Graeber “Consumption” “the ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us forget this. Most of all it does so by suggesting that (a) human desire is essentially a matter not of relations between people but of relations between individuals and phantasms; (b) our primary relation with other individuals is an endless struggle to establish our sovereignty, or autonomy, by incorporating and destroying aspects of the world around them; (c) for the reason in c, any genuine relation with other people is problematic (the problem of “the Other”); and (d) society can thus be seen as a gigantic engine of production and destruction in which the only significant human activity is either manufacturing things or engaging in acts of ceremonial destruction so as to make way for more, a vision that in fact sidelines most things that real people actually do and insofar as it is translated into actual economic behavior is obviously unsustainable.”

Why do we use the term? How did it come about?

“Consumption” has become a dominant framework for understand human-human and human-object relations in the 21st century. It is assumed to be self-evident.

Ignoring the phenomena is considered a failing (especially in revisionist appraisals of previous scholarship, i.e. in the Frankfurt School)

-people were manipulated to consume to serve the needs of Capitalist production

“Active” Consumption A now orthodox position that people aren’t dupes to marketing and instead take an active role in meaning making in relation to the things they buy, read, wear, listen to, etc.

To denounce consumerism is to denounce the identity work that people are engaged in when engaging with commodities.

For Graeber, this leads to categorizing everything as either “production” or “consumption” and doesn’t capture nuance. It doesn’t allow us to distinguish between authentic oppositional cultures, marketing categories, or “non-alienated” production (production not for markets).

This fiction sustains both critical Marxist positions AND neo-liberal positions: critical positions can argue that consumption serves the needs of production and therefore is an area of potential resistance; neo- liberal positions can argue that consumption is a form of liberation since consumers are actively creating themselves.

From Psychology to Anthropology Marketing and economics moves from one to the other:

1) Psychology: behaviours, motivations, desire 2) Anthro: subcultures, countercultures, belonging, group dynamics

Anthropology’s relationship to business was reluctant at first.

Research into subcultures began to conflate them with countercultures.

Definitions are scarce, and when they do occur they are very broad.

Definitions

“any activity that involves the purchase, use or enjoyment of any manufactured or agricultural product for any purpose other than the production or exchange of new commodities.”

This broad definitions means that:

1) Portrayals of consumption as passive can be critiqued as too narrow and deterministic (since there’s a lot involved in “enjoyment” and “use”), and

2) Basically anything that we do when we’re not working can be viewed as consumption

It assumes a world in which these two spheres are rigidly separate: one of production (in Capitalism, more or less forced) and one of desire, wants, and imagination.

Etymology To consume is to destroy or use up.

In capitalism, a system predicated on “growth”, this is a central concept: in order to make room for newly produced commodities, old ones need to be destroyed – used up or cast as outdated or ineffective.

Despite exaggerations about the destructive potlatch (Bataille) what is important here is that consumer society is organised around the “ceremonial destruction of commodities.”

Desire It is relatively recently that desire is conflated with the desire to use things up, to destroy, to “consume”

Prior thinking saw desires are primarily products of the imagination, oriented towards human beings, and theorized in two different ways:

1) The imagining of a lack or absence and how one could fill it 2) The imagining of ceasing to exist and the desire to continue to exist

“Recognition” and social relations are also important here: we can observe ourselves from “outside” ourselves (self-consciousness), but we need a reason to do so. This is the desire to be recognized by another as human (as attractive, as important, as capable, etc.) and automatically entails a social relation between one and another.

Hedonism Traditional Hedonism: immediate gratification, the direct experience of pleasure.

For capitalism (predicated on constant growth) this is a problem since people become satisfied or bored.

Modern Self-Illusory Hedonism: we take pleasure in never being satisfied; our desires are imaginary, continuous, and the joy comes from the “reveries” of daydreaming about products.

It’s the difference between desiring an object, and desire as the object of one’s desire.

From Desire to Consumption

“If one starts with a model of desire where the object of desire is assumed to be a human being, then it only makes sense that one cannot completely possess the object […] And one is presumably not intentionally in the business of destroying it, either.”

How we get to a consumerism that moves from the metaphor of desire for the other to one that is based more on something like eating?

1) Individualism: thinking is already centred on the differences between individual action and passivity – the world presents a situation of desire, and one chooses to act on this in whatever way. Which of these becomes seen as a worthy attribute? A reaction to a “passion” or a passive acceptance?

