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Commodity Culture

The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914; Thomas Richards

The commodity culture we live in now was created during those 65 years listed above. At this time, they were mostly promises, and only now are we beginning to critique and understand what the delivery of those promises has meant.

Basic Theses

• Commodity is “basic arbiter of all representation in capitalist societies” 13
• Focus on advertising (why advertising? it’s where commodities were organized into semiotic system: integrated, independent of humans)
  • That lets you see that semiotic systems are not mere “epiphenomena” of “institutional practices” 12
  • Advertising isn’t the origin of anything but a “point on the continuum”
• “how capitalism produced and sustained a culture of its own in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” within which the economy’s structure creates cultural forms, which then appear synonymous with the economic form 1
  • This new culture steamrolled the older and all alternative cultures (for example, open-air markets)
  • the commodity: 1851-1914, “the centerpiece of everyday life, the focal point of all representation, the dead center of the modern world” 1
  • “key to all the mythologies of Victorian life” 3
• Heroes: advertisers
• Capitalist form of representation
  • Almost a “theological” problem b/c you represent the actual creator of the world
  • Creation of stable system: 1820s economists up to Great Exhibition, which was “devised by a think tank expressly to become a sort of semiotic laboratory for the labor theory of value” 3
    • But it didn’t manage to do so: Richards notes how the glass was to look like crystal, a greenhouse to look like a palace
    • Instead, “a monument to consumption” which created unity for the system of heterogeneous objects
• Great Exhibition of 1851, which legitimized rule of capitalism and esp the middle class, the moment when capitalism appears to be creating a semiotic system, not just economics: the spectacle
  • They were classified, set in light, given no captions, left to speak for themselves: exalts the ordinary, makes the real unreal (even lumps of clay or coal)
  • You feel like a flaneur, but really you’re being herded and managed
  • This semiotic system above all fits together “the various contradictory imperatives of capitalism” 4 to make “symbolic virtue out of economic necessity”
• How does this become “indistinguishable” from capitalism itself? when people realize that representation itself will be profitable: “symbolic capital paid dividends” 4 (esp advertising, by mixing objects with ideology like nationalism)
  • Creates “the consumer” as a new way of being; “consumerism” as a new ideology
    • The consumer: your sense of identity wound up in experience of commodities
    • What’s the culture of it? Dickens’ novels, Darwins’ view of constant creation, Wagner’s total art
    • Why the commodity? Takes Baudrillard’s “the one and only form that traverses all fields of social production” qtd 11
• To what degree could cultural field be unified?
  • Limited: “could not…replace social life with a system of signs” 15
  • Agrees with Debord’s refusal to say that this system of signs is all you can have; disagrees with Baudrillard’s claim that there’s all that is (“the only culture there is” 15)
  • We are “awash” with commodities and representations of them, but that doesn’t mean everything else disappears

Advertising

• His method: actually looks at the advertisements and then goes from there for this book is the first to study 19th century advertising in its own right (most people study 20th c only)
• As “exhibition of things”
• Unwittingly shows the bourgeoisie trying to justify capitalism to everyone
  • At first, “talking to itself” (which means that the “cultural forms of consumerism, then, came into being well before the consumer economy did” 8 which is not what most historians think, making them undervalue the earlier forms of capitalist culture)
  • Then, towards working class (cf creation of penny dailies, 1896 Harmworth’s Daily Mail)
• Before 1851, only hundreds of people involved in it full-time; and it wasn’t anything radical, just a collection of time-honored tricks done mostly on the street
  • After that, a long journey, but eventually draws on G8 Exh spectacle to create modern advertising by end of century, the first time for Victoria’s Jubilee 1887
• Each company controls its advertising (not monolith agencies that dominated culture)
  • Instead, it’s all over the place: “the great centralized images of advertisnig lacked a central point of origin” 10 which upsets people: seems like a lack of human agency (was not “a pure act of untrammeled human creation”
    • So the objects themselves look like “independent actors on the historical scene” 11
• Rely on “outbursts of bourgeois self-congratulation” 7
• Master-slave dialectic

