Summaries of my Readings, by Alex

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Friday, 23 December 2011

Daniel Miller, Material culture and mass consumption (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)

Introduction

Miller starts by arguing that the material culture, despite its role in the shaping of human cultures, is
deeply understudied due to the fact that its non-linguistic, but rather physically material character
resists attempts to comprehend it. The second reason for negligence of it in research is a deeply
rooted negative left wing tradition of associating materiality with philistinism.

In response, Miller proposes a drastically different research agenda: to look not at material objects
as such, but at the subject-object duality. He then pronounces his interest to the contemporary mass
culture as “the dominant context through which we relate to goods.” (4)

The political agenda of Miller is rather positive: he argues that mass culture, including mass
consumption, contains within itself mechanisms which make common people agents of historical
process—this is what interests him in the history of mass consumption. (5) He then argues that in
the conditions of the contemporary mass culture, urban society and overall mobility, such
conventional social categories as class, race, gender, etc. are complemented by different ways of
consumption of things, or other aspects of mass culture: “In this respect, the division of labour…
becomes only another dimension of difference.” (8)

Miller, in particular, looks at the rejection of a universalist approach to the production of consumer
goods—which seemed to dominate in the mid-20th century—as an indication of this power of
common people to shape the very vision of modern economy, instead of being homogenized by the
capitalist ideas of what a modern society should be. (10)

Miller offers to analyze culture in a more or less similar way to that of Bourdieu: as “the relationship
through which objects are constituted as social forms,” (11) i.e., as a relational phenomenon.
“Culture… is always a process and is never reducible to either its object or its subject form.” (11)
Therefore, it is senseless to analyze material objects “in themselves,” as well as “society and social
relations” “in themselves.”

Miller describes his method in this book as “eclectic,” as he borrows certain theoretical aspects
related to materiality from Hegel and Marx (“objectification”), anthropologist Munn’s research of
pre-industrial society of Australian aborigines, Philosophy of Money by Georg Simmel. He combines
them to extract “profound ideas” related to the understanding of material culture. He then looks at
artefacts as specific cultural manifestations of material objects, studying—through the methodology
of Pierre Bourdieu—how they constitute the social field in relation with social agents. He finally
applies these methodological insights to the study of consumption, with a rather politicised agenda
to reinvest academic interest in the study of the domain of mass consumption, as he comprehends it
a necessary precondition for the further social development.

2. Hegel and Objectification

From Hegel, Miller borrows the concept of objectification, i.e. the dialectical relationship between
subject and object. A subject, in order to understand itself, creates (alienates, or objectifies) an
object, which it then appropriates, only to create another object, and so forth. The important thing
here is processuality of this phenomenon: a subject is never a subject as such, but always is defined
through its relationship to an object. Besides, the Hegelian dialectics imply the notion of progress,
which suits Miller’s political agenda. Drawing on Hegel, Miller concludes:

A theory of culture can have no independent subject, as neither individuals nor societies <subject.—
me> can be considered as its originators, since both are inseparable from culture itself <object.—
me> and are as much constituted by culture as constituting it. This process is inherently dynamic;
the relation between subject and object is never static. <…> Finally, the term objectification may be
used to assert that the process of culture, which must always include self-alienation as a stage in its
accomplishment, is thereby inherently contradictory. Since this contradiction is embodied in the
particular vehicle or form taken by culture, and since modern culture has become increasingly a
material culture, this materiality may play an ever more important part in the constitution of this
contradiction. (33)

3. Marx: Objectification as Rupture

Miller moves on to discuss how Hegel’s concept of objectification was appropriated by Marx and
Western Marxism to denote the rupture between the man and his labour and how a number of
derivative concepts were created on its basis: estrangement, alienation, reification, which later led
to a re-interpretation of the original Hegelian objectification. Miller argues that in order to
emphasize the social oppression in the capitalist society, Marx and Marxists overemphasized the
process of production (where alienation happens) over the process of consumption, which remains
nearly undiscussed in their works. Miller sees—at least, partly—his task to overcome this situation
(as he realises that any discussion of objectification and consumption will be comprehended at the
background of contemporary Marxism), not by disregarding Marxist writing, but rather by focusing
on the earlier neglected part of the process of objectification:

