consumption
consumption (2011) by david graeber via 39 pg kindle version from anarchist library [https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-consumption]
notes/quotes:
3
Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to be bombarded with endless—and often strangely moralistic—exhortations to acknowledge the importance of something referred to as “consumption.” The exhortations were effective; for the past 2 decades, the term has become a staple of theoretical discourse. Rarely, however, do anthropologists examine it: asking themselves why it is that almost all forms of human self-expression or enjoyment are now being seen as analogous to eating food. This essay seeks to investigate how this came about, beginning with medieval European theories of desire and culminating in the argument that the notion of consumption ultimately resolves certain conceptual problems in possessive individualism.
I do not want to offer yet another critique of consumption or of consumer practices. I want to ask instead why it is that we assume such things exist. Why is it that when we see someone buying refrigerator magnets and someone else putting on eyeliner or cooking dinner or singing at a karaoke bar or just sitting around watching television, we assume that they are on some level doing the same thing, that it can be described as “consumption” or “consumer behavior,” and that these are all in some way analogous to eating food? I want to ask where this term came from, why we ever started using it, and what it says about our assumptions about property, desire, and social relations that we continue to use it. Finally, I want to suggest that maybe this is not the best way to think about such phenomena and that we might do well to come up with better ones.
Consumption served the interests of manufacturers seeking greater profits, and citizens became the passive victims of advertisers. Processes of standardization, they argued, were accompanied by the development of a materialistic culture, in which commodities came to lack authenticity and instead *merely met “false” needs. **These needs were generated by marketing and advertising strategies and, it is argued, increased the capacity for ideological control or domination. (MacKay 1997:3)
*even survival needs are not deep enough.. ie: perpetuating survival triage.. so need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
**any form of m\a\p increases capacity for control/domination
5
The following quote is from a recently published encyclopedia of anthropology, in the section, “Anthropology and Business”:
The British anthropologist Daniel Miller argues that this “turn” represented a metamorphosis of anthropology, from a less mature state in which mass consumption goods were viewed as threatening (i.e., signifying both the loss of culture and a threat to the survival of anthropology), to a more enlightened outlook that frankly acknowledges consumption as the local idiom through which cultural forms express their creativity and diversity. This rather amazing about-face has permitted a confluence of interest between anthropology and the field of marketing. (Baba 2006:43)
The author goes on to observe that
the literature in consumer behavior and marketing produced by anthropologists has been well received by marketing departments and corporations, with the result that anthropologists now hold positions in the marketing departments of several major business schools (e.g., University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern University, University of Nebraska, University of Utah). It would appear that anthropology is now a permanent addition to the disciplines that comprise the academic marketing field. (Baba 2006:47)
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Perhaps the real question should be, Why does the fact that manufactured goods are involved in an activity automatically come to define its very nature?
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It seems to me that this theoretical choice—the assumption that the main thing people do when they are not working is “consuming” things—carries within it a tacit cosmology, a theory of human desire and fulfillment whose implications we would do well to think about.[8]
endnote 8: Here I also want to answer some of the questions rather left dangling at the end of my book on value theory (Graeber 2001).
The English “to consume” derives from the Latin verb consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely” and, hence, by extension, to “eat up, devour, waste, destroy, or spend.” To be consumed by fire, or for that matter consumed with rage, still holds the same implications: it implies something not just being thoroughly taken over but being overwhelmed in a way that dissolves away the autonomy of the object or even that destroys the object itself.
Consumption in the contemporary sense really appears in the political economy literature only in the late eighteenth century, when authors such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo began to use it as the opposite of “production.” One of the crucial features of the industrial capitalism emerging at the time was a growing separation between the places in which people—or men, at least—worked and the places where they lived. This in turn made it possible to imagine that the “economy” (itself a very new concept) was divided into two completely separate spheres: the workplace, in which goods were “produced,” and the household, in which they were “consumed.” That which was created in one sphere is used— ultimately, used up, destroyed—in the other.
need – oikos (the economy our souls crave).. ‘i should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ – gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
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Consumption,” then, refers to an image of human existence that first appears in the North Atlantic world around the time of the industrial revolution, one that sees what humans do outside the workplace largely as a matter of destroying things or using them up. It is especially easy to perceive the impoverishment this introduces into accustomed ways of talking about the basic sources of human desire and gratification by comparing it to the ways earlier Western thinkers had talked about such matters. *St. Augustine and Hobbes (1968), for example, both saw human beings as creatures of unlimited desire, and they therefore concluded that if left to their own devices, they would always end up locked in competition. As Marshall Sahlins (1996) has pointed out, in this they almost exactly anticipated the assumptions of later economic theory. But when they listed what humans desired, neither emphasized anything like the modern notion of consumption. In fact, both came up with more or less the same list: humans, they said, desire (1) sensual pleasures, (2) the accumulation of riches (a pursuit assumed to be largely aimed at winning the praise and esteem of others), and (3) power. None were primarily about using anything up. Even Adam Smith (1976[1776]), ..turned to an entirely different framework ..one that assumed that what most humans want above all is to be the object of others’ sympathetic attention.
