ABSTRACT
Yet these changing sensibilities, these new (and often destructive) emotional states, feelings and desires engendered by Western consumer society are seldom considered, especially within criminological circles. This is a considerable oversight, for the lessons and messages of consumerism have been closely studied and crisply retained – most obviously by young people, so often the target for pronounced socalled ‘lifestyle’ advertising. This is not to suggest that criminology has never engaged with questions about the putative nature of market culture and, in particular, how it shapes and influences the actions and sensibilities of young people.12 The work of the broadly Marxist-inspired Birmingham School in the United Kingdom, for example, took great pains to illustrate the extent to which much working-class youth delinquency was the product of symbolic rebellion against the dominant values of society and the contradictions of capitalism (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hall et al 1978). The situation today, however, is a good deal more intense and indeterminate than the one that confronted the members of the Birmingham School in the 1970s, not least because the desire to consume is so universal and pervasive, confronting us at every turn, bombarding us with an unprecedented array of aspirational messages. Moreover, prospects have changed. Class delineations are less highly stratified. People now respond less and less to the inequalities of capitalism by turning inward and creating subcultures of resistance based on a heightened sense of (working) class consciousness and a deep mistrust of all things different or unknown (see Willis 1977). Rather, the market has redirected our gaze outward. As Mary Douglas has commented, capitalism wrests ‘us (willingly) out of our cosy, dull niches and turn[s] us into unencumbered actors, mobile in a system, but setting us free they leave us exposed. We feel vulnerable’ (1992: 15). With its emphasis on diversity, novelty, play and self-expression, the market attempts to shift parameters of expectation. Consequently, consumer culture and aspirational culture are now locked in a deadly embrace, each begetting the other. In an important and too often overlooked work on the changing nature of everyday culture, Paul Willis articulates this point in clear terms, and by doing so, greatly develops his earlier classic study of working class sensibilities:
The market is the source of a permanent and contradictory revolution in everyday culture which sweeps away old limits and dependencies. The markets’ restless search to find and make new appetites raises, wholesale, the popular currency of symbolic aspiration. The currency may be debased and inflationary, but aspirations now circulate, just as do commodities. That circulation irrevocably makes or finds its own worlds ... Commerce and consumerism have helped to release a profane explosion of everyday symbolic activity. The genie of common culture is out of the bottle – let out by commercial carelessness. Not stuffing it back in, but seeing what wishes may be granted, should be the stuff of our imagination. (1990: 26-27, emphasis added)
12 The work of the Dutch criminologist Willem Bonger provides us with an early example of criminology’s engagement with the subject of consumerism (although Bonger preferred the term ‘covetousness’). Consider this quote, evocative of the era: ‘As long as humanity has been divided into rich and poor ... the desires of the masses have been awakened by the display of wealth; only to be repressed again by the moral teaching impressed upon them, that this was a sinful thing’ (1936: 93).
