Book Review: Seal on Horowitz's Consuming Pleasures

Review of Daniel Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). ISBN: 9780812243956. 491 pages.

Reviewed by Andrew Seal
Yale University

The book under review is the third that Daniel Horowitz has published on consumer culture in the United States, and it both is and isn’t useful to think of it as part of a trilogy, along with The Morality of Spending: Attitudes Toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875-1940 (1985) and The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2004). One reason in favor of doing so is simply that it puts Horowitz’s efforts into perspective: Horowitz has produced an achievement in many ways on par with Richard Slotkin’s dense and sweeping trio chronicling the place of the West in the American imagination, one of the very few other instances of such sustained scholarly diligence.[1]

It is clear that Horowitz himself sees Consuming Pleasures as building on the arguments of the previous two works, providing a further development of “the subject I have been working on since the early 1970s, the story of how intellectuals have responded to affluence and consumer culture” (x). Consuming Pleasures advances this story by tracking a new development in this debate: the emergence of a “postmoralism” or an “anthropological outlook on culture” which superseded the “new moralism” of modernist disdain and paternalistic expertise (the subject of Anxieties of Affluence), the position which in its own day had supplanted the more traditional moralism of self-restraint and parsimony (The Morality of Spending).

Horowitz argues that, in the heady first flush of the postwar U.S. economic boom, and in the slowly reconstructing and still rationing European envy of that prosperity, the seeds were sown for what was at first, for figures like David Riesman, the early Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, and Richard Hoggart, a hesitant détente between intellectuals and “popular culture.” That thaw then gradually became, for Tom Wolfe, Herbert Gans, Stuart Hall, and Susan Sontag, a more engaged if not fully appreciative approach to the study of “consumer culture.” Pluralist assessments of cultural validity and worth reluctantly edged out hierarchical standards and fixed canons, with critics locating newfound resources for bottom-up creativity and even individuality within what was previously considered the top-down and stultifying domains of mass culture. By 1972, Horowitz argues, cultural critics like Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown had begun not only to tinker with the distinctions between high and low culture, but to argue for the suspension of such segmentations altogether. Such critics emphasized the emancipatory or even utopian promise of consumption, identifying within it an entirely malleable system of communication, a realm of free play and self-creation.

Like the prior two works, Consuming Pleasurestracks the shifts and rearticulations of these broad, society-wide dispositions through the writings of a deep roster of prominent intellectuals. It has long been one of Horowitz’s signal strengths to work over the contents of important texts and corpora in subtle ways through novel juxtapositions and insightful re-readings. Horowitz has expanded the boundaries of intellectual history in small but appreciable ways by, as he put it in The Morality of Spending, “insist[ing] on the benefits of exploring the interplay between the related stories of how Americans spent their money and how writers thought they should. The juxtapositions of data and advice enables us to see how changes in the standard of living prompted reconsiderations of the dilemmas of affluence, as well as how attitudes toward spending shaped the investigations” (Morality, xix).

In fact, Consuming Pleasures is far less interested in the data and investigations of consumer spending. The intellectuals it treats are more like organic intellectuals than were the figures covered in Morality of Spending or Anxieties of Affluence, speaking less as policy or corporate experts and more often as critics attempting, like the rest of the populace, to make a life inside consumer culture. Yet the feedback loop between prescription and description, between is and ought, is still the dominant motif of Consuming Pleasures. While the intellectuals of this book were not as insistent on knowing better as were figures like Simon Patten, Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith, or Christopher Lasch, the “postmoralist” critics—Wolfe, McLuhan, Sontag, Venturi and Scott Brown—still insisted on being in the know. And being on the cultural bleeding edge often pushed these postmoralists to turn prescriptive in spite of themselves, becoming advocates if by nothing other than the momentum of their predictions of consumer culture’s success and of its viability as a permanent and versatile social force. Part of the book’s own pleasures lie in Horowitz’s skillful reconstruction of these vexed and overdetermined positions.

While Horowitz’s ability to excavate the nuances of tone and disposition from a rich archival trove is impressively graceful, the foregoing account may not overturn or greatly complicate what the reader already knows of the intellectual transformations of the postwar decades, and indeed Horowitz freely admits in Consuming Pleasures that “some of what I say about individual books or authors is not especially new.” But he also asserts that “I demonstrate patterns and connections previously obscured by treating these texts and their authors in isolation” (11). The texts and authors covered in Consuming Pleasures do range widely, although as with the prior two works, the book’s structure has a loose, almost episodic quality which prompts the reader to wish more often for the addition or substitution of alternative authors and texts than might have been the case were Horowitz to have written a more synthetic, more argumentative account. But it is actually the question of breadth that makes Consuming Pleasures in some ways an odd man out in this trilogy, and its differences from Morality of Spending and Anxieties of Affluence provide both its greatest strengths and its disappointments.

For one thing, to characterize Consuming Pleasures as responding primarily or even principally to Horowitz’s previous works is to parochialize it excessively, for it is in many ways as much or more in dialogue with other scholars’ work than with Horowitz’s own, as tight as the thematic and methodological approaches may be. Horowitz is inordinately generous in his citations of other works, patiently reconstructing the arguments and historiographies of a formidably voluminous reservoir of scholarship. (Graduate students like myself ought both to cheer and quail at such an example.) Citing previous work by Eugene Lunn, Michael Denning, Lawrence Levine, Paul Gorman, and Andrew Ross early and often, Horowitz makes great use of this body of scholarship to take some productive shortcuts, allowing him to cover more ground and extend his reach considerably past the specific intellectuals whom he highlights.[2] Consuming Pleasures, although it was, according to Horowitz’s preface, written in about only seven years, is a work of formidable patience and detail, an aggregation and synthesis of decades worth of reading in the secondary sources. Horowitz’s command of these literatures almost redeems the standard scholarly excuse for an abbreviated, cover-your-behind footnote “The literature on this topic is vast, but… here’s what I can claim to have read.” Horowitz’s style is more, “The literature on this topic is vast, and here’s what you should know from it.”

