ABSTRACT
This chapter serves as an introduction to some general theories of consumption and the consumer, and will examine the two elements of consumer and commodity starting within the larger context of economics, and then within social theory more generally. We start with a brief historical overview of the commodity and the consumer for Marx, Veblen and Simmel, with Marx’s famous notion of ‘commodity fetishism’. Marx observed that consumer capitalism depended a great deal on the importation of foreign and exotic commodities such as foods, tea and coffee, tobacco and spices, and so the role of Empire in the movement and marketing of these goods is a consideration, especially in promoting a taste for the exotic and different. From this more economic analysis of consumer capitalism we turn to the philosophy and cultural theory of the Frankfurt School, whose ideas about the ‘mass culture industry’ are pertinent. Following from this, and continuing the trajectory of this chapter from the economic to the symbolic aspects of consumption, an overview of Fredric Jameson and what, after Ernest Mandel, he terms “late capitalism”: the furthering of the aesthetic, the perpetually novel, “depthlessness” (1995: 12). Looking at these theories of consumer capitalism we can then begin to situate acts of consumption within larger economic processes, and we will revisit these theories of consumption when considering detailed case studies in later chapters. Limiting ourselves to more
foundational socio-economic theories of consumption in this chapter first, we must be mindful of the way that ideas of the consumer and the commodity in political economy tell very little of the whole story. In fact there has been a historically impoverished understanding of the consumer and consumption in general by economists. As Ben Fine argues, often economists equate consumption with individual purchases and have no real understanding of who the ‘consumer’ actually is. They become an aggregate, a hypothetical figure in the imaginations of economists, such as the archetypal ‘housewife’, invoked to explain sets of statistics rather than seeing the consumer as flexible and the bearer of meanings or values. The problem of understanding consumers in this way is down to the limitations of models of ‘neoclassical’ economics, argues Fine (1993: 133). Political economy and theories of mass culture also often tend to diminish the role of the consumer, seeing their acts of consumption as trivial within the largely deterministic system of global capital, advertising and media.