…Analysis of consumption… is no longer merely relegated to an outcome of conflicts centered

elsewhere <i.e., in the production.—me>, and a use of the concept of objectification to understand
the nature of contradictions and strategies which cannot entirely be reduced to the nature of
capitalism as the conditions of rupture. (49)
4. Munn: Objectification as Culture

In this section, Miller looks at works by anthropologist Nancy Munn, who studied pre-industrial
societies from the perspective of objectification. Within one society (Australian aborigines), the main
medium of objectification is landscape, which is transformed by the act of objectification into a
social (or cultural) landscape, which is later re-appropriated by the collective subject (i.e., tribe) to
understand itself better:

The moral order and the social order of the society are understood only as they are mapped out
onto a cultural landscape which is ‘naturalied’ by being mapped in turn onto the natural features of
the geographical landscape.. As a medium of objectification, the properties of the landscape become
of central importance; it provides the permanence, the authority, and the massivity which can
legitimate the social world (58).

In pre-industrial society, the objectification is necessarily material:

In a world where material objects are scarce, and where those which exist are largely transient, a
particular cultural form which is visibly the product of the remote past and is destined for the
remote future has a profound implication matched only by the permanence of the landscape itself.
Here again, it is the very materiality of the medium of objectification which is important for the
process taking place… Material forms thus provide a medium for present, transient and particular
history to be subsumed under a large experience, in which past and present are absorbed into an
infinite dreamtime where cultural order merely re-enacts its own self-creation (59)

Objectification is also of key importance in relations between societies. Exchange of objects between
societies serves as a means of “creating social hierarchy through the display of differential ability in
the manipulation of its potential…” (63). Yet another anthropological aspect of the objectification
between societies is important. People “invest themselves in the act of creating a cultural object”
(61), which is intended for the consumption within a different society. The objects which they get in
response “gain their significance from the social relations which are objectified by the act of
exchange, a significance which therefore could not result entirely from manufacture itself” (62). The
“other” is absolutely necessary for this type of objectification, which provides for a better
understanding of the (collective) subject:

Objectification can here be understood as a process of externalization and sublation which is

dependent upon the relationship between two societies, and not merely the internal workings of
one (62).

Miller then argues that Munn’s observations about how systems of exchange work within and
between societies are “the key to the construction of individual reputation” (64), and thus allow to
remove the artificial dualism between the individual and the social. According to Miller, subject does
not exist prior to the process of objectification, due to its specificity: the relationship of subject-
object is that of dichotomy, not of dualism.

5. Simmel: Objectification as Modernity

Miller is interested in Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900), as it provided a new outlook at the
process of objectification: a focus on consumption, rather than production. Simmel argued that
modern (i.e., capitalist) societies are of monetary character, which, Simmel argues, is a necessary
precondition for the freedom. The logic is that Simmel, following the general Hegelian-Marxist logic
of how a subject develops within the dichotomy of subject-object, considered historical process to
represent an increasing awareness of the “outer” social relations and values. Economic exchange
was a necessary mediating tool to overcome subjective values, “the essential condition of all human
relationships” (71). The most abstract representation of economic exchange are money, as they
become a universal phenomenon upon which all other things derive their significance. In
comparison to non-monetarized societies, where the burden of family and social obligations on a
person destroys all possibilities of personal “freedom,” the monetarized bourgeois society
depersonalizes these obligations. “Money therefore tends to extend a concept of equality, in so far
as the perception of inequality becomes based upon differences in the possession of money, rather
than on an essentialist notion of intrinsic differences in persons” (73). Money, in other words, is that
medium which alone makes equality possible:

Money is held to provide the basis for that level of abstraction at which people are regarded as
fundamentally equal to one another, bereft for purposes of social construction of their personal
characteristics. Money is thus the foundation for ideas such as socialism and equality between the
sexes, which, as abstractions, would be literally inconceivable outside of a highly monetarized
society (75).

