Buying Into Culture

How commerce cultivates art

Charles Paul Freund from the June 1998 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Accelerating trade and industrialization in Britain, however, created a large middle class with increasing money and leisure, and that class was to reorder the cultural world entirely. The arts, especially literature, flourished. The influence of the nobility was annihilated; culture moved from the court to the city, and the system of imitative fine arts as we still know them was developed. Artists, for their part, enjoyed enormously enhanced social status and regard. If the age of art begins with the Renaissance, the age of the artist, as Hans Belting has noted, begins with the Enlightenment.

In the meantime, "[t]here was a consumer boom in England in the eighteenth century," according to the Cambridge economic historian Neil McKendrick, a boom that "reached revolutionary proportions." It was, McKendrick wrote in 1982, "a convulsion of getting and spending" that had never been seen before. "Luxuries" became "decencies"; "decencies" became "necessities"; necessities "underwent a dramatic metamorphosis in style, variety and availability." Goods were everywhere available in unprecedented profusion, and the rising middle class used them not only for convenience and comfort, but to recreate themselves socially and culturally.

Because of the social conditions of the period, a great deal of middle-class energy originally went into emulating the aristocracy by dressing and otherwise attempting to live like them. But inevitably, the middle classes soon became interested in the world they themselves were creating and the types of persons they were becoming. One major result was the explosion of fiction reading and the rise of the English novel. Literature played the same role for industrialization's middle classes that painting had played for the patrons of secular Renaissance art and the Dutch burghers: the aesthetic reflection of a changed people in a changed world.

Interestingly, Neil McKendrick's description of the commercialization of 18th-century society parallels Grant McCracken's description of the present. "[U]nabashed by any sense of plenitude in Nature," McKendrick writes of the 18th century, "men deliberately sought to create new and improved species and exciting novelties with which to delight the eye, to exhibit one's taste and to assert one's wealth."

In Augustan England such speciation was descriptive of the exploding world of goods. But the use to which people have put such goods in two centuries of social, political, and cultural development has been a key factor in allowing McCracken to apply the very same metaphor to society itself. McKendrick's Enlightenment is an urban place in which people draw on the material world to break the bonds of class and status; McCracken's late 20th century, in which wealth is far more widely disseminated, is an individualized place where people draw on their material surroundings to create and recreate aspects of themselves at will.

EVERYBODY AGREES THAT "consumerism" is a modern curse, perhaps the modern curse. Clergymen, intellectuals, social critics, environmentalists, artists, politicians, journalists, and pop ascetics of every kind describe it as a vulgar, advertising-driven accumulation of unnecessary junk, and a build-up of debilitating debt. Marxists have explained it in terms of such concepts as "commodity fetishism," "symbolic capital," and, in a still-vital concept formulated by the German Marxist Frankfurt School, "false needs" insinuated by a conspiratorial capitalism. Meaningful lives, the whole world agrees, lie in simple things that cannot be purchased: love, nature, family, and the contemplation of eternal spiritual values.

It is obviously true that happiness lies in such essential concerns, just as it is obvious that in many individual cases, "consumerism" really is little more than a crass reflex often resulting in crippling personal debt. So why is it that, while everybody expresses the heartiest contempt for consumerist behavior, everybody in the world who can do so indulges in it, including most of its critics? There is one complicating factor in the universal condemnation of acquisitiveness: personal liberty, and the opportunity to employ the material world as a tool for self-expression.

What we regard as "consumerist" behavior does not begin with industrialization and the manufacture of cheap, ready-made goods; it can be traced to antiquity. One revealing way to trace its past is through the proclamation through history of so-called sumptuary laws that attempted to control acquisitiveness.

These laws expressly limited the quality of things--clothing, gems, and the like--that any given individual was allowed to own or display. The purpose of such laws was not spiritual; they were not intended to turn anyone's attention to family or nature. Rather, the laws' purpose was to maintain the political and social status quo. These laws preserved despotic distinctions politically by limiting the material display to the hereditary upper classes (or to such professional classes as doctors or professors), and they underscored the effect of poverty psychologically by preventing anyone from expressing their individuality except in ways allowed by tradition. Urban classes either wore or owned what they were supposed to, or faced punishment. (Pre-industrial rural classes, though they are often seen through a filter of nostalgia for "simplicity," owned almost nothing, and lived narrow lives marked by ignorance, hunger, and destitution.)

Those who enacted sumptuary laws understood very well the relationship between material goods and individual power. So, more recently, did the administrators of a failing Soviet Union, who might have saved themselves for at least a little longer had they figured out (as the Chinese have) how to supply their citizens with such things as jeans and rock music.

That is the relationship that Jardine, McCracken, and McKendrick (among other scholars) are, in their respective ways, addressing: The translation of material wealth into an assertion of individualism. Their subject is people who are drawing (or have drawn) on their material context to recreate themselves and even, in McCracken's work, to experiment with their identities, either validating or escaping external, imposed, or inherited categories of class, nationality, or geography (the very sorts of categories in which the academic left--and such cultural nationalists as those of France and Canada--have been seeking to trap culture).

At a mundane level, one might argue that the more worldly goods (and services) to choose among, the less worldly constraint. But it is not the goods themselves that matter; what counts is the potential for making self-defining choices, an intellectual act. That is the engine driving culture under capitalism. The florescence of cultural artifacts that accompanies periods of intense acquisition is part of the same process of individuation.

Even some cultural-studies academics have begun to recognize consumerism as a route to empowerment. The New York Times recently reported that such scholars as Deidre Lynch, of State University of New York at Buffalo, are now arguing that 18th- and 19th-century stores allowed women to emerge into public, where, merely by imagining they owned the goods they saw, they were "transported into new identities." But because such intellectuals think commerce is about conflict and oppression, these scholars maintain that women browsers somehow taught store clerks lessons in class by taunting them with possible purchases, and even that they fortified class divisions by "cheapening" the clothes they tried on.

Anti-sumptuary Marxists regard even this analysis as going too far, because it grants consumers "creativity," "autonomy," "rebelliousness," and even "authority." According to British sociologist Don Slater, whose work is quoted in the Times, consumers have none of these characteristics. Such analysis reflects "the logic of the consumer society it seeks to analyze." The new theories, complains Slater, assume that consumers are rational and autonomous creatures who, in the Times's paraphrase, acquire what they want and want what they acquire. Slater and his fellow critics think they know otherwise.

Sociologist Slater is, of course, speaking the language of Frankfurt School Marxism; the Times cites his belief that consumers do not know "real needs" from "false needs," a classic formulation. The century's Western Marxists, for all their own speciation of theorists, have never been able to come to grips with consumerism. They have advanced a series of theories that attempt to account for acquisitiveness and its cultural ramifications by denying individual preference, and as a result have blundered into forms of intellectual occultism: corporate mesmerism, class conspiracism, consumer robotism, etc.