Quiz 5 Consumer Culture

Theory of Shopping

• Shopping is a economic and social transaction

Daniel Miller

• Theory of Shopping: The shopper seeks to create a desirable subject

  • The shopper wants to shape the recipient into a subject that will desire what the shopper offers

  • Not necessarily buying what the recipient wants or needs

• Case Study of Women Routine Shopping in London: Focused on for whom the shopper shopped

  • Shopping shapes the relationship between the shopper and recipient- act of devotion or love

  • Purchases constantly materialize loving relationship

  • Long term project for shopper

• This builds on Mauss’s gift- objects carry the person of the giver AND shape the recipient into a desirable subject

Shopping and Gender

• Shopping is more associated with women than men

• Marti Barletta: Women are valued for being thrifty- “bargain hunting”

  • Women are usually shopping for their families, unlike men

  • Women began becoming primary providers after industrial revolution

Legacy of Shopping in Victorian Era

• Middle-class women provided for the home while men worked

• Public space and transportation once dominated by men was now opening up to women because of the increased number of women having to shop

• New department stores designed for women

  • Toilet facilities

  • Home-like furnishing

• Retailers disciplined women to become certain kinds of subjects

  • Subjects that would desire to shop there

• Women were encouraged to move into “public space” of city centers

  • With “thriftness”

• Created the contrast in how men and women shop and reinforces gendered identity and alterity (men feel out of place, they are the “other”)

Paul Mullins

• Studied the material aspects of shopping over time

• Studied how changing retail spaces shaped consumption

• Women’s shopping changed gender identity and public attitude

  • Retail space has become the first major public “female” space that impacted identities of women and men

Tim Dant

• Keeping: Work to improve our domestic spaces

  • Part of how we live with things

  • Continuous work

  • These social projects requires a lot of consumer products

• House keeping is gendered

• Good-housekeeping became essential to a woman’s sense of self

• How have housework projects impacted identity projects as new appliances or products for keeping are introduced?

  • Case study: family laundry

  • Doing laundry is an act of love but requires little skill and is not highly regarded

  • Machines “trap women” in “caring” but tedious domestic labor

• Every object breaks, and we can blame the “trap” on clothes. So this theory is not complete enough

Entanglement: Human-Thing 

• Ian Hodder

• Humans depend of things

• Things depend on other things

• Things depend on humans

  • To come into being

  • To go through their “use-lives”

  • To be maintained

  • To be reproduced

• Humans depend on things that depend on humans

  • the entrapment- humans keep investing labor and time into things that keep breaking down

  • Humans adapt to taking care of (keeping) things they depend on

  • “Reverse Adaptation” by Langdon Winner: We adapt to things we possess

Thing

• Cannot be defined

• it could be anything and everything or nothing

Heidegger

• Thisness

• Explains Hodder #2

• Things do not exist “in themselves”

• Thing (in german) means assembly

• The nature of a thing is to “gather”

  • How a thing things

  • Gather humans, events, times, objects, and places- creating “social fields"

• They “bundle” different properties, qualities

• Occurs in a relational ontology: entities emerge from gathered relations with others

  • Things are always emerging and becoming because they are gathering- they are always in motion

Kaulingfreks’ “The Broken Mug”- Treating Objects as Agents

• The mug of a man broke

  • It did not upset him because there was so many but then he reflected on how he felt and realized it was apart of his routine

  • He was sad, then became angry because the “mug broke on its own”

  • He treated the mug as a “social agent”

Georgina Kleege “Secret Weapon”

• Blind woman calls her cane her “secret weapon” because it can “see” while she cannot and “communicates” to others that she is blind

• Her cane has “magical power”

• The cane does “social work” because it directs her actions and those of people around her

Theories of Object Agency

1. Conventional Idea: Agency requires intention (thinking) so only humans by default have social agency

2. Transference Theory: Humans transfer their capacity to act onto objects- Tim Dant and the Coffee Mug

3. Theory of Object Agency- Alfred Gell

4. Actant-Network Theory- Bruno Latour

Theory of Object Agency by Alfred Gell

• Redefined agency as the capacity to cause events to happen, to have effects

• Agency is causation, not intention

• After an event transpires, we infer (abduct) which agent causes it

• We usually do not infer object agency until it acts in an unexpected way

• Primary Agents: Those who can put their intentions in action 

• Secondary Agents: Can cause events to happen even though they lack intention

• This is not transfer of agency, we act and react as if objects have agency- we infer their agency as intentional actors

• We treat objects as causing effects and having intentions

• Agency is relational- it is a capacity that emerges from interactions and relationships

• Theory focuses on relationships and interconnections

Actant-Network Theory

• Bruno Latour

• We need to get rid of pro-human bias we created in moderism and move onto posthumanism

• Posthumanism: We reject the idea that humans are above objects

• Agent: Any entity that makes a difference in another agents action

• Agency emerges out of networks of relationships with other actants

• Actants are assembled, gathered

• Networks/assemblies endow actants with agency- human and nonhuman

• “The Social”: Connections, movements, and networks among actants