The same phenomenon—the rise of the monetarized economies—provides the basis for the
negative tendency: due to the quantitative rise of consumer goods, the subject is simply unable to
(re)-appropriate them back into him/herself:

Simmel effectively extends Marx’s concept of rupture to account for the inability of modern
individuals to recognize themselves in the world of goods. The problem is that the massive increase
in objective culture has not been appropriated by the subject in such a way that material goods
become the instrument of the subject’s self-development through the sublation of its own
projections; instead, the subject confronts the world of material goods as an alien sphere (77).

In order to appropriate at least something in the world, subject specialize: as the result, it is likely
that two subject will share no common interests and, thus, their personal interaction will be of the
most empty style.

Consequently, Simmel develops a new concept of culture: culture as a never-ending process:

Simmel emphasizes the paradoxical nature of culture, recognizing the essentially positive process of
modernity which has allowed for hitherto unimaginable possibilities; but he is ware of the forces
which lead towards reification and autonomy, both of which are inimical to human interests (79).
Culture for Simmel is not constituted by the material world in itself, but exists only as a process of
the subject’s becoming. To that extent, modernization represents only a potential for development,
not necessarily an actual development (80).

Thus, Simmel offers a new perspective on the concept of objectivation: it is a process which creates
culture as a by-product of the development of some subject (usually, collective). Since all cultural
forms are subjective, it erases the distinction between individual and society: it exists only on
analytical level, since individual is inseparable from society and vice versa.

6. The Humility of Objects

Miller starts this section by stressing the fact that in the dichotomy of material-linguistic, the latter is
increasingly overemphasized as a medium of society, while the former is generally disregarded by
scholarship. He then focuses on the role of material objects in human ontogenesis, arguing that this
is the key to the understanding of the social role of material objects. He starts by considering the
theory of Piaget, who discovered a direct link between the structures of the mind and those of the
(social) environment. The development of a child is determined, then, by what kind of objects he is
confronted in his everyday life. This development revolves around the processes of accommodation
and assimilation:

Through accommodation, the mental structures at whatever stage they have reached are
themselves changed in order to encompass the particular characteristic of the environment they
have encountered. In assimilation, by contrast, the environment is incorporated only at the level of
comprehension the child has attained at any given stage (88).

Accommodation is, e.g., dominant in imitation (a child rubbing its hands as if washing hands), while
assimilation is dominant in play (a child using a stick as if it were a horse), which “leads to
increasingly complex imagined worlds over which the child assumes control” (89). But at some point,
accommodation comes back when a child is confronted by the external rules of the game (as a social
activity). This is, thus, a dialectical movement of dynamic interaction between the subject and
object, which allows to create a sense of self and other. What is important:

This ‘other’ is, however, always understood as a projection equivalent to the stage of development
of the subject… (89).

In a way, this is the same dialectics of externalization (assimilation as projection) and embodiment
(accommodation as introjection).

Miller then turns to the works of Melanie Klein, who studied how a child’s education through
involvement (from the first minutes of life) in the subject-object relation creates it as a social agent.
She names this process “paranoid-schizoid position,” which means that the primitive ego of an infant
“splits itself” and then projects these part onto material objects in the outside world. As these
objects can be “good” or “bad,” part of infant’s ego (projected on these objects) become good or
bad, too. Hence “paranoid-schizoid.” Moreover, when an infant is confronted with a real breast, it
projects it onto certain parts of its ego (projection), but when an infant is confronted with absence
of mother’s breast, it tries to introject (i.e., to pretend as if it exists) that part of its ego, which is
associated with the “good” breast, onto the outside world, pretending as if “bad” breast does not
exist. Gosh.

