(De)Commodification, consumer culture and moral economy

 

Andrew Sayer

Department of Sociology

Lancaster University

Lancaster LA1 4YL

 

August 2002

 

1. Introduction

This paper derives from a wider project on 'moral economy' which is concerned with the moral sentiments and norms that influence economic behaviour and how these are in turn influenced, compromised or overridden by economic forces (Sayer, 2000). It combines both positive and normative thought, on the grounds that their divorce over the last two centuries has been deeply damaging - yielding on the one hand a positive social science that is fearful of venturing into normative argument and hence has difficulty understanding the normative sentiments and concepts embedded in practice, and on the other, a ghettoisation of normative thought in moral and political philosophy where it often has difficulty relating to recognisable social life. The wider project involves trying to further understanding of economic life by applying concepts and distinctions from normative moral philosophy which are arguably implicit in lay practice but sometimes missed by social scientists. In this paper I try to develop the understanding of commodification and consumption by using ideas from the work of Adam Smith and Alasdair MacIntyre, in combination with more recent research.

 

I should perhaps warn that some readers may be surprised that the references to Smith do not fit with popular views of his work. The neoliberal hi-jacking of Smith as a one-dimensional advocate of self-interest is increasingly recognized by intellectual historians as an egregious misrepresentation (Griswold, 1999; Weinstein, 2001; Lubasz, 1998; Winch, 1978; 1996, Tabb, 1999). For Smith, individuals are social beings who are always dependent on others and concerned with understanding them; benevolence and a need for recognition, as well as self-interest, are normal, 'natural' dispositions. Individuals continually monitor their own behaviour in relation to the responses and welfare of others and how they would themselves be judged by others, developing their moral sentiments through social interaction. Smith's advocacy of markets was qualified by the assumption that there would be not only significant public investment and state provision, for example in education and infrastructure (he was far from an advocate of laissez-faire), but that commercial society would also be a moral economy in which self-interest was itself intimately tied to the welfare of others and would be balanced by benevolence and justice. This is a long way from the neoliberal Smith, an invention based on taking a couple of short passages from The Wealth of Nations out of context and projecting neoclassical assumptions from over a century later back onto his ideas. As I hope to demonstrate, we can still gain insights into consumer culture by drawing upon his moral philosophy.

 

Commodification affects our lives most directly through employment and consumption. Though both involve markets, in  labour markets, workers (or rather their labour-power) are in varying degrees treated as if they themselves were commodities, while in the consumer product markets, people are the buyers rather than the bought. Although some would argue that commodification has a bigger impact on people's lives through employment than through product markets (e.g. Lane, 1991; 1998) in this paper I shall concentrate on the influence of commodification on consumption.

 

Consumption covers very diverse activities and any particular act of consumption implicates several different social/material relations: between the consumer and producer; between the consumer and the purchaser (e.g. child and parent)^[1]; with other consumers, whether they are joint consumers, third parties affected by externalities, others who might also have claims on the same resources (including distant others and future generations), or competitors for status and recognition in the struggles of the social field a la Smith, Veblen and Bourdieu; and finally there are the relations with ecological systems whose moral dimensions and implications are of increasing concern. What is beneficial with respect to one relation (e.g. parent-child), could be highly damaging with respect to another relation (e.g. rich consumer-poor consumer). Although we might expect a rough correlation between this series of social relations and geographical scale, the correlation is weakening as continued globalization churns up and reconfigures geographical hierarchies. This is not to say that distance does not matter, but that it matters in terms of the particular processes constituting it, be it - in this case - relations between concrete others, between strangers, between members of the same or different social groups, incomes, etc., involving commodity exchanges, gifts, or redistributed goods. Different theories and evaluations of consumption tend to apply to just some rather than all of these relations, and in this paper I can only attend to some of them.

 

Early pre-disciplinary social science, in which positive and normative discourse formed a seamless whole, was characterized by an overarching concern with the emerging moral order of the new society - how it would be affected by the development of commerce, individualism and democracy, and what would follow the (generally celebrated) decline of tradition. Greater concern was voiced about the cultural and moral consequences of the rise of capitalism than about economic inequalities. There were not only fears about the loss of traditions and weakening of communities but about the possible rise in egotism and hedonism. One of the key features of markets is that they allow individuals (with sufficient money) to realise their preferences without any need for getting the approval of others. This was welcomed by economic liberals, for whom markets answer political liberalism's call for individuals to be allowed to choose what they consider to be best for them rather than having some external conception of the good imposed on them. Indeed, for neoliberals, commodification encourages individual responsibility and personal investment.

