Douglas Cazaux Sackman

Anniversary Forum

Consumption and the Angel of History

IN HIS "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin uses a Paul Klee painting, Angelus Novus, as his point of departure for thesis number nine. "This is how one pictures the angel of history," Benjamin writes. "His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."¹

Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-073671-D.
A Japanese American family in July, 1942, at the Nyssa, Oregon, farm on which they lived and worked during World War II relocation. Environmental historians have considered the differing histories of men and women with regard to the environment, but we might also envision an environmental history of the family. As the family changed in form and meaning, how did its connections to nature shift as well? How have ideas about nature and the natural in turn directed social and cultural understandings of family?

Family of Workers at Nyssa, Oregon, Farm

I am tempted to call Benjamin's cherubim the angel of environmental history. Have we not looked back, over history, toward paradise, longingly? Have we not looked at the seemingly senseless chain of events, put them in order, documented the debris they have left, and told our readers to look with new eyes on what we call progress? Have we not, ecologically oriented in our values and aspirations, wished to make whole what has been smashed—even though we know that we put the past back together in our narratives, not in the living, breathing world?

To be sure, one would have to say that this angel is a creature from out of our field's past. We no longer try to look back, to some paradise, and regard all anthropogenic alterations in the earth as evidence of destruction. Paradise was once imagined to lie on the earth's high point—its nipple; everything else was downhill from there. Our histories often implicitly looked up and back to Eden, and configured everything that had happened as declension. We have learned to no longer privilege paradise; we know there is no perfect nature out there, only a world constantly in flux, with or without human beings and the economic systems they have created. We try not to be nostalgic for some better, other place. Though we certainly seek to show the interconnections of people, plants, and animals, we do not pretend that we can holistically heal the past.

Still, there is a lot of significant work to be done even though we have exiled ourselves from paradise—or at least ruled out using it as a measure of change and value. Looked at another way, Benjamin's storm-battered angel facing the debris of progress can point us toward some of what is to be done. Benjamin called the storm progress; environmental historians have a strong tradition of doing the same, or suggesting that a more accurate weather report would name the storm capitalism. A good recent example is William Robbins's penetrating two-volume history of the Oregon Country, but such a narrative is at work in much of what our field has produced.² For Benjamin, the storm is blowing from paradise. It is hard to imagine how capitalism could gather force in the original garden, but perhaps the fateful bite of the apple brought the storm on. Adam didn't need to eat that apple, but he did so anyway. Should we blame the serpent, or the woman, each of whom had a hand in the fall? (Or the deity, standing off-stage like some Madison Avenue agency with its invisible hands creating the irresistible temptations making consumption inevitable and illimitable?) Whoever gets the blame, consumption, in this story of genesis at least, first stirred the winds of change.

For environmentalists and environmental historians, consumerism often appears as the handmaiden of capitalism in their declensionist narratives. As Paul and Anne Ehrlich argue in their recent book One with Nineveh, our habits of consumption call "into question the sustainability of the human enterprise."³ In this formulation, consumption will result in the end of nature, which will at the same time be the end of history. Certainly, an analysis of consumerism is a keystone to any critique of environmental danger and destruction in the modern world. Its ecological and economic importance has not been missed by environmental historians, but we have tended to see things that we consume as nature eviscerated—doornail-dead commodities. We could do more to reveal the social and cultural significance of what we consume.⁴ There is, of course, a rich historiography on the culture of consumption that does just this. But a problem with most of this work is that it is not grounded. Putting the culture of consumption in its ecological and economic context is something we can do, and this would lead to a fuller understanding of human relations to nature.⁵

We might take a cue from anthropologists who have argued that objects become animated and enculturated as they are consumed, that "commodities, like persons, have social lives."⁶ The commodification of nature disenchants the natural world, to be sure; but in entering the human world nature takes on a second life. The use and consumption of objects connects people to nature, though often in ways they do not themselves recognize. Everything that people are is intertwined with what nature becomes for them. To consider consumption as a key place where nature and culture interact leads us to look more deeply into both the realm of nature from which those goods have come and the social world through which those goods move, make meaning, and create connections. Indeed, how and what humans consume from the natural world plays a large role in the constitution of the social world. No one argues any more that race or gender are a biological given, something determined by nature. But even as we regard them as "social constructions," we should pay closer attention to the building materials for these constructions; they come from nature. Our relations with nature are always already social relations, since the nature we consume and the debris we leave behind contribute to what and who we are. It is the stuff of identity, the material world metastasized and turned into meaning—flesh made into spirit.

In Wim Wenders's film Wings of Desire, the ethereal angels long for the material, desiring desperately to be embodied. Over a decade ago, William Cronon noted in the Journal of American History roundtable on environmental history that our field has been characterized by a split between those works that do a good job of dealing with the material levels of analysis (ecology and economy) and those that deal with the ideological (representations of nature).⁷ Environmental historians still manifest this split: Some soar with the angels in the empyrean of ideas, others run with the wolves of the forest and marketplace. A strand of environmental history that looks again at consumerism, tracing the goods with which we surround ourselves—both back to nature and forward to human identity and social relations—would show just how the three realms interconnect. The angel of environmental history would pick up the debris, feel its weight, and recognize it as part of what it is to be human. If that is worthy of the angel's attention—his longing as well as his tears—it is worthy of a portion of ours as well.

Douglas Cazaux Sackman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Puget Sound. His first book, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden, was published in 2004 by the University of California Press.

Notes

^1. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257–58.

^2. William Robbins, Landscapes of Promise: The Oregon Story, 1890–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) and Landscapes of Conflict: The Oregon Story, 1940–2000 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).

^3. Paul and Anne Ehrlich, One with Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2004), 215.

^4. One work in the field that does this quite well is Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

^5. For cultural histories that begin to draw out ecological implications of consumption, see T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999).

^6. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3. For more on this idea as it relates to environmental history and consumption, see Douglas C. Sackman, "Putting Gender on the Table: Food and the Family Life of Nature," in Seeing Nature through Gender, ed. Virginia Scharff (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003): 169–93.

^7. William Cronon, "Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History," Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1123.

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