The Production of Consumption

The study of consumption has long been regarded as the province of economics, and, although Adam Smith argued that "con-

sumption is the sole end and purpose of all production" (Minchinton 1982:219), the analysis of consumption has been largely neglected in favor of production and distribution. This neglect may have resulted from the assumption that consumption was unproblematic because it was based upon the concept of rational individuals buying goods to maximize their satisfaction. That rational choice might be modified by social pressures such as the customs and habits of the people was given only minor acknowledgment. In the late nineteenth century we find some interest in external effects on utility, such as conspicuous consumption, the snob effect, and the bandwagon effect (Minchinton 1982:221). In general, sociological interest in the move to mass consumption in the second half of the nineteenth century has been restricted to indicating the limitations of strictly economic or market explanations of human behavior. This sociological critique of economics has sometimes been coupled with a concern that mass consumption brought about social deregulation and a threat to the social bond. The move to intensified mass production, mass consumption, and the extension of the market into more areas of life is thus generally seen as harmful to culture. The new culture produced for mass consumption, then, was often viewed negatively, especially by neo-Marxist critics, who regarded advertising, the mass media, and the entertainment industries as logical extensions of commodity production in which markets were monopolized to produce mass deception and a debased consumer culture. The tendency has been to deduce the effects on consumption of culture from the production of culture and, within the neo-Marxist framework, to follow variants of the base-superstructure model. From this perspective it is possible to regard the logic of capitalist mass production as leading to a more extensive mass society.

One of the clearest statements on the power of the productive forces in society to harness consumption to fit with its designs is the Frankfurt school's theory of the culture industry. Nonwork activities in general become subsumed under the same instrumental rationality and commodity logic of the workplace, and artistic and cultural goods become subjected to the same standardization and pseudoindividualization used in the production of other goods. Hence Horkheimer and Adorno (1972:137) state that "Amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work." Art, which formerly supplied the promesse de bonheur, the yearning for the otherness that transcends the existing reality, now openly becomes a commodity. As Horkheimer and Adorno remark, "What is new is not that it is a commodity, but that

today it deliberately admits it is one; that art renounces its own autonomy and proudly takes its place among consumption goods constitutes the charm of novelty" (157). The culture industry offered the prospect of a manufactured culture in which discrimination and knowledge of culture (the high culture of the literati) was swamped and replaced by a mass culture (the prestige seeker replacing the connoisseur) in which reception was dictated by exchange value. For Adorno the increasing dominance of exchange value obliterated the original use value (in the case of art, the promesse de bonheur, the enjoyment, pleasure, or purposiveness without purpose with which the object was to be approached) and replaced it with exchange value (its instrumental market value or "currency"). This freed the commodity to take on a wide range of secondary or artificial associations, and advertising, in particular, took advantage of this capacity.

From this perspective advertising not only used, transformed, or replaced traditional high culture to promote the consumption of commodities and further mass deception but also drew attention to the symbolic aspect of commodities. The triumph of economic exchange need not just entail the eclipse of traditional culture and high culture, but a new "artificial" culture was generated from "below," via the logic of commodity production, to replace them. Hence, a number of commentators have focused upon the centrality of advertising in the genesis of a consumer culture (Ewen 1976; Ewen and Ewen 1982; Leiss et al. 1986).

Another example of the interpretation of the culture of consumption in terms of the commodification of everyday life is found in the work of Fredric Jameson. Following the capital logic approach, which points to the profusion of a new artificial culture with the extension of commodity production, Jameson (1982:139) emphasizes that "culture is the very element of consumer society itself; no society has ever been saturated with signs and messages like this one . . . the omnipresence of the image in consumer capitalism today [means that] the priorities of the real become reversed, and everything is mediated by culture." This perspective is central in his influential paper "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in which he outlines the contours of postmodern culture (Jameson 1984:87).