 

In addition to fears of increasing egotism, there have been recurrent concerns that commodification, as a change from producing what previously or otherwise might have been simply use-values to producing goods for their exchange-value, tends to induce a change in normative values, and hence a major cultural shift: by elevating exchange-value over use-value, questions of what is good give way to the question of what can be sold at a profit.^[2] This has often been associated with the fear that the rise of 'commercial societies' would encourage vanity, the valuation of appearances and status over worth and achievement. Just as, for the commodity producer, it didn't matter if the use-value of the commodity they produced was good or bad, as long as it sold and brought them a profit, so it would not matter what a consumer was like or had done, so long as they could convince others to admire or envy them, and conspicuous consumption would help them do that. Thus, appearances would come to be the measure of worth (Smith, 1757; O'Neill, 1999).  Worse, income, wealth and expenditure would become measures of the worth of individuals. More recently, research on consumption has emphasized how it functions as a means by which people can construct identities (e.g. Jackson and Thrift, 1995; Cook et al, 1999), but others have seen it as a threat to identity, inviting the illusion that material possessions (and their sign-values), rather than commitments and relationships, are the basis of personal identity (Slater, 1997; O'Neill, 1999).

 

As Daniel Miller (2001b) notes, many of the moralistic critiques of consumption have been based on elitist prejudices rather than empirical evidence of how people consume. However, I shall argue that in addition to correcting this empirical deficit, we need to develop rather than abandon available normative resources for understanding evaluating commodification and consumption. These include distinctions between internal and external goods, and between worth and status. As we shall see, doing so need not result in a more negative view of consumption and consumer culture, though such is the diversity of activities conventionally included under the economistic abstraction of 'consumption' that one should not expect unreservedly favourable evaluations either.

 

Given the unusual inclusion of explicitly normative arguments, I should perhaps first comment on the thorny question of how normative arguments are to be 'grounded'? The normative grounding of any critique often seems elusive and much of what is claimed to be 'critical' social science does not reveal or examine the grounds for its critiques, so that for example, it uses critical terms like 'oppression' and 'racism' without providing arguments for why anyone should object to them. However, this avoidance is perhaps understandable in that as soon as authors make normative thinking more explicit they are typically met with a popular sceptical reaction to the very possibility of defending normative claims - they are surely 'subjective' and 'culturally relative'. Such responses are themselves symptomatic of the expulsion of normative thought from most social science education, and of the extraordinary insensitivity of much recent social theory - both radical and conservative - to the moral dimension of social life. The sceptical reaction is undoubtedly hard to respond to, though arguments against subjectivism and relativism can be found in any introduction to ethical theory (e.g. Norman, 1998; Blackburn, 2001; Williams, 1972). While scepticism is easy to profess, it is virtually impossible to practice. Those who, in the seminar room, are radical sceptics about the defensibility of normative arguments and who dismiss them as subjective and merely culturally relative, get as upset as anyone else if someone wrongs or injures them in practice; they do not say, 'if you want to treat me that way I can see no grounds for objecting': they argue and remonstrate, appealing to criteria which are not merely subjective and relative.

 

In the absence of knock-down arguments and the impossibility of scepticism, all we can do is sift out better from worse arguments from the range available. This paper is influenced by recent neo-Aristotelian theories of authors such as Amartya Sen (1992) and Martha Nussbaum (1999). Though there is not space to elaborate them, they imply a position which might be termed 'minimal ethical naturalism'. It is a kind of ethical naturalism because it argues that the meaning of 'good' and 'bad' depends on what kind of beings humans are and on the nature of their broad capacities for flourishing and suffering. It is minimal because a) it recognizes that these capacities are always and everywhere culturally-mediated (though not simply culturally-produced), and are therefore varied in form, and b) that in addition there are needs which are indeed wholly culturally-determined and relative, whose satisfaction also influences whether members of particular cultures flourish (for example, the need of muslims to pray).

 

My purpose in putting forward these normative arguments is not to 'legislate' but to invite those who disagree with them to respond with better normative arguments. The latter is different from smugly avoiding engagement by recourse to the cop-out of 'it's all relative or subjective' - a response which belies the immense importance that all people attach to how they (are) treat(ed by) one another.

 

I shall focus on two major themes: the effects of commodification on how people value things, practices, themselves and others, and its alleged encouragement of individualism and selfishness. While I believe the older critiques of consumer culture are still important, I wish to argue that they present an overly negative view of commodification which fails to account for the lack of popular resistance to it. I shall argue first that this is because they see commodification overwhelmingly from the point of view of the seller and not enough from the point of view of the consumer or user. Accordingly they tend to overlook the way in which the use of commodities - or at least of final consumer goods - involves a process of decommodification or recontextualisation in which the emphasis is on use-value (and sign-value), not exchange-value, and in which the incorporation of goods within signifying social practices, the stuff of culture, looms large.  I shall then introduce a distinction between internal and external goods in order to assess the critical analyses of consumer culture of Veblen and Bourdieu which emphasize the competitive pursuit of status. This will be followed by further use of the distinction to attempt to illuminate symbolic domination and the influence of class upon consumer culture. Lastly I shall consider the implications of Daniel Miller's work on consumption and altruism for older critiques of consumer culture, and conclude.

