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Escaping Steigerwald's "Plastic Cages": Consumers as Subjects and Objects in Modern Capitalism
Lizabeth Cohen
| I am tempted simply to say, "Thanks for the endorsement, Dave," and quit while I am ahead. In "All Hail the Republic of Choice," David Steigerwald has paid me the enormous compliment of singling out my two books, Making a New Deal and A Consumers' Republic, as significant contributors to the effort to understand the "historical consequences of consumption" for the United States.1 Moreover, he has read my books extremely carefully, fully comprehending—and clearly articulating—their arguments. Nor am I the only beneficiary of Steigerwald's analytical acuity and integrity. His essay contends with an astounding number of works in the field of consumer history and theory and, with deep understanding of and engagement with their arguments, puts them in dialogue with each other. What results is historiographical writing at its best, the revelation of order and structure, trends and cleavages where little seemed to exist before. We all are indebted to him for transforming a fertile but chaotic new field of historical literature into a more mature, better-cultivated terrain of scholarship. |
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As tempting as it is to take his accolades and run, doing so would be a disservice to Steigerwald's achievement. Only by engaging with his analysis can I return his compliment and advance our thinking on important intellectual and political matters. Although many aspects of his essay invite comment, given the space limitations, I will focus on Steigerwald's central arguments about the theoretical stance most appropriate for consumer history and the nature of the American consumerist society it reveals. |
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Steigerwald has positioned my work as exemplary of the "darker view of consumption as a process of manipulation buried within the larger system of social relations," in contrast to T. H. Breen's emphasis on "the emancipatory potential of consumer choice." Relatedly, he has seen in my books a materialist approach to consumer history—an investigation of "an objective, material reality linked to the state, to hard-and-fast class interests, to the geography of social life, and, above all, to how work is done"—as opposed to more cultural analyses that stress the subjective aspects of consumer experience, the meaning that individuals bring to market exchanges. Steigerwald credited me with helping construct two "plastic cages of consumerism," to use his apt terminology: a historical argument that the American economy and polity has turned mass consumption into a tool for oppressing rather than liberating Americans and a methodological argument that any effort by analysts to deny corporate capitalism's power by emphasizing popular cultural negotiation and resistance or individual meaning making is misguided. He concluded his essay with very strong statements: that "the widely accepted premises of the critical consumer and consumer liberation are discredited," their claims in "bankruptcy"; that "the revolt against materialism has clearly failed," and "its subjectivist and cultural conceptions of freedom must be discarded."2 |
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It is a little hard to challenge Steigerwald's reading of my work when he has flattered me as "always the soberest" and "the realist," but not to do so would entail abandoning one of my major commitments.3 I argue that the structures of capitalism, on the one hand, and more indigenous forms of cultural meaning and expression, on the other, exist in dialectical relationship. This is not to say that it is always a fair match; more often than not consumers lose out to those who seek to manage their consumption for economic or political ends. And I too am impatient with interpretations that celebrate every purchase as a transgressive act. But I would still insist that in the dynamic evolution of consumer society, consumers can respond to market changes by establishing beachheads of private and communal meaning and even political defiance, forcing the structures of capitalism to adapt to challenges from below. I would like to look at several examples in my books that support this analysis. Take note that Steigerwald, close reader that he is, has acknowledged most of these cases, but he has tended to downplay the extent of meaning making or resistance that resulted, whereas I see significant moments of give-and-take in the development of the United States into a consumers' republic by the mid-twentieth century. |
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