Moving from secondary to primary sources offers another way in which Consuming Pleasures does much more than build on Horowitz’s previous work. While he drew on understudied sources before, in Consuming Pleasures, Horowitz retrieves for the English-speaking scholar an exciting new clutch of previously untranslated or exceedingly obscure articles by Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Jürgen Habermas, and revives a now neglected but germinal text on popular culture, the 1964 Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel collaboration, The Popular Arts.[3] He also continues the recuperation of C. L. R. James as a major figure of the middle decades of the twentieth century, an indispensable voice for understanding those years, despite his obscurity during them.

A large part of the excitement of opening up these documents to current scholarship is that they come as something of a historiographical surprise—not even missed in prior treatments of U.S. consumer culture, their authors considered to be part of other formations tangential at best to the “domestic” debates over mass culture, affluence, and consumerism in America. The singular methodological innovation of Consuming Pleasures is its insistence on setting the intellectual discourse on postwar consumer culture within a transatlantic frame, and doing so is, I feel, a major advance for the study of these debates and the intellectuals involved in them.

Setting forth the agenda of writing a transatlantic history of intellectual responses to consumer culture is considerably easier than writing it, however, and Consuming Pleasures accomplishes this task somewhat unevenly. Horowitz dealt with émigré intellectuals before in The Anxieties of Affluence (George Katona and Ernest Dichter), but rightly adds to that category a wider-angle consideration of transnationality, one less defined by the space of the nation-state. “The main focus here,” Horowitz writes, “is on the consequences of the flow (or blockage) of people and ideas across national borders, what the historian Thomas Bender has called the result of ‘the permeability of the nation at boundaries, the zones of contact and exchange among people, money, knowledges, and things’” (13).[4]

That indecision between “flow (or blockage)” is a risky move, but it is one that Horowitz makes central to his project, emphasizing repeatedly the ways that intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic rather stubbornly failed to look around themselves properly to take advantage of the many concurrent ideas for how to come to terms with the postwar consumer landscape. Yet documenting—much less theorizing—how these ideas became “lost in translation,” as Horowitz prefers to describe these blockages, often requires more fancy footwork than proving a connection did occur, and the temptation for the historian to reconstruct a debate that he or she feels should have happened over those that did is a challenge to resist. At least it ensnares Horowitz a little too often, even though he admits that, while “[o]ne can only speculate about what difference it would have made to American discussions of popular culture had the works of Barthes, Benjamin, Eco, Habermas, and James been available in the immediate postwar period… [n]ot much is the best guess” (121). Still, the desire to force these texts into circulations they did not have is palpable in Consuming Pleasures, and its counterfactuality adds a touch of awkwardness.

Horowitz notes repeatedly that many of the western European texts which today can provide us with such a rich record of responses to the idea of American consumer culture were not translated into English until the tail end of the period he covers, if not later (as with the untranslated Eco, Habermas, and Barthes essays he works with).[5] Horowitz does not explore this curious fact very much, or attempt to track down the specific circumstances of when and why they were finally translated. Nor does he really make as much use as he might have of the transatlantic connections within cultural criticism generally, and the study of popular or mass culture more specifically, that preceded World War II—sources which, like José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, massively impacted the postwar debates on mass culture. The only prewar transatlantic intellectual given much treatment is T. S. Eliot.

To be fair, though, that lack of prewar coverage is not an oversight on Horowitz’s part, but a conscious argument, albeit one that is, I would argue, overly mechanical. Horowitz sees the emergence of these new attitudes toward consumer or mass culture as the ineluctable product of its postwar inundation: “[postwar c]hanges in the economy [i.e., the period of sustained prosperity through the 1950s] made consumerism so prevalent that it was hard to ascribe the consumption of goods simply or primarily to moral weakness” (8). Horowitz adds further down the page that, along with these transformations in the economic base come important superstructural considerations: “shifts in attitudes, ideas, and approaches deserve at least equal attention.” Yet the main shift Horowitz outlines is a simplistic ideological turnover: “Generational shifts played important roles, especially the waning of the memories of totalitarianism and of the prominence of writers for whom Stalinism and Nazism were central… A new set of imperatives emerged over time, in part as a result of how the waning or reconfiguration of Marxism underwrote these changes” (9). Yet Horowitz is too good a historian for these somewhat schematic arguments to bleach the nuance and subtlety of the actual content of the rest of the book; holdovers from the prewar period—including the irrepressible Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg as well as the fraught memories of the Popular Front—hover over much of Horowitz’s analysis, even if they might have been more directly and profitably engaged. Horowitz’s charming preface begins with an anecdote about stumbling on a 1937 essay written by one of his high school teachers, a woman with a Yale Ph.D., on the culturally redemptive possibilities present in moviegoing. In many ways, that initial move toward the Thirties encapsulates the persistent problem Horowitz faces that so much of his history is a sequence of almost random discoveries and undiscoveries—moments when a text like his high school teacher’s essay could be swallowed for years before popping up poignantly if also somewhat inconsequentially.