Details from Chapters

• Great Exhibition’s presentation of gadgets: “mechanical device so specialized as to be practically useless” 33
  • One newspaper noted that they “look at a tissue which nobody could wear; at a carriage in which nobody could ride…at endless inventions incapable of the duties imputed to them” qtd 33
  • Swiss Army knife with 80 different instruments
  • They “prefigure” late-Victorian commodity culture (ie Oscar Wilde in 1891: “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing so long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”
• His illustrations show mid-Victorian advertising: a palimpsest with advertisements peeling away, more being added, no rhyme or reason
  • He says more like “bricolage” (using whatever available material to adapt for a new purpose; Levi-Strauss)
• The 1840s habit of parading on carriages gigantic “effigies” of commodities, like the seven-foot top-hat that Carlyle immortalizes in Past and Present 1843 which he said showed “vanity” of consumer culture
• “Commodities provided a common ground for everyone,” “assumption was that they all wanted exactly the same articles,” hence democratic 61
• Images of Victoria in her Jubilee 1887: the Jubilee was a spectacle itself, where Victoria’s lack of charisma as a monarch, lead to obsessive performance of spectacle, lead to kitsch
  • Kitsch: defined as material and immaterial coming together
  • Before she had been either unorganized in public appearances (royal carriages shabby) or reclusive (after Albert’s death), but this time: all the stops
  • Results in advertisements that constantly repeat Victoria’s image b/c it’s profitable
  • Both elements—the official organized majesty and advertisements—ended by giving Victoria charisma
• “Selling Darkest Africa” chapter 3: economic moment, the surplus Britain produces must go somewhere
  • 1890s: people believed that “surplus served the specific interests of Empire and that it would, in time, overrun the world” 120; they saw Empire as a way to secure economic expansion (and back in 1870s J R Seeley said so; then 1890 Henry Stanley’s travel narrative In Darkest Africa, where he tries to convince the other of the commodity’s greatness, spending lots of time convincing the natives that the commodities are important even though they tend to forget, drop, or lose them)
    • Calls it the “myth of surplus production” where representations convince people that England has more wealth than it could possible deal with
    • Just as Marx had said that capital will “dispose ever more fully of the globe…so as to find productive employment for the surplus value it has realized” 120 German Ideology
  • He looks at “the surplus commodity” in all sorts of narratives: “tracts, novels, short stories, and advertisements” 121
  • Advertisements put the objects in any non-European setting they can: where Richards points out the natives are “prisoners” of commodities rather than consumers (they can’t have them or understand them so you are better); or they show that “the commodity would remake the world” in Britain’s image 166 (British power through commodities): the key to culture
• Patent Medicine: Erodes the self: “traditionally represented as distinct and inviolable,” now “laid the self completely open to commercial assault” so that to have a safe, healthy self, you must consume the commodities: body is site for spectacle
  • Esp the woman, seen as particularly vulnerable for various kinds of sickness and psychologically disposed to go for patent medicine instead of regular doctor

