In Our Time - Materialism and the Consumer

Episode Date: March 23, 2000

Melvyn Bragg examines materialism and the consumer. Does consumerism - as a cult, a fact, a need, a religion - threaten culture as we have known it, individuality as we desire it, life as we aspire to its best condition? Is the march of Mammon an army of jack-booted businessmen, using the propaganda of advertising and the seduction of the supermarket to trample us into submission, and into the worshipping of the great god - Buy? Or is the consumer the new source of power? A truer, more democratic individual freedom? Wordsworth prophesied much current criticism of consumerism when he wrote “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours:/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”. How has ‘getting and spending’ come to enjoy the place of importance it holds in our lives, and why have we so often seen shopping as in opposition to some notion of our ‘true natures’?With Rachel Bowlby, Professor of English, University of York and author of Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping; William Gibson, science fiction writer and author of Neuromancer and All Tomorrow’s Parties.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Are we in the thrall of consumer culture? Hopelessly manipulated by materialism? Has the market developed to better the condition,

liberate even the situation of man and woman? Wordsworth could be said to prophesied much current criticism of consumerism, 200 years ago when he wrote, The world is too much with us. Late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours. We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. How has getting and spending come to enjoy the place of importance it holds in our lives,

and why have we so often seen shopping as in opposition to some notion of our truer natures? With me to discuss the development and future of material culture is the influential science fiction author William Gibson, whose books include Neuromancer and Altamorous Parties. He's in London to give talk on science and the creative mind at the ICA. I'm also joined by Professor Rachel Boulby, author of a forthcoming book, Carried Away, The Invention of Modern Shopping.

Rachel Boulby, the turn of last century, Thorstein Veblen, wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. He first coined the phrase, conspicuous consumption. It seems rather modern phrase. Has the idea of conspicuous consumption, Did he establish it, and has it changed not much from the time he introduced the phrase? Well, Vablund's idea of conspicuous consumption was based on the idea that the consumer is a man rivaling with other men

who wants to need to display his wealth in order to prove he's better than the other guy. And the notion of conspicuousness there is about it's all in the image, it's all in the display. I have something that you haven't called, I'm better than you because I can be seen by you to be better than you. And there's a straight line here from that display of late 19th century display of wealth and having more than somebody else

to the postmodern idea of simulation, masquerade. It's all in the sign, all in the image. You'll have to develop that a bit, simulation, masquerade, postmodern. Can you open that over a bit? Well, in the 80s, following from thinkers like Boudriard and so.

on who actually took a lot out of Fablin, there was a very strong notion that identity and wealth and all that bound those two together were not so much in the substance of what you've got going back historically or in terms of your own background, but in what you could be seen to have, the personality that you could put on to display to others. And this goes back through a much longer tradition as well of fashion in the idea that you can choose an identity, that you can choose an identity, identities are always changing, always to be put on at will. This idea of Babel and conspicuous consumption, it's a very good phrase, it's a handy phrase, it's a useful phrase. But surely it wasn't new at the end of the 19th century as an idea. You can see conspicuous consumption whenever you go to any of our galleries and look at Elizabethan portraits or before the Renaissance.

You're talking about fashion, but you think of Castellione and the courtier, and so on and so forth. So why is it a useful starting point? because nothing about it is new, is it? Well, there are always things about it that are new because the forms of consumer culture or the forms of display culture are always changing. I think it's been such a tenacious phrase

because, as you say, it can be hooked into all sorts of other historical forms going back to the Renaissance and probably before that. And it doesn't just apply to contemporary cultures, although it's been fertile for thinking about the different ways in which identity is displayed or wealth is... put on show. Let's hammer away at that particular starting point to William Gibson. The British economist Alfred Marshall introduced the notion of pleasure in shopping.

The notion was probably there before, but introduced it in 1890. He called it the consumer's rent. Again, there's a similar question. Do you think that there was a sea change there? Because pleasure in shopping, surely when silks came along the old Silk Road and so on, people were quite pleased to get that bounty from the Far East through Venice and so on. What has changed? Why is this a useful starting point for this discussion?

