To discover the various uses of things is the work of history
—Karl Marx
No one really imagines any more that schools are about emancipation for working class and subordinate groups. There is no talk of middle-class aspirations and possibilities, only of the dull and detailed, increasingly compulsory, increasingly remedial measures felt to be necessary—alongside welfare reforms, work experience schemes, and labor market bridging mechanisms—to try to ensure the fitness for working, at least, of the working class. The highest ambition inculcated into the working-class student, indeed reflecting their own desperate needs, is for a job, often any job.
The socially reproductive function of schooling has shed its liberal clothes and increasingly forms the main visible template for the assembly of a whole jigsaw puzzle of social, juridical, welfare, economic, and training policies. The pieces may be differently shaped, named, and arranged in different countries, but most of the puzzles share a vector of a newly intensified attempt to regulate and prepare labor power for insertion into capitalist labor processes on employer’s terms. These tendencies are not without marked internal contradictions, and they will not proceed without resistances and unintended consequences of various kinds. Not without reason, however, the promoters of renewed control and regulation may hope to work along the grain of some of the real fears and necessities that are part of subordinate and working-class existence; central among these are the rigors attendant upon those who have only their manual labor power to live by or sell, seeking a buyer under conditions of the global “oversupply” of labor, the renewed dominance of capital, and the retreat (as well as coercive turn) of state welfare.
These are important issues deserving of the closest attention. In this chapter, though, I want to contribute to only one and slightly oblique aspect of this complex bundle of issues, to outline some important practices and processes operating in the everyday lifeworld, the lived culture, of those who are at the receiving end of “reformed” training and welfare strategies; processes that will often ironize or displace the latter’s aims and intentions. For there are important changes under way in the ordinary, or common, culture of the popular classes, which will add further pressures and contradictions to how education/training develops, including an increasing marginality of schooling. Though continuing as an important site for the playing out of crucial issues, schooling may be becoming increasingly marginal to the actual formation of subjectivity, identity, and culture.
This chapter is a theoretical extension and development of some of the arguments of Common Culture (Willis et al., 1996), which reports the results of a Gulbenkian Foundation-supported qualitative inquiry into the informal cultural practices of young people in relation to the creative consumption and use of popular cultural items, drawing instances from style and fashion, rock and pop music, and the cultural media. In particular, I explore how some of the practices of informal culture, especially in relation to the uses made of cultural and electronic commodities, are predicated upon and help to develop the expressive and creative powers of the self, in contrast to the forms of instrumentalism and discipline on offer in the formal sector. I draw a contrast between the expressive labor power of the former and the instrumental labor power of the latter.
My basic starting point is that the self-making of culture in the popular classes takes place under changing conditions, including now the seemingly unstoppable rise of the commodization of cultural materials and of their associated electronic mediation. The old locating cultural frames—work, community, labor movement institutions—are being displaced by, or developed in complex and less centered ways in relation to, new frames of meaning: leisure, consumption, and the cultural commodity. Where before the market and market relations could be seen as external—things to be opposed, alternatives found for, or means to be found through which to survive despite—the cultural market increasingly becomes the terrain for the creative negotiation of the conditions of life. The cultural market is more inward with, not opposed to, culture as a way of life. Experience is not against but increasingly through cultural commodity relations, even when these latter express opposition, difference, or indifference to general commodity relations.
These changing conditions of culture and communication are not just changes in context for unchanged people to perhaps take note of or exclude; they are changed conditions for the very self-production of our humanity, for changing the essence of what we are. Just as one of the great modernist questions concerns whether schooling is a force for the emancipation or reproduction of the working class, so one of the great late-modern questions concerns whether the new cultural media, electronic and commercial, are the means of a renewed and more subtle domination, or, whether, through the creativities of productive reception, they might constitute new networks for semiotic possibility for subordinate groups. We’ll begin to find answers, or to find complex moving equilibriums of truths, in both formulations only by looking at the real profane world as it develops now through its “bad” sides, not by stopping in self-confirming, safe, institutional circuits of traditional cultural values or assuming that the global cultural market offers only cretinization to the young working class. In particular, we need to examine very closely and in an open and experimental manner the actual social articulations and in-practice meanings of one of the prime movers of late modernization—the cultural commodity. That is the purpose of this essay.
I hope readers will bear with me through the lengthy and perhaps idiosyncratic theoretical digressions that follow in the next two sections. To try to get at the specificity and social dialectic of the commodity dynamic as it comes to dominate the cultural realm, I return to a consideration of Marx’s original formulations on commodity fetishism and try to build from there toward an understanding of the cultural commodity. Later sections deal with how the informal practices of everyday culture or common culture, what I call practices of symbolic work, creatively take up fetishized commodity meanings and materials for their own meaning-making (see Willis, forthcoming).
First, a little necessary exposition on the basic commodity form before we get to a consideration of its cultural variety. The category of the commodity is right at the heart of the Marxist system of exploring the inner workings of the capitalist system. It is where Marx starts in volume 1 of Capital, and an analysis of the circulation of commodities opens volume 2.
The commodity produced by the capitalist labor process appears on the market naked, as a simple object for sale. Its smooth surfaces show no sign of the social relation of exploitation that produced it or of the labor time embodied within it, which gives it exchange value on the market. It might have fallen from heaven. Forgetting its common history of production, breaking off all meaning arising from that, each object seems to be wholly independent and different from other objects, carrying meaning only in relation to possible future uses for which it may be variably suited—its use value. Commodities are alienated from each other, alienated from prior meaning, alienated from the human processes and relationships that produced them. They seem to exist only in and for themselves, they are fetishized.
But, of course, commodities are in fact produced in a highly specific and determinate set of histories, relations, and skills. They have not fallen from heaven. Follow any commodity back to the factory, and there is a world of surprise in store: complex labor processes, human hierarchies, discipline, sometimes bizarre management regimes of control and motivation, conflict, weariness, and often suffering too. These things we know very familiarly in what we ourselves produce or provide, but we forget them in what all others produce. This forgetting produces a fascination in commodities and in their own glistening forgetfulness and mysterious self-absorption.
