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Economics: Consumption

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Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood wrote The World of Goods out of exasperation with the limited view of consumption that has dominated discussions, the “tendency to suppose that people buy goods for two or three restricted purposes: material welfare, psychic welfare, and display. The first two are needs of the individual person: the need to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, and for peace of mind and recreation. The last is a blanket term that covers all the demands of society. These then tend crudely to be summed up as competitive display. Thorstein Veblen has much to answer for when we consider how widely his analysis of the leisure class is received and how influential has been his unqualified scorn of conspicuous consumption.”

Their first move is to recognize that consumption should be understood in the context of “social process, not merely looked upon as the result or objective of work.”

“Consumption has to be recognized as an integral part of the same social system that accounts for the drive to work, itself part of the social need to relate to other people, and to have mediating materials for relating to them. Mediating materials are food, drink, and hospitality of home to offer, flowers and clothes to signal shared rejoicing, or mourning dress to share sorrow. Goods, work, and consumption have been artificially abstracted out of the whole social scheme. The way the excision has been made damages the possibility of understanding these aspects of our life.”

But the deeper problem is that economic rationality has been conceived too narrowly. ”Simple induction and deduction” are the only mental activities “worthy of the name of thinking.” Douglas and Isherwood disagree and argue for the priority of metaphor: ”there is a prior and pervasive kind of reasoning that scans a scene and sizes it up, packing into one instant’s survey a process of matching, classifying, and comparing. This is not to invoke a mysterious faculty of intuition or mental association. Metaphorical appreciation, as all the words we have used suggest, is a work of approximate measurement, scaling and comparison between like and unlike elements in a pattern.” To understand consumption, “the economist’s idea of rationality ought to incorporate this code-breaking, jigsaw puzzlesolving activity of the human mind. By giving due credit to metaphorical understanding, we can come to a more accurate idea of why consumers buy goods.”

Armed with this expanded notion of rationality, they argue that goods are to be understood semiotically, metaphors or metonyms of the values of the consumer: “goods are treated as more or less costly, more or less transitory markers of rational categories. Behaving as an economic agent means making rational choices. Goods assembled together in ownership make physical, visible statements about the hierarchy of values to which their chooser subscribes. Goods can be cherished or judged inappropriate, discarded, and replaced. Unless we appreciate how they are used to constitute an intelligible universe, we will never know how to resolve the contradictions of our economic life.”

Having cleared this ground, they do not give “consumerism” a free ride. Instead, they want to arrive at a more accurate evaluation of the ethics of consumption: “The best result we could hope for from this exercise would be to strip away the materials in which social relations are constituted, and see the bare patterns of the relationships which they cover. Then we would find that, having understood better the springs of rational choice, and having credited goods with a more important place in rational behavior, the consumer society is not absolved from guilt. Each free individual is responsible for the exclusiveness of his own home, the allocation of his free time, and hospitality. The moralists who indignantly condemn overconsumption will eventually have to answer for whom they do not invite to their table, how they wish their daughters to marry, where their old friends are today with whom they started out in their youth.”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, February 20, 2012 at 3:43 pm

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Economics: Consumption

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