Imagining the cultural consumer: Class, cool and connoisseurship

Abstract

This chapter considers the changing visions of the cultural consumer that emerge from historical and contemporary research into ‘consumer societies’. These visions play out, the chapter will argue, through some perennial debates, stretching back to at least the sixteenth century and intensifying across the late twentieth, about the processes and meaning of the consumption of culture and the role of the cultural industries in shaping these meanings. The chapter will focus on the persistent and continuing role of class as a surprisingly hardy, underlying infrastructure for these processes and their accompanying images of the cultural consumer as a distinctive and distinguishing figure. It is an accepted truism that, at least in the global North, we live in a ‘consumersociety’. The meaning of the term changes depending on the context of its use but it tends to refer to the relationships between the practice of consumption – that is, the buying and selling of consumer goods – and the broader social processes that stem from these practices, including the formation of individual forms of identity. Contemporary consumer goods are especially suited to be used in this kind of society, so this story goes, because they are inscribed with various forms of meaning, sign-values and symbolism that allow them to become resources in the construction of latemodern selves. Such resources help fill in the gaps vacated by older forms of identity work – including those connected with the class struggle – that have an apparently weakened grip on the imagination of contemporary subjects. The assumptions and the historical novelty of these relationships are clearly debatable, and doing so extensively is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the consumption of culture, i.e. of art, literature, music, film and similar goods that are explicitly concerned with the aesthetic and the symbolic has a distinct place in this story. Culture, unlike other commodities in the consumer market-place, is often thought of as appreciated, experienced or engaged with, rather than produced, consumed, bought or sold. The popular and commercial versions of these symbolic forms, by contrast, have anambiguous role in the stories of the consumer society. Contemporary cultural genres or products, such as reality TV, blockbuster films, fast food and X-Factor-style music production exemplify what have been long established by critics of radical and conservative bents as the tendencies of a crude ‘mass’ culture towards inauthenticity and shallowness. In this version of the story the consumption of commercial culture is a form of exploitation of the leisure time of consumers, which mirrors, and ultimately enables, their exploitation in the capitalist workplace (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997/ 1947). At the same time, the studied appreciation of other, ‘higher’ kinds of culture, art, literature and music, albeit that these forms are also increasingly distributed on commercial lines, provide resources for refuge from, or even creative resistance to, these same tendencies. Cultural consumption, then, can be seen to provide the resources for the critique of abiding social and political relationships in consumer society. At the same time, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) revealed in hisstudy of the social patterns of taste in the France of the 1960s, cultural consumptions helps to cement these relationships by securing certain kinds of culture as the legitimate property of dominant classes and undermining other forms as the popular distractions for the subordinate. Traces of these class-inflected contrasts remain despite the considerable transformations in social life more generally in ‘consumer societies’ and in the cultural industries in particular. The labels attached to consumers of art and culture – whether historical ones such as ‘flâneur’ or ‘bohemian’ or more recent ones such as ‘fan’ or ‘omnivore’ draw on and evoke specific imaginaries about the characteristics of the activities of appreciation, experience and engagement and those who participate in them. By drawing on examples of these labels, I argue that such distinctions are as much a result of judgements about the qualities of people as the qualities of culture, as much about who is doing the consuming as what is consumed. The next section begins this process by sketching some of the changing relationships between social and cultural hierarchies revealed by empirical and historical perspectives on cultural consumption.