Operating with concepts of projection (of the self on objects) and introjection (of objects on the
self), she argues that as an infant grows and is capable of grasping more complex objects (mother as
such instead of her breast as a good object or absent breast as a bad object), it develops an ability to
integrate the operations of projection and introjection—as in case when an infant is forced to
confront “the good breast” and “the bad breast” simultaneously in its mother’s object. This
integration does not mean coherency:

…Rather, the new position leads to still more sophisticated forms of internal and external
contradiction and relationships, exhibited in part through more developed emotions, such as guilt
and mourning, as the infant deals with the contradictory nature of the mother (92).

Here, e.g., when “super-ego” is formed as an interiorized form taken by parental authority.
Moreover, this mechanism explains how, by way of growing up and later education, certain symbolic
processes provide the foundations for the ego, become highly integral and intractable:

As the sense of the self, they provide the basic attitudes and perspectives which are taken for
granted in relations with the external world, by virtue of the extent to which they are models into
which that world must be assimilated (93).

Miller argues that these two theories are important, as they allow to return to material object their
importance in the creation of a social order. Play—a major mechanism of socialization—is first about
material objects, and language comes later, first only as a subordinate subject. Only at a rather late
stage of development, when a child has a significant level of interaction with the material world, the
abstract functions of language can be mastered.

While after this stage, a man is able to negotiate her interaction with the social world through
language, it does not mean that the role of material objects in determining his social position
become less important. According to Miller, it occupies an “ambiguous position… between self and
the outside,” and has a special “relationship to the unconscious” (95).

Miller starts by referring to an observation of S. Langer that human perception of aesthetic objects
(fine arts, e.g.) is not of “discursive” form, as in case of text, but of “presentational” form, which
means that people perceive it “at once, rather than sequentially” (97). He then refers to criticism of
imposition of linguistic methods on studies of architecture, since “arbitrary” meanings (as of words)
cannot be extracted from the spatial and functional context of the material of buildings.

Miller, finally, argues that language is inappropriate for description of objects in everyday
interaction. He suggests an experiment: to try to describe a difference in the shapes of a bottle of
milk and a bottle of sherry or between the taste of cod and the taste of haddock. Even such
elaborate systems of description as the one adopted by wine experts do not work alone, without
wine itself.

Then, a material object—an artefact, as a material object intentionally produced by man—is an

important social phenomenon which tends to escape scholarly attention due to its very properties
(physicality and resistance to linguistic description) and position between consciousness and the
unconscious.

Language requires the complete break between sign and signified, as the development of linguistic
system is based on arbitrariness. Material objects, due to their concrete nature, can never be
entirely abstract or arbitrary. A material object can be perceived in thousands of different ways,
each determined by certain conceptual systems, but it, anyway, “does act as a firm physical
constraint upon them” (99).

Miller then claims that while the language is responsible for consciousness, “objects may retain their
place in the ordering of the unconscious world” (99). An example of that comes in form of the
picture frame, which organizes our perception of what is inside as the object of art—the latter, if
placed on a billboard, will be comprehended in a very different way:

In this instance, by establishing a relationship of immediacy with our unconscious, one object is able
to control the nature of our consciousness, making it appropriate to the context within which that
object is working (101).

Miller characterizes common objects by their “humility”: while organizing our perception of reality,
they are seemingly invisible. He demonstrates it by discussing modern furniture, which reflects the
tastes of its owner and which works as an medium of communication of social information as
effectively as language, although in an absolutely different way:

In modern linguistics, we are often told of our remarkable ability to construct meaningful sentences
which we have never previously heard; yet this is surely matched by our ability to absorb the social
implications of an array of furnishing consisting of a combination which is not only almost certainly
in some degree unique, but some of whose basic elements may also be new to us. It is clear that this
impression made upon us is no less significant in determining our conception of the individuals
concerned than the articulate self-expression represented by the conversation we may be engaged
in within this setting (102).

He then claims that this is only one example of how “unconscious, non-linguistic processes may act
to control conscious and linguistic articulation” (102). Of course, the language still retains autonomy,
but this autonomy is no more total.