 

 

2. Commodities and decommodification

 

Commodities have both use-value and exchange-value^[3] and elicit two radically different kinds of valuation. We assess use-values qualitatively and according to different, often incommensurable standards - be they qualities of films, food, houses or banking services, and hence disagreements over their valuation refer to and sometimes dispute different criteria for different use-values (Anderson, 1993). These qualities have particular associations or meanings for users, or in more recent terms, following Baudrillard, 'sign-value', though there is nothing new about this.^[4] Valuation invokes and evokes meanings of the thing valued for the valuer, and since meanings are always social, valuations have a social dimension (Anderson, 1993). This is especially where use-values are concerned, not only in the case of informational products like books, lessons or films, but also products like food or holidays, whose associations are part of what we value about them. These associations may be strongly attached to the character of the object and subject, such as that between a sofa and relaxation, while others may seem arbitrarily related, such as the association between a certain brand of jeans and a particular youth sub-culture. Although as Baudrillard argued in his discussions of 'sign-value' the latter situation may be becoming more common, this can be acknowledged without imagining that use-value is no longer important, or that it is always detached from sign-value. In contrast, exchange-value is quantitative: in determining how much one thing will exchange for another we commensurate the incommensurable and compare them on a single scale regardless of qualitative differences in the objects exchanged.

 

Aristotle's distinction between production for use and for money-making (in which a means to the economic end of consumption - money - becomes the end of economic activity), was described by Polanyi as "probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the history of the social sciences." (Polanyi, 1944 [1957], p. 53; see also Booth, 1993). It anticipated the shift later summarised in Marx's notation as a move from C-M-C (the sale of commodities for money in order to buy commodities) to M-C-M' (the advancement of money capital to buy and produce commodities for sale in order to make a profit) (Marx, 1976). With the rise of capitalism, what was merely an incidental pathological aberration or vice in Aristotle's time -  the direction of economic activity towards the accumulation of money - becomes an imperative (Booth, 1993). Yet while this is capital's goal or condition of survival, which it ignores at its peril, it is not normally the goal of either labour (or other final consumers); employees work for money, but primarily as a means to buy commodities for their use-value. On the other hand, if they are working for capitalist organisations, and increasingly if they are employed by underfunded public organisations, being able to contribute to the production of profit is a condition of their being able to receive a wage as a means to their end of getting use-values. Commodification in relation to wage-labour and labour markets therefore has different implications from commodification in relation to consumer product markets.^[5]

 

Commodification appears to be rampant, influencing social relations and culture to an unprecedented degree, and much of social science since Marx's time has been concerned with studying the implications of this shift. However, from the point of view of consumers, commodification is not so much a durable state as a series of passing moments, and is continually being negated in consumption or use. More generally, while our culture is in many ways unprecedentedly commodified, as Miller and others have pointed out, consumption has a significant degree of independence from the sphere of capitalist production. This derives not only from the fact that much of it takes place at different times and places from commodity production. It is also because consumption usually offers ways of decommodifying the objects produced and exchanged as commodities, indeed this is a precondition of the continued production and sale of commodities. Until recently, radical theory has overlooked this. In focussing primarily on production, it has failed to understand one of the main sources of contentment with - or at least lack of resistance to - capitalism, and contributed to a one-sidedly negative view of commodification and consumer culture.

 

As Igor Kopytoff (1986) notes, once final consumers of commodities have bought them they usually de-commodify them by ignoring what was or might become their exchange-value, and they take advantage of their use-values and sign value, often in personalised ways. Only if the purchased goods are intended for resale - recommodification - is this process suspended. Thus the CD or the shoes or the car take on specific patterns of use and significance to the consumer and others. At the moment of exchange, the producer of commodities is concerned with something universalisable, their exchange-value, but the way in which final consumers use them has the effect of 'singularising' them, or as Daniel Miller puts it, 're-contextualizing' them. It follows, therefore that it is a mistake to imagine that once a commodity, always a commodity. Just as capital goes through certain 'moments' in its circulation, changing its social and (other) material relations accordingly, so commodities go through a series of moments, of which exchange for money is just one, albeit the key moment from the point of view of sellers.

 

Kopytoff's argument complements the observation that the growth of commodification is matched by the expenditure of increased energies in the cultural definition, location or classification of de-commodified objects. This is why advertising of final consumption goods, which of course is aimed at increasing sales revenues, so frequently focusses on this process of decommodification, not only by highlighting the functional qualities of what is on sale but by trying to create appealing sign values for them, often including the promise of enhanced attractiveness, status, sociability, personal liberation and even cathartic experiences. At least where final consumption goods are concerned^[6], the continued success of commodity production therefore depends on successful de-commodification by the consumer, usually with a cultural steer by the producer. 

