"The world-system advocates" = Fernand Braudel The Wheels of Commerce, Immanuel Wallerstein, John Nef, Werner Sombart, Chandra Mukerji From Graven Images
the "home demand" advocates = Joan Thirsk, D. E. C. Eversley, Jan de Vries, Simon Schama The Embarassment of Riches (1987).
"For Braudel, though, the `right string to pull to start the engine' of capitalism was always demand, and it has been to the demand-side of the capitalist market-place that current revisionists have devoted most of their attention" (23).
Aside: Both McKendrick and Simon Schama rely on Mandeville: Birth 15-19, 51-3; Embarassment 321, 467-8. (Agnew note 21, p. 36)
McKendrick's thesis that 18thc England presented the right ingredients for awakening a consumer society, viz., "a fluid social structure, rising wages, an emulative bourgeoisie and its servants, a showcase capital city and in intellectual environment increasingly hospitable to the public benefits of private vices"--contested by Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, "Consumerism and the Industrial Revolution," Social History xv (May 1990), 151-79.
McKendrick's argument shifts the focus of "Wedgwood's achievement as an entrepreneur from the supply side to the demand of England's commercialization. Despite, or more accurately because, of his many aristocratic connections, Josiah Wedgwood had made himself into a promotional wizard, able, as McKendrick put it, to `milk the effects of social emulation and emulative spending' among England's middling ranks [Birth 72]. Economists have traditionally referred to such imitative or bandwagon phenomena as `Veblen effects'" which McKendrick wants to rename "`Wedgwood effects' [Birth 103, 140-1]" (24). But, Agnew says, since McKendrick's argument is about Wedgwood--the producer, it is still not an argument about consumers generating demand, and in fact it is an almost "consipiratorial" account, relying on "strikingly magical and manipulative metaphors (`exploiting,' `milking,' `conjuring,' [Birth 13, 42, 43, 71].
vs. "McKendrick's `instinctivist, manipulationist, Veblenesque' approach to the consumer revolution as an inadequate explanation for a pattern of consumption that eighteenth-century critics themselves labelled as manic and addictive [Ethic 42-3]" (25).
Campbell deals, like Werner Sombart, Tibor Scitovsky The Joyless Economy, and Albert O. Hirschman Shifting Involvements: Private Interests and Public Actions, with "the almost Proustian cycle of anticipatory pleasure and consummatory disappointment upon which the Wedgwoods of the eighteenth century so skilfully played" (25).
Campbell's concepts: traditional vs. modern hedonism--"a `state of enjoyable discomfort' [Ethic 77-95, esp. 86]" (25)
"By Campbell's lights, modern (i.e. eighteenth-century) hedonism collapsed the Weberian dichotomy and sequence between deferred and immediate gratification--savings and spending--into a single, iterable experience of unquenchable desire. Like Veblen and, in a measure . . . Mary Douglas, Campbell treated the symbolic values of consumer objects as their use-value, but unlike them he defined those communicative uses as fundamentally private, covert and inconspicuous. Where Veblen and Douglas had treated acquisitions as forms of direct address, Campbell regarded them as--at best--soliloquies. The modern consumer or hedonist, he argued, `is continually . . . attaching [his day-dreams] to objects of desire, and then subsequently "unhooking" them from these objects as and when they are attained and experienced' [Ethic 86-7]. This was the dialectic of demand that Campbell saw entering, `irreversibly,' into eighteenth-century English commercial culture" (25).
Campbell "located an alternative and, once again [as w/ Mukerji--see notebook notes] complementary intellectual tradition within the Reformation, a tradition running parallel to Weber's inner-worldly asceticism but rejecting its emotional economies. Campbell thus traced a genealogy of feeling from Dutch Arminian ministers through increasingly secular, latitudinarian, sentimentalist and romantic writers of the eighteenth century. Their cumulative impact was to legitimize the kind of affective self-indulgence at play in the new consumerism [Ethic chs. 6-7]" (26).
Agnew not convinced by Campbell's "party of feeling" argument insofar as it is an "intellectualist" one, but he does buy "the intimate, if not dialectical, relation between the control and the exploration of appetite and feeling": "`both the delaying of gratification andthe suppression of emotion work together to create a rich and powerful, imaginative inner life within the individual, the necessary prerequisite for a `romantic' personality,' and, one need only add, for a modern consumer [Ethic 222]" (26).