A similar emphasis upon cultural profusion and disorder, which threatens to obliterate the last vestiges of traditional popular culture or high culture, is found in the work of Jean Baudrillard, on which Jameson draws. Baudrillard (1970) builds on the commodification theory of

Lukács and Lefebvre, arguing that consumption involves the active manipulation of signs and that what is consumed is not objects but the system of objects, the sign system that makes up the code. Baudrillard draws on semiology to develop the cultural implications of commodity analysis and argues that in late capitalist society sign and commodity have fused to produce the commodity-sign. The logic of political economy for Baudrillard has therefore involved a semiological revolution entailing not just the replacement of use-value by exchange-value, but eventually the replacement of both by sign-value. This leads to the autonomization of the signifier, which can be manipulated (for example, through advertising) to float free from a stable relationship to objects and establish its own associative chains of meaning.

In Baudrillard's later writings (1983a, 1983b), references to economics, class, and mode of production disappear. Indeed at one point in Simulations, Baudrillard (1983a) tilts at Bourdieu when he argues that social analysis in terms of normativity or class is doomed to failure because it belongs to a stage of the system that we have now superseded. The new stage of the system is the postmodern simulational world in which television, the machine of simulation par excellence, endlessly reduplicates the world. This switch to the production and reproduction of copies for which there is no original, the simulacrum, effaces the distinction between the real and the imaginary. According to Baudrillard (1983a:148), we now live "in an 'aesthetic' hallucination of reality." The ultimate terminus of the expansion of the commodity production system is the triumph of signifying culture and the death of the social: a postsociety configuration that escapes sociological classification and explanation, an endless cycle of the reduplication and overproduction of signs, images, and simulations that leads to an implosion of meaning. We are now in the increasingly familiar territory of the transformation of reality into images in the postmodern, schizoid, depthless culture. All that remains on the human level is the masses, the silent majority, which acts as a "black hole" (Baudrillard 1983b:9), absorbing the overproduction of energy and information from the media and cynically watching the fascinating endless play of signs. Baudrillard's conception of mass has taken us a long way from mass culture theory, in which the manipulation of the masses through the popular media plays a central role. For him the logic of commodity development has seen the triumph of culture, a new postmodern phase of cultural disorder in which the distinctions between levels of culture—high, folk, popular, or

class—give way to a glutinous mass that simulates and plays with the overproduction of signs.

Today the high culture/mass culture debate arouses little passion in academic life. Since the mid-1970s the attacks on the distinction between high culture and mass culture have proceeded apace. Particularly influential in the British context has been the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (see Hall et al. 1980) and the Open University (see Bennett et al. 1977; Bennett et al. 1981). One finds a wide range of criticisms. There is the alleged elitism of the Frankfurt school's pro-high-culture distinction between individuality and pseudo-individuality, which condemns the masses to manipulation (Bennett et al. 1977; Swingewood 1977). Other criticisms include the puritanism and prudery of those arguments that favor notions of creative production against the right of the masses to enjoy its consumption and pleasures (Leiss 1983; New Formations 1983); the invalidity of the distinction between true and false needs found in the critiques of consumer society and its culture in the work of Marcuse (1964), Debord (1970), and Ewen (1976) (see Sahlins 1976; Leiss 1983; Springborg 1981); and the neglect of the egalitarian and democratic currents in mass culture, the process of leveling up and not down, that finds one of its strongest statements in Shils (1960) (see also Swingewood 1977; Kellner 1983). There have also been criticisms that the foundation of the critique of mass culture is to be found in an essentially nostalgic Kulturpessimismus perspective on the part of intellectuals who were entrapped in a myth of premodern stability, coherence, and community (Stauth and Turner 1988) or a nostalgia for a premodern, precommodity form of symbolic exchange or a presimulational reality such as we find in Baudrillard's work. The critics of mass culture theories also have neglected complex social differentiations (Wilensky 1964), the ways in which mass-produced commodities can be customized or signs can be reversed with their meanings renegotiated critically or oppositionally. See the work on youth subcultures by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, especially Hebdige (1979 on punk; also de Certeau 1981). In addition there is Raymond Williams's (1961) pronouncement that "there are no masses, only other people." Such critiques point to the importance of transcending the view that uniformity of consumption is dictated by production and emphasize the need to investigate the actual use and reception of goods in various practices. Such critiques also entail a revaluation of popular practices, which are no longer to be seen as

debased and vulgar. Rather, the integrity of the culture of the common people is defended and suspicion is cast upon the whole enterprise of the construction of an autonomous cultural sphere with its rigid symbolic hierarchies, exclusive canons, and classifications.