Miller then refers to Bourdieu as a social theorist who gave a brilliant explanation of how material
objects participate in social reproduction and who allows to avoid psychologism in explaining social
phenomena, instead offering a good conceptual framework. Miller values Bourdieu, as the latter’s
conceptual framework also helps to avoid subjectivism or objectivism, instead combining the two
into a coherent picture of social agency. Habitus is a “set of classificatory schema,” which imposes
on children the normative order of its society. Habitus then allows the subject who belongs to it to
apply these schema against new phenomena and assimilate them into his/her cultural order. This
sense of normative order is something which is given, fundamental, rather than negotiated.

Habitus is learnt through interactive practices, “as the acts of living within a world which is
composed of this same order are continually reinforced in different domains” (104). Therefore, it’s
better to speak of familiarity, rather than learning. The habitus then organizes subject’s social
activity “as a structured set of dispositions which provides a basis for the enactment of strategy
according to interest, perspective and power” (104). Yet it does not dictate how to behave: there are
strategies, rather than rules, but strategies are pursued within the objective limits of the social field.

For Bourdieu, materiality is very important in the reproduction of the social order, as it is “embodied
in details such as dress, body movement and manners” (105). The material world, then, is not a
“vulgar” determinant factor of the social practice, instead physicality is what constrains and modifies
our social vision, but never totally determines it.

Artefacts are also important for maintaining certain sets of dispositions, because their physicality
disguises their symbolism:

The artefact… tends to imply a certain innocence of facticity; it seems to offer the clarity of realism,
an assertion of certainty against the buffeting of debate, an end or resting point which resolves the
disorder of uncertain perspectives. All this is, of course, quite illusory; the object is just as likely as
the word, if not more so, to evoke variable responses and invite a variety of interpretations (106).

In other ways, an object as an important foundation of disposition is less challengeable than

language, which, by the nature of its abstraction, is more likely to be perceived as arbitrary.

To summarize, Miller offers the following functions of artefacts within human culture:

- they play bridging roles, as they, through their representational form, have close relations to
emotions, feelings and basic orientations to the world.

- they promote fine distinctions through their relation to extremely sophisticated mechanisms of
perceptual discrimination which tend to remain outside of consciousness.

- they exemplify the concept of praxis, in that this materiality is always an element in cultural
transformation (107).

- they are instrumental to social reproduction.

- they explain the dialectics of subject and object, as they work as mechanisms which create the
subject in history, but are themselves shaped by the social subject’s role as active agent;

- they assist in creating different forms of social reality, which is assisted by their affinity to the
unconscious.

7. Artefacts in the Contexts

Artefact, as a manufactured object produced intentionally, by its very physicality aspires to avoid the
scholarly attention. This is revealed even in its form, as it often disguises the true material from
which it was manufactured (plastic sold as wood). “The object has always had the ability to proclaim
one technological origin while actually deriving from another” (115). What is important is “the ability
of the object to stand for a particular form of production and its attendant social relations” (115). He
then says that while artefacts can, indeed, stand for certain social relations, it is not always the case:

It might be though, for example, that the major distinctions between socialist and capitalist
development, terms which are founded in contrasting philosophies of the proper relations of
production, would be a prime subject of the symbolic capacity of the modern artefact. In practice,
when making a purchase, it is very rare for us to note whether an object is made by a cooperative or
a private factory, or in East or West Germany, and extraordinarily this division appears hardly, if at
all, within the major symbolic dimensions of the contemporary world of commodities. We do not
think in terms of capitalist shoes and socialist shoes.” (115)

Which people on the other side of the Iron Curtain actually did, all the time.

The conclusion is, however, different: Miller says that those divisions which are important for
language and ideology can be non-existent on the level of material culture, while divisions in the
material world can be ignored elsewhere.

Miller then says that in the domain of material culture, the connection between the object and its
function is very important: it’s the basis for naming for kids (which means that for them it’s
fundamental), and for adults functions of things play “an important, though highly flexible, role in
the description of objects in daily life” (116).

The problem here is that this connection between an object and its function is NOT a connection
between an object and its everyday use. In daily life, there are hundreds of types of shoes which
perform the same function, and a behavior of a consumer selecting a specific shoe is mostly likely
related “to social rather than functional considerations which may more convincingly account for the
majority of purchases” (116).

