Consumer society is not characterized merely by the rapid growth of individual expenditure. It is also accompanied by the growth of expenditure met by third parties (by the government in particular) for the benefit of private individuals, the purpose of some of this being to reduce the inequality of the distribution of resources.
This proportion of collective expenditure meeting individual needs has risen from 13 per cent of total consumption in 1959 to 17 per cent in 1965. In 1965, the percentage of needs met by third parties was:
Collective expenditure is clearly channelled more towards human beings, then, than into the goods and material equipment made available for their use. Similarly, public expenditure is at its highest under the budget heads which look set to grow fastest. But it is interesting to note, with E. Lisle, that it was precisely in this sector where the community assumes the greater part of expenditure, in the sector which it has developed most intensively, that the crisis of May 1968 broke out.
In France, the ‘social budget of the nation’ redistributes more than 20 per cent of gross internal production (the national education system alone absorbs the total of taxes on personal incomes). The heavy disparity between private consumption and collective expenditure which Galbraith attacks seems much more characteristic of the United States than of the European nations. But this is not the issue. The real problem is whether this state expenditure makes for an objective equalization of social chances. Now, it seems clear that this ‘redistribution’ has little effect on social discrimination at all levels. As for inequality of standards of living, comparison of the two studies on family budgets made in 1956 and 1965 shows no reduction in the discrepancies. We know the incurable, hereditary disparities which apply in the field of education: where other mechanisms more subtle than the economic are in play, the use of economic redistribution alone very largely amounts to reinforcing the mechanisms of cultural inertia. The proportion of 17-year-olds in full-time education is 52 per cent: 90 per cent for the children of senior managers, professionals and teachers, less than 40 per cent for farmers and workers. In higher education, the chances of access for boys in the former category are more than 33 per cent, but only 1 or 2 per cent for the latter.
In the health field, the redistributive effects are not clear: among the active population, there would seem to be an absence of redistribution, as though each social category were at least intent on getting back what it paid in contributions.
As regards taxation and social security, let us examine what E. Lisle has to say on the topic.
Growing public consumption is financed by the development of taxes and other contributions: where social security alone is concerned, the ratio of contributions to total wage costs has risen from 23.9 per cent in 1959 to 25.9 per cent in 1967. Social security thus costs employed workers a quarter of their resources, it being fair to regard the so-called ‘employers’ contributions’ as a deduction at source from workers’ incomes, as is also the 5 per cent fixed-rate contribution. The total of these deductions is much higher than the sum deducted in income tax. Since the latter is progressive, but social security contributions and the fixed-rate contribution are regressive, the net effect of tax and other deductions is regressive. If we accept that indirect taxation, which mainly takes the form of VAT, is proportional to consumption, we may conclude that direct and indirect taxation and the social contributions paid by households and very largely earmarked for the financing of collective consumption would not, overall, have any effect of reducing inequality or any redistributive impact.
So far as the effectiveness of public amenities is concerned, the available studies show frequent ‘deflections’ from the intentions of the authorities. When these amenities are designed for the most deprived, we gradually see their ‘clientele’ becoming more varied, with this diversification leading to an affective rejection, more for psychological than financial reasons, of the poor. When the amenities are intended to be open to all, the elimination of the weakest members of the community occurs from the outset. The effort to achieve open access usually ends in a segregation reflecting the social hierarchy. This would seem to indicate that in a highly inegalitarian society, political actions aimed at ensuring formal equality of access more often than not have increased the degree of inequality. (Commission du Plan, Consommation et Mode de Vie)
Inequality with regard to death rates remains very great.