Commodities are not without meaning, certainly not without future usefulness, but their meaning is strangely truncated, condensed, cut off. We struggle with our own cargo cultist mentality. Where have these perfectly formed objects come from? There’s a mystery in the way in which commodities both contain (because produced by) and deny (they’re only objects) wider social relations. This phenomenon of commodity fetishism is the starting point and lynchpin of Marx’s analysis:
A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of the labour . . . a definite social relation between men . . . assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. Fetishism . . . attaches itself to the products of labour . . . value (i.e., capitalist production) [and] converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. (Marx, 1957, p. 42)
The use of the term hieroglyphic here is fascinating and illuminating. A hieroglyph is a picture sign, as in the picture script of the ancient Egyptian priesthood, a system now taken to be difficult or impossible to decode. Note the point that the commodity is already a sign, as well as a material thing, but a sign that seems to mystify and obfuscate rather than to communicate.
An analysis of the mode of production of this hieroglyph takes up the rest of volume 1 of Capital. Marxists have, in general, concentrated on questions of the social relations and resistances involved in capitalist production and on questions of how human labor power is itself bought and sold like a commodity. But as volume 2 of Capital makes clear, the commodity form is also central to the process whereby capital accumulation is realized through circulation and exchange. There, the circuit of capital is represented as M-C-P-C’-M’. Money capital (M) buys commodities (C, labor and materials) and the technical means of production (P) to manufacture new commodities of greater worth and value (C’), which are then sold to reproduce the money form, now expanded (M’).
It is a supremely important precondition for the whole cycle and therefore for surplus extraction and accumulation that newly produced commodities are actually sold. The forms of the circuit must be continuously transformed, metamorphosis that is at the very heart of the capitalist process. There is a devilish risk that capitalists may not sell their products, that they may be left with a full warehouse. They risk this tragedy every time they produce a new batch of commodities. They must take the risk repeatedly in order to accumulate at all. The characteristic of the commodity that promises, not guarantees, this ability to fly off the shelves is its real or apparent sensuous usefulness, what it promises to do or satisfy in human need or desire. The exchange value of a commodity is therefore dependent on its use value. In the endless cycle of capital, the capitalist ceaselessly reinforces this characteristic—usefulness as the promise to sell—and unceremoniously turfs out what seems not to offer concrete use. This all adds to the mysterious and restless fascination of commodities; they’re honed, however imperfectly, always in the direction of desire, honed always to the future of individual consumption rather than to the past of collective production. Within this general framework there are some general points I’d like to make about the nature of cultural commodities.
The first point is that the circuit of the transformation of capital really does concern a metamorphosis. This is the change of the money form into the cultural commodity form. These things are ontologically separate. A cultural commodity is not money in clothes. It is a cultural form. It must have existence and identity on the cultural plane if the circuit of capital is to continue to flow. Money does not make itself. The nervous capitalist is forced to unleash a metamorphosis in order to accumulate at all, but there is no way to avoid the terrible risk of the process stopping midstream, that no further transformations follow and that the cultural commodity not be turned back into (more) money. It might stop forever in its own form. The cultural commodity might not sell. Capitalists would surely sell their souls to find some magic alchemy to secretly code this form to find its way back into money every time.1 Sadly, this cannot be. Indeed, the risks are more severe in the cultural realm. Only about one in ten films and records make any real money, but all ten have to be made in order to have the chance of making money on the one. This continuous metamorphosis of money into something quite unlike itself, which it cannot control, should rule out all simple reductions behind the texts and artifacts of capitalist cultural production to economic motives and organizations of production.
Cultural commodities are not subject to the same laws as money. They do not do the same bidding as money. They do not move the factors of production or organize social relations as does money. And if money cannot even ensure turning the commodity back into money, why should we grant it powers not even claimed, powers to so program internal textual meanings as to hold the same direct sway over receivers that money wields over workers, to make them fatal realists and to accept alienated tasks and meanings—the walking dead workers of capitalist consumption? If capitalists could really control the internal workings of the cultural commodity, the first order they would give would be for the commodity to turn itself back into money. Since this requirement is so often unfulfilled, we should have our doubts about other social orders. Cultural commodities make—all on their own, by their very existence—a practical distinction and separation between the social relations of production and the social relations of consumption.
A further point follows about the nature of the necessary, inevitable, and driven role of commodities in the circuit of capital. The circle is unbroken and never ending; so instead of starting the circuit with money, why not start it with commodities? Just as capital is transformed in the three stages of its life, so is the commodity transformed in three stages: market commodities are sold to produce money, which purchases commodities for productive consumption in labor processes, which produce more new commodities for the market (which are sold for money, etc.). Just as capital risks transformation and loss as a necessity in its own expansion, to the same degree are commodities driven to change form.
It’s possible, then, to cycle forward the famous circuit of capital to produce: C-M-C-P-C’.2 This starts and ends with commodities (C), as the usual cycle starts and ends with money (M). Just as the money at the end of the conventional cycle is a greater volume (M’), so is the commodity at the end of the commodity cycle “greater” (C’). The valorized money form of circulation is also a valorized form of expanded commodity circulation. Here we see a good exemplification of the very important general point, embedded in all of the arguments here, that the cultural commodity is not just a category of political economy but is equally of cultural and community meaning. As capital accumulates, so do commodities, so that they become available on an everyday basis to all (with money) in modern societies. In this regard, they are truly like the commodities of the international commodity exchanges for cereals and metals. That which was unavailable or restricted becomes an ordinary feature of the environment. In this, of course, cultural commodities are massively assisted by electronic mediation, with its multitude of one-way telephone calls “silencing the masses.” Whatever the truth of this last phrase, commodification and electronification certainly bring mass availability.