Those Lovely Seaside Girls

• “The most modern form of spectacle devised by late-Victorian commodity culture” 240 and the beginning of “youth culture” (young spenders) (adolescents)
  • 1904, G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, saying that it’s the formative period of life; b/c you have leisure: can’t work but can consume, in liminal space;” autonomous (from family) and plastic tastes; they want to amass “sense capital” (exploration of youth itself) 243; full of longings
    • Richards: this shows need for commodities to be springing from WITHIN, from your own body 243
  • Advertisers begin to see adolescence as having value in itself: “as an end in itself” 244 even if it’s just the superficial appearance of youth: “youthness” rather than an actual age; now, womanhood is “prolonged girlhood” 244
• Joyce in Ulysses: “first time a writer confronted the lived reality of the advertised spectacle” 207 showing that it’s “coercive” and can “invade” consciousness
  • “Nausicaa” chapter: Gerty Mac Dowell? (a figure Joyce takes up from Maria Cummins’ 1854 The Lamplighter domestic realism with Sunday school morality) is the arch-consumer, where advertising becomes “a consciousness industry” 207
    • Bloom: he creates the seaside girl (he is advertiser), Gerty become it, and then Bloom consumes it 246 (still it’s about pleasing men)
      • Why does Joyce see this in the 20s but write about 1904? Because, Richards notes, “the basic images of consumerism cam into being well before the consumer economy did” 248. Advertising, the Jubilee, Imperial, and G8 Exhibition rhetoric depict world of plenitude that doesn’t really exist till very late-Victorian
    • Her interior monologue involves her placing herself as the heroine of her life, in the form of domestic fiction, but then it keeps on being interrupted by the fragmentary discourse of her typical thought-process which is inundated by products (cosmetics, medicines)
    • What they have in common is the moralizing tone, the idealizing idiom (the perfect body and mind) and the aspirations involved behind them: the ads and the domestic fiction
  • The chapter “nurses forbidden desires—desires aroused and arrested…by a new mutation of commodity culture” 210
  • She is the common reader of turn-of-the-century Dublin 211, showing that the extreme “acclimation” to the world of consumer goods that commonly occurred makes them “generalized and impoverished,” “one-dimensional” 211, a product of the “collective pressure…of a bourgeoining commodity culture” 212
    • This fact is mimicked by the realist style of this chapter: the genre reflects her reading and her consciousness, made simple, silly
• Advertising is “psychoanalysis in reverse,” Leo Lowenthal in Literature, Popular Culture, and Society 1968
  • Richards elaborates, saying that “dream work” is similar to advertising; both “condensation on a large scale” 210 where the unconscious is condensed into advertising
    • This is where advertising begins to try to produce people (begins to anticipate the culture industry, I’d say)
• Back to Gerty: infiltration of commodity through characteristically modern “ubiquitous and liquid” form 217
  • Commodities as helping to create a self, a personality
  • Beyond commodification (“a process by which commodities suddenly appear where they have not been before”): it’s now “thoroughgoing psychological assimilation of the practices, methods, aims, and spirit of commodity culture in its Irish form.” 218
• Those Lovely Seaside Girls
  • From mid-19th c music hall song (Blazes Boylan in Ulysses recites it silently)
  • Bank Holidays and schedule of work week makes seaside resort possible, as well as railways
  • Brighton, Scarborough, Hastings, Blackpool, Southport, Bournemouth
  • Amateur marine biology, aquariums, shell collecting
  • Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: noted that Freud’s case-studies show cures often happening at seaside resorts (Richards also notes that Marcel meets Albertine at seashore)
  • “a site of fantasy and a primary locus of Victorian sexual politics” 227
    • The sick to get well; the healthy “to see and be seen” 227
    • “mixed bathing:” quite common (gives diary entry of Reverend who happened upon a completely nude woman posing for sculptor on seashore 1874)
      • “refined the forms that sexual desire and gratification took” 227; “crystal palaces for the libido” 228; and of course “integrated sexual practice into the practice of consumption” 228
  • Tons of advertisers there, sometimes more than the number of folks visiting
  • The Girls in advertisements: “the transmission of the urge to consume” 236
    • Physically fit ladies along the seashore, walking, swimming, or sleeping
    • Beecham’s Pills advert: “What are the wild waves saying? Try Beecham’s Pills” 232
    • Advertising pills, lotions, potted meat, soap, shampoo, cocoa, corsets
    • The incongruity: the lovely whiteness preserved by these products that’s been associated with feminine modesty and chastity, yet the advertisements themselves were “violation of sexual taboo” that was allowed by the female consumer (ie, the lady who slathers Beetham’s ointment on her skin can throw off her hat and pull up her skirt in the full sight of the merciless sun, “self-exposure of the seaside girl” 234): altogether, it creates “an imagined world” where commodities are fantasies, not material objects
  • What is the seaside holiday? “leisure time, impulse buying, non-partisan quiescence, and a therapeutic ethos of individual fulfillment through a manufactured utopia of commodities” 235 (harsh); “festive and euphoric” 236
• Gerty’s relationship to commodities is not one that resembles Miller’s reading of Cranford where the careful manipulation of commodities is supposed to give you a measure of independence from them; but instead she is immersed in it
  • Gerty is dangerous b/c it shows “several reified forms of language tangled up with one another” 238; so that she’s a “figment of representations” 238; alienated but not aware of it; “arrested development” common of consumers 239; where there’s an “enmity” between humans and commodity culture 240
  • Joyce is great b/c he can show this involvement in material culture alongside the traditions of Ireland, the latter of which are usually the only side of the coin represented by for example Celtic revivalists