Once again, then, the unadorned figures have no meaning and the increase in available resources – a green light to affluence – has to be interpreted in its real social logic. Social redistribution and, in particular, the effectiveness of public action has to be questioned. Should we regard this ‘deviant’ performance on the part of ‘social’ redistribution, this restoration of social inequalities by the very mechanisms which are supposed to eliminate them, as a temporary anomaly due to the inertia of the social structure? Or should we, rather, formulate the radical hypothesis that the mechanisms of redistribution, which are so successful in preserving privilege, are in fact an integral part, a tactical element, of the power system – and hand in glove in that regard with the educational and electoral systems? There would then be no point deploring the repeated failure of a social policy: we should, rather, have to conclude that it was performing its real function to perfection.1
In spite of certain findings, the evaluation of the effect of transfers, as regards both redistribution and the orientation of consumption, must be delicately handled. If the overall effect of transfers has, in the long run, made it possible to reduce the range of net incomes by half, the relative stability of this distribution of net incomes has only been achieved at the cost of a very great increase in the sums redistributed.
The advances of affluence – that is to say, of the possession of ever more goods and individual and collective amenities – have been accompanied by increasingly serious ‘environmental nuisances’ which are a consequence, on the one hand, of industrial development and technical progress, and, on the other, of the very structures of consumption.
First, we have seen the degradation of our shared living space by economic activities: noise, air and water pollution, environmental destruction, the disruption of residential zones by the development of new amenities (airports, motorways, etc.). Traffic congestion produces a colossal deficit in technical, psychological and human terms. Yet what does this matter, since the necessary excess of infrastructural building, the extra expenditure on petrol, the costs of treatment for accident victims, etc. will all be totted up as consumption, i.e. will become, under cover of the gross national product and statistics, an indication of growth and wealth! Does the flourishing mineral water industry permit us to speak of a real increase in ‘affluence’ since, to a large extent, it is merely a response to the deficient quality of urban water? And so on. We should never be done with listing all the productive and consumer activities which merely counteract internal nuisances generated by the system of growth. Once it has passed a certain threshold, extra productivity is almost entirely wiped out, swallowed up, by this homoeopathic treatment of growth by growth.
The ‘cultural nuisance effects’ caused by the technical and cultural effects of rationalization and mass production are, of course, strictly incalculable. Moreover, value judgements prevent us from defining common criteria. It would not be possible objectively to characterize the ‘nuisance effect’ of a grim housing estate or a ‘Z feature’ movie, as we might do with water pollution. Only a civil service inspector could propose, as happened at a recent congress, the creation, alongside a ‘clean air ministry’, of a ‘crime of offending the intelligence’ to protect the populace against the effects of the sensationalist press! But we may admit that nuisance effects of this kind are growing at the same pace as affluence.
The built-in obsolescence of products and machines, the destruction of old structures by which certain needs were met, and the increasing number of bogus innovations that are of no appreciable benefit to our lives may all be added to the balance sheet here.
Perhaps even more serious than the downgrading of products and machinery is the fact, pointed out by E. Lisle, that
the cost of rapid progress in the production of wealth is the mobility of labour, and therefore the instability of employment. A turnover and retraining of human beings which has very serious social costs and, most importantly, produces a general sense of insecurity. The psychological and social pressures of mobility, of status and competition at all levels (income, prestige, culture, etc.) are becoming more burdensome for everyone. It takes longer to recover, to get back to one’s best, and offset the psychological and nervous wear-and-tear produced by the wide range of nuisances: the journey to work, overpopulation, continual stress and aggression . . . In short, the major cost of the consumer society is the sense of generalized insecurity it engenders.
Which leads to the system, as it were, devouring itself:
In this rapid growth . . . which inevitably engenders inflationist tensions . . . a non-negligible fraction of the population is not able to keep up with the pace. These people are ‘left on the scrapheap’. And those who stay the course and achieve the mode of life which is proposed as the model do so only at the cost of an effort which leaves them diminished. With the result that society finds itself compelled to cushion the social costs of growth by redistributing a growing proportion of the gross internal product into social investments (education, research, health) which are designed, above all, to serve growth. (E. Lisle)
Now, these compensatory expenditures, whether private or collective, which are intended to cope with dysfunctions rather than increase positive satisfaction, are added in, in all the accounts, as part of the rise in the standard of living. Not to mention the consumption of drugs, alcohol and all the other conspicuous or compensatory expenditures, or the military budgets, etc. All of this is growth and, hence, affluence.