*only because we haven’t yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
It was only with the growth of economic theory and its gradual colonization of other disciplines that desire itself began to be imagined as the desire to consume.
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that is, the moment when a significant portion of the population could be said to be organizing their lives around the pursuit of something called “consumer goods,” defined as goods they did not see as necessities but as in some sense objects of desire, chosen from a range of products, subject to the whims of fashion (ephemera again), and so on.
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
Since Plato, the most common approach has been to see desire as rooted in a feeling of absence or lack. This does make a certain obvious intuitive sense. One desires what one does not have. One feels an absence and imagines how one might like to fill it; this very action of the mind is what we think of as “desire.” But there is also an alternative tradition that goes back at least to Spinoza (2000) that starts off not from the yearning for some absent object but from something even more fundamental: **self-preservation, the desire to continue to exist (Nietzsche’s “life which desires itself”). Here desire becomes the fundamental energetic glue that makes individuals what they are over time.
**need life over survival ness.. otherwise will always have ie: khan filling the gaps law et al
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One can generalize from here a much broader theory of desire .. where the object of desire is always some image of perfection, an imaginary completion for one’s own ruptured sense of self (Graeber 2001:257–258). But then there is also the approach adopted by authors such as Deleuze and Guattari ..Appealing to the Spinozist/Nietzschean tradition, they deny that desire should be found in any sense of lack at all. Rather, it is something that “flows” between everyone and everything; much like Foucault’s power, it becomes the energy knitting everything together. As such, desire is everything and nothing; there is very little one can actually say about it.
In other words, the one constant element in all these definitions is that desire (unlike needs, urges, or intentions) necessarily involves the imagination. Objects of desire are always imaginary objects and usually imaginary totalities of some sort because, as I have argued before, most totalities are themselves imaginary objects (Graeber 2001).
The other way one might say desire differs from needs, urges, or intentions is that as Tzvetan Todorov (2001) puts it, it always implies the desire for some kind of social relation. There must necessarily be some kind of quest for recognition involved. The problem is that owing to the extreme individualism typical of the Western philosophical tradition, this tends to be occluded; even where it is not, the desire for recognition is assumed to be the basis for some kind of profound existential conflict. The classic text here is Hegel’s (1998) “On Lordship and Bondage,” the famous “master/slave dialectic” in Phenomenology of Spirit that has made it difficult for future theorists to think of this kind of desire without also thinking of violence and domination.
If I may be allowed a very abbreviated summary of Hegel’s argument, human beings are not animals because they have the capacity for self-consciousness. To be self-conscious means to be able to look at ourselves from an outside perspective— that must necessarily be that of another human being. All these were familiar arguments at the time; Hegel’s great innovation was to bring in desire, to point out that to look at ourselves this way, one has to have some reason to want to do it. This sort of desire is also inherent in the nature of humanity, according to Hegel, because unlike animals, humans desire recognition. Animals experience desire simply as the absence of something: they are hungry; therefore, they wish to “negate that negation” by obtaining food; they have sexual urges; therefore, they seek a mate. Humans go further. They not only wish to have sex—at least, if they are being truly human about the matter—but also wish to be recognized by their partner as someone worthy of having sex with. That is, they wish to be loved. We desire to be the object of another’s desire. So far this seems straightforward enough: human desire implies mutual recognition. The problem is that for Hegel, the quest for mutual recognition inevitably leads to violent conflict, to “life-and-death struggles” for supremacy. ..a battle for recognition is inherently unwinnable, because if you kill your opponent, there is no one to recognize you; on the other hand, if your opponent surrenders, he proves by that very act that he was not willing to sacrifice his life for recognition after all and therefore that his recognition is meaningless. One can of course reduce a defeated opponent to slavery, but even that is self-defeating, because once one reduces the Other to slavery, one becomes dependent on one’s slave for one’s very material survival while the slave at least produces his own life and is in fact able to realize himself to some degree through his work.