Agnew says that Campbell really proposed a "deconstruction" of the "Protestant ethic" by "demonstrating . . . how that superfluity of feeling which asceticism was in earnest to displace could become, by the very power of its own repressive mechanisms, the sentimentality it eventually came to embrace"--a familiar argument, Agnew says, to Americanists who "will make out in this dialectice of discipline and desire many of the features of Daniel Bell's theory of the cultural contradictions of capitalism, of Ann Douglas's theory of the feminization of American culture and of Jackson Lears's theory of the shift from salvation to self-realization--all of whom critically link the cultural fascination with intense and expressive feeling to the onset of an anti-puritanical consumerism. Unlike Bell, Douglas, and Lears, however, Campbell rejected any formulation of these dichotomies as contradictions, much less as a sequence of declension. There was for him no lamentable fall out of Calvinist discipline into the symbolically impoverished world of consumerism. To the contrary, he saw an almost Hegelian leap in the imaginative possibilities . . . available to the west as a result of the centuries-long `rationalization of pleasure' [Ethic 217-8; Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Captialism (1978), 73-4]" (26).
[the above looks to me like the repressive hypothesis at work on history.]
Agnew says that McKendrick and Campbell were working on the genesis of "consumer culture as a middle-class phenomenon" which their new periodization now dates "from eighteenth-century England," but that:
"[I]mmigrant workers and their families entered hesitantly, if at all, into the developing infrastructure of bourgeois consumption-the sanitized `dream worlds' of the movie palace, department and chain stores. And when new goods and services were purchased, they were often incorporated into imported, inherited, or in other ways alternative systems of meaning" (27); [note says:] "For a theoretical treatment of the ways in which goods may be `singularized' or `deommoditized' by their incorporation into other personal, familial or cultural frameworks of meaning, see Igor Kopytoff, "The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process," in Arjun Appadurai, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultual Perspective (Cambridge UP, 1986), 64-91.
Most accounts of rise of mass consumer culture "tell a story of a staggered working-class entry into the world of `rationalized pleasure,' and entry delayed and deferred by the constraints of income, race, ethnicity, gender and their corresponding cultural meanings. . . . [T]he narrative of this encounter with organized leisure bears a striking resemblance to Herbert Gutman's now classic account of immigrant [27 / 28] workers' repeated encounters with (and resistance to) the world of rationalized labour" (27-28). The story told is not about "the blue-collar consumer's passive immersion in a ready-made mass leisure experience; working-class consumption was less a form of cultural suicide than a model of cultural awakening, a case of native and immigrant workers actively appropriating and transforming leisure goods to suit their pleasures and purposes" (28).
[Summarizing George Lipsitz's argument about post-war television:] "[T]he culture industry inadvertently infused its products with the same malaise the products were supposed to resolve. If the industry did indeed operate as an ideological hypodermic needle, as some mass culture critics insisted, its solution appeared to carry unanticipated and unwanted antibodies. . . . [Lipsitz used] Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the `dialogic imagination' [note cites The Dialogic Imagination], Stuart Hall's notion of the ideological effect' ["Culture, the Media, and the `Ideological Effect,'" in James Curran, Michael Gurevitch and Janet Woollacott (eds.), Mass Communication and Society (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979, and "Notes on deconstructing `the popular," in Ralph Samuel (ed.), People's History and Socialist Theory, Routledge, 1981], and Fredric Jameson's notion of reification ["Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text i (1979): 130-48] as models for his own analysis of post-war television . . . . [T]hese same theoretical influences are everywhere visible as more and more historians come to look upon the boundaries between high and low cultural commodities as themselves politically contested conventions. [Note: "for a more recent formulation of this challenge to cultural boundaries--in relation to the status of middlebrow culture--see Andrew Ross, `Introduction' and `Reading the Rosenberg Letters,' in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1989), 1-41" n. 45, p. 37]" (28).
from a "cross-fertilization between history and cultural studies," Agnew says, has come "the political redemption of consumer choices once airily dismissed as forms of working-class escapism and wish-fulfilment" (28), which Agnew sees as analogous to but significantly different from the ways that "Colin Campbell has reinterpreted and reclaimed the bourgeois daydream. Whereas Campbell treats the middle-class longing after goods as a characteristically private, almost Rousseauan reverie that has been wishfully freed of all obstacles and discomforts, the interpreters of working-class consumption have stressed teh social dimension of that consumption and the class, gender, and generational tensions with wich its fantasies are invariably laced" (28).
re: "the licensed pleasures that Janice Radway and Anne Snitow see women claiming from Harlequin Romances"--
To the extent . . . that pleasures publicly enjoyed . . . cease to be a bourgeois, male prerogative and become instead an object of competitive claims, the pleasure principle itself has been politicized. From this perspective a world of increasingly libidinized goods would seem to present as many opportunities for aggressive as for repressive desublimation. The ghost of the Frankfurt School thus returns unbidden to the interpretation of consumer culture, but this time in the guise of Herbert Marcuse's deepest utopian longings. The resemblance is striking" (29).