The growing number of categories of people ‘dependent on society’, though not actually a nuisance as such (the battle against illness and the decline in mortality being one of the aspects of ‘affluence’ – a consumer demand), nonetheless puts a heavy financial burden on the process itself. Ultimately, writes J. Bourgeois-Pichat, ‘one might imagine the part of the population whose activity is devoted to maintaining the good health of the country’s inhabitants growing larger than the part that is actually involved in production.’
In short, we are everywhere reaching a point where the dynamic of growth and affluence is becoming circular and generating only wheel-spin and where, increasingly, the system is exhausting itself in its own reproduction. A threshold where the wheels turn, but do not advance, where the entire increase in productivity goes into maintaining the system’s conditions of survival. The only objective result, then, is the cancerous growth of figures and balance sheets. In all essentials, however, we are returning, in strict terms, to the primitive state, which is that of absolute penury, the state of the animal or the native, all of whose energies are devoted to survival. Or the state of those who, as Daumal has it, ‘plant potatoes so as to be able to eat potatoes, so as to be able to plant potatoes again, etc.’ Now, a system is inefficient when its cost is equal to, or higher than, its output. We are not at that point. But, through nuisances and the social and technical correctives to those nuisances, we can see on the horizon a general tendency towards a tentacular internal functioning of the system. With ‘dysfunctional’ consumption, both individual and collective, rising more quickly than the ‘functional’, the system is basically becoming parasitic upon itself.
In this reference to mystique, we are speaking of the most extraordinary collective bluff on the part of modern societies – of an operation of ‘white magic’ on the figures which in reality conceals a black magic of collective bewitchment. We are speaking of the absurd gymnastics of accounting illusions, of national accounts. Nothing enters into these except factors which are visible and measurable by the criteria of economic rationality, and that indeed is the central principle of the magic. Research, culture and women’s domestic labour are all excluded from these accounts on this basis, though certain things which have no business there do figure in them, merely because they are measurable. Moreover, like dreams, they have no conception of the negative and lump together everything -nuisances and positive elements – in the most total (though by no means innocent) illogicality.
Economists lump together the value of all products and services of all kinds, making no distinction between public and private services. Nuisances and palliatives to them figure in the accounts on the same basis as the production of objectively useful goods. ‘Motion pictures, television, cars, and the vast opportunities which go with mobility, together with such less enchanting merchandise as narcotics, comic books, and pornographia, are all included in an advancing gross national product.’2
The deficit side – damage and obsolescence – does not figure in the accounts or, if it does, it figures positively! The costs of travel to work, for example, are accounted as consumer expenditure! This is the logical result, expressed in figures, of the magical goal of production for its own sake: every article produced is sacralized by the very fact of its being produced. Every article produced is positive, every measurable thing is positive. The 30 per cent reduction in the luminosity of air in Paris over the past 50 years is regarded as external and non-existent by the accountants. But if it results in a greater expenditure of electrical energy, of light bulbs and spectacles, etc., then it exists – and exists, moreover, as an increase in production and social wealth! Any restrictive or selective infringement of the sacred principle of production and growth is met with cries of sacrilege (‘We shall not touch one screw of Concorde!’). As a collective obsession consigned to the accounting ledgers, productivity primarily has the social function of a myth. And anything can be used to fuel that myth – even the conversion of objective realities which refute it into figures which confirm it.