The emphasis on missed connections overall gives Consuming Pleasures a rather ghostly feel—an effect heightened by the continuing reverberations of the death of Susan Sontag, who in many ways anchors the back half of the book. Horowitz makes wonderful use of her recently published journals, and the opening up of these hidden sides of Sontag’s personality and experiences to the public eye adds a startlingly sharp dimension to the more sedate reflections of the other figures in the book. Yet Consuming Pleasures is haunted not just by the belated translations of Eco or Barthes or by Sontag’s journals, although Sontag herself brings together the two larger presences which Horowitz draws upon. Consuming Pleasures is, not too far under the surface, a story about how (some) Jews and (some) gay men and women fought simultaneously to use popular culture to achieve an identity and a place in American society and to justify to the more rarefied strata of that society the importance of popular culture. And because it tells that story, the Holocaust and homophobia loom in the shadows of the book. Unfortunately, that’s all they really do, though, as Horowitz does not fully engage with why Jews and gays seemed to have been so central to the repudiation of traditional hierarchies of high and low culture, and he often comes off as using these categories fairly reductively. There is even an interesting footnote in which he says, “I am grateful to Herbert J. Gans [also one of the subjects of Consuming Pleasures] for helping me think about the relationships of Jews to popular culture, even though we did not always agree” (376). That footnote follows the sentence “Whatever the sociological origins of concerns among Jews about popular culture, it is hard to overestimate the impact on them of an awareness of how Hitler had used mass media to advance Nazism” (21).

As uneven as these hauntings can be, they do make Consuming Pleasures a much richer book, and, together with the truly monumental feats of research and synthesis which Horowitz has performed, they promise readers a rewarding and deeply provoking experience.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Notes

[1] Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973); The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (New York, 1985); and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York, 1992).

[2] The principal works here are Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley, CA, 1982); Michael Denning, “The End of Mass Culture,” International Labor and Working-Class History 37 (Spring 1990): 4-18, and The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996); Lawrence Levine, “The Folklore of Industrial Society: Popular Culture and Its Audiences,” American Historical Review 97.5 (Dec. 1992): 1369-1399; Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996); Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, 1989).

[3] Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (Boston, 1967). It is interesting to note that the U.S. paperback edition—cited here—came out in a series edited by David Manning White, the editor of what Horowitz refers to as the “locus classicus of these [1950s] debates [on mass culture]… the 1957 book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White” (19).

[4] Horowitz is quoting from Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006), 7.

[5] Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957) was not translated until 1972, and even then only partially; Walter Benjamin’s key essays of the 1930s were not published in an accessible manner until 1968; Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 landmark book Dialektik der Aufklärung, with its crucial chapter on the Culture Industry, was not available in English until 1972; Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta (1962) and Diario Minimo (1963) were incompletely translated as The Open Work (1989) and Misreadings (1993); The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) by Jürgen Habermas only came out in English in 1989; and, while C. L. R. James’s American Civilization (1950) didn’t have to wait for a translation, as Horowitz points out, it nevertheless was not in print until 1993.

“You Can’t Say That”: A Reply to Michael Fisher

Author: James Livingston

[Editor's note: Here is Fisher's original review. - TL]

I

Since I started writing Against Thrift in 2009, the typical response from my liberal and left-wing colleagues has been “You can’t say that!” I’ve heard it a hundred times by now. They mean it. They assume that consumer culture is, at best, the place where bad taste, bad faith, and bad manners rule with the permission of advertising—it’s redeemable only by recourse to the suspicious methods of cultural studies—and is, at worst, the place where conscience, commitment, and even common sense go to die. When I was a fellow at the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library three years ago, one of my colleagues responded to the description of the project by saying, with no trace of irony or humor, “You’re the Devil.”

The book has been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but not in the New York Times or The New Republic. It’s been reviewed in Bloomberg Business Week, but not in Dissent, The American Prospect, The Atlantic, or The Nation. Meanwhile I’ve written book-related op-eds for mainstream publications like Wired, the LA Times and the Christian Science Monitor, and been interviewed by NPR stations from San Francisco to New York. The last radio interview I did, however, was with John Batchelor at WABC, where his talk show colleagues include Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh.

How to account for this discrepancy? Is it a clear Left/Right divide, or just a difference between academic and middlebrow discourse? My argument on behalf of consumer culture makes no sense in the absence of my argument for a redistribution of income and a socialization of investment—and vice versa. Conservatives like John Batchelor and Leftists like Sasha Lilley at KPFA/San Francisco have grasped the connection between these arguments, and have responded with reasoned aplomb rather than astonishment. So the question becomes, Why is the liberal, academic Left so uniform in its views of consumption that its reflexive response to my defense of consumer culture is exasperation and dismissal (“You can’t say that!”), if not horror and disgust (“You’re the Devil”)?

You could say it’s a trade book with an incendiary title, so what’d you expect? Of course the middlebrow radio stations and the mainstream newspapers would pay attention—they need as much “provocative” content as they can get to attract listeners and readers—but you can’t expect serious journalists, intellectuals, and academics, typically liberals who are necessarily suspicious of finance capital, to entertain an argument that takes the universalization of exchange value (a.k.a. commodity fetishism) for granted, and that meanwhile treats advertising as the last utopian idiom of our time.

In these serious parts, it goes without saying that commodities are the enemy of the spirit; that consumer culture privatizes our experience and infantilizes our desires, thus precluding local community as well as progressive political action, not to mention the salvation of our souls; that advertising, the advocate of mindless consumption and the enemy of plain speech, puts everything up for sale, including our very souls; and that consumerism is clearly the most dangerous threat to the environment.

II

Actually, it doesn’t go without saying, and that fact raises a different question: why do we need to keep repeating ourselves? The same thing gets said over and over, as if hundreds of clerics were transcribing one master text—as if the critique of consumer culture is a reaction formation that has finally become a repetition compulsion. From Max Horkheimer to Paul Goodman, from David Riesman to David Potter, from Stuart Ewen to Juliet Schor, from Benjamin Barber to Jackson Lears, from James A. Roberts (an earnest marketing professor) to Kalle Lasn (the editor of Adbusters and a crucial inspiration of Occupy Wall Street), and—while we’re at it—from Robert Samuelson to David Brooks, the refrain never changes. It goes like this: Americans are the pliant products of a social pathology specific to the extremity of capitalism; they’re the willing subjects and the passive objects of a consumer culture induced by advertising and enabled by debt.

