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Consumption and Everyday Life CONSUMPTION AND EVERYDAY LIFE This book introduces key ideas and theorists of consumption in an accessible way. Drawing on theories of everyday life, this is an engaging and comprehensible introduction of key themes in consumption and consumer culture. • the semiotics of branding and advertising • the representation of 'nature' and the environment • the relations between consumer and producer • ethical consumption • the tensions between local spaces of consumption and globalised markets • the hisrory of consumption • shopping and identity This book is essential reading for undergraduates on cultural studies, sociology and cultural geography courses. Mark Paterson is a lecturer in philosophy and cultural studies at the University of the West of England, Brisrol, and is interested in the senses, phenomenology and technology. He has also written about hap­ tics, the technology of touch, which allows us to reach out and touch virtual objects. Along with contributions to edited collections such as Emotional Geograpbies (Ashgate, 2005), The Smeff Culture Reader (Berg, 2006), and The Book 0/ Touch (Berg, 2005), he is currently writing a book for Berg entitled The Senses of Touch, THE NEW SOCIOLOGY CONSUMPTION AND EVERYDAY LIFE SERIES EDITOR: ANTHONY ELLIOTT, UNIVERSITY OF KENT, UK MARK PATERSON The New Sociology is a book series designed to introduce students to new issues and themes in social sciences today. What makes the series distinctive, as compared to other competing introduc­ tory textbooks, is a strong emphasis not just on key concepts and ideas but on how these play out in everyday life - on how theories and concepts are lived at the level of selfhood and cultural identi­ ties, how they are embedded in interpersonal relationships, and how they are shaped by, and shape, broader social processes. Forthcomi ng in the series: Religion and Everyday Lire Globalization and Everyday Lire STEPHEN HUNT (2005) LARRY RAY (2006) Cultureand Everyday Lire The Body and Everyday Lire DAVID INGLIS (2005) HELEN THOMAS (2006) Community and Everyday Lire Nationalism and Everyday Lire GRAHAM DAY (2005) JANE HINDLEY (2006) SelF-Identity and Everyday Lire Ethnicityand Everyday Lire HARVIE FERGUSON (2005) CHRISTIAN KARNER (2006) Consumption and Everyday Lire Risk, Vulnerability and MARK PATERSON (2005) Everyday Lire lAIN WILKIl'JSON (2006) i~ ~~o~~~~n~5~~UP LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, axon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge For my parents, David and Jennifer 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Reprinted 2007 (twice), 2008, 2009 Routledgeis an imprint ofthe Taylor & Francis Group, an informabusiness © 2006 Mark Paterson Typeset in Garamond and Scala Sans byTaylor & Francis Books Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguingin Publication Data A catalogue record for th is book is available from the British Library Library ofCongress Catalogingin Publication Data Paterson, Mark. Consumption and everyday life / Mark Paterson.-- i st ed. p. cm. -- (The new sociology series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-35507-9 (pbk.) -- ISBN 0-415-355°6-0 (hard cover) 1. Consumer behavior--Social aspects. 2. Consumption (Economics)-­ Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series. HF5415·32·P3752006 306·3--dc22 2°°5°22317 ISBNlO: 0-415-355°6-0 ISBN13: 978-0-415-355°6-3 (hbk) ISBNlO: 0-415-35507-9 ISBN13: 978-0-415-35507-0(pbk) im inf orn1a Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division ofT&F Informa pic. CONTENTS SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xii Introduction: consumption as everyday act You are what you buy: theories of the consumer 10 2 Consumption and identity: manufacturing choice 36 3 McDisneyfications 58 4 Bodyshopping: the commodification of experience and sensation 87 5 Nature, Inc. 112 6 The knowing consumer? 141 viii CONTENTS 16 7 Mallrats and car boots: the spaces ofconsumption 9 8 Logo or no logo? The poetics and politics of branding 197 SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD 9 Where do we want to go today? The postmodern consumer 224 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 247 "The New Sociology" is a Series that takes its cue from massive social transformations currently sweeping the globe. Globalization, new infor­ mation technologies, the techno-industrialization of warfare and terror­ ism, rhe privarizarion of public resources, the dominance of consumerist values: these developments involve major change to the ways people live their personal and social lives today. Moreover, such developments impact considerably on the tasks of sociology, and the social sciences more generally. Yet, for the most part, the ways in which global institu­ tional transformations are influencing the subject-matter and focus of sociology have been discussed only in the more advanced, specialized literature of the discipline. I was prompted to develop this Series, there­ fore, in order