But there is perhaps in this mythic algebra of financial accounts a profound truth, the truth of the economico-political system of growth societies. It seems paradoxical to us that the positive and the negative should be added together indiscriminately. But it is perhaps quite simply logical. For the truth is perhaps that it is the ‘negative’ goods, the nuisances compensated, the internal operating costs, the social costs of ‘dysfunctional’ endoregulation, the subsidiary sectors of useless prodigality which play the dynamic role of economic engine in that set-up. This latent truth of the system is, of course, hidden by the figures, the magical addition of which conceals this admirable circularity of the positive and the negative (alcohol sales and hospital building, etc.). And this would explain the impossibility, despite all efforts and at all levels, of rooting out these negative aspects: the system lives by them and cannot rid itself of them. We shall meet this problem again in connection with poverty, that ‘balancing counterforce’ of poverty which growth societies ‘drag along behind them’ as a defect and which is in fact one of their most serious ‘nuisances’. We have to accept the hypothesis that all these nuisances somewhere enter into the equation as positive factors, as continual factors of growth, as boosters of production and consumption. In the eighteenth century, in The Fable of the Bees, Mandeville proposed the theory (already regarded as sacrilegious and libertine in his day) that a society achieves equilibrium not through its virtues but through its vices, and that social peace, progress and human happiness are obtained by the instinctive immorality which leads them continually to break the rules. He was, of course, speaking of morality, but we may construe his words in a social and economic sense. It is, precisely, by its hidden defects, its balancing forces, its nuisances, and what seem like vices when compared with a rational system, that the real system prospers. Mandeville was accused of cynicism: it is the social order, the order of production, which is objectively cynical.3
We know how much the affluence of rich societies is linked to waste, given all the talk of a ‘throwaway society’ and the fact that some have even envisaged a ‘garbage-can sociology’: ‘Tell me what you throw away and I’ll tell you who you are!’ But the statistics of waste and rubbish are not interesting in themselves: they are merely a redundant marker of the volume of goods on offer, and their profusion. We can understand neither waste nor its functions if we see in it only the residual scraps of what is made to be consumed but is not. Once again, we have here a simplistic definition of consumption – a moral definition based on the imperative utility of goods. So, all our moralists rail against the squandering of wealth – from the actions of the private individual who no longer respects that kind of moral law internal to the object which its use-value is taken to be and the object’s time-span (the individual who throws his goods away or changes them to comply with the whims of prestige or fashion, etc.) to waste on the national and international scale – and even on a kind of global scale, where the human race is seen as squandering wealth in its general economy and its exploitation of natural resources. In short, waste is always considered a kind of madness, of insanity, of instinctual dysfunction, which causes man to burn his reserves and compromise his survival conditions by irrational practice.
This vision at least betrays the fact that we are not in an era of real affluence, that every present-day individual, group or society, and even the species as such, stands under the sign of scarcity. Now, it is generally the same people who maintain the myth of the inevitable coming of affluence who deplore waste, linked to the menacing spectre of scarcity. At any event, this whole moral vision of waste as dysfunction needs to be reviewed from the perspective of a sociological analysis which would bring out its true functions.
All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual – and society – feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive. That consumption may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction, which then takes on a specific social function. In potlatch, for example, it is the competitive destruction of precious goods which sets the seal on social organization. The Kwakiutl sacrifice blankets, canoes, etched ‘coppers’, which they burn or throw into the sea to ‘maintain their rank,’ to assert their value. And, again, it is by ‘wasteful expenditure’ that the aristocratic classes have asserted their pre-eminence down the ages. The notion of utility, which has rationalistic, economistic origins, thus needs to be revised in light of a much more general social logic in which waste, far from being an irrational residue, takes on a positive function, taking over where rational utility leaves off to play its part in a higher social functionality – a social logic in which waste even appears ultimately as the essential function, the extra degree of expenditure, superfluity, the ritual uselessness of ‘expenditure for nothing’ becoming the site of production of values, differences and meanings on both the individual and the social level. Within this perspective, a definition of consumption as consumation – i.e. as productive waste – begins to emerge, a perspective contrary to that of the ‘economic’ (based on necessity, accumulation and calculation) and one in which, by contrast, the superfluous precedes the necessary, and expenditure takes precedence in terms of value over accumulation and appropriation (even if it does not precede them in time).
‘O reason not the need! Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superfluous./ Allow not nature more than nature needs,/ Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.’ writes Shakespeare in King Lear [Act II, Scene iv]. In other words, one of the fundamental problems posed by consumption is the following: do human beings organize themselves for purposes of survival, or in terms of the individual or collective meaning they give to their lives? Now, this value of ‘being’, this structural value may involve the sacrifice of economic values. And this problem is not metaphysical. It is at the centre of consumption and may be expressed as follows: does not affluence ultimately only have meaning in wastage?
Should we define affluence in terms of foresight and the laying in of provisions, as Valéry does?