Like Christopher Lasch, who claimed thirty years ago that consumerism was the material condition of what he named the culture of narcissism—it was no longer an occasional personality disorder—these writers repeat the refrain because they assume it’s self-evident. Barber, for example, knows that his readers are already familiar with the master text, and so he never bothers to make an argument in Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole (2007); instead, he reintroduces Lasch to an audience that might have forgotten him and proceeds directly to the requisite hyperbole: “Lasch’s account of narcissism resonates with much of what I will portray as the new capitalist ethos of infantilism. The ethos animating postmodern consumer capitalism is one of joyless compulsiveness. The modern consumer is no free-will sybarite, but a compulsory shopper driven to consumption because [sic] the future of capitalism depends on it. He is less the happy sensualist than the compulsive masturbator, a reluctant addict working at himself with little pleasure, encouraged in his labor by an ethic [not ethos?] of infantilization that releases him to a self-indulgence he cannot altogether welcome.” (51)

Sound familiar? Of course it does. Benjamin Barber, a political theorist by training, holds an endowed chair at the University of Maryland, and, according to the flap copy on his book, he “consults with political and civic leaders throughout the world on democratization, citizenship, culture, and education.” James A. Roberts is a professor of marketing at Baylor University in Waco, Texas; he’s not a communitarian critic of capitalism, and he’s never been to Camp David. But in a new book called Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy (2011), he explains the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic goods, cites Jean-Paul Sartre on the meaning of life—I am not making this up—and then reproduces Barber’s boisterous critique of consumer culture in prose that would put a ferret to sleep: “Compulsive buyers are preoccupied with the importance of money as a solution to problems and as a means of comparison. Like status consumers, they make purchases in an attempt to bring into balance the discrepancy between their identity and the lifestyle projected by various products. . . .But as compulsive buying becomes more severe in an individual, and more prevalent in our society, it causes serious personal, interpersonal, and social problems.” (102-3)

Is this strangled prose a kind of plagiarism? If I were grading Roberts, I’d have to consult my university’s guidelines under the heading of “permissible paraphrase.” But then I’d have to bet on a source, and what could I exclude from the database? Barber, a likely source, isn’t the author of the master text—his renunciation of argument is evidence of his own borrowing—he’s just another cleric with a pornographic imagination and a strong prose style. But if it’s not plagiarism, what is it, what do we call this borrowing? Is Barber’s purple prose convincing because it works at the level of rhetoric, where close observance of the conventions, speaking of pornography, permits but also requires the occasional flourish, that moment when the argument is completed not by reference to evidence but by the athletic effect of a perfect metaphor or a quick cut?

These plaintive questions, which I ask without irony, boil down to just one. Why do we—academics, journalists, artists, intellectuals, writers, editors, readers—take the master text for granted, so that the typical response to my argument on behalf of consumer culture is, “You can’t say that”?

III

Michael Fisher makes the question quite poignant in his smart, funny, and friendly review of my book. He has of course borrowed from the master text transcribed by Barber, Roberts, et al., knowing that the original was written, once upon a time, by high-brow fugitives from mass culture and learned critics of its industrial apparatus. But he has tried to translate that text, to transpose it into a new key, where we might read and listen differently. He’s not just reiterating; he’s riffing.

Fisher deftly summarizes the economic argument of Against Thrift, and, like most of the comrades on the Left who favor the idea of redistribution in the name of equality, he finds it convincing. But, again like most of the comrades, he labels it “hard-boiled” and “descriptive,” as in dispassionate and reportorial—as if my disagreements with every other explanation of the Great Recession are unimportant, as if I hadn’t chosen to argue against the conventional wisdom on the role of consumption in economic growth, as if my description of the current crisis (or any other description, for that matter) is not already an analysis with an accompanying policy agenda.

Fisher then makes a slow turn, from what he calls my “descriptive argument for why consumer culture is good for us” to what he calls the “normative argument.” At this point, the equally ancient distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goods makes a timely appearance, and it hereafter serves as sturdy rhetorical protection against the intellectual intrusions that follow. At the gates of hell, these metaphysical niceties have always served as prayerful homilies: when nothing else abides and your soul is at stake, you can always console yourself by writing a footnote to Plato. Ask P. G. Wodehouse.

“Thankfully, Livingston is not one to shy away from ambitious intellectual tasks (he likens himself to Galileo early in the book). In ‘Part Two: The Morality of Spending,’ he unveils his normative argument for consumer culture’s goodness, this time with respect to our souls, and tries to re-designate consumption, instant gratification, and instinctual satisfaction as intrinsic moral goods.”

Or do I? Is my language a “subtle pragmatist’s trick”? It is true, I have no patience for metaphysics. I’m a pragmatist through and through, and so I don’t see how any description of any phenomenon excludes or postpones a normative argument—that is, an actionable attitude toward the object of knowledge. I also don’t see how a distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic goods holds up under the condition we call modernity, or post-modernity, when the universalization of exchange value (“reification”) is complete. But I do show that it is only in the neighborhood of consumer culture—at our leisure, after hours and at play—that we learn to treat each other as ends in themselves rather than means to the ends of our incomes or careers. In this sense, I show that what comes of buying, using, and sharing goods is better for us than what comes of producing goods under the sign of alienated labor. It beats working.