I suspect that it changed with presentation. I don't know when the idea of a shop, as we know shops, came to be. I've always thought that watching people in markets anywhere in the world was very pleasant and somehow uniquely archetypal. It seems to be one of the more enjoyable things we do to shop. But watching people shop in a third world market for necessities is a very different thing. I think of the modern shopping experience as essentially being the window shopping experience, whether you're doing it through a sheet of glass or a computer screen. So you think perhaps the change from the market, the open market to the enclosed shop,

is a useful changing point? It might have something to do with the evolution of cities, actually, or the evolution of towns. That's quite interesting too in connection with what you started off by saying about Wordsworth, because Wordsworth associates what he calls that blunting of the discriminating powers of the getting and spending world with the move to cities, with the increasing accumulation of men in cities and a craving for extraordinary incident that's satisfied by the rapid production of information and so on. That's the preface to lyrical ballads. So right from the start, there's an argument going on about whether there's,

the new city culture is somehow enhancing and increasing experience or drawing it in and blunting it. Yes, because I would have come back to William Gibson and said the market culture continues with enormous tenacity. I mean, you look around this city, London, and there are markets all over the place and markets thriving. The particular corner of North London turns out to be Camden Market a few years later, but nobody quite knows why.

And it booms away and these things keep happening. But let's say at the end of the 19th century, did start something more wealth to bigger middle classes and so on and so forth. What do you think, is there any other drive there, is there any deeper drive there, Rachel Belfi? Freud, you've talked about the reference to Freud as being a useful starting point for this. Well, Freud, in perfect coincidence with the development of advertising and consumption, was bringing out theories of the inherent instability of human nature and unsatisfying, unsatisfi-satisfiability of desires

just at the time when advertisers were trying to sell more and more things to people and to inculcate the notion that you will never have a number. There's a cluster, isn't it? Freud's part of that class of Abelin, Marshall, Freud. It's all around that time, yes. Sorry, I interrupted you, yeah. And the Marshall thing is interesting, too, when you brought in the idea that Marshall put pleasure into shopping. The pleasure for Marshall is actually a pleasure in the avoidance of spending. So it's an interesting kind of turning point where there is a notion of pleasure involved. But it's a very 19th century pleasure where you don't spend,

you avoid getting rid of your money as opposed to a pleasure in shopping itself, in the enjoyment of the things. So Marshall's talking about window shopping in the sense of look but don't touch. He's talking about a 19th century miser, if you like, who's interested in saving and in not losing his money, as opposed to a 20th century more feminine idea of the consumer who loves spending for its own sake. And yet another text of the turn of the century

drives as Sister Carrie, where the heroine is a pure consumer as in a pure spender. She wants nothing more than the pleasure of spending. William Gibson, what's to stop a listener to this programme saying, look, people shop because they wanted things. They didn't have enough chairs. They needed curtains. as things went on, they wanted a fridge.

And just to build up things to make life easier is enough to go on. I think that what we're looking at here has to do with a sort of glamour or an idea of glamour. And window shopping for me is about is about comparison so that when industrial civilizations

evolve to a certain point one can distinguish between one object and the next object of a similar kind and this has been going on for a long time because it's still essentially what we do in antique shops

it's all about distinguishing degrees of glamour or degrees of desirability down to incredibly fine distinctions, which is, you know, something that this city has in spades. It's quite extraordinary, the specialist nature of retailing in London.

Do you think that the development of the department store is an important development in the culture of materialism? I think so, because it's a modern, it's one of the great modern forms. When you look at the... Modern forms of what? Forms of urban existence, I suppose. You look at the galleries Lafayette in Paris,

and how extraordinary that must have been, how modern that must have been when it all began. So what did it do? So we've got the galleries Lafayette, We've got big department stores in many British cities, many American cities, German cities, and what are they doing? Well, from an American point of view, they are proto-malls, although the mauling of the United States has now reversed itself, and the streets are becoming malls again, but they aren't streets in the sense that they formerly were. What I'm trying to get at is, is this signify much more in society than just having places where you can go and buy stuff.

Now, you both have written to this theme. I mean, so let's try to explore it as what might be going on as well as places where you can go and buy stuff. I mean, Zola called the department store in Obuner de Dam. He called it the Cathedral of Modern Commerce. Do you agree with that, William Gibson? If so, you brought up the gallery Lafayette, so we're in the same country. If so, what's he getting at? I think that the

the initial experience of the department store would have been an initial experience of what marketers call an end point destination the department store would have been a sort of theme park of commerce where you could you could be a customer and simultaneously be an actor. Part of the pleasure of the department store originally must have been the drama of being there. And I suppose... Is it different from the drama from being in a market?

Yes, I think so, because that's the cathedral aspect. You're entering a purpose-built structure. In effect, you're entering something that... that strives to be a sort of virtual reality, a set in which a certain ritual will be acted out. So how is that supposed to affect you? How does it change you? It makes you slightly less wealthy.

But imagining yourself is more wealthy? Yes, yes. You've actually, you've left, I think, the department store experience, in its purest form is that you've left a bit of capital there and you've emerged with sense of being part of something. Each department store, in a sense, it's a sort of would have been a sort of pseudo-class.

You leave, you have the, it still works a bit. You leave, you have the carrier bag. People know you've been there. You are part of that. you have become Harvey Nichols a little bit just for one day. So you're part of a tribe or even a cult. Do you see any deeper overturns than that?

