Of Bookworms and Busybees: Cultural Theory in The Age of Do-It-Yourselfing

Abstract

Much of Cultural Studies can be seen as a response to Horkheimer and Adorno's famous essay "The Culture Industry," where the authors denounce film, television, and popular music as mass mystification.' Over the past quartercentury, the discipline of Cultural Studies has largely shown that the "masses"-such as they even exist-are as much manipulators as manipulated because the act of consuming cultural commodities is rarely the direct injection of rulingclass values into the consciousness of ordinary people.2 Instead, consumption is a complex process of interpretation in which consumers often remake the meanings of products. While products remain charged with the values of the upper classes, the consumer draws from other dimensions of the culture in which he or she is imbedded, such as working-class solidarity, feminist consciousness, or queer irony. Consumption becomes an act of interpretation through which the meaning and value of commodities are made and re-made. Thus, one of the cardinal principles of contemporary Cultural Studies has come to be that the meaning and value of commodities are subject to the mediating influence of the consumer. The significance of the commodity is rarely reducible to the intentions of the producer or to its observable qualities because, in the terms of Cultural Studies, the commodity can be "appropriated" or "subverted" by the consumer toward ends not necessarily in keeping with those of the makers (outside of the important fact that money was spent on them). Though never cast in such terms, what we have here is quite simply a theory of creativity that I shall term interpretive consumption. When consumers practice interpretive consumption, they exercise some control over the massproduced objects delivered to them by the culture industries. The capacity for interpretive consumption is the main reason why cultural theorists do not believe that mass consumerism implies the complete destruction of individual autonomy. The concept of interpretive consumption can be detected in all the major strains of contemporary Cultural Studies, from British Gramscianism to French poststructuralism and American Communication Studies.3 While interpretive consumption has been a salutary addition to our understanding of consumer practice, I will argue that it is not an exhaustive model of creativity in mass culture. The concept of interpretive consumption deals mainly with the way people use industrially produced, finished products. But other kinds of products might imply other kinds of practices, hence, other kinds of creativity. Indeed, the pervasive explanatory role of interpretive consumption has created a blind spot in Cultural Studies around the ubiquitous consumer practice of "doit-yourselfing." By do-it-yourselfing, I mean practices in which consumers buy semi-finished materials that they then use in the creation of something of their own design, though usually modeled on commercially available, professionally made products. Home improvement is the most visible kind of do-it-yourselfing. Professional services can be contracted for most home improvement projects, but many can also be done by a nonprofessional