Contemporary European History from Work to Consumption
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Contemporary European History http://journals.cambridge.org/CEH Additional services for Contemporary European History: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society ANDREAS WIRSCHING Contemporary European History / Volume 20 / Issue 01 / February 2011, pp 1 - 26 DOI: 10.1017/S0960777310000330, Published online: 14 December 2010 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0960777310000330 How to cite this article: ANDREAS WIRSCHING (2011). From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society. Contemporary European History, 20, pp 1-26 doi:10.1017/ S0960777310000330 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CEH, IP address: 130.92.9.58 on 14 Apr 2015 From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality in Modern Mass Society ANDREAS WIRSCHING Abstract This essay deals with the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between labour, consumption and individuality in modern mass culture. This relationship has been conceptualised rather differently in American and European visions of individuality. In recent years, the long-lasting tradition of European (and especially German) scepticism towards the consumer society, which was nourished by conservative, (neo)liberal and Marxist influences, has retreated in favour of a more general acceptance of modern consumerism. While labour has not been replaced as the most important means of economic and cultural participation, the social construction of personal individuality is seen to take place through an ever-increasing multitude of means of consumption. The article analyses this profound process of cultural change and at the same time reflects upon the opportunities and limits of the current scholarly paradigm concerning the consumer society. Imagine a modern housewife who has just acquired a washing machine, which will make a big contribution to rationalising her housework and saving time. And what will she do with the time she’s saved? She will turn on the television and look at adverts for washing machines.1 Jean Baudrillard’s ironically exaggerated portrayal of the modern consumer society (1970) postulates a specific interaction between labour and consumption. It reflects the contemporary icon of the Fordist model which underlay the post-1945 welfare dynamic. Rationalised, Taylorised labour increases productivity so that higher productivity boosts wage levels and higher wage levels increase mass purchasing power. Ideally, this mechanism should produce a new standard of living2 in which Lehrstuhl für Neuere und Neueste Geschichte, Sekretariat (Raum 2006), Universitätsstraße 10, 86159 Augsburg, Germany; [email protected] 1 Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society (London: Sage Publications, 1998 [1970]), 153. 2 Cf. Andreas Wirsching, ‘Erwerbsbiographien und Privatheitsformen. Die Entstandardisierung von Lebensläufen’, in Thomas Raithel, Andreas Rödder and Andreas Wirsching, eds., Auf dem Weg in Contemporary European History, 20, 1 (2011), pp. 1–26 C Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S0960777310000330 2 Contemporary European History work and consumption are in perfect balance: husband as sole wage-earner, with a factory job for life, married to a housewife and mother – hopefully equipped with all modern conveniences including a television and washing machine. An assured wage would bring more leisure time and increased consumption. In the 1950sand1960s this living standard had a formative influence on practically all industrialised Western societies and shaped the existences of millions of men and women. The labour society and the consumer society balanced and stabilised each other to produce unprecedented levels of well-being. Adding an extra flourish to Baudrillard’s portrait, we may postulate that the husband works in a factory producing domestic appliances – washing machines, or maybe television sets. Cultural critics in continental Europe from the 1950stothe1970s, and particularly in Germany, thought otherwise: to them the ideal just described was a stumbling block. They saw both labour and consumption as alienated modes of living that left no room for genuine individuality. They complained that the ‘habits of mind created by externally imposed working practices’ (Jürgen Habermas, 1956) were becoming universal, with the result that ‘this attitude to work – disguised as consumerism – now pervades every facet of life and imposes its particular brand of alienation’.3 So much by way of introduction to the theme of this essay: the ambiguous and contradictory relationship between labour, consumption and individuality. This essay links to a conspicuously powerful trend in recent historical, cultural and sociological research: over the last few years the paradigm of the consumer society has become a favourite subject of study, generating a plethora of substantial, empirical studies.4 It eine neue Moderne? Die Bundesrepublik in den siebziger und achtziger Jahren (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2009), 83–97. 3 Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notizen zum Mißverhältnis von Kultur und Konsum’, Merkur 10, 97 (1956), 212–28, here 221. See also Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II (Boston: Bacon Press, 1989), 356. 4 The literature on the development of the consumer society, and on various aspects of it, is large and wide-ranging, and cannot be fully reviewed here. An influential collection is Neil McKendrick, John BrewerandJ.H.Plumb,The Birth of the Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa Publications Ltd, 1982). More recent overviews include Wolfgang König, Geschichte der Konsumgesellschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000); Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History. The Global Transformation of Desire (London: Routledge, 2001); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Konsum und Handel. Europa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Hartmut Kaelble, Sozialgeschichte Europas 1945 bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2007), 87– 94; Christian Kleinschmidt, Konsumgesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht, 2008). Important collections of essays include Hannes Siegrist, Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Kocka, eds., Europäische Konsumgeschichte. Zur Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte des Konsums (18. bis 20. Jahrhundert) (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1997); Hartmut Berghoff, ed., Konsumpolitik. Die Regulierung des privaten Verbrauchs im 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999); Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton, The Politics of Consumption. Material Culture and Citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Michael Prinz, ed., Der lange Weg in den Überfluß. Anfänge und Entwicklung der Konsumgesellschaft seit der Vormoderne (Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003); Reinhold Reith and Thorsten Meyer, eds., ‘Luxus und Konsum’ – eine historische Annäherung (Münster: Waxmann Verlag, 2003); Frank Trentmann, ed., The Making of the Consumer. Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006); Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Claudius Torp, eds., Die Konsumgesellschaft in Deutschland 1890–1990. Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main and New York: From Work to Consumption. Transatlantic Visions of Individuality 3 is also, and deservedly, gaining ever-greater significance as an element in concepts of modern Western societies.5 But this development cannot simply be taken for granted: it calls for explanation, historiographical contextualisation and critical comment. I shall begin by examining a range of critical approaches to consumer studies. Then I shall look at earlier, more positive views of consumerism and show how, from the 1980s if not before, adverse criticism gradually lost its bite and yielded to widespread acceptance of the American consumerist model. Thirdly, I shall propose an interpretive tool for probing the roots of this conceptual revolution, which seems to have originated in a long-term historical shift. In modern mass societies the construction of selfhood depends ever less on work and ever more on consumption: it is through consumption that individual identities are constructed and defined. Finally, in the light of current trends, I shall offer some reflections on the true extent of this shift and the nature of the conceptual problems it has engendered. I. In the famous opening chapter of Das Kapital, Karl Marx uses the striking phrase ‘the fetishism of commodities’, by which he meant that commodities have a life of their own which depends not on their use value, but rather on a fictitious exchange value which, in capitalist societies, soars so high above the use value that commodities assume a ‘mystical character’.6 For a century, Marx’s analysis shaped left-wing critiques of consumerism – meaning consumerism in the alienated living conditions created by capitalist production. The most potent developments took place from the 1920s on- wards in the emerging field of critical theory, which added new critical categories and brought Marx’s theory of alienation to bear on the novel phenomenon of mass culture. Applied to works of art, this critique saw something that had once been unique but had, in the age of mass culture and ‘mechanical reproduction’, lost its ‘auratic’ character and become a mere commodity.7 In 1938, Theodor W. Adorno took a similar view of the latest trends in popular music, lamenting ‘The