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This is a myth, a parable. Clearly, there is something profoundly true in it. Still, it is one thing to say that quest for mutual recognition is necessarily going to be tricky, full of pitfalls, with a constant danger of descending into attempts to dominate or even obliterate the Other. It is another thing to assume from the start that mutual recognition is impossible. As Majeed Yar (2001) has pointed out, this assumption has come to dominate almost all subsequent Western thinking on the subject, especially since Sartre refigured recognition as “the gaze” that, he argued, necessarily pins down, squashes, and objectifies the Other. As in so much Western theory, when social relations are not simply ignored, they are assumed to be inherently competitive.
not so much about the mutual.. but that recognition ness is cancerous distraction
Insofar as it is useful to distinguish something called “desire” from needs, urges, or intentions, then, it is because desire (a) is always rooted in imagination and (b) tends to direct itself toward some kind of social relation, real or imaginary, and that social relation generally entails a desire for some kind of recognition and hence an imaginative reconstruction of the self, a process fraught with dangers of destroying that social relation or turning it into some kind of terrible conflict.
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It is this constant lack of satisfaction, the argument goes, that then drives consumption and thus allows the endless expansion of production. If the system delivered on its promises, the whole thing would not work.
The result is a social order that has become, in large measure, a vast apparatus for the fashioning of daydreams. These reveries attach themselves to the promise of pleasure afforded by some particular consumer good or set of them; they produce the endless desires that drive consumption, but in the end, the real enjoyment is not in the consumption of the physical objects but in the reveries themselves (see also Wagner 1995).
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One of the greatest problems in medieval metaphysics was to explain how it was possible for the rational soul to perceive objects in the material world because the two were assumed to be of absolutely alien natures..These images then circulated through the body’s pneumatic system (which centered on the heart) before they could be comprehended by the intellectual faculties of the soul. ..when a man fell in love with a woman, he was really in love not with the woman herself but with her image, one that, once lodged in his pneumatic system, gradually came to hijack it, vampirizing his imagination and ultimately drawing off all his physical and spiritual energies. Medical writers tended to represent this as a disease that needed to be cured; poets and lovers represented it as a heroic state that combined pleasures (in fantasy but also, somewhat perversely, in the very experience of frustration and denial) with an intrinsic spiritual or mystical value in itself.
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It apparently never occurred to Bruno or anyone else in this early period to apply such protoadvertising techniques to economic rather than political purposes. Politics, after all, is about relations between people. Manipulating others was, by definition, a political business, which I think brings out the most fundamental difference between the medieval conception of desire and the sort of thing Campbell (1987) describes.
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This might at least suggest a solution to what has always struck me as a profound paradox in Western social theory. As I have already noted, the idea of 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 fully developed by authors such as St. Augustine and therefore formed an accepted part of Christian doctrine throughout the Middle Ages. At the same time, very few people actually seemed to behave like this. Economically, the Middle Ages were still the time of “target incomes,” in which the typical reaction to economic good times, even among urban craftspeople and most of the protobourgeoisie, was to take more days off. It is as if the notion of the maximizing individual existed in theory long before it emerged in practice. One explanation might be that until the early modern period, at least, high culture (whether in its most Christian or most courtly versions) tended to devalue any open display of greed, appetite, or acquisitiveness, while popular culture—which could sometimes heartily embrace such impulses—did so in forms that were inherently collective.
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What I am suggesting, then, is that while medieval moralists accepted in the abstract that humans were cursed with limitless desires—that, as Augustine put it, their natures rebelled against them just as they had rebelled against God—they did not think this was an existential dilemma that affected them; rather, people tended to attribute such sinful predilections mainly to people they saw as social and therefore moral inferiors. Men saw women as insatiable; the prosperous saw the poor as grasping and materialistic. It was really in the early modern period that all this began to change.
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Agamben (1993a) has a theory as to why this happened. He suggests that the idea that all humans are driven by infinite unquenchable desires is possible only when one severs imagination from experience.
people increasingly came to see themselves as isolated beings who defined their relation with the world not in terms of social relations but in terms of property rights. It was only then that the problem of how one could “have” things, or for that matter experiences (“we’ll always have Paris”), could really become a crisis.[25]
endnote 25: In other words, rather than asking how is it possible to truly “have” or possess some object or experience, perhaps we should be asking why anyone should develop a desire to do so to begin with
to have or to be ness
Private property is one particular that entails one individual’s right to exclude all others—“all the world”—from access to a certain house or shirt or piece of land, and so on. A relation so broad is difficult to imagine, however, so people tend to treat it as if it were a relation between a person and an object. But what could a relation between a person and an object actually consist of?