 

 

3. Cultural and moral aspects of (de-)commodification: internal and external goods

 

In order to develop the above points I want to use a distinction between internal and external goods. This is a modified version of the distinction introduced by Alasdair MacIntyre in his critique of modernity (MacIntyre, 1981, pp. 187ff).^[7] Something similar is also implicit in Adam Smith's distinction between praiseworthy acts and praise (Smith, 1757). Although it is associated in MacIntyre's case with a critical stance towards consumer culture, I shall argue that it need not be. I shall begin by explaining the distinction and its normative implications for the consumption of commodities. I shall then use it to address the concerns of Smith, Veblen and especially Bourdieu about consuming for status. In particular I shall argue that the distinction can resolve some problems in Bourdieu's analysis of symbolic domination and class and consumption.

 

3a) The distinction and its normative implications

Internal goods are those which are internal to a practice in which one takes part such as the specific achievements, skills and satisfactions of participating in sports, art, music, academic study, cooking or medicine, or alternatively internal to relationships, such as a friendship or parenting.^[8] While I may achieve and enjoy internal goods through these relationships and activities, they may also bring me external goods of approbation, fame, prestige and money. Whereas the internal goods of making music, intellectual work, friendship or cooking, etc., are specific to each, the external goods which one might achieve through them are more indifferent to their character, particularly in the case of money.

 

This distinction partially overlaps with that between use-value and exchange-value, but the differences between the two distinctions are several. First, whereas the use-value/exchange-value couple is characteristic of commodities, internal and external goods relate to things which may be unrelated to commodities, indeed to things which can't be commodified such as friendships. Secondly, and related to this, internal goods are not evaluated in such narrowly utilitarian terms as use-values, but may have ethical dimensions. Thirdly they are not so much about what one might get from things but what we can achieve with them. Fourthly, one might sometimes want to argue that the use-value of something includes not only its possibilities for providing access to internal goods, but for promoting external goods too, as in the case of a prestigious car. Fifthly, exchange-value or money is not the only kind of external good, for there are non-pecuniary kinds too.

 

In some cases the pursuit of internal and external goods may be compatible, for example, as in making music or consuming luxury goods; in others they may be mutually exclusive - as when trying to befriend someone as a way of making money undermines the friendship. While some practices, for example, sport, may involve competitive behaviour, success may enrich the practice's internal goods in ways which benefit others. For example, winning innovations in football tactics and skills help develop the game and enrich it for others. However, competition for external goods is a zero-sum or positional affair, in that it is impossible for all to benefit simultaneously - for example for all to have high status.

 

Although they are not always incompatible, the normative implications of the pursuit of internal and external goods are very different. While, like Adam Smith, MacIntyre acknowledges that external goods are genuinely goods that "no-one can despise . . . without a certain hypocrisy" (1981, p.196)^[9], he, again like Smith, argues that they are properly tied to and parasitic upon internal goods (see also O'Neill, 1999). When we assess a research project in terms of its internal goods, we focus on things like the quality of its methodology, its use of theory and so on.  In assessing it in terms of external goods we ask how big the grant was, how much publicity it has had, and so on. We expect the latter to be proportionate to the internal goods; a sloppily-designed, under-theorised bit of data-bashing should not be rewarded with praise or money, while one that is carefully-designed and theorised, etc., should.^[10] Smith's point was that the internal goods (or 'praiseworthy acts') would be good even if no-one happened to praise them (Smith, 1757). When a teacher manages to teach a child to read both have achieved internal goods regardless of whether either gets any praise for it, though of course one hopes that they would be praised. We are social beings and we need the recognition of others (Honneth, 1996): the question is what the recognition is for, or, to put it provocatively, whether there is any problem with anyone being just 'famous for being famous', or having unearned income, or more generally, receiving external goods unrelated to any internal goods. The fear of many commentators was that the rise of capitalism and a highly commodified culture would lead to the prioritising of external goods over internal goods.^[11] 

 

While the distinction between internal and external goods is helpful for a critical analysis of consumer culture, it can also lead to a more favourable view of it than those critiques which emphasize the pursuit of status as uppermost in consumption. It is well established that consumption choices help to construct life-styles and identities. In some cases, the construction of life-styles may amount to little more than a matter of cultivating appearances and style as a means of winning approbation, perhaps based on the assumption that personal identities can be bought. But life-styles may also involve and support serious commitments^[12] to certain practices (in MacIntyre's sense), relationships and ways of life, enabling people to do things for internal goods. These commitments and relationships usually require some expenditure. Would-be chefs buy recipe books, cooking equipment and special foods in pursuit of the internal goods of cooking, musicians buy instruments to enable them to make music, academics buy books to further their intellectual inquiries, parents buy toys for their children's enjoyment, and institutionalised practices such as medicine require extensive purchases of equipment, for the good of those whom they serve. While MacIntyre's analysis of internal and external goods in relation to practices continues the anti-market themes of classical theorists' fears that commodification would encourage the elevation of appearances over worth and deeds, this does not necessarily follow. One could argue that consumers have been more successful in avoiding these tendencies than such theorists anticipated, indeed that the rise in real incomes in the richer countries of the world allowed by the rising tide of cheap yet often good quality commodities has allowed far more people to obtain the goods and services needed to participate in and develop practices for their internal goods than would otherwise have been the case.

