Empire of Things
Page 46
In early American accounts the middle class and suburbia blurred into one. Already in the 1930s, writers noted how suburbs were fuelling a more competitive material lifestyle of ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. Asked what they would do if they had another $1,000, the members of a Parent–Teacher Association in Westchester put travel first, then ‘desire for material goods and services’, such as a better car or ‘pretty clothes’.7 Only after that came savings and better schools for the kids, at a time when the country was still in depression. Suburbanization also boosted home-based leisure – one of the reasons for the conservative restoration in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Once he had returned from his office job in the city, the commuter tended to stay home. Suburban families did puzzles and played board games together. Physical isolation and dependence on the car meant that they went together to the movies. Researchers in Westchester noted how the family was ‘the most stable nucleus of recreational activities in the suburb’.8
For affluent suburbanites in mid-twentieth-century America, civic life and fun were increasingly one and the same. ‘We are concentrating more and more on giving ourselves a good time,’ one Westchester woman noted in 1923. ‘The newer members . . . are more interested in bridge, teas . . . and Beauty Culture courses than in helping the community.’ Suburban women’s clubs were conveyors of new products, tastes and recipes to be tried at home, such as ‘Sunday Night Supper Treats’.9 From here it was a short step to the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, which turned the lounge into a sales floor. By 1954, over 20,000 belonged to the ‘Tupperware Family’. Tupperware containers were emblematic of the family-oriented consumption regime. They were utilitarian, saving money and left-overs. They taught children to have their lunch in ‘an orderly and pleasing manner’. At the same time, the parties offered housewives a way out of isolation and self-abnegation. The vice-president Brownie Wise urged women affiliates to ‘use it all’: instead of putting away their precious lingerie, women should wear it and indulge themselves.10
Home leisure was helped by air-conditioning. When the writer Henry Miller warned of The Air-conditioned Nightmare in 1945, the controlled environment was largely limited to cinemas, department stores and offices. It was in the 1950s that AC window units entered middle-class homes; in 1957, the Federal Housing Administration began treating AC as part of the mortgage cost rather than as an extra. Families with air-conditioning, advertisers said, spent more time with their kids at home.11 AC was absent from European homes, but there was a similar inward turn. The war reinforced the home’s appeal as a place of security. ‘The home of tomorrow,’ a popular guide for the home owner stressed in 1954, ‘is a bulwark against a hostile world, and makes the family impregnable from the outside.’12
Suburbs, researchers concluded, nurtured a new kind of American, characterized by sociability, aspirations and upward mobility. In fact, this confused cause and effect. Material aspirations and a hyper-active social life were the results of middle-class affluence, not of suburban living. Working families did not share them. A study in the mid-1950s followed Ford workers to their new suburban homes just north of San Jose.13 There was no increase in partying or going out. Many did not know what a cocktail was. Most did not belong to any club or association. Consumer culture did not automatically snuff out associational life – most workers were not joiners to begin with. Nor did new-found domestic comfort drag them on to a social treadmill. Workers hoped to stay in their jobs, not move up in the world to outshine their neighbours.
By the late 1950s, American workers earned around $4,000 a year. In the previous two decades, their income had seen a spectacular ten-fold increase. And yet working families retained a material outlook of their own. Affluence did not create a classless monoculture. A study at the time compared the approach to money and goods amongst middle-class women and working-class housewives in Chicago, Louisville and Trenton.14 For the middle class, material craving was sustained by a sense of a brighter future: ‘As long as I want things and am not completely satisfied with what I’ve got I’ll continue to be happy,’ said one middle-class woman. ‘I’m always wanting something more or different or new.’ Working families, by contrast, suffered from ‘depression phobia’. Two decades of rising incomes notwithstanding, wives were convinced that their husbands would never earn more in the future. These were not the optimistic, self-confident consumers painted by studies of the middle class. Fancy cooking pots, toys for the kids and other impulse purchases triggered feelings of guilt. Most had instalment plans but saw them ‘as an almost immoral self-indulgence’. Affluence did not extinguish a working-class concern with how to make ends meet. Goods were measured by their usefulness – a large sofa that could be turned into a bed – not their beauty. Recreation was a frivolous waste of money better spent on ‘important’ things. Department stores in the centre of town were viewed with suspicion, alien to their own way of shopping, which was based on the familiar and the local. One bought in neighbourhood shops or through friends and family contacts.