A third supremely important point concerns the transfer of the quality of usefulness within the general form to the cultural form of the commodity. The circuit of capital concerns unlike things, although it is held together by the value form. The circuit could break down at any point, especially at the crucial stage at which commodities are sold on the market. It is the use value of the commodity that is the best guarantee of purchase, and this will be developed and emphasized at every point through the never-ending cycles. The direction of change and the nature of “accumulation” in the cultural commodity circuit must be, therefore, of the ever-refocused invitation to use. All other norms and social conventions of consumption are subordinated to the primacy of use, any possible use—whether in the brothel or in the cathedral of cultural meaning.3 The cultural commodity is a force for the distillation of usefulness freeing up the space from inherited social dependencies.
All of the foregoing applies, actually, to the commodity qua commodity applied to its cultural case. How are we to understand the specificity of cultural commodities? What is the meaning of the social in their social hieroglyph?
I argue that what separates cultural commodities from commodities in general is the particular nature and quality of their usefulness. This quality is one of actual or potential communicative meaningfulness, the ability to enable communication of meaning from object to human and, ultimately, from human to human. The signs, symbols, and materials used in communicative commodities can operate as use values only to the extent that they are meaningful to consumers. But this is to say something very strange indeed about a commodity form. The general form that primarily breaks communication through its very fetishism—concealing its social relations of production, how and why it was made, for whom and by whom—must in this case and as its first purpose enable meaningfulness.
It is evidently necessary to separate two levels in the commodity form: its basic commodity-ness, or the bearer form, and its communicative usefulness, or its cultural code. Marx says that the commodity is, in general, a social hieroglyph. We may say, then, that the cultural commodity is a hieroglyph on a hieroglyph, an enigma within an enigma. One hieroglyph points back darkly to a hidden production, one points forward brightly to possible use. The consequences of this double, compressed, and contradictory symbolic articulation have not been adequately analyzed, both for the complexity it must bring to an understanding of the cultural commodity and for the possibility of impacted contrary decodings of the dual hieroglyphs.
Let us consider, first, what I call simple usefulness. The whole point about the second hieroglyph, the cultural code, is that it must be inherently more decodable (useful) than the first hieroglyph, the bearer commodity form. A potential customer might be expected to be able to imagine future use values of a “noncultural” commodity—eating food, sitting on a chair. Such use values are direct and can be understood most independently from the social hieroglyphic aspect of the general commodity form. Matters are very different in the case of finding use values for a really and intrinsically hieroglyphic hieroglyph. Mere alienated squiggles, dots, or sounds might find no customers! In order to be as certain as possible of finding customers, it is necessary to operate in some kind of cultural code, which by definition cannot be private, arcane, or special. It must be shared with as many customers as possible and include communality, some experience of social connection, between them and the original message producers, both of whom are participants in a community of meaning. This directly contradicts the cutting of social connection inherent within the basic commodity form, an astonishing thing in view of commodity fetishism.
The contradiction I am trying to expand upon is that, although cultural commodities are subject to commodity fetishism simply because they are commodities, they are simultaneously subject to the absolute need to defetishize themselves, simply because they are also meaning-communicative objects.
Think of the example of music. For itself, for its hieroglyphic hieroglyph nature, music is simply just noise. It is only within a shared community of communication and understanding that specific types of noise can be defined as music and that a giving up and opening of aspects of the spiritual self can be undertaken and experienced as appreciation of that music. Think of the example of sports. There’s been much commentary on the commodification of football in the United Kingdom and its recently much-expanded electronic presentation, but no amount of fetishism will destroy the necessity for an assumption of football knowledge—rules, clubs, characters, folklore, fandom—in the code of the commodified text. Televised football games cannot exist apart from the football community. You could say that commodification of British football and the flotation of clubs as joint stock companies is a cynical exercise in the buying and selling of blocs of fans (their communities). But equally—my point—this commodization also recognizes community, however exploitatively, in a way that general fetishism would lead you to think was impossible.
The ubiquity and expanded nature of cultural commodity production seems to offer endless new possibilities for extending communication and community and for making their materials as legible, open, and usable as possible. Distilled usefulness drives cultural communities not only to seek and connect with communities of meaning but also to shape and enlarge them in the direction of the greater usefulness (meaningfulness to others) of their meanings. Classic FM radio has doubled the radio audience for classical music in the United Kingdom at a time when subsidized concert halls are emptying. Pavarotti’s World Cup anthem brought a whole new audience to opera. The serialization of literary classics on television produces tenfold increases in book sales. The commodization of Manchester United through television exposure, sales of scarves, kits, clothes, and memorabilia has produced a community of fans (fan base for the stock market and basis of comparative capitalization) of two and a half million, far more than could ever watch a match in a real community gathering. Manchester United plans to start its own satellite TV channel, not least to tap into the huge emergent Asian market for football, so helping to produce an electronic community of many millions more.
Perhaps Hollywood’s commodization of film is the paradigm case for the turning of cultural artifacts into cultural commodities through the distillation of communicative usefulness for the largest possible number. Realism is the visual lingua franca for reaching back and forth across the commodity form to find meaning and continuity. The rest of Hollywood filmic grammar pivots on convergent attempts to maximize recognizability and use: human interest, pace, identification, audience targeting, and structuring of taste and legibility through strong genre demarcation.
The general commodity form then may militate against social meaning, but it needs shared meaning when it wears its cultural clothes. One may say that capitalist culture is trying not to be capitalist. Moreover, it is the capitalist obsession of the ever-driven circuit of accumulation (remember, a commodity circuit, too), which ensures the never-ending and restless search for precisely that social connection that the capitalist commodity form denies. The uncertainty of whether the commodity will sell has to be negotiated time after time as a condition of the circuit that produces it, and it will sell only if it offers meaningful use in some shared symbolic world. The prior semiotic, material, and human factory of production of cultural commodities cannot be cut off from in the same way as the factory is from the material commodity. It is these connections that allow it to be sold at all; in the ever-repeated cycle of capital accumulation, the commodity is ever repeatedly revalo-rized not only with value (embodied human labor time) but also with meaning—new, extra, or more relevant meaning, meaning at any rate whose prerequisite is that sharedness that the fetishized commodity form denies.