 

As usual there are further qualifications to be made. Buying things so as to facilitate the pursuit of internal goods still allows a range of motives - from the selfish, to the self-interested-but-not-selfish, to the benevolent or altruistic, and ones which are neither egotistic nor altruistic. There are also problematic inequalities in access to practices and internal goods. The inequalities of the social field are only secondarily about the distribution of status: they are primarily about access to internal goods.

 

3b) Internal and external goods and Bourdieu

I now want to relate the internal/external goods distinction to the relationship between consumption and status, with particular reference to the work of Bourdieu. Bourdieu's interests in these matters had many precursurs. Where Smith briefly mentioned reservations about the use of consumption for display and vanity, Veblen famously developed a more sweeping critique of the use of consumption for status-seeking. However, as Judith Lichtenberg (1998) has argued, consuming because others consume may not necessarily be driven by a desire to demonstrate superiority over them but rather to achieve equality with them, and, we might add, not merely in terms of external goods. What looks like status rivalry from Veblen's position looks different in the terms of the theory of relative deprivation. In practice, as style fascism implies, things may be more ambiguous in that being equal to peers may be a way of suggesting superiority relative to non-peers. As we shall see later, there are also moral aspects to these relationships, the recognition of which tends to support Lichtenberg's contention.

 

In Distinction, Bourdieu provided an empirical analysis of status rivalry and symbolic domination in relation to taste by applying economic categories to all spheres of life. Individuals and groups gain differing amounts and types of economic and non-economic capital, particularly 'cultural capital', partly through what they consume and how they consume it (Bourdieu, 1984). Consumption practices and objects signify particular positions in the social field. Use of, and reference to consumer goods and practices are prominent in behaviours of symbolic domination and the subaltern strategies of deference, making a virtue out of necessity ('we wouldn't want that anyway') and resistance. Although the differences of taste and appearance that mark out the differentiations of the social field and the relative positions of the dominant and subordinate are complex and subtle, and sometimes difficult to describe, we can often also 'see them a mile off'. Judgements of the worth of goods and practices are closely associated with judgements of superiority and inferiority of social groups. These distinctions are continually contested and in flux, as particular objects and practices and the 'capital' associated with them are re-valued or de-valued. Particularly for the subordinated, for whom this marking process is often one of stigmatisation, awareness of its significance can be one of the most painful aspects of their experience, as they are likely to be torn between accepting the evaluative criteria of the dominant, so as to appear respectable, and refusing such criteria and hence confirming the dominant groups' negative views of them (Sennett and Cobb, 1973; Skeggs, 1997; Reay, 1998).

 

However, Bourdieu's analysis of status struggles through concepts of cultural, social and other forms of non-economic capital, conflates the use-value and internal goods of objects and practices with their exchange-value or associated status - external goods - in terms of advantages they bring their possessors. There is a difference between the use-value of a car and the status it contingently brings us in terms of advantages vis-a-vis others. There is a difference between the internal goods of being able to play the cello and the status or cultural capital it brings, though Bourdieu does not distinguish them. There is a difference between friendship and the external goods it may bring such as 'opening doors', though Bourdieu subsumes both under 'social capital'. Status is an external good and is an important aspect of sign-value, and like exchange-value it yields advantages or profits vis-a-vis others who lack it or have less. More generally, status is a positional good, i.e. one whose value varies inversely with the number of people who have it. To be sure, just as exchange-value often varies directly with use-value, so status sometimes varies with the quality of the objects or practices which it is taken to signify, but exchange-value or status can also vary independently of the quality of the associated use-values - overvaluing (as in the case of the 'sham') or undervaluing the latter ((Bourdieu, 1984; Sayer, 1999a; 1999b). In general, given the hierarchical 'slope' of the social field, the goods, practices and people associated with the dominant are likely to be overvalued, while those associated with the dominated or subaltern are likely to be undervalued.