"Is it really surprising that a generation of scholars raised on mass culture and, many of them, involved in the movements of the 1960s should chafe against a tradition of inquiry into mass conumer culture hobbled between the stark alternatives of celebration and revulsion? And is it any more surprising that the fantasy life long associated with commodity-consumption should at this moment receive another look and, with it, another historical and political valuation? I think not" (29).
"Yet another indication of the way in which the world of goods has expanded to fill the available analytical space--to become, as it were, the air we breathe--has been the gradual marginalization of labour and production in many recent cultural studies. What began after 1968 as a legitimate effort to correct the labour metaphysic of classical and Marxist political economy and to restore the symbolic dimension of consumption has given way to a blanket dismissal of such categories as subsistence, use-value, and labour. [Note cites Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings, Marshall Sahlin's Culture and Practical Reason.] The word `production' survives largely as a figure of speech, a metaphor used to evoke the active powers at play in the symbolic uses to which a produced and purchased good may be put. Consumers invariably reread, reconfigure and recontextualize their purchases, and, in so doing, reproduce, recreate and refashion themselves. . . . In this manner consumption becomes `cultural work,' productive of `cultural capital' [Bourdieu cited], and grist for cultural `resistance.' From the ashes of the dead author (or producer) arises the heroic figure of the restless reader (or consumer), for it is in the sphere of consumption, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller has recently argued, that `the strategies of recontextualization are at their most advanced.' Consumption, Miller has announced, `is now at the vanguard of history.' [Material Culture, 213]" (30).
Daniel Miller argues that consumption is part of "`the full project of objectification in which the subject becomes at home with itself in otherness.' . . . Miller's notion of consumption as the act of a home-making (as distinct from a homeless) mind conforms to the arguments of several other sociologists and anthropologists" (30): [note lists:] Appadurai (ed.), Social Life of Things, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge UP, 1981); Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Indiana UP, 1988). [note 58, p. 38].
Many scholars working on U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s argue that "the pervasive promise of American consumerism inspired the labour militance of the 1930s and after" (31).
"[I]f to this image of depression-born, consumption-fuelled labour militance, we add the thesis--first intimated by [Warren] Sussman but most recently developed by Robert Westbrook--that war mobilization likewise operated on conspicuously private, consumptionist themes, then we may very well be describing a process whereby private desires reconstructed notions of public rights and [31 / 32] obligations--reconstructed them, that is, in the image of the objects upon which those desires happened to be cathected. As one wartime GI was reported to have said, `I am in this damn mess as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to preserve the million other benefits our country blesses its citizens with'" (31-2).
[Note after "cathected" says:] "`Commodities are symbols of belonging,' Michael Walzer has written;
standing and identity are distributed through the market, sold for cash on the line (but available also to speculators who estabish credit). On the other hand, in a democratic society, the most basic definitions and self-definitions can't be put up for purchase in this way. For citizenship entails what we might call `belongingness'--not merely the sense, but the practical reality, of being at home in (this part of) the social world. This is a condition that can be renounced but never traded; it is not alienable in the marketplace. Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (N.Y.: Basic Books, 1983) 106.
[note 64, p. 38; note continues:]
"See also Robert Westbrook, "`I want a girl just like the girl that married Harry James': American women and the problem of political obligation in World War II," American Quarterly xlii (December 1990): 587-614 . . . ." (n. 64, p. 39).
[note on the coke thing cites E. J. Kahn, The Big Drink: The Story of Coca Cola (1960), 13.]
"[W]hat the history of twentieth-century consumption is telling us is that a far-reaching ideological redefinition of polity and society did begin to take hold during the 1930s and 1940s: the promotion of the social contract of cold-war liberalism, which is to say a state-sponsored guarantee of private consumption. But, more importantly, we are also being told that this redefinition of rights and obligations articulated itself in the seemingly innocuous language of soft drinks, cars and household appliances, and that it therefore occurred, as Colin Campbell might put it, privately, imaginatively and inconspicuously--in short, without discussion" (32).