Instant gratification or instinctual satisfaction—and how, pray tell, would we gain access to our instincts?—can’t be an “intrinsic moral good” in these terms, and I never claimed either was such a good, because we can’t know anything’s value, moral or otherwise, except in retrospect, as a moment in an unfolding semiotic sequence. In other words, value, moral or otherwise, is like truth: neither can be known until exchanged, unless represented. Here is how William James put the proposition: “Day follows day, and it contents are simply added. They are not themselves true, they simply come and are. The truth is what we say about them.”

And yes, it is true, I suggested in the introduction to the book that Galileo was my hero because he wasn’t a deep thinker, just a radical empiricist looking to demonstrate the new facts made visible by his telescope. It was my clumsy way of choosing history over theory. I said that “the telescope at my disposal compresses time rather than space,” and hoped readers would, as a result, understand the obvious limits of the project rather than attribute inordinate ambitions to its author. But I now want to make those ambitions clear, because no review of the book, including Fisher’s, and no interview about it, not even at Pacifica Radio, has yet revealed the scope or the implications of the argument.

IV

I wrote this book in the hope of allowing us to see that consumption is the proper goal and the necessary limit of production. When it has been or becomes this goal and limit, the use values that consumers want can contain—not displace—the pursuit of exchange value, of wealth in the abstract. Money and credit, accordingly, can become means of exchange, not ends in themselves: the formula for capital (M-C-M*) can then give way to something like simple commodity circulation (C-M-C), something closer to the archaic yet real and pleasurable circuits of gift economies.

This seemingly utopian urge—this hope of mine—is actually validated by the measurable trends of recent economic history, the last hundred years of development. We can make consumption the goal and the limit of production. But to do so, to accept and act on my economic argument, is to interrogate what we mean by “character.’ The structure of our moral personalities is at risk in that interrogation, because the realization of desire we call “spending” and the deferral of gratification we call “saving” are both emotional achievements and material accomplishments. Max Weber and Sigmund Freud understood this social-psychological congruence, and tried, accordingly, to itemize the historical conditions of an ascetic or anal-compulsive character type that could systematically and happily abstain from the pleasures of the world. On the wings of the Owl of Minerva, they were explaining the Cartesian ego at the very moment of its dissolution.

It’s time that we followed their example—it’s time that we tried to itemize the historical conditions of new character types and the moral (not to mention political) horizons that become visible from their standpoint. But how? My procedure in Against Thrift was to begin with the economic history of the last hundred years as an indispensable preface to a defense of consumer spending and consumer culture. Redistribution was the least of my goals—it was just the first step, I thought, toward the imagination of a moral universe in which repression, denial, and delay of gratification are no longer the foundation of the social-psychological structure we recognize as “character,” and, consequently, in which any fixed boundary between inner self and outer world (the central conceit of modernity, according to Nietzsche) is erased.

So let me retrace my steps.

Private investment out of profits is an unimportant source of growth, and so the pursuit of profit as such is, as Keynes put it in 1930, a “somewhat disgusting morbidity.” It follows that the forced savings or deferred consumer choices that corporate retained earnings represent are worse than pointless, they’re destructive. It also follows that we don’t need to keep decisions about our future in the hands of those who think that the bottom line is a larger sum of exchange value—rewarding CEOS and traders with lower taxes and higher profits is a recipe for economic and moral disaster.

Let me put it as plainly as I can. The members of the investing class—we used to call them capitalists—are now as superfluous and superannuated as the European landed nobility had become by the late 18th century. They’re good for deep background, baroque settings, and self-parody if you want to write a novel or make a movie about a civilization that has already expired. Otherwise they don’t matter. Otherwise we need to get on with a future that excludes them except as public servants, as “humble, competent people, on a level with dentists,” according to the Keynesian designation of economists. We begin by redistributing income away from the 1%, toward the 99%.

What then?

We socialize investment because we need to—because we need to redefine profit to include the social consequences (the “externalities”) of investment, including the environmental consequences, and because the pattern of economic growth can no longer be determined by the insatiable needs of those who honestly believe that more money in the bank is the purpose of life and the insignia of success. That means we take responsibility for the future, or rather that we stop sacrificing the possibilities and pleasures of the present to a future held ransom by our own deference to an archaic economic model and an outmoded character type.

It means that we stop saving for a rainy day, and stop assuming that the inner-directed, anal-compulsive character is normal and, dare I say, normative.

Notice that our obligation to future generations is enlarged, not diminished, by this commitment to, and in, the present. But notice, too, that when we stop saving for a rainy day because we can, we have already begun to reconstruct our “character” in ways that move us beyond inner-direction and anal compulsion. In this sense, we have already begun to move beyond Protestant Christianity—that old work ethic—as the “deepest moral resource” of our everyday lives. So yes, of course, we have already begun to redefine individualism, the very nature of our selves, as soon as we ask who and what we’re saving for.

V

That’s what Against Thrift is about, this ongoing, incomplete, still inarticulate movement toward a new moral universe made navigable by the passage beyond what Marx and Marcuse called the realm of necessity, where hard work and emotional sacrifice add up to the cause of character and the price of civilization. Either way, in retrospect or prospect, it’s not a pretty picture—the future I sketch looks like hell itself according to Michael Fisher—but either way, we don’t have much of a choice in the matter. We can treat the differences between these pictures as moral possibilities that are real historical events and thus empirical problems, or we can continue to copy from the master text, which simply denies that consumer culture contains any possibility worth contemplating.