When one contemplates piles of imperishable foodstuffs, is one not looking at time in hand and activity spared? A box of biscuits is a whole month of idleness and life. Pots of conserves and fibre baskets stuffed with seeds and nuts are a storehouse of quietude; a whole winter of tranquillity lies hoarded up in their aroma . . . Robinson Crusoe could smell the presence of the future in the coffers and chests in his store-room. His hoard radiated idleness. A sense of time emanated from it, in the way an absolute heat emanates from certain metals . . . Humanity only raised itself up slowly by finding a footing on that which endures. Foresight and the laying in of provisions gradually freed us from the rigours of our animal necessities and the ‘word-for-word’ character of our wants . . . Nature suggested this: it so arranged matters that we carried with us the means of resisting somewhat the inconstancy of events; the fat which is on our limbs, the memory which stands ready in the depth of our souls are models of stores laid up which our industry has imitated.
This is the economic principle to which Nietzsche’s (and also Bataille’s) vision of the living being, who wants above all to ‘expend his strength’, stands opposed:
Physiologists should think again before positing the ‘instinct of preservation’ as the cardinal drive in an organic creature. A living thing wants above all to discharge its force: ‘preservation’ is only a consequence of this. Beware of superfluous teleological principles! The entire concept ‘instinct of preservation’ is one of them . . . The ‘struggle for existence’ – this formula refers to an exceptional situation; the rule is much rather the struggle for power, the ambition to have ‘more’ and ‘better’ and ‘quicker’ and ‘more often’. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power [Fragment 650])
This ‘something more’ by which value asserts itself may become the ‘something of one’s own’. This law of symbolic value, which states that the essential element always lies beyond what is indispensable, is best illustrated in expenditure, in loss, but it may also be verified in appropriation, provided that the latter has the differential function of being extra, of being ‘something more’. As witness the Soviet example: the worker, the cadre, the engineer and the party member have a flat which does not belong to them: whether rented or granted for life, it is accommodation which goes with the job, tied to the social status of worker and active citizen, not to the private person. This good is a social service, not a piece of property, nor even less a ‘consumable’. On the other hand, the secondary residence, the dacha in the country with its garden, is something which belongs to them. Neither is this a lifetime possession, nor is it revocable, and it can survive them and become hereditary. Hence the ‘individualistic’ infatuation attaching to it: all efforts are directed towards the acquisition of that dacha (for want of automobiles, which to some extent play this same ‘second home’ role in the West). The dacha has a prestige value and a symbolic value: it is the ‘something more’.
In a way, it is the same with affluence: for this to become a value, there has to be not simply enough, but too much. A significant difference has to be maintained and manifested between the necessary and the superfluous. This is the function of waste at all levels. By this, I mean that it is illusory to wish to reduce it, to aspire to eliminating it, for it is waste, in some way, which orientates the whole system. Indeed, just like the gadget (where does usefulness end, uselessness begin?), it can be neither defined nor delimited. All production and expenditure beyond the needs of strict survival can be termed waste (not just fashion in clothing and the food ‘dustbin’, but military super-gadgets, the ‘Bomb’, the superfluous agricultural equipment of certain American farmers, and the industrialists who renew their machinery every two years rather than getting the full value out of it: not only consumption, but production too – not to mention politics – largely obeys the laws of ostentatious processes). Profitable and sumptuary investments are everywhere inextricably interlinked. An industrialist who had invested 1,000 dollars in advertising declared: ‘I know half of it is wasted, but I don’t know which half.’ This is always how it is in a complex economy: you cannot isolate what is useful or try to remove what is superfluous. Moreover, the (economically) ‘wasted’ half is not perhaps the half which takes on the least value, in the long term or, viewed more subtly, even in the very act of being ‘lost’.
We have to interpret the immense wastage of our affluent societies this way. It is that wastage which defies scarcity and, contradictorily, signifies abundance. It is not utility, but that wastage which, in its essence, lays down the psychological, sociological and economic guidelines for affluence.
Is not the fact that the glass packaging can be thrown away the mark of the golden age?