--embargoes, boycotts and fasts" including "the nonimportation movement before the American Revolution" as described by Timothy Breen ["An empire of Goods: the Anglicization of colonial America, 1690-1776," Journal of British Studies xxv (October 1986), 467-99; "`Baubles of Britain': the American and consumer revolutions of the eighteenth century," Past and Present cxix (May 1988), 73-104]:
"[T]he American colonies were absorbing some nine thousand different commodities, most of them British, with the result that the colonists were becoming gradually and visibly Anglicized. `The colonists belonged to an empire of goods,' he concludes, and `loyalty depended on commerce . . . and not upon coercion.'["Baubles" 86]. . . [C]ommodities were the most widely shared `semiotic order' in the colonies and . . . the patriots did not hesitate to conscript this system of signs when constitutional crises erupted in the 1760s and 1770s. Without knowing it, then, British parliamentarians effectively `transformed private consumer acts into public political statements' ["Baubles" 88]. Non-importation agreements further politicized these goods, such that the `artefacts of consumer culture took on a new symbolic meaning.' . . . [T]he `confrontation with British imports was extending the political horizons of ordinary people,' extending them in a way that would make it `possible for the [32 / 33] colonists to imagine a new nation' ["Baubles" 93, 104]. For the colonists British imports suddenly became, as Mary Douglas might put it, `good for thinking' [Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (NY: Norton, 1979), 62; "the phrase is of course a deliberate echo of earlier structuralist formulations by Claude Levi-Strauss and Stanley Tambiah," n. 71, p. 39].
"Perhaps. But one may still wonder about the thought or systems of thought these goods were drafted to express. For it is just as plausible to argue that the rich, differentiated and conspicuously British language of goods was just that which non-importation deliberately and extravagantly negated. And the rhetoric of that denial--the rhetoric of non-importation--operated in considerable measure at a distance from the `language' of those commodities, for it sprang directly out of the evangelical and republican traditions that the patriots deployed exactly in order to defamiliarize those commodities around which British loyalties were suspected to have formed. . . . [W]hen one recalls that Americans promptly rushed back to their British goods after the Revolution, one realizes that the co-ordinates of loyalty and citizenship lay not in the sphere of goods--and certainly not in anything that could be called a consumer culture--but rather in other spheres: religion, ideology, and so on. . . . [T]here is an important historical and theoretical distinction to be drawn between the politicization of commodities and the commodification of politics, between a concept of citizenship framed around religion and republicanism and a concept of citizenship framed around an `American Way of Life,' especially when that way of life is defined as a shifting ensemble of cultural and material commodities. Only the latter concept, one would think, indicates the presence of a `consumer culture' [Breen's term, "Baubles" 91]" (33).
"True, commodities have and will continue to be used to construct and communicate the meaning of social relationships and, if Colin Campbell is right, to order and indulge our affective response to them. But there is nothing in the literature that I have reviewed here to support the view that commodity consumption has enhanced our appreciation of the remote consequences of our acts or has clarified our responsibilities for them. A political unconscious, an allegorized desire, a subversive reverie of plenitude--all may provide the commodified ground for alternative or oppositional readings of consumer culture. But the distance between that ground and the groundwork required to translate such longings into organized practice seems vast indeed. . . .
"Even less charitably, one could argue that it is precisely because the meanings of commodidities are so fluid and recontextualizable that questions of responsibility and accountability remain submerged within them. Whatever the personal meanings that the American GI may [33 / 34] have attached to the custom of Coke-drinking that he fought for in World War II, they probably did not include the conviction that he was also fighting for the Coca-Cola company. How, then, might it be said that his political horizons were thereby extended and his concept of citizenship tehreby clarified by Coke? . . . . As the GI's invocation of Coke suggests, commodities can be used--ironically, nostalgically, militantly--to put the state in its place, but they are next to useless when deciding what to put in the place of the state. . . . So much for the `recipe-knowledge' of consumer culture: whatever else such knowledge may yield up, it seems as likely to obscure as to clarify our social and political consciousness" (33-4).
"How does brand loyalty mediate civic loyalty? . . . . [T]here has been a strong chronological parallel between consumer booms and anti-communist campaigns in this country since the 1920s . . . . confirm[ing the] suspicion that employers are always ready to promte moral panics in order to defeat the demands of a militant labour force. But the connection between appeals to the Good Life and appeals against the Evil Empire also lends weight to Michael Walzer's thesis that a market-modelled liberalism must of necessity draw on other, non-liberal traditions and fears in order to inspire a loyalty that reaches beyond the market-place" (34).
Also, the "`recipe-knowledge' of consumer culture" threatens "historical consciousness as well"--"neither the history nor the historiography of consumer culture has done much to help us think about" "the privatization of civil rights and obligations," to think about how to prevent the "elid[ing of] the difference between a bill of rights and a bill of goods" (34).