ro introduce students - as well as general readers who are seeking to come to terms ';"ith the practical circumstances of their daily lives - ro the various ways in which sociology reflects the transformed conditions and axes of our globalizing world. Perhaps the central claim of the Series is that sociology is fundamen­ tally linked to the practical and moral concerns of everyday life. The authors in this Series - examining ropics all the way from the body to globalization, from self-identity to consumption - seek to demonstrate the complex, contradicrory ways in which sociology is a necessary and very practical aspect of our personal and public lives. From one angle, this may seem uncontroversial. After all, many classical sociological analysts as well as those associated with the classics of social theory emphasized the x SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD SERIES EDITOR'S FOREWORD xi practical basis of human knowledge, notably Emile Durkheim, Karl parion of contemporary women and men attempting to navigate the Marx, Max Weber, Sigmund Freud, and George Simmel, among many dizzying array of choice on offer in the marketplace of advanced capital­ others. And yet there are major respects in which the professionalization ism. Our contemporary mantra: I shop, therefore I am! Yet this is not of academic sociology during the latter period of the twentieth century just a matter that can be reduced to either the positive or negative - for led to a retreat from the everyday issues and moral basis of sociology Paterson insists there are both gains and losses here. But by a certain itself. (For an excellent discussion of the changing relations between way of reading the consequences of consumption in out everyday lives practical and professional sociologies see Charles Lemen, Sociology After (partly through drawing upon the brilliant conceptual departures of the Crisis, Second Edition, Boulder: Paradigm, 2004.) As worrying as Michel de Cerreau), Paterson renews emphasis on the signifying system such a retreat from the practical and moral grounds of the discipline is, of shopping and shopping malls, commodities and the spaces of con­ one of the main consequences of recent global transformations in the sumption. The result is an introduction to the sociology of consumption field of sociology has been a renewed emphasis on the mediation of which is rich and insightful, combining acute political engagement everyday events and experiences by distant social forces, the interrnesh­ with generously interdisciplinary perspectives. ing of the local and global in the production of social practices, and on ethics and moral responsibility at both the individual and collective lev­ els. "The New Sociology" Series traces out these concerns across the ter­ rain of various themes and rhematics, situating everyday social practices in the broader context of life in a globalizing world. In Consumption and Everyday Life, Mark Paterson documents with verve and precision the location of consumption in our late modern or postmodern worlds. He does this, firstly, by reviewing developments in sociological theories of consumption - in Marxism, POSt-structuralism, posrrnodernism and, broadly speaking, what is termed cultural theory. From Marx to Marcuse, and from Benjamin to Barthes, he traces the possibilities and pleasures of shopping, the rhetoric and routine associ­ ated with consumerism. And in this respect his analysis is refreshingly reflexive and open-ended: there is no doctrinal insistence on one partic­ ular method of study, or rating of one theory against another. Rather, Paterson is out to make theory 'work' in the interests of elucidating con­ sumption. Consumption, as he shrewdly perceives it, is intricately entwined with culture, capitalism, codes and colonialism - and so social theories need to be deployed to comprehend, combat, modify or trans­ form the consequences of practices of consumption. Which brings me to the second optic through which Paterson analy­ ses consumption: namely, the everyday. That consumerism has in some ways become deeply interwoven with the processes, pleasures and perils of global capitalism is obvious enough from the attention it receives today in popular culture and the mass media. [fhroughout the polished, expensive cities of the West, consumption has become a central preoccu- ACKNOWLEDG EM ENTS INTRODUCTION CONSUMPTION AS EVERYDAY ACT I am hugely grateful to a number of people who sustained me through­ Everyday life is what we are given every day (or what is willed out this enterprise. My thanks go to my colleagues here at the University to us), what presses us, even oppresses us, because there of the West of England and elsewhere, who were generous with their does exist an oppression of the present ... Everyday life is rime and read drafts of chapters. My colleagues Rehan Hyder, Kieran what holds us intimately, from the inside. Kelly, and Richard Homsey offered many useful comments concerning (de Certeau et al.
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