Miller then moves to explore the social uses of things by analysing the relationship in the triangle of
artefacts, the self and society. He points to examples which demonstrate that the border between
the self and things is cultural, defined in each case by the specific society, as in case of some
societies in which even infants can become alienated. Moreover, the relationship between people
and things is determined by the social concepts of property.

He then discusses the key role of things in the social construction of space, not only in terms of
spatial planning, but also in creating stereotypes about geographic locations and even imposing
these stereotypes on the “other” through economic motivation (he brings an example of “oriental”
style of textile which was produced in India due to economic demand on this type of textile in
Britain, even though this “oriental” style had nothing to do with Indian own textile design). This is
particularly important at the level of ideologies:

Nation-states define themselves, in part, in terms of what they are not; that is, by setting themselves
in opposition to alternative degenerate or ideal societies. Both people and objects are then required
to exemplify the stereotypes which have been constructed. (124)

A similarly tight connection exists between things and time. Nation-states, e.g., used archeology to
legitimize their historical existence by dating their origins back to paleolithic age through museum
exhibitions. Another example is fashion which endows objects with the ability to signify the present.

Miller finally comes to a very important domain, the relationship between artefacts and style. Miller
looks at all objects of the same kind (all cars, all curtains, etc.) and claims that the internal
relationship between these objects of the same kind is built on the principle of style. They will differ
in certain details while retaining similarity in essential features, and these details ensure the internal
order within a domain of one type of things.
Such internal order is highly significant, since it reinforces the point that objects are not best
understood as merely subservient to social divisions. Social groups may be divided according to the
logic of objects with which they associate, which includes the objects’ autonomous tendencies
towards pattern, as well as their physical constraints. (128)

In a way, societies can be characterised “as a reflection of style,” and different social changes would
be marked with minor shifts in the style of things. Consequently, in the modern society, the form of
things can start dominate over their functionality, as in the case of apartments in which everything is
purchased to match a certain style.

Ironically, that set of ideas and ideals which expressed the legitimacy of form following function was
most effective in ensuring that function followed form. (129)

Miller concludes, that the very physicality of artefacts makes them powerful in terms of cultural and
social construction, as they participate in it “through action rather than just conceptualization.”
(129) The oject also important, because it places an individual

within the normative order of the larger social group, where it serves as a medium of intersubjective
order inculcated as a generative practice through some version of ‘habitus’. (130)

Artefact also occupies a deeply integrated place in the contemporary culture, as one object—let’s
say, a high-modernist building—can stand for “rationality,” “formalism,” “functionality,” and “style.”
This deeply integrated place of the artefact in the culture and social relations makes it so difficult for
the social or cultural analysis.

8. The Study of Consumption

Miller argues that the traditional relationship between the Industrial Revolution and new models of
consumption is more complex, as it was not industrialism which spurred consumption, but rather
the process was double-sided, as it was cotton industry (and the demand for textile goods) which
gave an initial impulse to the Industrial Revolution.

In the contemporary world, the study of material culture, according to Miller, should be based on
the idea of objectification—i.e., social agents objectify themselves in artefacts, and social
distinctions and distinctions between commodities co-exist and define themselves mutually. Hence
Miller’s criticism of a “sociability fetishism,… in which social structure is often treated as both prior
to and ontologically superior to, its appearance in goods” (146).

Miller then draws on the works by Bourdieu and Veblen to prove his claim that consumption plays
an instrumental role in social distinctions. The artefacts achieve their function of social
differentiation through imposition of tastes on the public. Taste is “the key dimension controlling the
significance of ordinary goods” (149). To understand, how taste works, it is necessary to look at
social distinctions, as they, rather than aesthetic values, form tastes, which then work as
classificatory devices. Tastes become embodies in the social groups to which they belong. Education,
as well as the overall social environment, plays a key role in the formation of tastes.
A similar <immense> set of divisions can be identified in a vast range of goods. The middle-class
children’s toy s never intended for mere amusement or pleasure; its prime interest is its educational
value, the child must absorb the toy as a challenge, something from which it will learn in order to
improve itsel. Similarly, there is an array of products for producing the body beautiful, a tall elegant
figure disdainful of practical or even biological constraint. In every consumer domain, fashion
provides opportunities for differentiation, in ters of speed of access to knowledge. Through such
example, it becomes clear how the habitus acts both to generate the diversity of forms and, in turn,
to classify these same diverse fields (153).