I may seem here to be arguing that usefulness in the case of the cultural commodity, and only in the case of the cultural variant, overpowers fetishism. It is certainly important to stress the useful meaningfulness of the cultural commodity at a certain stage of the argument, to underline just what a strange and contradictory thing is this latter thing. But if the cultural commodity were indeed all usefulness, it would in fact cease to be a commodity. The usefulness of cultural commodities cannot actually imply a sharing of real, authentic, organic community as, for instance, that which lies behind our sense of William’s whole way of life. Millions of the new Manchester United fans have never visited, and will never visit, Old Trafford. Nor does the special kind of communicative usefulness of the cultural commodity imply knowledge in the consumer of the actual industrial labor process and capital relation that reproduces the cultural commodity.
Here we come to the nub of the argument, the final, clinching specificity of the cultural commodity, which is that, actually, its usefulness must not only permanently coexist with fetishism but also be profoundly and contradictorily transformed, altered, and stressed by it. In no other commodity form are usefulness and fetishism so unifyingly opposed. Defetishization works against fetishism, and fetishism works against defetishism, producing a continuingly stable instability in the cultural commodity. This is the elusive quality I’ve been pursuing, the particular nature of the cultural commodity. We may say the Quasimodo commodity. Its two halves are always half formed, struggling to complete themselves but failing through the ceaseless tension arising from their other half, from which they can never escape. Hardly has a community of meaning held sway than it is extinguished by fetishism; but only by its instant renewal will the commodity perform its appointed role. Unreal advertisements surround the shows and films that seem so real; glossy book covers, which have nothing to do with what’s inside, tell you that someone wants to sell to you more than to communicate with you; the way you buy an album of love songs from multiple copies in the store tells you that it was not really made for “only you.” The patronizing familiarity and bogus friendliness of the disc or video jockey tells you that he is no friend, really. Conversations are cut off rudely by phone-in hosts, showing the caller that the electronic commodity community is like no real, warm community. Your purchasing power being bought and sold on the London stock market makes hardly a home of a grounds that you have never visited in Manchester.
There is then a fundamental contradiction and instability in the doubly half-formed, Quasimodo, cultural commodity form. It must seem to offer the shared and communal, although its very form breaks organicism, local connection, and local meaning. A hieroglyph must simultaneously be not a hieroglyph. Fetishism must defetishize itself. Lack of social connection must present itself as social connection. This is the unstable, though intrinsic, double naturing of the cultural commodity, the source of its seductive charm. Neither nature can predominate, but each will struggle against the other to the end of time. In this eternal tension, an offer of meaning is immediately cut off. The impossibility of decipherment works through ease of decipherment. Semiotic social promiscuity works through an offer of individual faith and warmth. Alienation must overcome estrangement. Here lie clues to the secret powers of cultural commodities, to their hypnotic polysemy, to the inner creative impulses they supply to those who accept their offer: Use me but do not possess me.
Here too, at last, we see why the age of the ascendency of the cultural commodity is also the age of the domination of communication by electronic means. The insistent but impossible community offered by the cultural commodity is the false immediacy of the electronic message, best exemplified in the sensuous offer of community in the realist TV image. Reach out to touch its warmth and you find only cold glass. The false, ever hopelessly self-repairing, cultural commodity makes its fraudulent offers ad electronic infinitum in every home. Forgive the determinism; but once set upon the colonization of the cultural realm, the commodity age was somehow fated to develop the electronic image, its own abstract nature made concrete.
The workings through of these contradictions of the Quasimodo cultural commodity in practice are complex and multiform. The blind hand of the market and the ceaseless circuitry of commodities, finding any uses that will sell them, speeds up and explores all the permutations and limits of the contradictions in concrete cases. Yet the central, locating contradiction remains common to the tensions of all possibilities. These possibilities do not simply cancel each other out, fetishism wholly negating defetishism. They produce a number of potentially positive and productive potentials of complex usefulness, the usefulness of fetishized usefulness.4 Fetishism may truncate meaning, but it simultaneously makes what remains more open, contestable, and “sticky.” I discuss these complex usefulness possibilities under the headings of loss of dependency, displacement, and subversion.
Fetishism corrupts the possibility of simple usefulness within particular or named, real, sensuous communities of meanings. It interrupts the code, but the desperate bid to find any social connection across the bridge of fetishism leads to a promiscuous displacement of meaning onto as many other bearer forms as possible. The half message left in the communicative bit of the commodity, split off from its real community home by fetishism, seeks imaginary community in any other kind of human activity, value, solidarity, or worth. Electronic football becomes entertainment or a new aesthetics for the middle class or the giant screen community of a pub or club.
In news and current affairs, meaning is diffused across as many other uses and categories, across as many implied or imagined communities, as possible, to make as many contacts with receivers as possible beyond the purpose of simply to inform. So the newscaster becomes a friend and guide, the program a neighborhood get-together with human interest and “to end with” or “and finally” items emphasizing imaginary solidarity, with ambulance and police car chasing emphasizing human sensation, shock, and horror, in case the viewer’s senses have drifted momentarily during a previous, more purely information, item that could not be imbued with some other value or meaning. Public broadcasting is not exempt. A recent secret report drawn up by senior BBC executives, called “Reflecting the World,” suggests including entertainment stars into news reporting because “the groups at the bottom are looking for entertainment, not information.” BBC weather forecast stalwarts are being dropped as broadcasters switch to a “more entertaining” American format.