 

It is in the interest of producers and sellers to treat exchange-value as a good measure of use-value, and in the interest of the vain to pretend that their personal value is reflected in what they own and consume, as early critics of commodification such as Smith and Rousseau feared. Yet the struggles of the social field over consumption are not just about exchange-value, or the rate of exchange of different types of cultural capital, and involve more than strategies of 'talking up' - or talking down - goods and practices in order to gain advantages over others. They are also about what actors think goods and practices are worth in use-value, aesthetic and ethical terms, regardless of whether they bring those who own or are involved in them external goods such as prestige. The struggles between popular and elite culture, for example, are not just a pure battle for power and prestige for their own sake, but over the appropriate recognition of the qualities of the goods and practices themselves by reference to the internal criteria of those practices - be they music, art, sport, literature and so on.  In other words the struggles of the cultural field include competing claims about the valuation of objects and practices themselves and what is good for us, not necessarily in order to change actors' status by raising the (exchange-) valuation of the cultural capital associated with them, but because they care about the objects and practices themselves.^[13] Social inequalities and struggles are not merely about the definition and distribution of capital of various kinds in terms of external goods, but in terms of internal goods too.

 

Of course, this is not always the case. In some cases of symbolic competitions of the social field, such as the petty forms of 'style fascism', the point of the rivalries may be simply oriented to enhancing their owners' status regardless of what they actually do and what kinds of people they are. One of the ironies of markets is that although they allow people the freedom to be able to acquire things without the need for anyone else's approval (provided they have the money), consumers may nonetheless buy things in order to win approval. Often centring on the purchase of branded goods, this is a surprisingly enduring feature of the behaviour and symbolic rivalries of social groups across the whole social field.

 

At the same time, thankfully, such strategies are easily seen through, indeed doing so is an important strategy in countering the 'soft forms of domination' which Bourdieu analyses. To refuse to acknowledge any other goal and criterion of valuation than personal gain, the pursuit of cultural and social capital, etc., is ironically to mirror the priorities of the market: as long as you can persuade people to buy or that you have status, that is all that matters - profit (non-pecuniary as well as pecuniary) is the measure of worth. In part, this is appropriate for a highly-commodified  culture, but only in part, for even within such a culture we still make some judgements of use-value and of what to do regardless of whether it brings us approbation, indeed sometimes in spite of anticipated misapprobation. The most cynical interpretation of actions is not necessarily the best. The whole critical thrust of Bourdieu's work on symbolic domination implies that it is unjust and arbitrary, but his crypto-normative approach^[14] and his quasi-neoclassical use of the concept of capital, coupled with his reluctance to accept that judgements (other than his own) can be disinterested, deny him the grounds for arguing why it is unjust (Sayer, 1999a). The most important kind of counter to undeserved external goods is the recourse to evaluation of use-values, and valuation according to the internal goods and criteria of practices, contentious though this usually is. Otherwise, we can only interpret the symbolic competition as merely a groundless struggles for power without justification, thereby removing any basis for criticising the resulting inequalities.

 

It is common for judgements of use-value or worth to be coloured by status in terms of position in the social field. Smith referred to distortion according to wealth as "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments" (Smith, 1757), though the same applies to equivalent distortions according to gender, race, etc., so that we use double- or multiple-standards for assessing the same behaviour. Differences in consumption patterns between social groups reflect not only differences in taste but hierarchies of wealth, gender, and 'race', and the valuation of goods reflects this too. Thus the pursuit of internal and external goods does not take place on a level playing field but within a hierarchy that is defined - at least in relation to commodities - predominantly by economic class, which in turn has little to do with merit or desert. As Bourdieu demonstrates this is a hierarchy in which the dominant claim not only superior wealth and the power over others that derives from this but superiority in taste. Although, surprisingly, Bourdieu leaves it implicit, the behaviour of the dominant also betrays an assumption of superiority in moral worth relative to others. The dominant try to establish a hegemony in which their dominance is a justified consequence of their superiority over others; they are more meritworthy, more deserving. This moral dimension, surely, is the crucial - and most reprehensible - feature of symbolic domination. As a result, valuations or judgements of goods become entangled with the class hierarchy and symbolic domination; the associations of class spill over into associations of quality and the good. This hegemony is contested, but the contestation can take two forms, a rarer, socialist one which recognizes that class is a structural feature of capitalism and that individuals' class position has more to do with the accident of birth and subsequent luck in markets than merit or moral worth, and a more common populist one which disputes only the positioning of particular individuals or groups within the hierarchy, which is itself taken as given. The struggles of the social field documented in Distinction are mainly of the second kind.