Random

• Women are the ones who buy, so they “mediate” between commodity culture and the men who will be the real consumers
• Situationist graffiti: “Merchandise is the opiate of the masses.” May 1968
• Adam Smith: treated commodities as neutral, mere vectors for the making of money; a given. Whereas Richards says it “came alive,” a “live letter of the law of supply and demand” 2
  • Hmmm Richards is describing reification: what Marx already said
• Grundrisse: the concrete should be at the END of our work, not the “point of departure” 9 (Grundrisse: “a unity of the diverse” is how Marx defines the concrete, which has to be a complex of many “determinations” not something given in advance)
• Critiques Marx’s way of personifying commodities DESPITE his idea of fetishism b/c he ignores how everyday language already anthropomorphizes (“Fetishism and Ideology,” an article of Baudrillard’s that makes a similar argument)
  • Side note: why Marx does this, why his “metaphors…seem to go haywire” is that it’s his “imaginative response to the spectacularization of the commodity” that Smith never lived to see 68
  • It’s very difficult to avoid illustrating commodities that do things, that think and act: representation of commodities simultaneously invests objects with human attributes and apparently shows humans at the center of everything
    • We must avoid the “creationist perspective on commodities;” instead you must find historical reasons for why the commodity was so central and how you are tempted to treat them that way
  • He says it’s like Darwin, whose evolutionary theory also sought to demystify the “creationism” he saw in his culture (ex: Darwin’s revisions of the Origin of Species took out passages that seemed to refer to humans as central to the process)
  • HERE’S MY RESPONSE: instead of seeing personification of objects as an example of anthropocentrism, see it as a way to decenter the human: that is to reconsider what is human and what is not-human: namely, the qualities we believe are unique to the human are actually NOT unique. Thus, fetishism actually challenges our notions of the human.
    • Andrew’s helpful examples: Bruno Latour’s definition of the technology of the swerve (transhistorical; technology causes human agency to “swerve” ie not a murderer till you pick up a gun; when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail: objects have agency, not just humans) and Guattari’s Chaosmosis (the non-human forces of subjectivation; humans are not controlling the object; they are in competition with the object for subjectivity b/c objects too provide a model of subjectivation; Guattari’s upshot for this is that any political formation is a theory of subject formation)
      • Andrew: they are being too Cartesian; takes too literally subject/object dualism
    • MY THEORY: Commodity is crazy b/c challenges our understanding of the human
• About WWI: scholars often “treat the First World War like a band of scorched earth dividing Victorian from modern Britain.” 13 but he suggests “continuity”
• Richards’ debt to Guy Debord: his identification of spectacle as the common element in 19th c and 20th c advertising (whereas Debord saw spectacle as recent, Richards says it is 19th c phenomenon too)
  • Says Society of the Spectacle (1967) is “Marx meets Saussure,” the Communist Manifesto for 20th century
  • Debord fixes the “slipperiness” of the commodity by giving it the tool of semiotics
  • Debord saw the spectacle as a fixed form in capitalism (unlike the other cultural semiotician, Roland Barthes, who said that “there is no fixity in mythical concepts” qtd 13)
  • What’s the spectacle? “Series of related images” (that’s Richards’ phrase) in which consumer sees “the world of the commodity dominating all that is lived” (that’s Debord qtd 13)
• Great quote from Capital: commodity “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”
• Lukacs
  • As the first example in the long Marxist tradition of linking economic modes with modes of representation
  • History and Class Consciousness 1922: commodity not in isolation nor as the central problem of economics, but instead as “the central, structural problem of capitalist society in all its aspects” 14
  • Understanding commodity lets you into objective and subjective elements of bourgeois society