The search for home or community leads not only to the hijacking of other existing communities of meaning, expressive practices, or human values but also to the opening up of new ones by adding or greatly expanding (perhaps there are no wholly noncommunicative human uses), the communicative or expressive dimension of the use values of other commodities. A culturalizing process seeks and finds whole new branches of productive application by suggesting new, other, or more developed social meanings for functional objects, to give other reasons than their immediate usefulness for buying them, driving an abstract content into other forms to increase their prospects for cultural usefulness—imbuing them with communicative usefulness.
Communicative or expressive usefulness seeks to be embedded in other kinds of usefulness: noncoded, residually coded, or sensuous. This produces a kind of coding in the embued item, though always material and mixed and not of the floating signifier type. From the communicative side—whatever is doing the embuing—there is a decoding or dedigitalizing or dearbitrizing of a code; the possessing, literally, of other entities: bodies, practices, things, uses, materials. In such ways, cultural commodities find and make whole new and changing markets out of a previous cycle of commodization. Manchester United has found a whole new market for clothing and memorabilia. Purchasing a car is also to purchase a life statement. Perhaps the whole of the modern advertising industry is about seeking to further imbue, or cultural-ize, objects that may have only limited functional physical uses, to associate them with other meanings, to make them to some degree expressive. Under modern conditions perhaps, there are no noncultur-alized objects; that is, objects that signify only their own direct uses and satisfactions. The culturalization of commodities is now a condition of our culture and is the way we make sense of ourselves and others.
The desperation to find a sensuous base for fetishized communication in the proffer of imaginary community meaning, and to see in all sensuous activities and uses the possibility of embuing them with community and meaning, produces a tendency to focus on the expressive and cultural properties of the human body. The body and how it is seen is, so to speak, the smallest unit of communicative practice, the immovable material resting place, for the possibility of lodgement of fraudulent community. Here is one of the main mechanisms of detradi-tionalization, one of the main mechanisms of the rise of individuation as the hallmark of late or post modernism, especially as the somatization of individual meaning in an emergent, more body-based, structure of feeling in commodity culture.
Unconsciously and blindly, not willed or knowing, commodification of communication seeks to embody usefulness in as many body-oriented and immediate ways as possible. Commodities insinuate themselves into the interstices of daily life and in and around the somatic natures and tactile presence of the human body. Commodity-related meanings are therefore likely to be tied up with libidinous meanings in complex ways, both as a materialism of desire (what actually turns you on) and as a projection of the self as materially desirable to others. The marketing and design of the fetishized use values of fashion glamor and hygiene products invite us to sell ourselves like commodities to each other—in actual use, tempered toward enhancing the sensuousness (usefulness) of actual warm bodies in real relationships, in which, however, remaining fetishisms add distance and exploitation to personal relations, a mystery and objectification never to be fully overcome but which may aid desire.
The imbuement of the body and concrete practices with meaning looking for completion also aids in the globalization of the commodity culture; embued semicodes travel where purely arbitrary digital-alphabetical ones cannot.
The double enigma of the Quasimodo cultural commodity form produces not only a struggle of one part against another—commodity as usefulness, commodity as fetishism—but also, as we have seen, of this communicative part (usefulness) within itself. The effect of the bearer form (the fetishism of the general commodity form) on the communicative code is to partially fetishize and distance the latter’s internal forms. Of course, the communicative code cannot be completely fetishized; otherwise, it would not communicate. But the instability between the forms gives a good nudge within and without the text to understand the fetishistic nature of the form, thus subjecting its surviving internal meaning to irony, relativism, and even subversion. Football fandom can never be the same after the flotation of Manchester United. The usefulness bit of the argument and balance of contradiction, though, should not be forgotten, nor should the way this produces its handmaiden of realism, nor should the fact that usefulness is never dissociated from fetishistic loosening of immediate identities, not least in realistic representation. Viewers and listeners may be presented with the familiar and knowable, but the commodity form ensures, both internally and externally, that it can never be taken as authentic and original.
The productivity in reception of simple usefulness in texts may be along a grain of realism and realist decodings. But the complex usefulness of cultural commodities also offers the productivity of immediate subversion. In the days of representative innocence, the experts could have fund dissecting how the rest of us were manipulated semiotically. But now these simple investment returns to an elite have been crowded out by the speculations of the mass. We are all practical experts on mythologies now, on how to read the codes in cultural literacy, on how to take the broad hint when the advertisements’ inside and outside texts tell us that nothing is real. When there’s no one left who believes what they’re told, there’s no point in deconstruction. Realism subverts realism in the commodity relation.
People make their own culture, but to paraphrase Marx, they do it under conditions and with materials not of their own making. It is the materials, and their uses, that I am focusing on in this chapter. These are now overwhelmingly, especially for the popular classes, commoditized materials.
Common Culture (Willis et al., 1996) gives many examples of the creative practices around young peoples’ uses of cultural commodities and the electronic media. Young people are able to select, combine, and recombine chosen elements from an enormous range of received symbolic material and appropriate them to their own concerns and feelings. Often, they assemble new symbolic wholes. This is particularly evident in the active mining by the young of forty years or so of popular music history; in the production of off-air tapes, circulated to an extent that has precipated a crisis of copyright in the recording industry; and in the creativity of fashion and popular style. In such ways, young people demonstrate the ability to appropriate and recontextu-alize provided materials to express personal and often profound feelings and meanings of their own.
Consumption is still often seen as passive and manipulated, a mechanistic reflection of the cynicism and debasement of the manner and motive of production of what is consumed. In Common Culture, I use the term symbolic work to focus on the active and productive nature of practices of consumption, wherein meanings are assembled or derived from a variety of symbolic materials, now centrally including the fragments and flows of a commoditized, electronic environment, in order to make whole, or to bring greater coherence to, sets of personal and collective meanings in particular structured context. Symbolic work is comparable to but less alienated than wage labor. It involves Marx’s famous element of the humble architect raising structures in imagination and is a form of work as self-realization. Historically, commodity production may have driven out from the inside of the labor process the pride in skill and craft that it now welcomes back and needs in the outside world of (productive) cultural consumption.