Fisher is of course correct to suggest that I am uninterested in “lasting salvation”—who except a dead man can tell us what that means?—and to label Christian faith as the moral adhesive of the civil rights movement. But I would insist that my godless project is in keeping with the social origins and import of this faith, indeed that it aims to complete what religion (and, in its own fashion, advertising) can only attempt. In the beginning, the criterion of need—from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs—regulated the disposition of the church’s economic, emotional, and doctrinal resources: you were your brother’s keeper, so charity wasn’t a choice. But as the church became a going concern in the post-republican, Hellenic world, the criterion of need became politically problematic. In the absence of ways to deliver the goods to everyone—in a world dominated by disease, hunger, and poverty—this criterion became local or eschatological, either the creed of communities that had withdrawn from the larger society, or, what is practically the same thing, the ideological correlate of faith in an impending apocalypse.

We still inhabit a world dominated by disease, hunger, and poverty. But withdrawal is not an option, not anymore, because we know how to deliver the goods to everyone: we know that scarcity, whether economic or emotional, is socially contrived and culturally enforced. We’ve long since solved the problem of production; we haven’t even begun with the problem of consumption because we’re so afraid of what it will cost us in the currencies that underwrite our “character.” We can finally afford to be our brother’s keeper—we can live by the ancient criterion of need, and, in doing so, we can live up to the original challenge of Christianity. We don’t yet know how because we’re still too afraid of the material abundance that enables consumer culture.

My purpose in writing Against Thrift was to lay these fears to rest—or rather to explain them, to myself among other adults made anxious by the extremities of very late capitalism. Michael Fisher understands that, I think, because he has refused to merely reiterate the master text that has allowed so many smart people to say the same thing about consumer culture without thinking, and without evidence. He never falls back into the parental moment when “You can’t say that” sounds like the appropriate response to bad taste, bad faith, or bad manners. Still, his review would suggest that I have only inflamed our fears of the future. That makes me nervous.

Book Review: Fisher on Livingston's Against Thrift

Review of James Livingston's Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York: Basic Books, 2011). ISBN: 9780465021864. 288 pages.

Reviewed by Michael Fisher
University of Rochester


Goods Aplenty: Against Thrift and the Question, “What For?”


Following on the heels of his contentious re-reading of late twentieth-century American thought and culture,[1] James Livingston has written a new book that promises to provoke much more than historiographic controversy. As the title suggests, Against Thrift is an ethical indictment and a political argument against the Protestant work ethic; yet it also prophesies a new moral order that might be just around the corner.

Livingston wants us to be happier, more carefree and better able to enjoy the pleasures of this life. In no uncertain terms, he thinks we ought to abandon the last vestiges of Puritanism that constrain our bodies and our minds in favor of a wholehearted embrace of spending—vigorous spending. Instead of saving and delaying gratification, he goads us: we should be focusing our scarce psychic and material resources on satisfying desire in the here and now. Why? Because the age-old assumption that work should come before play, that self-discipline and restraint are preferable to immediate gratification, is based on a series of false premises. So Livingston says and, for much of Against Thrift, he presumes to demonstrate. As he puts it in the introduction, “In this book, I make the case for consumer culture: why it’s actually good for the economy, the environment, and our souls, among other things. In this sense, I’m trying to heal the split in our personalities by demonstrating that less work, less thrift, more leisure, and more spending are the cures for what ails us.”[2]

What ails us in Livingston’s view is partly economic and partly psychological (hence the supposed split in our personalities). But the twin ailments stem from a common cultural root. At least in theory, most Americans still buy the Puritan premise that disciplined frugality begets virtue whereas giving in to one’s instincts begets vice. Because we remain beholden to the resulting economic mindset, which assumes that saving and investing in the future are the best ways to ensure long-term growth and security, we have trained ourselves psychologically to associate the deferral of emotional gratification—particularly the gratification that comes with buying consumer products—with goodness.

According to Livingston, this conventional wisdom informs everything from our personal morality to our response to the 2008 financial crisis; and the symmetry between the two examples is scarcely coincidental: “All adults—not just parents—have a powerful psychological urge to put their desires on hold, and that urge makes us receptive to the notion that we’d better be saving more and spending less, just like all the mainstream economists and reputable journalists keep telling us to. We know what will happen to our bank accounts, our waistlines, and our marriage vows if we stop listening to their insistent voice of reason.”[3]

Against much popular (in fact Populist) opinion, Livingston argues quite convincingly that both the Great Depression and the Great Recession drew from this very thrift-centered mindset. We miss the connection, he says, only because we have yet to distance ourselves sufficiently from the late nineteenth century. Since the 1890s, when the original Populists almost succeeded in restructuring the existing relationship between labor and capital, American antimonopoly sentiment has gone hand in hand with the traditional argument against consumption; and the two have tended to reinforce each other. Particularly when the economy goes bust, as it did in 1929 and 2008, the majority of Americans blame corporate power and profligate consumers, and the underlying problem is said to be moral failings on the part of irresponsible individuals.

As Livingston documents throughout “Part One: Our Very Own Perestroika,” this typical response—moral indignation against excessive spending, speculation, and greed—was especially widespread after the 2008 crisis. Yet it ignores several key pieces of historical evidence, most importantly the role of surplus capital, or what Livingston calls “redundant profits with no productive outlet, which eventually find their way into speculative markets that inflate bubbles.” Here is his extended reading of both the Great Depression and the Great Recession:

I explain both events as results of surplus capital generated by huge shifts in income shares away from labor, wages, and consumption, toward capital, profits, and corporate savings. And I draw the obvious conclusion from the historical comparison: if the New Deal succeeded by enfranchising working people and shifting income shares back toward wages and consumption—not by means of a ‘financial fix’—then a massive redistribution of income away from capital, profits, and corporate savings is our best hope of addressing the causes of the recent crisis and laying the groundwork for balanced growth.[4]

In hardboiled form, this is Livingston’s descriptive argument for why consumer culture is good for us, and it’s difficult to refute. As Marx, Keynes, and even Milton Friedman all agree, he tells us, increasing aggregate consumption is the true handmaiden of long-term growth and security; it was what ended the Great Depression, and it is what will get us out of the current slump if we let it, that is if we give in to more of our desires and spend vigorously here and now. Our real obstacles are cultural and psychological, not economic, Livingston insists. But our atavistic resistance to instinctual gratification—in effect, our Puritan attraction to repression—runs deep. Without a total revaluation, or at least a major reshuffling, of values it’s virtually immovable. Thankfully, Livingston is not one to shy away from ambitious intellectual tasks (his introduction is called “Waiting for Galileo”). In “Part Two: The Morality of Spending,” he unveils his normative argument for consumer culture’s goodness, this time with respect to our souls, and tries to re-designate consumption, instant gratification, and instinctual satisfaction as intrinsic moral goods.