  • Says the Lukacs here contains Richards’ own method: social life “in one way or another” organized “around economic representations” making commodity a “coordinating frame” for say literature, politics, culture, psychology… 14; the source of any “unity” whose best representatives are the spectacles of exhibitions and advertising
• Laments the “consumption versus production” mode of criticism right now
  • Examples
    • Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking 1985 (commodities from consumer’s viewpoint)
    • Norman Felte’s Modes of Production of Victorian Novels 1986 (commodities from producer’s point of view)
    • Catherine Gallagher called out this separation in review essay in Criticism (29.2 (1987))
    • Gallagher’s article “echoes” 1971 W. F. Haug in Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: “to derive the phenomena of commodity aesthetics from their economic basis and develop and present them within their systematic connections” qtd 267
  • Says that “in the spectacle production and consumption are paired moments in a single process of commodity representation” 15
    • I’m not sure I buy this b/c I don’t think he can exhaust the significance of either field by talking about its representation
  • Marx: advises that we see “production as directly identical with consumption,” (Grundrisse)
    • But…Marx’s reflections on production and consumption are based on earlier type of capitalism: you can’t say that capitalism is all the same all the time b/c constantly changes. Marx’s dictum reflects a diff organization of capital.
  • This is more interesting: says that representation IS a mode of production (produces signs)
    • Says that advertising is a complex of production, distribution, and consumption all at once
    • Says the spectacle and capitalism became “indivisible” during last half of 19th c (which is the world we still live in)
• Adam Smith
  • supply and demand like a natural law (for example, the Newtonian gravitation of objects hovering about their “natural price”) 67
  • believes commodity is neutral, which Richards denies: b/c it’s always in a specific form and reacts at specific historical moment
    • commodities will obey laws of supply and demand ONLY once they’re in the market
  • capitalism is dynamic b/c expansionist
  • demanding reinvestment: you can’t just consume everything or you will “leave nothing behind” 66
  • But he is proven wrong by G8 Exh, b/c now people want to see prosperity, plenitude, abundance: so that the goods are the “liberation” of English people against poverty
• Marx’s Metaphors, 68-9: he analyzes Marx’s style, which is “polyvalent” to the point where Marx’s writing itself is a spectacle: a lightning-fast chain of stylistic moves of metaphors, which shows that “Marx is aware that the commodity can no longer be viewed as an exclusively material form of exchange”
  • Metaphors of Transcendence
    • Religious, mysticism
  • Metaphors of Community
    • Objects begin to have independent relations w/each other and w/people
    • “social relation between the products”
  • Metaphors of Sensory Experience
    • like seeing something and thinking it’s a result of the object not the “subjective” action on the senses, we see commodity as objective
    • commodity as “privileged datum of sensory experience” in Richards’ words
• Freud fetishist: “a person fixed metonymically on an object or body part as a surrogate for sexual desirable” 210, all of which are “unsuitable”
• I’m pissed about people saying that “X becomes a commodity” too quickly, too loosely. Do they really? Why? It’s a silly trope to say ultimately it too or she or he too becomes a commodity. A commodity must be produced to be put up for exchange.
  • “language becomes a commodity” 216 he glibly slips in (maybe if we say it is packaged into discrete units, mass produced, and consumed, okay; but don’t just say it as a cliche and then leave it alone)
• Marx, early writing, “Private Property and Communism”
  • ”all the physical and spiritual senses” have been replaced by “the sense of having” qtd 222
• Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the loss of the aura is also an “occultation of its origins; the human and time-bound circumstances of its creation effectively disappear behind a protective veil of technology” (Richards’ words 223)
• James Walvin, Beside the Seaside