Symbolic work concerns symbolic understanding and manipulation, meaning-making and sense-making, a centripetal force to place against the now mandatory decenteredness of the subject. As in the material capitalist labor process, production takes the form of the transformation of commodities—their productive consumption through the expenditure of human labor power to produce expanded value. This expanded value arises from the productive exploitation of the prior use value of commodities and takes the form of an expansion of that use value, that is, making the cultural object more useful, especially in connecting and converting general, alienated, and fetishized meanings into local, specific, contextual meanings and satisfactions of a kind not available locally before. This can be seen as an increase of use value over exchange value in the commodity, of conversion of estrangement into belonging, of the decommodization of the commodity.
My specific point is that all of these processes presuppose and help to produce a broad, humanist, and expressive subjective sense and practice of the labor power that is doing the work, in stark contrast to the narrow, instrumental models inscribed within training or state forms of the regulation and attempted formation of labor power. Though working with alienated materials, this expressive labor power is less alienated at least within its own bounds than is instrumental labor power; it works at home (cf. Marx, “He [the worker] is at home when he isn’t working, and when he is working he is not at home”) in ways that enable its owner’s own dreams and plans to be at least partly recognized, not least in the affirmation and development of the very possibility of the exercise and future expansion of expressive powers.
In some very important ways, cultural commodities are highly suited to adoption within the symbolic work of informal cultural production. The promiscuous and ubiquitous fetishized object (unlike the scarce auratic object) offers as many clues as possible for its own (ultimately impossible within its own circuit) dehieroglyphization. Cultural commodities are self-programmed with permanently open address systems. False offers and illusions pile on fraudulent intimacies. Intrinsic imperatives to profane use (the opposing force to aura) suppress all possible limiting norms of consumption. The ever-renewed existence of the fetishized object as a communicative commodity predicates any or all possible use of imagination or desire long enough at least to shift it off the shelf. A general satisfaction of desire is somehow on offer, a particularly elusive element of the attractive mystery of commodities, but so is specific use and apparent concrete contact. All fraudulent points on the compass of human desire are charted—and at the same time, if possible. This cacophony of possibility may upset the purist and pollute authenticity. Think of the visual clutter of Main Street, USA. Multiple temptation, evident sensation, and sheer tackiness insult the “improving heart” still beating within even the most left-wing breast. But however brutal may be these insults to refined sensibilities, they also do everything possible to suggest, pump, prime, encourage, even bully into use.
More unexpectedly, the fraudulence (inescapable fetishism) of the commodity form also has its uses for informal production. It accomplishes the suspension of guilt and moral context as determined by others. Destroying the reverence with which symbolic forms are viewed for a practice of profane use is the backhanded cultural contribution of commodity production. Tawdry it may be, but here are grounds for understanding one late-modern route into everyday practices of creativity and meaning-making. Contradictorily, the “homeliness-less-ness” of cultural commodities can liberate use values in concrete and contextual practices. Textual contradictionness can loosen up meanings, preparing them for reattachment in the real local meanings of actual receivers, listeners, viewers, and so on.
So even though, perhaps because, commoditized meanings are fetishized, they are actually highly suited to informal meaning-taking and meaning-making within lived everyday culture. Fetishism produces an estrangement, a lack of home, a loss of parentage and loyalty, which solicits any use, any possible attachment in a guiltless, never-ending offer of semiotic promiscuity. They indecently invite in a communicative antifetishism. Fetishism cuts the past; antifetishism opens the future. Cultural commodities have a “stickiness” for lived meanings because of their depthlessness.
You could say that commoditized meanings are predigested, pre-manualized, preexperientialized in highly appropriate ways for use in living cultures, which derive their own embedded meanings from the specific relation of sensuous parts rather than from concentrated linguistic expression. Cultural commodification seeks communicative usefulness without precondition and so finds a meeting point in practices and uses of the widest kind, not understanding themselves as being about, but nevertheless dealing in, meaning. There is an unholy, or you might say holy, fit between commodities struggling with their own fetishism and varieties of exploratory cultural and living arts practices seeking embedded communication. Lived cultural forms accept the invitation (overlooked or refused by others) to promote the internal tendency of defetishization of the cultural commodity into an external reality of real social defetishization, of social art. Lived cultural forms complete some strange new communities of meaning underneath the noses of an uncomprehending, though presiding, capitalist system.
My case then, with respect to the general cultural commodity form, is that it contains an inescapable tension, a sprung bow of exclusion and possibility. The internal signs of the cultural commodity are not simply polysemic in some inert or mechanical or matrix way. They are internally dynamic, internally contestable, internally tensed in ways that incite a response: to repair their wounded meanings. They are a distinct category of things in the world, not codes, but not not-codes. They are sensuous expressive forms that invite bodily and somatic forms of knowing and use. Just as the sacred auratic object glowers at mismatch, the commodity leers at it. It has half severed itself from its own too-insistent meanings. The mismatching of informal production finds and binds severed ends and in different ways in different circumstances. Think of how symbolic resources from the very different context and history of black American culture have been offered through commercial music to British white working-class culture, informally cut, edited, and taken up there for different purposes, without condition, without guilt, without historical baggage. The alienated offer of meaning in the commodity object is quite different from the command of cathedral understanding in the auratic object and can be taken into many homes.
Of course, the immediate qualifications are necessary again. None of this is to argue that all is for the best in the symbolic best of all possible cultural worlds. We are still no nearer to true depth in usable information for all, no nearer to the genuine understanding of other cultures in context. There are practices and materials toward a 3-D view of daily life and its dilemmas but not toward a 3-D view of the real political economy or the conditions that make up the everyday arena. The strange and alienated democracy of signs that feed the informal production of meaning was born contradictorily out of an undemocratic communications market (concentration of power, rising accumulation, etc.). Certainly, the rise of semiotic democracy is no more about economic democracy than was the rise of political democracy; there, a thousand signs fired at us everyday from advertisers. But try firing back just one, put up one humble fly poster, and you’ll find yourself fired and reporting to the local police station every week for a year. Still, the reality of the daily circulation of usable symbols within the flows of trash and the daily scope for creative meaning-making as ordinary events should not be made invisible simply because they do not fit the templates of our idealist precommodity dreams.