The persistence of such class cultures in prosperous America is a reminder that we should be careful when talking of national styles of consumption. Katona and colleagues contrasted an American forward-looking mentality with a conservative German one: ‘The average American consumer happily spends tomorrow’s income while the German only likes to spend yesterday’s savings.’15 The problem is that there is no such person as the average national consumer. Treating the middle class as a norm tends to obscure differences across class and regions; Northern Italians, for example, continue to spend a larger proportion of their earnings on leisure and sport than those in the south. Unlike their middle-class neighbours, American workers were not that much more optimistic than Europeans. The contrast between American credit-addicts and continental European savers must not be overdone. Europeans, especially young industrial workers, also took out instalment plans. In the 1960s and ’70s, the private savings rate in the United States was only marginally lower than in Western Europe.16
The ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis attracted the greatest attention in the motherland of the working class: Britain. The economic sociologist Ferdynand Zweig returned to England from a study tour to the United States in 1952 struck by how workers there had responded to his question about who the middle class were: we are, they told him. In the course of the next decade, Zweig found that British workers were moving along the same road.17 Affluence, he argued, was eating away at working-class culture. A community of work and neighbourhood was breaking down into acquisitive individuals. Workers carried a mental checklist of what to buy next rather than thinking about the class struggle. In their aspirations and lifestyle, they no longer took their lead from their fathers and mates but from their social betters. The resulting clash of values was captured nicely by Alan Bennett in his play Enjoy (1980), set in one of Leeds’ last back-to-back houses, itself awaiting demolition. ‘I do not want love,’ Linda, a call-girl, exclaimed to her parents, ‘I want consumer goods!’18 The ‘new acquisitive society’, Zweig warned, was self-destructive, no longer checked by old values of restraint and self-sacrifice. An inflationary spiral would pull down the welfare state.
Zweig’s thesis – echoed by the market researcher Mark Abrams at the time – was soon subjected to sociological critiques and found wanting. In the mid-1960s, the sociologist John Goldthorpe and colleagues studied 250 affluent workers in Luton, an engineering and car manufacturing town.19 That workers took home more money did not mean they were joining the bourgeoisie. Blue-collar workers, the sociologists wrote, swapped a community of work and neighbourhood for a world of private comforts. Hardly any manual labourer shared friends or leisure pursuits with the middle classes. At the same time, union membership and support for the Labour Party remained high. While blue-collar workers were shedding their traditional collectivism for a new individualism, white-collar workers were moving from their inherited individualism towards a pragmatic support for collective bargaining. What they shared was an
orientation towards money and possessions. Otherwise, they kept their distance. The effects of affluence, then, were limited. If material aspirations were converging, social hierarchies remained intact.
Looking back on these debates half a century later, it is difficult not to be struck by the way in which the discussion of consumption was framed by an overarching concern about the future of the Labour Party. Private consumerism, it was feared, was destroying traditional close-knit communities built on solidarity and fairness and without selfish pleasures – Zweig compared it to a ‘cocoon’.20 Historically, this was a curious concern, for Labour parties had expanded at the very same time as commercial leisure, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In reality, working-class communities had always been fractured by gender, ethnic, confessional and regional identities. Working-class conservatism, similarly, existed before affluence, while social networks and understandings of class continued to co-exist with new private comforts. Money was not everything. Luton workers understood social inequality as an inherited combination of power and pounds: ‘ordinary people like us’ versus ‘Mayfair Johnnies’.21 The references to material aspirations in the 1950s and ’60s need to be viewed in the unique context of their time – high growth and the lowest peace-time unemployment of the century. When hard times returned, working families switched back to a concern with getting by. A researcher who revisited Luton in the gloomy mid-1980s – when unemployment stood at 14 per cent – found plenty of social networks. Affluent workers watched TV, but they also met with kin, neighbours and fellow workers. Nor did affluence eradicate gender segregation. Men participated more in domestic life, but they still had their outside world of drink and football.22
The British debate involved a new recognition that ‘affluent workers’ derived their identity and self-worth from the things they owned and used rather than from the things they made. But how exactly was what people liked related to social inequality? It was in France in the 1960s that Pierre Bourdieu assembled the most ambitious account of the nexus between class and culture, eventually published in 1979 as La Distinction, ‘the single most important monograph of post-war sociology published anywhere in the world’.23 Such has been its success that ‘distinction’ has entered everyday vocabulary to describe how we use things to send signals about who we are. For Bourdieu, it was much more. It was the centre of the social universe, the sun around which classes orbited. The gravitational force was taste. Taste distinguished in a double sense. It separated one group from another. And ‘it distinguishes in an essential way, since taste is the basis of all that one has – people and things – and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others.’ The reference to ‘people and things’ is crucial, for Bourdieu insisted that each class had its own distinct taste regime: ‘Taste is what brings together things and people that go together.’ People’s preferences and lifestyles, what they liked and how they consumed things, had a unity to them, embodied in an appropriate ‘habitus’, and socialized through a hierarchical educational system.24
Through interviews, surveys, theory and elaborate diagrams, Bourdieu drew a cultural map of French society. At the top was the well-educated elite, which defended its monopoly over ‘legitimate culture’ and claimed a ‘superior’ distinction (‘art for art’s sake’). Typical was ‘S’, a forty-five-year-old lawyer born into the Parisian grande bourgeoisie. S lived in a 300 square metre flat in the 16th arrondissement and had a country house in Burgundy. His guiding principle in life was refined pleasure. He despised people who bought ‘not what pleases them but what has value’. He liked Matisse as well as Botticelli. Cooking was ‘a state of mind’ for him – ‘To appreciate it, you have to be “relaxed”: Sturgeons’ eggs, some Russian cooking, is quite delicious.’ He was a connoisseur of Bordeaux wines and kept ten bottles from 1923. Drinking fine wine was a ‘liturgy’, to be celebrated ‘only with certain people, who are capable of enjoying it in the same way’.