As a self-described “radical empiricist,”[5] Livingston may object to this last claim. He doesn’t believe in intrinsic moral goods the same way he doesn’t believe in metaphysical ideals like Truth, Beauty, or Justice, he might say. Yet by employing the word “Good” in his subtitle, he slyly evades the hard edge of his radical empiricism. He wants to enter into the debate over values, and in true Nietzschean form, his epistemological hang-ups about what actually constitutes “truth” take a backseat to the argument he wants to make convincing, indeed appetizing.

Whether his language is a subtle pragmatist’s[6] trick or not, we ought to take Livingston at his word: he aims to convince us that spending is “moral,” that consumer culture is “good,” and that learning these lessons “might produce a new human nature that is more at ease in the world… a human being informed by a constant awareness of the needs of others, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral.” To be fair, he frames this last bit provisionally; Livingston admits that “we just don’t know what will happen when the renunciation of desire and the deferral of gratification and the delay of satisfaction are no longer necessary to organize society and build character.”[7] But the reason he thinks this outcome is brightly possible is that he believes the liberation he prescribes is intrinsically good for us, not just pragmatically worthwhile. There is a difference, and Livingston’s language makes his argument clear.

So how does his argument work? The first step involves what Livingston calls “the politics of more.” Around the turn of the twentieth century, the Age of Scarcity passed into the Age of Abundance, and with this shift came a profound redefinition of American individualism. As Livingston describes it:

Defenders of the old individualism, then and now, typically insisted that the site of self-discovery and self-determination—the address of autonomy—was work, where productive labor taught the moral lessons of punctuality, frugality, and honest effort, and meanwhile imposed external, objective, material limits on the imagination of the producer. Defenders of the new individualism moved this location, or rather scattered it, so that the site of self-discovery and self-determination could be leisure, the pleasurable scene of goods consumption, as well as work, the strenuous scene of goods production. Thus necessity and freedom, occupation and identity, even males and females, were now aligned at different angles.[8]

The Age of Abundance created the possibility for a new kind of self, a “social self” whose identity was primarily other-directed. For a social critic like Christopher Lasch, the erosion of traditional individual autonomy undermined psychic stability and led toward a culture of narcissism.[9] Yet Livingston sees the transition in more sanguine terms. “The politics of ‘more’ defined autonomy…as a collective result of association with others—fellow workers, to be sure, but also people gathered with purposes or interests reaching beyond any workplace.” Redefined as such, American individuals enjoyed new political opportunities as well as new aesthetic ones. But the basic change was psychological: “This new individual’s identity was anything but private. It wasn’t an enduring inner self you discovered by retreating from the outer world; it was instead a social construction, the result of interaction with others.”[10]

In Livingston’s account, the movement beyond scarcity—in America, the first stirrings of a mature surplus economy that advanced rapidly after 1900—etched the contours of the new moral horizon of consumer culture. In doing so, it also laid the seeds for two of the most important social movements of the twentieth century. Pointing to the Civil Rights Movement and the revolutions in Eastern Europe between 1968-1989, Livingston identifies a common pattern of resistance in which the (social) desire to take part in the joys of consumption “produced revolutionary political change.” In both cases, he argues, African American music—what he calls “the black aesthetic”—was “the crucial medium in the redistribution of representational power accomplished by the movement.” It gave African Americans and Eastern Europeans “the cultural credentials they needed to speak for the future, for the people, for the nation.” And without the new technologies that allowed the black aesthetic to be mass distributed and mass consumed, neither movement could have succeeded. In short, Livingston thinks we owe both movements and their positive contributions to society to “the ‘reification’ or commodification of social life we (rightly) associate with consumer culture.”[11] It goes without saying that this debt should make us more appreciative of the ways in which consumer culture is good for our souls.

Livingston is certainly right to point to the correlation between late twentieth- century social movements and expanding consumer consciousness. But he downplays the fact that Protestant Christianity was in many ways the deepest moral source of what came to pass in the American South between 1955-1963, and that Vaclav Havel had serious misgivings about the West’s model of “consumer-led growth.”[12] In Livingston’s telling, it’s as if the two movements arose from consumer longings alone, and therefore consumer culture stands acquitted of all the charges leveled against it. This curious logic points to a question Livingston never fully answers: independent of the ends to which people put them, is there a moral imperative embedded within consumer culture and the mass communication mediums that help diffuse it, or are these platforms morally neutral? Could they be used to produce any number of results, including the Civil Rights Movement? Or does some inherent moral property bend them toward manifesting greater respect for differences and deeper yearnings for democracy?

The question becomes especially pertinent when Livingston begins his defense of advertising, what he calls (again provisionally) “the thesaurus of our real feelings, the indispensable, vernacular language we use to plot our positions on the emotional atlas that is everyday life.” By now it’s clear what Livingston means by the eclipse of the former form of American individualism, and why he’s glad about this as a radical empiricist. As he explains ever so delicately, there is not, and has never been, any “enduring, authentic, internal core of your self that you call your character.” This is a myth we have inherited from history. In reality, “we all know that who we are depends, more or less, on what others make of us, how they see us, and that these others are mostly the absent causes we call strangers.”[13] And we may as well embrace this. What David Riesman called the other-directed personality[14] is in fact the natural state of human existence, and this just happens to be good news for the advertising industry.