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The connections here are infinitely complicated: I have argued that capitalism is really a transformation of slavery and cannot be understood outside it..t (Graeber 2005).
graeber enslavement law et al
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In other words, when “creative consumption” is at its most creative, it is not really consumption at all; when it most resembles something we would call “consumption,” it is at its least creative.
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Above all, I think we should be suspicious about importing the political economy habit of seeing society as divided into two spheres, one of production and one of consumption,[36]
endnote 36: Or, at best, three: production, consumption, and exchange.
If we wish to continue applying terms borrowed from political economy—as I have myself certainly done elsewhere (e.g., Graeber 2001, 2005)—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.
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One thing I think we can certainly assert. Insofar as social life is and always has been mainly about the mutual creation of human beings, the ideology of consumption has been endlessly effective in helping us forget this..t ..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. Even as anthropologists and other social theorists directly challenge this view of the world, the unreflective use—and indeed self-righteous propagation—of terms such as “consumption” end up undercutting our efforts and reproducing the very tacit ideological logic we are trying to call into question..t
Comments
Robert Cluley and David Harvie
School of Management, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, United Kingdom (david.harvie@ gmail.com). 29 XI 10
Part of the appeal of consumption, then, is that it simultaneously pleases the two handmaidens of the modern university: business and intellectuals. It bridges the practical and the useless, the scholarly and the mundane. ..Here Graeber shows us how the concept of consumption has changed over time, from being a reference to waste and destruction to a mirror for production in monopoly capitalism and now, finally, in the “consumer society” to being a mirror to itself. It is not the things we consume that are important to us anymore but that we consume. We no longer produce things in a sphere of production that we consume elsewhere. Rather, we consume everywhere. Or so say the scholars.
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For many academics, consumption is a concept whose ingredients are milk and honey. And it is true that for many of us in paradise, we plan to do a lot of consuming. But there is a hell of a lot of consumption going on in hell, too. Here, though, it is the individual who is being consumed—by fire, hate, and frustration, by one’s inability to be consumed. It is through prolonging desire, as desire for destruction, that hell is imagined to be so, well, hellish. In hell, your appetites are turned against you. The separation of appetite or desires and consumption, we might conclude, is tantamount to hell. In short, capitalism, for most people for most of the time, is a lot like hell. And it is capitalism that produces this separation (or “scarcity” in the language of economics) just as it consumes we who labor within it.
So for us, the power of Graeber’s piece is that it encourages us to ask what the world might look like if we, like early political economists, could draw a line around “consumption”—thus defining it and containing it. ..But what if we had a concept other than production, consumption, or some stupid combination of the two that would allow us to look into the mirror of consumption rather than hold up another mirror to it?
If marketing scholars do not want to limit their studies, economists rarely care, and anthropologists have been distracted by the very concept they should be critiquing, what is to be done? One solution is to look outside of academia. Those outside the academy are happy to critique consumption. This work is being done. Graeber’s challenge to us, though, is to force ourselves to regurgitate the concept, to stick our scholarly fingers down our academic throats until we vomit up the idea of consumption. The question is, once it has been exposed to the disinfectants of sunlight, will we, like dogs, return to the concept and swallow it down once more?
Dimitra Doukas
Independent Scholar, 408 West College Street, Fredericksburg, Texas 78624, U.S.A. (dimitra.doukas@gmail.com). 29 X 10
This is a very persuasive analysis. Consumption, Graeber argues, no matter how creatively it is used by the people we study, is an ideology that tricks us into shouldering the modernist assumption of an economy with two spheres, production and consumption. Whatever is not production for markets becomes, by default, consumption, a symbolic eating that both destroys and incorporates its object. Relegated to the sphere of consumption, social life appears as the pursuit of products, its life-giving creativity all but forgotten..t In this ideological regime, social life itself, the “mutual creation of human beings,” can appear as “a gift granted us by the captains of industry.”
26
The problem here is that a truly autonomous being would have no desire for recognition from another nor any other kind of social relationship. Hegel and those who followed this line of thinking were not so much “starting from a model of possessive individualism,” as Graeber proposes, but rather from one of innate competition, a model that would soon surface as “survival of the fittest.” Human beings are in no way autonomous. (Hegel’s two men meet “at the beginning of history,” having never encountered another consciousness, i.e., in the impossible condition of having survived infancy without caregivers.) To the contrary, we are, as the late Walter Goldschmidt (2006) put it, innately “affect hungry,” such sluts for recognition that we are likely to see worthiness in anyone who offers us encouraging words, as flatterers and cons the world over have always known.