Even if there are difficulties in its recognition and conceptualization, the reality of informal symbolic work, the values it produces, are evident in two striking ways. First, embodied labor time increases potential use values of cultural objects as they are embedded in real practices in concrete contexts. Some of the practices include selection; combination; recombination; cutting and mixing; presentation; personal and personally appropriated fashions, musics, styles; personals edits and collections. The realization of embedded value, here, can be through the medium of informal exchange in informal groups and protocom-munities, the passing around and sensuous use and exploitation of technical equipment: matermixes; off-air tapes, copies, pirates; ideas for dress, recombinations of styles, and new appropriations. The scope and importance of these informal exchanges among the young should not be underestimated and is a main vector of their chosen interests and activities. Just as Marx insists that exchange is the sine qua non of surplus realization, so the manifest evidence of exchange and realization in the informal cultural sector demonstrates a prior process of real value production. The informal circuits are evidently driven by the value at stake, just as is the formal commodity circuit, but without the money moment. Personal and informal symbolic work produces multifarious forms of new value that, although unseen by the formal world, is made evident through continuous informal exchange.
Second, the existence of this value is most conclusively demonstrated, perhaps, by the way in which the capitalist cultural commodity circuit keeps dipping back into the streets and trawling the living culture for ideas for its next commodity, its next circuit. Capital’s cultural producers remorselessly ransack the everyday in their never-ending search to find, embody, and maximize all possible use values in products. The usefulness of the new or more developed communicative forms produced and shared in real informal communities of meaning is precisely the quality that attracts the predators, even as they deny it by plunging into further commodity relations. Evidently, the formal circuit would not keep returning to the streets unless it found real value there. This is the capitalist attempt to realize the value of informal production in the traditional capitalist form of money. This has not been adequately factored into the political economy of the circuit of capital.
What are the implications of the arguments advanced here for the nature and meaning of communication in newly developing ways of life? Are there any genuinely social and critical, as distinct from private and individual, meanings at play? Has my position lapsed into its own kind of fetishized, private, subculture, characterized by solipsist and idealist forgetting?
I would argue that we need new ways of understanding the revelatory qualities of informal cultural production. This will not, now, be in the form of any one settled discursive representation (or cultural complex of representations) of important external relations in the world claiming superiority (or having interpretive claims made on its behalf) over others. Rather than looking for how new representations may reflect social meanings and social position, we may have to look for eruptions and disruptions in the very materials in which representations are shaped and for changes in the sensuous human capacities, the kind of labor power that is involved in their development and use as expressions . Even if we cannot yet determine criteria for the epistemological superiority of any truth claims embedded there, the practices of informal production will nevertheless continue without us, making their own priorities and choices, shifting their own fields, choosing their own sites for contestation. What are some of the possible categories that will be burst in the development of expressive labor power?
The claimed creativities for productive consumption in Common Culture may seem trivial in a larger social frame. And yet we find something different if we direct ethnographic attention to the practical moment of sensuous activity. For themselves, these practical forms of activity can be seen as far from conservative, as actually a bursting of categories. Foremost perhaps, and crudely, they burst the category of the passive receiver, of fetishism in consumption, of the consumer taking in uncritically whatever meanings seem to be inscribed within cultural commodities. More ambitiously, and theoretically more adventurously, it can be claimed that these practical activities accomplish this not in primitive or naive assertion but in bursting the bounds of a formal textual aesthetic.
The traditional or institutional aesthetic has been firmly reified and cut off from human process; it is “in” things—paintings, pictures, texts, scores. The “protective” and “supportive” institutions have produced this execution of meaning. Galleries and museums produce the aesthetic distance, both physical and symbolic, that selects and separates art from daily life. The institution not only selects and distances but also places objects at the epicenter of concern—unique, timeless objects emitting their own aura. And it is the object, this auratic object, that is the timeless guarantee of, ironically, human meaning and value. But appreciating the aura, decoding the timeless code, is a specialist’s task. Not everyone has the eyes and ears—and training. A disposition toward fine things is necessary, possessing the right antenna and developing a sensibility to interpret the incoming signals, requiring, of course, a long liberal arts training in the conventions and equivalences of the code. All of this helps to produce and reproduce the distance, scarcity, and fixedness of traditional and institutional culture. Still, at its center, anchoring the whole thing, is the holy auratic object valorized by its internal aesthetic.
Contrastingly, the multiple and heterogeneous performances of common cultural consumption puts human activity at its heart. Whether we like them or not, as we have seen, the central imperative of the formation of the cultural commodity is that it shall be used. This is the sine qua non of the commodity, just as we may say that the sine qua non of the auratic object is that it shall not be used. Common culture reacts to and exploits this property of openness in the raging commodity, where official culture turns away into timelessness.
It may be the very homelessness and dirtiness of informal production (reflecting the alienation of the commodity) that guarantee its perpetual motion and inoculate against the insidious creeping auras of things absorbing back into themselves the human properties that made them. This can be seen as a bursting of a boundary, the stock in trade of textual modernism for most of the twentieth century (high art, bricolage, surrealism, deconstruction) is now part of everyday cultural practice. Although modernism as textual formalism preserved in institutions functions to reproduce social and cultural divisions and to make cultural elites socially unconnected, thus widening the gulf between mental and manual labor, popular practices function sensuously from the manualist side to break down that division. Modernism as institutional textual formalism offers a fraudulent, minority, and romantic escape at night from that bureaucratic, technological, commercial juggernaut that the same elites oil and service by day, as it empowers the commodity to rip on through the settled cultures of centuries without so much as a daylight word against it. In popular practice, it forces through the dialectic of living modernization in the ordinary experience of the majority.5
The practiced abilities of a developing, expressive, labor power developed through the productive consumption of cultural commodities demonstrate that labor power is, indeed, a commodity like no other and is capable of almost infinite application and extension. This is a sensuous basis for suspicion that not only is the capitalist purchase of labor power for a low fixed price an unfair exchange but the repetitive and disciplined uses to which it is put mark a limitation rather than an extension of human possibility. The inhuman use of labor power in wage labor counterpoints its expressive use in leisure, threatening to reignite old, as well as fire up new, themes of human alienation.
