ABSTRACT

I In the late nineteenth century, the theme of consumption can be detected as of growing importance in a number of areas. In literature, the commodification of aesthetic activities had already been dramatically problematized in Charles Baudelaire’s confrontation with the search for a market for his poetry, as Walter Benjamin was to argue in the following century.1 Later, the more recent theme of mass consumption was strikingly portrayed by Emile Zola, most noticeably in his literary treatment of the advent of mass consumption heralded by the development of the department store and the mass article in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise.2 Indeed, Zola highlighted the pathological form of unregulated desires in his presentation of kleptomania, a theme which should have been of importance to Emile Durkheim in his pathology of modernity.3 As Rosalind Williams has shown in Dream Worlds,4 mass consumption was indeed a significant theme in French social theory in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, for Durkheim, Gabriel Tarde and others. At the very close of the century, consumption is dealt with in a critical manner by one of America’s early critical social theorists, Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).5 There, Veblen introduces a significant definition of leisure related to consumption as an activity which ‘does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is nonproductive consumption of time. Time is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness.’6 Such ‘non-productive consumption of time’ indicates both a critical stance vis-à-vis classical political economy and, with its emphasis upon ‘consumption’ rather than ‘use’ of time, some accord with the concerns of the economists who had heralded the ‘marginalist revolution’ in their discipline. That revolution in the 1870s had signalled a shift of interest from production to consumption, to the economic subject’s search for the maximization of satisfaction in the realization of consumer demand.