One of the great themes of mass culture, as analysed by Riesman and Morin, illustrates this in an epic register: this is the theme of the hero of consumption. In the West, at least, the impassioned biographies of heroes of production are everywhere giving way today to biographies of heroes of consumption. The great exemplary lives of self-made men and founders, pioneers, explorers and colonizers, which succeeded those of saints and historical figures, have today given way to the lives of movie stars, sporting or gambling heroes, of a handful of gilded princes or globe-trotting barons – in a word, the lives of great wastrels (even if the imperative is often that they be shown, by contrast, in their daily ‘simplicity’, doing their shopping, etc.). With all these great dinosaurs who fill the magazines and TV programmes, it is always the excessiveness of their lives, the potential for outrageous expenditure that is exalted. Their superhuman quality is the whiff of potlatch that attaches to them. In this way, they fulfil a very precise social function: that of sumptuary, useless, inordinate expenditure. They fulfil this function by proxy for the whole social body, like the kings, heroes, priests or great parvenus of bygone ages. Like them, indeed, they are never so great as when, like James Dean, they pay for this elevated position with their lives.
The essential difference is that, in our current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective signification it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious consumation, too, has been ‘personalized’ and mass-mediafied. Its function is to provide the economic stimulus for mass consumption, which is defined in relation to it as a subculture of labour. The caricature of the magnificent dress which the star wears for just one evening are the ‘disposable panties’ which, 80 per cent viscose and 20 per cent non-woven acrylic, can be put on in the morning and thrown away at night, and need no washing. Above all, this sublime, de luxe wastage highlighted by the mass media merely replicates, on the cultural level, a much more fundamental and systematic wastage which, for its part, is integrated directly into economic processes, a junctional, bureaucratic wastage produced by the production system as it produces material goods, a wastage built into them and, therefore, obligatorily consumed as one of the qualities and dimensions of objects of consumption: their fragility, their built-in obsolescence, their condemnation to transience. What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equalled only by the speed of price rises. This alone would be sufficient to throw into question the ‘rationalistic’ postulates of the whole of economic science on utility, needs, etc. Now, we know that the order of production only survives by paying the price of this extermination, this perpetual calculated ‘suicide’ of the mass of objects, and that this operation is based on technological ‘sabotage’ or organized obsolescence under cover of fashion. Advertising achieves the marvellous feat of consuming a substantial budget with the sole aim not of adding to the use-value of objects, but of subtracting value from them, of detracting from their time-value by subordinating them to their fashion-value and to ever earlier replacement. And we may leave aside here the colossal quantities of social wealth sacrificed on military budgets and other state and bureaucratic prestige expenditure: that kind of prodigality no longer has any symbolic odour of potlatch about it; it is a desperate, but vital solution for an economico-political system in distress. This ‘consumption’ at the highest level is part of the consumer society, of the same order as the convulsive craving for objects at the level of the private individual. The two conjointly ensure the reproduction of the order of production. And we have to distinguish individual or collective waste as a symbolic act of expenditure, as a festive ritual and an exalted form of socialization, from its gloomy, bureaucratic caricature in our societies, where wasteful consumption has become a daily obligation, a forced and often unconscious institution like indirect taxation, a cool participation in the constraints of the economic order.
‘Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!’ Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but – without doubt much more deeply than this – by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic ‘happening’, the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation).
The consumer society needs its objects in order to be. More precisely, it needs to destroy them. The use of objects leads only to their dwindling disappearance. The value created is much more intense in violent loss. This is why destruction remains the fundamental alternative to production: consumption is merely an intermediate term between the two. There is a profound tendency within consumption for it to surpass itself, to transfigure itself in destruction. It is in destruction that it acquires its meaning. Most of the time in daily life today, it remains subordinate – as a managed consumptivity – to the order of productivity. This is why, most of the time, objects are present by their absence, and why their very abundance paradoxically signifies penury. Stock is the excessive expression of lack and a mark of anxiety. Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth. At any rate, it is clear that destruction, either in its violent and symbolic form (the happening, potlatch, destructive acting-out, both individual and collective) or in its form of systematic and institutional destructiveness, is fated to become one of the preponderant functions of post-industrial society.