Material Culture and Mass Consumption

"Material Culture & Mass Consumption"
by Daniel Miller

A Literature Review

Daniel Miller’s “Material Culture and Mass Consumption” treads the wide territory of archaeology, anthropology and social theory all at once. In its essence, Miller posits several things (and tries to back it up with a plethora of works of previous theorists):

1. Cultures objectify themselves and understand what they are from the objects they make
2. Cultures and its objects are mutually established
3. Consumption is the “work” of creative recontextualization of the object post-purchase, for the construction of collective and personal identities (potentially liberating, though still constrained by unequal access)

His book is broken up into three parts:

Firstly, he reviews the concept of objectification from Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”. Miller defines it as a “series of processes consisting of externalization (self-alienation) and sublation (reabsorption) through which the subject of such a process is created and developed.” (p. 12). So in this sense, he starts to build the notion that artefacts operate in society with social and symbolic meaning. And he recognizes that it’s not just the materiality and properties of the object but also the subjects who interact with these objects through consumption that allow for its reappropriation. Then, Miller uses Simmel as a basis to assert that the notion of possession as an activity means that material objects provide potential in defining the cultured self. Thus, culture (and therefore, self-expression) is a process of becoming in a material world. But unlike Simmel, Miller uses this to construct more “positive possibilities of social development” (p. 13). In this way, even in the modern condition of a mass produced world, this does not diminish the potential. If anything, a capitalist society gives newfound freedom from kinship obligations of traditional societies. And finally, in the first part of his book, he builds on the work of Nancy Munn, on aboriginal iconography. Munn speculates that an individual’s perception of the world is externalized in the landscape. So this inevitable and fundamental link between society and things implies that there are no social relationships that exist prior to the subject to object relationship.

In the second part of Miller’s writing, he emphasizes the importance of objects in psychosocial development. Since “the physicality of the artefact lends itself to the work of praxis – that is, cultural construction through action rather than just conceptualization” (p. 129), objects are ideal for manifesting ideas into executions. These objects may refer to social groups, possess a biography, signify luxury, and any other wide ranges of fine discriminations at almost immediate perception. That is why Miller is able to deflate the theory that language has superiority over other forms of expression. Instead, there is a rather useful co-relationship between the object and the linguistic code. He even creates a rough guide for analyzing style: (1) first an object is organized into type-tokens, (2) and compared in a given field where it contrasts with others, and finally (3) how, according to an underlying logic, it can cross coherent categories. In many ways, this rough guide is how the modern advertising world works in order to get their product recognized, relevant, and coveted. But Miller’s examples from Levi-Strauss amongst American Indians of the north-west coast fixes the argument to a more elemental level.

The last part of Miller’s book is a general theory on consumption based on the processes of objectification spoken of before. Drawing from the works of Veblen, Baudrillard and Bourdieu, (which I have yet to research further), Miller postulates that objectification permits pluralistic, small scale communities to positively appropriate material symbols even though they are distributed by impersonal institutions by modern capitalists. This means that consumption is actually viewed as a construction of culture. As the physicality of the object was previously discussed, it has the power to be an ideology. There is a certain level of autonomy in infusing meaning in these material goods. So instead of the traditional view of consumers as innocent victims of advertising and marketing, they are actually a part of an active process of creating a personal and political identity. Participatory and rather democratic, material culture can be recognized as social self-creation. What is most interesting and useful about this is that it feeds right into the core of my thesis, in that the luxury objects of today define society’s collective notions of value and beauty. In these contemporary social desires, we seek the paths towards the creation of our own identities.

In a way, Miller’s pillaging of ideas for all these various sources he happens to find relevant to his own preoccupations is exactly the appropriate way to approach it. He speaks of consumption as a recontextualization after the purchase. So what could be more fitting? However, there were many works cited of the past, but perhaps not enough on contemporary examples. Granted, this was written in 1987, an update with new theories is a must on the list of further areas to investigate. The book is occasionally repetitive, dense and not a very smooth read, which is very unfortunate for the proliferation of this work and its ideas. This is because the people who tend to gravitate towards material culture do not desire to theorize it too much, whereas those who are into social theory usually do not realize the issues raised in this work are significant. This is a tough demographic to sell towards, to legitimize the academic study of consumer culture. However, since it is far more common and easy to criticize consumption rather than exalt it, the opposing angle this takes is a commendable attempt.