The, the use of Bourdieu’s notion of habitus allows to address material culture, cognitive orders and
social divisions in their complex interactive unity.

9. Object Domains, Ideology and Interests

In this section, Miller suggests to turn upside down the commonplace assumption (shared, according
to him, by Bourdieu, too) that differences between goods are directly related to differences between
social groups. He suggests that while this is often true, there are divisions which originate in the
domain of material culture, and in order to understand social divisions which can be hidden from
conventional representations of the society (e.g., division into classes), a scholar should start by
identifying the social divisions between goods and then trace their equivalent in the social order:

As mass consumption, a particular array of objects may be found to represent and assist in the
construction of perspectives relating to control over production or rivalry between consumers, but
also to wider issues concerning morality and social ideals (158).

Moreover, the physicality of objects helps them to “belie the actual variety of meanings they evoke,”
(159) which makes them more powerful social forces than one might think.

Miller analyses different typical examples of housing in contemporary Britain and claims that their
symbolic function (semi-detached houses as middle-class individualism, modernist-style buildings
owned by municipal councils as communality) functions in a more complex way. Designers of
modernist houses prefer to live in typical middle-class housing, and the dwellers of council-owned
buildings do not generally appropriate the ideas of communalism embodied in them. It does not
work, because usually the dominant social group imposes on other social groups not what they
want, but the representations of what the dominant social group thinks other social groups want.
This is very deceiving, because “what appears to us as the image of one section of society is actually
fabricated by a quite different class.” (161)

In so far as society is divided into different interests, of which labour and capital are the prototypical
examples, it may well be that some interests have more control than others over the development
of representations which accord to their perspective and thus their interests… The concept of
perspective implies that understanding is derived from a particular position in the world. If two
groups have different perspectives, then, in so far as they are able to create the world, the naturally
attempt to do so in accordance with their own perspective, or habitus (163).
When interests of groups are contrary, or even different, dominated groups should invest itself in
those objects which were created, initially, to represent antagonistic interests.

Miller then criticises the new left criticism of consumerism, as it tends itself to construct an image of
what other classes should be and then to impose it on them, earning symbolic capital of its own.

Instead, Miller suggests that anthropologists of the consumer culture should concentrate on
recontextualization of consumed goods to find a middle ground between objectivism and
contextualism. He analyzes several examples—children sweets, motorollers, etc.-to demonstrate
how certain social groups can invest into certain commodities to create their own meanings. The
flexibility of a these usages is dependent on a number of factors, including the very size of objects
(sweets are easier to recontextualise than buildings).

His approach, actually, complicates the approach to studying material culture. While its objects are
products of the contemporary capitalist way of production, they are also appropriated by certain
social groups to create their own image. Hence the importance of recontextualization of objects.
But:

Simultaneous with the insistence that recontextualization may be possible has been an avoidance of
the other extreme, which is that all such recontextualization is a form of resistance which should be
regarded as inevitably positive in its consequence. The term recontextulization implies the concept
of text which is itself open to many readings, and several parallels may be drawn with discussions
concerning the death of the author (here perhaps the death of the producer)… Just as modern
sociological theory has suggested that the meaning of the text is not simply reducible to the
intentions, perspectives or interests of the author, so also the emergence of the object from the
world of capitalist or state production does not make it of necessity a direct representation of the
interests of capital or the state (176).

10. Towards a Theory of consumption

In this chapter, Miller uses his observations to suggest how we should rethink our attitude to
consumer culture, including on the political agenda.

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