That seems deep enough, really. I mean, it seems... I'm doing the best I can have this time. I'm not much of a consumer myself, so where we go. Well, it seems to me that, I mean, the department store is no more a place where you just go and buy stuff any more than the cathedral is a place where you just go and worship stuff.

There's so much more to be said as you were... describing and you come away with the carry bag and you also come away with the dream of the next time that you may come back with a bigger carry bag or your carry bag may be in the 19th century delivered for you by for liveried Bon Marchet servants or whatever they might be. But it's also the beginning of the idea of shopping

as a way to spend a day, a kind of leisurely activity for in that time the middle class lady going into town new experience that she would be spending the day in the city. So there are all kinds of possibilities that are opened up by this new world, this virtual reality, as you're saying.

Do you think the supermarket, Rachel Bowie, do you think the supermarket had a similar or does it have a different effect on people's lives? Both, I suppose. I mean, the supermarket starts off with quite different associations from the department store

as the place to go and get cheapest possible The consumer there isn't a fantasy consumer, but an economising consumer, probably a lower class consumer in the early stages in America. So it comes from the other end of consumption, as here is an efficient way to do shopping that's necessary shopping rather than shopping that's for dreaming or for imagining another life. But as the century has gone on, supermarkets have come much, much closer to the old,

all-encompassing. image of the department store as they've started to become all in one shop selling everything with forms of display just like a department store. So the differences have been blurred and it's now very hard to tell the difference. William Gibson. Yeah, I agree. I suppose the supermarkets initially targeted people who couldn't afford to have their own grocers and people who didn't have servants to go down and

go down and pick things out but it's it's all it's all very much of a piece these days and I'm in in trendy department stores

I'm always a bit uncomfortable with the effort being made to make me feel that I'm not in a supermarket I'm actually more comfortable I'm more I'm happier in selfridges than Harvey Nichols because no one will

no one will approach me an attempt to sell me anything and I can root through stacks of clothing and knows that I'm getting a thrifty deal, sometimes anyway. Rachel Berber, let's talk about advertising. Now, does it seem strange looking back that people at one time,

not long ago, thought that advertising would force us to buy things that we didn't want because it was so powerful and could be so manipulative? I think people still think advertising forces us to buy things we don't want, but everyone's aware that that's what advertising is trying to do. So it's an area where there's an everyday

experience of having the criticism, having the critique, speaking about the ways in which we are sold by advertising, but at the same time letting it happen. Yes. Sorry, you're about to go on? Well, in the 50s and 60s that idea of we're all manipulated

and advertising is doing things to us that we can't control was much more powerful, I think. think as a way of thinking about what was going on, then the idea that there was no possibility of resistance or negotiation, whereas the idea now is much more one of the consumer in control and able to resist back or manipulate back the things that advertising is throwing at it. I'm not saying that that's what actually happens, but that's more the ideology of advertising of an empowered consumer who knows what's going on. William Gibson, do you think in the 50s that Rachel has been referring to, people

were right to be rather paranoid and anxious about the use of psychology and the fear of the use of the powers of sinister powers of science to sell them things. I suppose they were initially whatever sophistication we came to imagine we had acquired that allows us to feel immune. I think a lot of it was probably that anxiety was almost superstitious. It's like the belief in the subliminal nudes and ice cubes and whiskey at Verda Smiths. Things like those are, it's like mythology. It's like folk legends.

And I don't think we believe in that anymore. Everyone's become superficially more sophisticated about these things. It's fun now to see what Levi is going to do to try to make you buy yet another pair of jeans. And yet people spend millions of pounds on advertising, and the next day people go out and buy millions of pounds worth of stuff. So something's getting summer, Rachel Boebb, isn't it? I mean, advertising is working, and therefore who's it working on?

Are people still right to worry that, or to be concerned, or to take note of the fact that they're watching, let's take television as an example, and a flood of advertising comes on about certain goods, and the next day or next week a lot of these goods are shifted. Now, would you like to comment on that? I think the difficulty is putting it in terms of if we buy the stuff, then we're being thoroughly brainwashed or manipulated

to use that kind of 50s language, and if we don't, we're not. I don't think it's as simple as one or the other, because that's the culture we're really. in where the things that we might buy are always going to be, by definition, advertised goods of some kind. I mean, one of the very earliest writers on advertising and psychology called Waterdale Scott talked about why we buy, or in his case, why he buys, a bar of ivory soap,

which was one of the earliest brand name advertised goods. And he says, I buy it because of the associations it has of spotless elegance. and I think I would be pretty dumb if I was buying it because it was a lump of fat, a lump of fat and alkali, a prosaic chunk of fat and alkali, that's the phrase. And it's not clear that when we buy something because of the advertising, we're necessarily being duped in that sense, isn't it better, he's saying,

to enjoy soaping yourself with spotless elegance than with a prosaic chunk of fat and alkali? So there's a happy coincidence there between what makes us better persons and what puts money into the pockets of people producing soap? Well, yes, you can put it that way, but it's still that's working with a kind of conspiracy theory that, of course, I'm trying to work out. You know a lot about this.

