2.2.3. Cultural Approaches
Cultural approaches to consumption tend to focus on its role in meaningmaking practices. The literature exploring these practices is vast and varied. Despite this diversity, cultural accounts have in common a tendency to view (and often celebrate) consumption as an expression of agency in the making of identity. This perhaps reflects the influence of Michel de Certeau (1984), the most important theorist in this current of work, who argued that consumption is a form of potentially counterhegemonic production. According to de Certeau, consumers, by cultivating creative practices in the sphere of consumption, can disrupt the ideological configurations that support the system of production.51 While not all cultural theorists emphasize the counterhegemonic possibilities of consumption, there is a general trend in cultural studies to focus on the role of consumption in creative projects of identity construction. As one sociologist working within this paradigm, Celia Lury (1996, p. 256), puts it: “consumer culture provides an important context for the development of novel relationships of individual self-assembly and group membership.”
The cultural approach to consumption, while often interesting and useful, nonetheless has some dificulty accounting for the general pattern of materialism under afluent capitalism. Although goods are indubitably deployed to construct and express identity, as with conspicuous consumption, using them in such a fashion requires time. As productivity and hourly wages continued to increase under industrial capitalism, why did wage earners not push more forcefully for shorter work hours, and therefore more time in which to engage in identity making practices? Furthermore, there are clearly modes of identity construction that do not require much in the way of income, but, rather, are more time intensive. Why should people be inclined to construct identity through commodity ownership rather than the cultivation of noncommodified practices? After all, practices, insofar as they demonstrate the ability to do something, would seem to be a more robust source of individual identity than mere ownership of objects. Surely engaging in, and mastering, practices constitutes a firmer, more reflexively convincing basis for claiming an identity than passive displays of objects.
More generally, the pattern of consumption and work that this book takes as its puzzle is an aggregate pattern, constituted by the behavior of all consumers / wage earners. To be sure, disaggregating that pattern will reveal a patchwork of distinct practices. But interpreting local practices is quite diferent from explaining why, under capitalism, there is a systematic bias toward accumulating stuf, as opposed to expanding free time. Cultural approaches, in emphasizing the plurality of meaning-making practices involved in consumption, thus fail to engage with the more general issue of the pervasive materialism of consumer capitalism. They risk missing the proverbial forest for the trees.
The Puzzle
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