 

The dominant classes obviously have the most economic and other forms of capital for gaining goods and they have the means for passing on their advantages to their children. But symbolic domination involves not only demonstrably being able to buy the most and the best. It also implies that anything which they have, do or value must be superior simply because it is associated with them. In effect, this could be described as 'playing the class card'. This can be illuminated by examining the meaning of the word 'posh' in English^[15]. Posh is a marker of high class position, be it a posh accent, posh car, posh wedding, or whatever. It is vital to understand that the posh only contingently corresponds to the good but its use often conceals this through a double slippage of meaning, firstly from associations of upper/middle classness to ones of quality and worth, and secondly from quality and worth back to their owners, so that not only is the posh equated with superior goods but with people who are in some way supposedly superior. The first slippage is not surprising given that expensive versions of particular commodities are generally better than cheap ones, and only affordable by the affluent. On the other hand, regarding the second slippage, from the superior quality of goods to the supposed superiority of their owners, merely refusing this slide by denying (correctly) that posh is necessarily good still leaves the class hierarchy intact. It merely challenges the support it gets from symbolic domination. The rich might lose some of their respect but they would keep their disproportionate wealth. This reminds us that who wins and who loses in capitalist consumer culture has scarcely anything to do with moral worth, and that where class is concerned, distribution is not wholly dependent on recognition.

 

The striving for respectability that the dominated feel pressured into when they find themselves talking posh in the company of people of higher class, spending more than they can afford on weddings, not wanting to look 'cheap', etc., are all understandable but doomed ways of proving that 'we are as good as them'. 'The construction of identities' is not merely about the aesthetics of lifestyle but about moral worth and recognition. The struggle is doomed because it is one which the subaltern are not allowed to win, and it is in any case irrational to judge people's moral worth according to whether their vowels are flat, what they wear at weddings, where they can afford to live, etc. It is also understandable because we all need recognition - of equality if not superiority - and material goods do influence our ability to live a fulfilling life, enjoying both the support and the autonomy to participate in relationships and pursue commitments.^[16]

 

The spoken and unspoken interactions of the social field including those involved in consumer culture are pervaded with subtle and not so subtle sentiments of 'class contempt' (Reay, 1998)^[17] which are extraordinarily sensitive to indicators of accent, demeanour, appearance, clothing and possessions. We should not need reminding of these familiar pathologies of our still highly classed consumer culture. If we ignore the hierarchically structured field within which consumption takes place, we may misread the symbolic struggles, confusing the struggle for respectability of the subaltern with a struggle for advantage driven by vanity, or alternatively as simply an expression of 'difference'.^[18]

 

Despite - or because of - evidence of the continuing importance of class and other inequalities in consumption (Warde, 1996) and symbolic competition in consumption, some consumers may want to break free of status markers and buy goods and services which they imagine escape these associations.^[19] For Bourdieu, the idea that we can escape the markers of our social location through our consumption choices is entirely illusory - a "dream of social flying, a desparate effort to defy the gravity of the social field" (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 370). Nevertheless, from a normative point of view (which may be present in lay motivations), the dream of escape from the influence of the distortion of moral and aesthetic judgements by class and other relations of domination remains central to egalitarianism (Tawney, 1952). It amounts to a desire to distinguish the good from the merely posh, and to pursue internal goods regardless of the class-influenced distribution of external goods.

 

Finally, notwithstanding the inequalities in consumption and in the internal and external goods relating to it, they may not have as much influence on individual happiness as one might expect. As Robert Lane has shown in his major review of empirical research on markets (Lane, 1991; 1998), increased wealth is only correlated with increased happiness for roughly the poorest fifth of the population of rich countries (a conclusion which Smith conjectured in The Wealth of Nations (Smith 1776)). In terms of happiness and fulfillment in life, the quantity and quality of commitments, relationships that we can form are more important than material consumption beyond a basic level. This emphasizes the importance of things which can't be commodified, but nevertheless whose attainment may be assisted by buying commodities. We might be sceptical about this finding, given the common tendency of the poor to rationalise their situation and make a virtue of necessity, or simply to be unaware of the benefits which are denied to them by their lack of income, but it is also a powerful rebuttal to the capitalist pressure to consume. We might also be puzzled, given the demand for more material wealth.

 

 

4. Altruism and consumption

 

From the standpoint of markets and sellers, buyers appear as individuals with money seeking to satisfy their individual preferences, and all that is necessary from the seller's point of view is that the buyer can afford what she wants. While this is true it does not mean that the buyer cannot consider others' interests, needs and advice, or be influenced by moral sentiments, norms and prescriptions, only that her doing so is not a necessary condition of the reproduction of markets. The oversight of this social and moral dimension has been reinforced by the individualist versions of liberalism^[20] that have come to dominate theories of economic life, with their inadequate concept of the individual as adult, implicitly masculine, free of dependants and not needing anything from others beyond what he can buy. Both market avocates and critics often overlook the fact that consumers differ from the individualistic model, being embedded in social relations whose meaning is central to their lives. As Daniel Miller has shown, there is a more direct and concrete moral dimension to shopping and consumption than those aspects discussed above (1998; 2001). His ethnography of shopping in North London highlights how far shopping is directed towards others, particularly family members, and how far it is guided by moral sentiments towards them and about how to live. Far from being individualistic, self-indulgent and narcissistic, much shopping is based on relationships, indeed on love. It often involves considerable thoughtfulness about the particular desires and needs of others, though it may also reflect the aspirations the shopper has for them, thereby functioning as a way of influencing them.^[21] Thus the pursuit of material possessions and their sign-values is not necessarily at odds with the maintenance and development of commitments and relationships as the basis of personal identity. To be sure, shoppers may also sometimes seek to buy 'treats' for themselves, but even here the egotistical stereotype of shopping needs modification because treats are precisely defined as exceptions to the rule of shopping for others.

