, 81, 83, 123, 173, 186, 243–246 vagueness 263 value 7, 13, 15, 17–21, 31–32, 36–37, 48, 56–57, 65, 69, 72, 83, 90, 92, 95, 97, 101, 106, 116, 121, 135, 147, 179–180, 185–189, 195, 203, 217, 243–244, 246, 251, 260, 268, 270 value judgments 7, 31 values 18, 20, 23, 31–32, 56, 72, 75, 96–97, 100, 133, 186, 195, 202, 208, 238, 259–260 vouloir-saisir 179 waste 186, 244–247, 271 welfare state 45