It was this elite that interested Bourdieu most. It used taste to justify and maintain social hierarchies. The classes below had their own lifestyles, which were oriented towards this ‘legitimate culture’ and affirmed its superiority. Thus, the petit-bourgeoisie put on Ravel’s Bolero to demonstrate its ‘cultural goodwill’. In its homes it introduced ‘nooks’ and ‘corners’ to show it was ‘living beyond its means’. The manual working class, meanwhile, submitted to a ‘taste for necessity’. Things were, first and foremost, about their function, not pleasure or aesthetic effect. Food was about calories, not cuisine. Clothes should be practical; Bourdieu found that working-class wives paid far less attention to fashion or beauty than their bourgeois superiors. Spending hard-earned money on a Bach recording was considered ‘pretentious’ and as ‘foolish’ as spending 2 million (old) francs on a fine watch.25 ‘Culture’ was for the elite.
Distinction was a giant step forward. Marxist accounts of ‘mass culture’ pictured consumers as passive dupes of a culture industry. This made it difficult to explain change. Bourdieu, by contrast, saw them as actively involved in reproducing a class system. And he went beyond the fashionable attention to signs and discourse at the time, concerning himself with how as well as what people consumed. His critique of the elite’s hold on ‘legitimate culture’ had a French republican agenda: political democracy required cultural democracy.26
The big question is whether this snapshot of France in the 1960s can be blown up to fit a wider frame. Were classes separate islands with their own uniform taste and habitus? Even for France in the 1960s this is doubtful. Bourdieu was mostly interested in the high culture that separated the elite from the working class, ignoring practices that cut across groups, such as watching television. Neither gender nor immigrant communities featured, somewhat ironically, since Bourdieu had made his initial mark with a seminal study of gender in Algeria. It is also debatable whether people had coherent, class-specific tastes. Let us recall the machine fitter in 1913 Bochum who liked Wagner as well as Cowboy-and-Indian movies.27 The sociologist Bernard Lahire, who has painstakingly gone through French data on cultural practices since the 1970s, has found that ‘dissonance’ is more widespread than any coherent class taste. Individuals mix and match genres, creating their own distinct taste portfolio. In the same family, some love TV game shows, while others despise them. Distinction is more a personal accomplishment than a class attribute – there is a ‘war’ between ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘noble’ and ‘vulgar’, ‘sophisticated’ and ‘trash’, but, according to Lahire, these battles are fought inside each individual, not between classes.28
Instead of unifying classes, the spread of mass media, TV and music equipment has, arguably, facilitated greater pluralism. This is partly the result of access to multiple genres via radio, TV and, most recently, the internet, and partly because of more domestic enjoyment. Participation in ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture used to be visible: a public act. With TV, all classes can watch a mix of programmes without fear of losing status. This does not mean class has gone away, however. Rather, its operating mode has shifted, from taste to degrees of participation. The most rigorous study of cultural consumption, conducted in Britain between 2003 and 2005, found similar preferences for music genres, sport and TV across groups; visual arts were an exception.29 Only for a small executive elite did high culture still serve as capital. Taste has been democratized. The main divide was now between those who were participating in art and music and those who were not. Workers especially were unlikely to go to concerts, the theatre or museums, or practise sport, and more likely to spend their time at home or socializing with friends.
Affluence, then, has brought to a close the clash of class cultures, although for reasons other than those anticipated by pluralist reformers like Crosland. Workers are no longer in awe of high culture. At the same time, they no longer have a culture of their own. Everyone now is a football fan. The Labour Party abandoned a distinct culture of producers. Meanwhile, the middle and upper cl
asses switched from snobbish elitism to cultural poaching. The new strategy of distinction is no longer to erect barriers to protect one’s class from hoi polloi but to become an ‘omnivore’ and mix as many styles as possible – to listen to working-class bands and world music as well as string quartets; to watch TV soaps as well as Shakespeare on stage. Paradoxically, then, letting go of the claim to own culture has helped the middle class to consolidate its sense of superiority.30
How did consumption affect social identities in communities where class was not the dominant marker? African cities are an interesting case because here migrant workers’ tribal identities were confronted with entertainment, new tastes and products. Accra in 1950s Ghana, for example, had eight large cinemas that showed American films, musicals and thrillers, as well as safari movies. There were twenty African dance bands and numerous social clubs. Consumption could reinforce ethnic divisions; the Indo-Ghana Club, for example, was for Indians only. Yet it also challenged hierarchies, both imperial and local. In French Equatorial Brazzaville, on the Congo River, football turned into a challenge to the colonial masters when successful native teams refused to take off their boots and play barefoot. At the same time, European hats, shirts and dresses rode roughshod over tribal dress codes, offering the young and poor a way to free themselves from a sartorial regime controlled by their elders. Young couples danced the rumba and waltz.31