 

All this reflects the gendered nature of shopping, and the hidden gender bias in traditional critiques of consumption. There is a danger of the celebration of the moral dimension of consumption becoming an endorsement of the way it is gendered. Equally, from the opposite point of view, there is a danger of critical awareness of its gendered nature leading to a dismissal of the moral qualities of shopping for others. What is most problematic is the gendering of the practice - the fact that the burden of this emotional labour is borne primarily by women, and not shared equally between men and women - rather than the practice itself.^[22] 

 

In one sense, showing love or care for others through buying them things contrasts with negative views of consumption in capitalism such as those of Lasch, who thought that it had become a form of vain attempt at compensation for individuals' increasingly alienated relationships with others (Lasch, 1979), and also those older fears that capitalism encouraged selfishness. Miller argues on the basis of his North London research that contrary to common assumption, "It is those persons who found that they were able to express their relationships through their manipulation of their material worlds who formed the closest social networks . . ." (1995, p.24)^[23] and that low consumption relative to income was associated with limited networks of friends. Miller's findings are nevertheless still indicative of strong capitalist pressures to consume large quantities of commodities, indeed it could be said to be a telling example of the influence of capitalism on culture that shopping for others is such a common way of showing love.

 

At the same time, such altruism may also assist family members in the cultivation of appearances and indicators of status and respectability, the accumulation of cultural capital and pretensions to superiority over others. Though not strictly individualistic, these external goods are positional goods in that they can help maintain or improve family or group status at the expense of others; they are not generalisable.^[24] Miller's favourable picture of shopping for others may seem strikingly different in tone and content from Bourdieu's merciless analysis of taste and distinction, but they are far from incompatible.

 

 

5. Conclusion

 

While, as Miller argues (2001), judgements of consumer culture need a stronger empirical basis, I hope to have demonstrated through the application of the distinction between internal and external goods that it is also helpful to refine rather than ignore normative arguments.

 

The consumption of commodities presupposes the possibility of their decommodification or recontextualisation by their buyers. This recontextualisation can take diverse forms - while it can centre on the pursuit of external goods, particularly status, it also involves the pursuit of use-values and can assist people in developing commitments, relationships and practices for their own sake and in achieving internal goods. The indifference of commodification to moral worth and moral behaviour exposes consumers to the influence of symbolic domination, with its prioritization of positional goods monopolised by the dominant classes, and its stigmatisation of those whose access to internal goods is restricted. But it also allows consumers free to follow their moral sentiments, and as Miller has shown, these may be stronger than many have realised.

 

Inequalities in consumption are important not only directly in terms of inequalities in the amounts of possessions, but also indirectly in terms of the resulting differences of access to internal and external goods, and the distortion of moral sentiments that results from this, so that consumption is seen as an indicator of moral worth. The biggest danger is that in a highly commodified society we might come to regard the worth of individuals to be indicated by their price and what they own, and hence confirm Hobbes's assertion that - "the Value or WORTH of a man, is as of all other things, his Price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his Power." (Hobbes, cited in Radin, 1996, p.6). This would, of course, mean that the poor are virtually worthless. Similarly, we might become like the character of Oscar Wilde who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is not easy to defend the distinction, but it is presupposed by any critique of how commodities, people and practices are valued (see O'Neill, 1999). If anyone were to ask us what we were worth, we would be forcibly reminded of the difference between our price and our moral worth.

 

Finally, it should be remembered that this has been a highly selective discussion of the moral economy of commodification and consumer culture, focussing on just some of the the social/material relations that are implicated. The main omissions have been the relations between rich and poor on a global scale in terms of ability to consume, relations with future generations and relations with ecological systems, which have been the focus of recent red and green critiques. As Wilks (2001) argues, whatever the moral qualities of consumption within households in rich countries, they do not negate the charges of excessive, unsustainable and unequal consumption, which are the outstanding features of the (im)moral economy of consumption globally. How we evaluate consumption is likely to vary according to which of the several different sets of social (and ecological) relations it involves we choose to examine. What is innocuous or progressive with respect to one relation may be problematic with respect to another, and there are still many more relations and aspects to consider than those analysed here.

 

 

Acknowledgements

My thanks, with the usual disclaimers, to Anne Cronin, Alan Warde and John O'Neill for recommendations of reading and discussions.

 

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