How you think advertising works and there are concerns about it. Do you think the fact that nowadays William Gibson, it's sometimes so clever that you don't know what the heck they're advertising until you get the name at the end if you're lucky? Do you think that is less insidious, if one might use that word? Well, it's more charming. I'm not sure that it's less insidious. That sort of advertising has a wonderful kind of end times quality to it.

It's as though we've almost come to the end of the process. Interestingly, the Japanese have been there for decades. Most Japanese television ads have nothing to do with the product. They're just designed to capture your attention. They had the high kid, didn't they? And so that's where it comes from, I presume. Richard Bellby, arts often been cast in opposition to this materialism. Do you think that the values of the marketplace

are still thought to be at odds with the values of real culture or high culture? I think there's a history of an argument about whether they have or haven't been thought to be at odds and there's always been a tradition of thinking the other way that they could work together as well as the tradition of that opposition. But in more recent times it's been so clearly, say, in pop art, a co-mingling of high art values with the values of the commercial world. I mean, Warhol was a spectacular example of this, wasn't it? Well, Warhol was himself a celebrity and a high earner and all of those things,

so it was very hard with him to maintain the sense of a contestation of artists separating themselves away from the market world and the money-making world. But that, in a sense, didn't perhaps seem necessary in the same way. And he was an endless and compulsive sharper as well. So you think that the opposition, which there was against the central notion of a materialist society, a lot of thinkers about art, and artists stood out against this. They thought, this is not what the best of life is about. This is a form of enablement, but also a form of corruption.

And if you want to go deeper into life, you have to get through this to put someone much, much ruder and cruder than I'm being. I also expressed it much better than I'm expressing it, but that was the idea. Now you think, are you saying you think that is past, that the waters have closed over, you talked about commingling, you mean we're all in the general stew and wash now. I don't think it's ever been in a general stew and wash,

because along with that idea of something being covered over or blunted, to use words with word, again, by the urban world, the commercial world. There's also been another tradition seeing the urban world and including the commercial world, the world of fashion as enabling, as making possible something new. I mean, that's Bodle-Air, for example, in the painter of modern life, talking about the wonders of what you can see every day on the modern street,

which are to be experienced, to be consumed, taken in, to be represented and recorded as quickly as possible before it all moves on. There's the same idea of speed and change as you get in words with with that idea of the rapid communication of things, going faster and faster that you can't stop. But in Baudelaire, it's a more positive idea that this is the excitement of the modern world that is for the artist to get down and record.

Do you think it's possible anymore for an artist to be outside or stand aside or have an anti-view of a consumer culture or are we all consumed by it? I don't apologize for the fun. I think it's become one of my chief concerns about about consumer culture today is that it seems to have become impossible now to have bohemias. And that's something that's only become apparent in my own lifetime.

The marketing research mechanisms are so fast and so responsive that it's impossible for anyone to produce an alternative culture quickly enough. And that's something, I think that's something new. Well, alternative cultures are commercialized instantly, aren't they? Yes. But just finally to take another point in Tyler William Gibson, do you see that the consumer culture and the fight of consumers for fair deals and proper service and proper treatment can be looked at politically as a way of increasing the consumer's sense of control of their own lives,

individuality to a certain extent of their democratic rights? Yes, I would say so. I'm in favor to a large extent with consuming. I mean to the extent that we need to consume. What does that mean? Well, to go back to the word. worthy and vision of this essentially hollow, wretched, pasty things and shop windows. I actually think of that as all being fear of the railroad, fear of things going too quickly.

People would start to hallucinate when the train got over 20 miles an hour. They didn't know what it looked like to move that quickly. And we've gone so far past that now, that this is where we live and this is what we do, and I think we need to do it more consciously and more responsibly. But this, you know, consumer culture is what we do. Rachel Bellby, I mean, do you think that we are, we just have to accept the inevitable and work through with it?

I don't think the inevitable is necessarily so, so bad, as William's saying. And we've gone past that station along that train, and we're still speeding up, as you're saying. But I think that we've always thought that we've, since words with time, that things are going too fast, and there isn't a space for resistance. And that itself is not something new. Thank you very much, Rachel Bower, William Gibson, and thank you very much for listening.

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