corporations over the taste forming processes
which generated demand for their goods.
Indeed, the critical stalemate that stymied
thinking about consumption until quite recently
was structured by an opposition between
economy and culture. On the one hand, liberal
traditions (including neoclassical economics)
assumed, as we have just noted, the autonomy of
consumption processes from economic ones, and
saw this as central to both the autonomy and the
‘authority’ (Keat et al., 1994) of the consumer:
economic processes should respond to cultural
(or biological or simply ‘subjective’ and indivi-
dual) determinations of needs and wants that occur
elsewhere. This view is particularly inscribed in
the notion of ‘consumer sovereignty’. The broad
liberal tradition, from Hobbes onwards, has
privileged the liberty of the self-determined
individual, possessed of self-defined desires and
interests, and placed this figure at the centre of
moral, political and economic good. The market
is crucial to this conception as a space in which
individuals are ideally freed from external social
regulation. At the same time, the individualist
premises of liberal thought are methodologically
inimical to a cultural approach to consumption,
in so far as ‘culture’ assumes meanings shared
within collectivities with consequential dynamics
and identities. In Margaret Thatcher’s immortal
formulation, for a neoliberal ‘There is no such
thing as society, there are individual men and
women and there are families’ (quoted in Heelas
and Morris, 1992: 2).
On the other hand, critical traditions – of both
the right and the left – have tended to regard
consumption as the site of major incursions of
economic processes into culture and everyday life.
For them, modern consumer culture did not regis-
ter the triumph of individual freedom but rather
expressed the dominance of market exchange and
industrial process over human life and meanings,
apparently rendering them inauthentic or other-
wise debased. Both conservative and progressive
critics have tended to start from a somewhat
nostalgic view of premodern life as an organic
community characterized by a direct and largely
transparent relationship between production and
consumption: most goods were produced by
people who were also final consumers, or in direct
contact with final consumers. In this idealized
world prior to capitalism,only a small fraction
of consumption was mediated by markets and
commodities. Culture therefore evolved (or more
often was held stable) through the internal
rhythms of collective life rather than through the
pursuit of commercial interests or the impersonal
structures of commodity exchange.In such perspectives, the market drives a
wedge through the previously organic relation
between production and consumption, and
monetary values become the only ones that now
adjudicate social worth and distribute social
goods. For conservatives this has meant that
social status and cultural goods are now opened
up to anyone who has the money to buy them,
hence threatening those social traditions and
hierarchies which – in premodern societies –
ensured thetransmission of ‘authentic’ values.
For progressives, it has meant that all social and
cultural values are bound up with commodity
exchange, hence subordinate to the logics of
profit and exploitation. In either case, consump-
tion tends to mark the process through which
culture is colonized by economic forces, and cul-
tural critique puts forward a model of culture as
an ideal realm purified of commercial interests. It
is important to note that the very word ‘culture’
developed its modern meaning in the eighteenth
century in relation to the rise of commercial
society. Raymond Williams (1976; 1985), for
example, argued that a ‘culture and society’
tradition emerged which sought to define values
that it believed were previously embedded in
traditional ways of life but which were now
under assault from industrial civilization and the
‘cash nexus’. Both conservative and progressive
intellectuals sought to map a terrain of authentic
culture that could be defended from capitalist
modernization on the basis of values that could
not be reduced to market prices and individual
choices. In relation to consumer culture, this
largely took the form of attacks on the commer-
cial debasement and industrial management
of public taste, leisure and consciousness in
perspectives as diverse as cultural criticism and
critical theory.
The most commanding formulation of market-
mediated culture as alienation is undoubtedly
that of Marx. Marx’s understanding of pre-
capitalist social order is largely romantic. However
brutal the old world might be, it is characterized
by a transparency and directness of the relation-
ship between production and consumption,
summarized in the model of production of use
values rather than exchange value. The commo-
dity form – production of exchange value for the
market; labour as commodity – means that workers
sell their labour power in one market for the cash
with which they might purchase the means of
consumption in quite other markets. This means,
firstly, that their (concrete) labour is discon-
nected from its own product: we do not work
directly to satisfy our needs. Capitalist consump-
tion is utterly warped by alienation. Secondly,150 THE CULTURE OF ECONOMY3029-ch07.qxd 03-10-02 10:46 AM Page 150