2) Class: different social classes imagined the satisfaction of desire differently. The poor imagined material abundance (food) while the rich imagined ephemeral sensory pleasure (aroma, spices, etc.). (These may actually fuse in the modern consumer consciousness.)

3) Gender: a move from viewing women as overindulgent, greedy towards a view of wholesomeness, virtue

The Paradox of Infinite Wants The theory that “human beings as creatures tainted by original sin and therefore cursed with infinite wants, as beings living in a finite universe who were inevitably in a state of generalized competition,” was already well developed, but history shows that people didn’t actually act this way.

1) Abundance usually meant more leisure (rather than a continued searching to satisfy desires) = more money, more time off!

2) Displays of greed were generally frowned upon 3) Generalized increases in wealth usually corresponded with collective revelry (not more individual indulgence – the

“privatization of desire” comes later, under capitalism)

Hierarchy of Desire Limitless desire (a product of the imagination) was seen as a failing, and assumed to be the case only with inferiors: men saw women as desirous, greedy, upper classes view the poor in similar fashion.

This is only possible when “imagination” and the “experience” are viewed as two separate spheres. Mediaeval thinking saw the imagination as a place where desire could be satisfied and experienced, there’s no expectation of such flights of fancy taking place in the material world.

When imagination and experience are separated, satisfaction of desires becomes a dilemma: how to satisfy in the “real world”?

The Market The final step towards a modern conception of consumption.

A world organised by market logic populated by atomized individuals who see their relations with others as based on property rights.

“Property” is a legal arrangement between people to formally recognize the possibility to exclude others NOT a relationship between a person and an object (though we uniformly mistake this to be the case)

Ownership (sovereignty) essentially rests on the ability to destroy what one possesses, and thus prove ownership. But there is a paradox: if you destroy it, you no longer possess it.

Consumption Resolves the Paradox

“the metaphor of “consumption” gains its appeal because it is the perfect resolution of this paradox—or, at least, about as perfect a resolution as one is ever going to get. When you eat something, you do indeed destroy it (as an autonomous entity), but at the same time, it remains “included in” you in the most material of senses. Eating food, then, became the perfect idiom for talking about desire and gratification in a world in which everything, all human relations, were being reimagined as questions of property.”

What about Consumerism then? Fossil Fuels vs Television

Why are both considered “consumption”?

The latter isn’t used up or destroyed, it’s not a commodity to be “owned” by its “user” – in fact it is “a continual stream of potential fantasy material, some intended to market particular commodities, some not.”

“Creative consumption” resembles something more like production, “passive viewing” is much closer to consumption, but still lacks those basic features. Thinking of both in the language of consumption is a choice to align with a corporate discourse that supports the idea of the constant filling of individual desire through the purchase or use of commodities that circulate for profit.

Anti-consumerist Paradox Anti-consumerism is a popular discourse, moreso than the “active audience” theories that tend to be isolated to the academy.

But then, critical views can often lend support the notion of active consumers since they posit a hegemony that can be resisted through forms of creative consumption. If all there is is sub-cultures of active consumers, then there’s nothing to resist, which means that creative consumption as a liberating idea goes out the window.

Non-alienated production The type of creative activity we do that is not oriented toward market goals (and which likely makes up the bulk of production anyway) – domestic labour, DIY, community work, arts, etc.

This is often bundled under consumption because manufactured commodities are often used, but these activities are not directed towards creating surplus value.

“Any production not for the market is treated as a form of consumption, which has the incredibly reactionary political effect of treating almost every form of unalienated experience we do engage in as somehow a gift granted us by the captains of industry.”

New Ways of Thinking

Comsumption is an ideology:

“it might be more enlightening to start looking at what we have been calling the “consumption” sphere rather as the sphere of the production of human beings, not just as labor power but as persons, internalized nexes of meaningful social relations, because after all, this is what social life is actually about, the production of people (of which the production of things is simply a subordinate moment), and it is only the very unusual organization of capitalism that makes it even possible for us to imagine otherwise”

“allows us to open up some neglected questions, such as that of alienated and nonalienated forms of labor, terms that have somewhat fallen into abeyance and therefore remain radically undertheorized. What exactly does engaging in nonalienated production actually mean?”

“in many of the societies we study, the production of material products has always been subordinate to the mutual construction of human beings and what they are doing, at least in part, is simply insisting on continuing to act as if this were the case even when using objects manufactured elsewhere.”