Paper on Consumer culture and social status -relating to a few readings!
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ics_392_w03_-_veblen__status.pptICS 392
Consumer Culture
Professor Al Muniz
Week 3 – Veblen and Status
Last modified September 25th, 2013
- Brands are complex socio-cultural-political entities
- They serve a variety of functions
- Marking status
Positional goods
Status and positional goods
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Status and positional goods
- Social class
- Coolness
- McCracken considers Social Class (“Status Convergence”) and The Cool Convergence as the Ying and the Yang of North American culture.
Status and positional goods
- Status culture ruled here for a long time.
- (It was a cultural artifact of our colonization by the British who had a status system based on European notions of the aristocracy.)
Status and positional goods
- Cool culture
- Cool as a status system
- Our concern next week
- Based on rebellion against the mainstream
- Replacing social class
- Social class/Status Culture
- The Unlived in Living Room as a status message
Status and positional goods
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Status and positional goods
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Status and positional goods
- Part of status is taste.
- We reveal our class when we reveal what we like and what we dislike.
- This takes us to Veblen and the idea that consumption, leisure and waste are symbols of financial strength and social standing
- Thorstein Veblen
- 1857 to 1929
- The Theory of the Leisure Class (1897)
- Essay entitled “Conspicuous Consumption”
- Conspicuous consumption
- Vicarious consumption
- Many of his ideas have become commonplace in the social sciences and criticism
Status and positional goods
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Veblen
7 main things to take away from this reading
1) Consumption, leisure and waste are symbols of financial strength and social class
2) Conspicuous consumption
3) Consumption is prevailing over leisure
4) Consumption is structured by class
5) Vicarious consumption
6) Conspicuous waste
7) Luxuries become necessities
Veblen
- 1) Consumption, leisure and waste are symbols of financial strength and social class
- Unproductive consumption of goods is honorable, primarily as a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity; secondarily it becomes substantially honorable in itself, especially the consumption of the more desirable things (p1).
Veblen
- 1) Consumption, leisure and waste are symbols of financial strength and social class
- The consumption of luxuries, in the true sense, is a consumption directed to the comfort of the consumer himself, and is, therefore, a mark of the master (p2.)
Veblen
- 2) Conspicuous consumption
- Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure (p4).
Veblen
- 2) Conspicuous consumption
- The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and of so gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods (p8).
Veblen
- 2) Conspicuous consumption
- The means of communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging of his reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is able to make while he is under their direct observation (p8).
- Consumption becomes a larger element in the standard of living in the city than in the country (p9).
Veblen
- 3) Consumption is prevailing over leisure
- Leisure held the first place at the start… Consumption has gained ground, until, at present, it unquestionably holds the primacy (p11).
Veblen
- 3) Consumption is prevailing over leisure
- The subsequent relative decline in the use of conspicuous leisure as a basis of repute is due partly to an increasing relative effectiveness of consumption as an evidence of wealth; but in part it is traceable to another force, alien, and in some degree antagonistic, to the usage of conspicuous waste (p11).
Veblen
- 4) Consumption is structured by class
- In order to avoid stultification he must also cultivate his tastes, for it now becomes incumbent on him to discriminate with some nicety between the noble and the ignoble [undistinguished] in consumer goods (p3).
- Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit (p3).
- Closely related to the requirement that the gentleman must consume freely and of the right kind of goods, there is the requirement that he must know how to consume them in a seemly manner (p4).
Veblen
- 4) Consumption is structured by class
- As wealth accumulates, the leisure class develops further in function and structure, and there arises a differentiation within the class. There is a more or less elaborate system of rank and grades (p4).
- …a system of hierarchical gradations. Those who stand near the higher and the highest grades of the wealthy leisure class, in point of birth, or in point of wealth, or both, outrank the remoter-born and the pecuniarily weaker (p4).
Veblen
- 4) Consumption is structured by class
- No class of society, not even the most abjectly poor, forgoes all customary conspicuous consumption. The last items of this category of consumption are not given up except under stress of the direct necessity. Very much of squalor and discomfort will be endured before the last trinket of pretense of pecuniary decency is put away (p8).
Veblen
- 5 Vicarious consumption
- Another, scarcely less obtrusive or less effective form of vicarious consumption, and a much more widely prevalent one, is the consumption of food, clothing, dwelling, and furniture by the lady and the rest of the domestic establishment (p1).
Veblen
- 5 Vicarious consumption
- Many… have in turn attached to their persons a more or less comprehensive group of vicarious consumers in the persons of their wives and children, their servants, retainers, etc (p5).
Veblen
- 6) Conspicuous waste
- It is here called “waste” because this expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole (p13).
Veblen
- 7) Luxuries become necessities
- The leisure class stands at the head of the social structure in point of reputability; and its manner of life and its standards of worth therefore afford the norm of reputability for the community. … The result is that the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum, and bend their energies to live up to that ideal (p7).
Veblen
- 7) Luxuries become necessities
- It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life; and it may in this way become as indispensable as any other item of the consumer's habitual expenditure (p14).
- Paul Fussell
- Born 1924
- Professor emeritus, English literature, University of Pennsylvania
- Class, A Guide Through the American Status System (1983)
Status and positional goods
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- Paul Fussell
- Although most Americans sense that they live within an extremely complicated system of social classes, and suspect that much of what is thought and done here is prompted by considerations of status, the subject has remained murky.
Status and positional goods
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- Paul Fussell
- ...You can outrage people today simply by mentioning social class. When, recently, asked what I am writing, I have answered, “A book about social class in America.” ... It is as if I had said, I am working on a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals
Status and positional goods
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- Why does social class make us so uncomfortable in this country?
- Why do we deny it exists?
Status and positional goods
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- Hence, two things happening
1) Social class is evolving
2) We see the emergence of alternate status systems
- Coolness
Status and positional goods
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