Consumer studies as critical social theory

Abstract

A fundamental concern of all critical social theory has been relating economic action to socio-political action when explaining social change. Along with critical theories of socio-political praxis and critical theories of production and reproduction, critical consumer studies has at times sought to demonstrate how narrowly productivistic solutions to this problem can be updated or supplemented to fit better with observable historical events. However, consumer studies itself lacks conceptual coherency and is split between extending and rejecting major productivistic assumptions, making the wider significance of this literature difficult to identify. I argue that consumption and production are best understood conceptually as related moments in the material and symbolic circulation of value in circuits of market exchange, redistribution and reciprocity. Whether consumer action functions to reproduce anterior productive arrangements is a matter of historical contingency. The real benefit of consumer studies is the capacity to question and modify existing historical narratives, while serving also to generate its own insights. Consumer studies can help to systematically reveal the extent to which collective social action is patterned by class divisions, but it can also identify forms of collective association that do not reveal a basically class logic. Likewise, consumer action may reinforce the ‘distinction’ that Pierre Bourdieu has helped to theorize, but it can equally create the ‘mutuality of being’ of which Marshall Sahlins speaks. Moreover, consumer demand may indeed reproduce certain productive arrangements, as consumer critiques have always pointed out, but production is often a response to prior consumer demand, and rises or falls in relation to this. Instead of a priori assumptions about the manipulability of consumer demand, which make it easy to evade this enormous problem, situated analyses of specific fields of consumption are required that show how, when and where consumer action leads to reproduction or to real historical novelty.