The reason Livingston calls advertising “the last utopian idiom of our time” is that he believes “it purveys a way of being in the world that is free of compulsion—free of necessary labor, the work you do because you have to—on the assumption that when at your leisure, you’re free to choose an identity that might accord with the goods on offer.” Yet what makes this way of being good for us? What about it furnishes the proper structure for our souls? Presumably Livingston’s answer to these questions is: “like it or not, we create identities by means of commodities, buying and selling what we want to be.” But isn’t this a shallow vision of what human life can be? Not to mention what it ought to be? The freedom to buy, to satisfy desire by clicking an icon after seeing an ad on TV, sets a low bar for Utopia, much less for the attainment of what any of us might call the good life. Still, Livingston seems willing to compromise: “what advertising invokes is more of an idea than a place, more like a map or a video game than something you can experience in three dimensions. But for now, that’s utopian enough.”[15] At this point one wants to cry out, “no, it isn’t.” Why should we be willing to settle for so little so late?

If, as Livingston believes, we have reached a condition of post-scarcity, advertising brings us no closer to lasting salvation. The surface depth and masked anxieties of the lives it depicts in its many varieties conjures something closer to hell: coercive visions of the good life achieved through proximity to certain products; silent invitations to mimic the elegant gestures of a person who exists only in a photograph or a set of moving images; how do these social messages offer anything resembling liberation from “compulsion, necessity, fear?”[16]

Following Livingston’s logic, we end up mired in a wasteland of goods aplenty. He defends other-direction as the necessary and binding condition of our lives, but the only compass he offers is an endless stream of barely distinguishable commodities, of consumer “goods.” This leaves him heralding a wild west version of American individualism in which nothing exists outside the market of changing circumstance, where insatiable desire is our only guide. Fortunately, Livingston doesn’t have to worry whether some permutations of social selfhood are bad for us because he doesn’t believe in any fixed human nature. Instead he says “we might as well buckle up and prepare for takeoff,” letting “change, flux, the dissolution of everything we take for granted” carry us forward. But toward what? Where does the unstated “premise of advertising: ‘All that is solid melts into air”’ ultimately lead?[17] After how many purchases do we ask the question, “what for?”

We get a hint in Livingston’s coda, “Bataille Made Me Do It.” After describing in great detail the lead-up to his “hamburger experiment,” the change in his life that he says is “most relevant to the arguments of this book,” the morality of spending finally reveals itself. It took a lot for Livingston to eat a hamburger again. As a dutiful husband and father, he denied himself the pleasure of animal flesh for years. But then things changed, and he decided it was time to loosen up and live a little. He scoured the best restaurant guides he could find, settling on a place called The Homestead “where the Kobe beef hamburger goes for twenty-one dollars as a lunch special and thirty-nine dollars on the dinner menu.” Livingston and his girlfriend went for dinner. He ordered a martini straight up to dull the pre-gratification anxiety, but it didn’t help. Nothing did. All he could do was face the moment when the burger came. And come it did:

It was delicious. Underdone, but delicious. All those fleeting bacon fumes from weekends past took up sudden residence in my mouth. But the meat was sliding around in there, as if the chef had somehow liquefied an honored part of a pampered, grass-fed cow. I was gargling beef. So I acceded to the unfreedom of my soul, took my girlfriend’s advice, and sent the Kobe burger back to the kitchen. On its return, it was much more solid and no less delicious. Even so, the junior partner in the table’s choices [his girlfriend’s burger] was clearly superior in every respect: the smaller, cheaper burger got the better of us. The sheer excess of the bigger, ridiculously expensive burger was worth the price, but just this once.[18]

The lesson from Livingston’s hamburger experiment is abundantly clear. But one wonders if he registers it. Although it’s delicious, his break from renunciation, from all the hidden vestiges of Puritan morality, culminates in a moment of bleak insecurity punctuated by a powerful compensatory desire for more sensory experience. As soon as he finishes, he’s “already descending that slippery slope, thinking ahead to another, maybe better hamburger.”[19]

If this is where consumer culture leads, we need a better set of goods than James Livingston can buy, much less sell. Perhaps it’s time to redefine American individualism, again?

[Editor’s Note: A response from James Livingston will appear next week. – TL]

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Notes

[1] James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD, 2009).
[2] James Livingston, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul (New York, 2011), x.
[3] Ibid., xi.
[4] Ibid., 7.
[5] Ibid., xviii.
[6] Livingston’s unique interpretation of pragmatism can be found in his earlier books Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994) and Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York, 2001).
[7] Livingston, Against Thrift, xii.
[8] Ibid., 90.
[9] Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York, 1979). For related accounts of the new psychology engendered by twentieth-century social and economic developments, see: David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of The Changing American Character (New Haven, 1950); Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (New York, 1961) and The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago, 1966); Richard Wightman Fox and T. Jackson Lears, Ed., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History 1880-1980 (New York, 1983); Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1984); and Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985).
[10] Livingston, Against Thrift, 89.
[11] Ibid., 100, 104, 106. Surely Livingston would interpret Arab Spring along similar lines.
[12] Ibid., 114.
[13] Ibid., 115, 176, 177.
[14] In The Lonely Crowd.
[15] Livingston, Against Thrift, 116, 128.
[16] Ibid., 158.
[17] Ibid., 121.
[18] Ibid., 197, 207, 208.
[19] Ibid.