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alf hornberg: The most significant point in Graeber’s paper is his observation that consumption is really about the production of people, echoing Marx’s insight that in capitalism, relations between people masquerade as relations between things. The human appropriation (and incorporation) of things has always been about the production of persons, but as Graeber reminds us, commodity fetishism encourages us to imagine otherwise. Although the idea of private property is a thoroughly social relation, that is, a person’s right to exclude others from access to a thing, it presents itself to us as a relation between that person and that thing. Nor do we generally see that the commodity is an embodiment of other people’s labor and landscapes. If the consumer’s sovereignty over his or her commodified objects is modeled on the monarch’s sovereignty over his or her subjects, as Graeber suggests, the affinity between the two relations thus boils down to a transformation of social power. Viewed in this light, it is indeed revealing to see capitalism as a transformation of slavery or even cannibalism. Graeber’s (2001, 2004, 2007a) stimulating and entertaining contributions to economic anthropology continue to generate insights about how human relations to objects are ultimately about their relations to other humans, whether objects are treated as humans or humans are treated as objects.
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peter n stearns: Even for the Western context, particularly before the eighteenth century but to an extent even since, I wonder also about a possible overemphasis on individualism. Another avenue to explore—and it may also encompass identifiable categories of desire—involves group consumerism. Premodern cities in the West but also elsewhere burst with group consumer projects (and I know by now I am referencing consumerism a lot despite the admonitions in the Graeber article). Religious projects were front and center, with consumer decisions about church and clergy styles and decorations, but guild presentations count as well. One of the constraints on individual consumerism was the pervasive emphasis on using costume and other objects to denote group identity and conformity, though in terms of a basic definition of acquisitive efforts beyond the needs of any reasonable subsistence, they fit a consumerism umbrella. And this element, though by now far less organized, has hardly disappeared from consumer behavior. The frequency of individual decisions to acquire items or entertainments that in fact help blend with a recognizable group—the peer cluster in school, the office assemblage—is another complexity in consumerism that needs attention. Here, too, links with as well as changes from more traditional patterns factor in substantially.
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Robert Cluley and David Harvie manage to be both funny and poetic at the same time. Writing from a school of management, they suggest in their relation to the business world, anthropologists have failed in their primary duty, which is to challenge economists’ received categories rather than reproducing them. This is perhaps not entirely fair (when I say it either), because there are anthropologists who are critical; it is just that marketers ignore them. But I would like to strongly second their point that the main voices criticizing consumption now come from outside the academy entirely. Here let me repeat an autobiographical note relegated to a footnote in the essay itself. I actually come from a working-class family—not only that, from a onetime Nielsen family that during my early childhood represented the entirety of southern Manhattan for ratings purposes until we gave an anonymous interview to TV Guide. I know a little about ordinary Americans’ attitudes. This is why I find it so bizarre to be lectured by a bunch of high-bourgeois-born academics that critiquing consumption makes me out of touch. Maybe they should stop designing so many surveys and talk to people for a change.
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I much appreciate Felix Girke’s suggestions that many have long been reminding us that “consumption” is largely about the creation and maintenance of households; one of the pitfalls of employing the term “production,” even when referring to the production of people and social relations (a usage that goes back at least to the German Ideology), is that much of the most important labor—and particularly caring labor, which should probably be considered the primary form of labor—is not about “producing” so much as preserving, maintaining, and sustaining things. So, too, with the point about passions. It dovetails both with Gershon’s critique of agency (Gershon 2011) and in a complex way, I think, with Doukas’s invocation of Herschfeld. We used to feel “consumed” by passions. Now we have a passion to consume. Yet to what degree is all this based not in an active desire to make, do, or construct but a (sometimes secret) desire not to have to do so for a change. In earlier drafts, one of the comments that most enraged marketing theorists seemed to be the idea that some of the desire to throw oneself in front of the television was grounded on the desire not to have to do—or think—anything at all.
Finally, I genuinely appreciate David Sutton’s comments about food—appropriate indeed for a project that began in a restaurant in lower Manhattan with just the sort of conversation he describes. I would just reemphasize the second half of the clause “40-year-old upper-class white men eating food, or at least their ideas about their eating.” Indeed. Conviviality has always been, for most humans everywhere, the definition of shared experience, a kind of communism of the senses that puts the lie to the entire ideology of consumption. (And even when rich white guys eat in expensive French restaurants—how often do you see one eating by himself?) It is not even most eating that is the model; it is the midnight snack, the piece of pie snarfed from the fridge when no one else is looking, the sandwich you have at the train station, the morning coffee, possibly the candy bar you buy when you are depressed. In a way, that last one tells you everything.
—David Graeber
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be you. 