The expressive self is also a force to burst reification in official and institutional communication. It is a specific source of a practical critique of, or a particular dissatifaction with, the technical and instrumental communications of work and other bureaucratic sites. The creative uses of provided materials open up the prospect of detaching meaning from provided vertical channels and axes to allow a lateral circulation of signs and symbols relatively freer from domination in general. The expressive self teaches how to treat others as more fully human, as other expressive selves, and so must embody if not express a wider critique of how vertical structures seek to prevent or control personal meaning.
Finally, there is another disruption of categories intrinsic to the possibility of the functioning of expressive subjects, an outcome as well as a precondition for a postcommodity production of informal meaning. This is a bursting of the unitary social subject from within, a move toward what can be termed as the semiotic differentiation of the subject, the birth of semiotic individualism. This is the awareness, at some level beyond the identity innocences of the inculcations of instrumental labor power, that the self is continuously made and remade individually and collectively rather than being inherited or arising from the necessities of capitalist work and organization.
Though I argue that the productive consumption of commodities concerns a move toward their defetishization, a reconnection through praxis to locality and meaning, this more organic connection can never be that of precommodity cultures. Such (more) local meanings, and therefore the sensibilities associated with them, are not innocent. This is enforced by the nature of the impacted double hieroglyph, the enigma within the enigma of the cultural commodity. The commodity code, its fetishism, challenges the cultural code the moment that it offers safety and home. Irony saturates even the most down-home use of what can never finally be “at home.” The commodity form itself operates to the other side of its limits (the opposite side to usefulness and friendliness) to preserve an element of strangeness, even as the cultural part of the cultural commodity finds new homes in and through the practices of informal symbolic work. So although the productive consumer is creatively called forth in order to reassemble the safety, to repair the gaping hole in the cultural commodity by defetishizing it in relation to personal meaning, the completion of the project is always prevented or delayed. This eternal dance and perpetually renewed elongation underline the role of artifice. Both the relocation to a personal meaning landscape and the failure of it to root fully like “natural” symbolic flora and fauna produce a loss in semiotic innocence as belief in the transparent reflection of reality in signs.
Popular cultural texts themselves now play on this. They are internally aware of artifice, they tell of their own construction in an almost Brechtian way. Self-conscious cleverness, punning, and cross-references are legion in modern advertising. It is no particular feat any more to be able to tell the difference between artifice and reality. And as advertising differentiates its markets, so it differentiates among the ties of the symbolic to the real—on the one hand, providing conflicting and cross-cutting appeals, or hails, to the subject; on the other hand, providing conflicting views about which products can do what for whom. In the practical recognition that all claims cannot be true, the differentiated cultural subject is born or strengthened.
Not only this, but advertising for the same classes of products changes over time (“You must try the new improved . . .”), contradicting itself, and so teaching us about variable desire rather than fixed need. New products betray old products, as we discover we do not really “need” the originals. New (false) meanings usurp previous (therefore false) meanings. Newly peddled desires negate old “authentic” desires. Subjectivities are not actually reassembled every time a new product appears, but they are differentiated with respect to representation. People do not believe everything they see and hear and so are under permanent pressure to assemble a semiotic working world and its possibilities for themselves, to make a new ordering of personal signification as ordinary events.
The repairing of the commodity, its defetishization in concrete local productive consumption, is the rearticulation of reality as it is lived and perceived by the sensuous human subject. Reality is moved, to however small a degree, by the expressive work of the labor of expressive self-making. That reality was not there in the same way before the personal work of the defetishization of the cultural commodity. The impacted double nature of the commodity sign and its built-in conflict over what is truly signified invites symbolic awareness. Here is a practical recognition that “all the world’s a stage” and the productive consumer “a player on it.” The spaces and contradictions and desperate incompleteness of the cultural commodity invite in symbolic subjects, but only if they exercise at least some autonomy, an autonomy that punctuates old naivetes. The creativities of informal production carry over the marks of alienation from the commodity and cannot forget the lessons learned during the endless struggle to dehieroglyphize the hieroglyph, to release an enigma from an enigma, to attend the strangeness of an alienated birth of nonalienation.
There is a powerful experiential basis here for personal differentiation from other symbolic structures—of the self and its powers of labor from prescribed roles, for instance (worker, mother, citizen, pupil)—that are clapped on social subjects from the outside. There is also the basis for a practical recognition of the self as a cultural producer, with interests developed through self-activity, for an awareness of others, mediated through the knowledge that they too produce themselves, and for a sensitivity to reality as, at least in part, a multiple collective production of social identities. Social relations between semiotically differentiated subjects are likely to be conscious of artifice, of play, of alternatives, of muted, implicit, or tacit knowledge that things, in micro at least, could have been different.
Repairing the meaning of commodities is a sensuous and practical democratic lesson (if not a cognitive or ideological recognition) that representations and symbols in general do not just unproblematically reflect a prior reality; they are made to connect. Just as there is an understanding of the scope for some “construction out” of the self during symbolic work, so there is the possibility for resistance against “construction in” of social classification of identity and labor power from the outside. This is also a practical basis for an alertness to the ways in which larger systems of social representation—of race, class, gender, sexuality, region, age—function not only to reflect a prior, given, reality but also to oppressively shape it, even to produce aspects of it. Not only resistance to these things but also an internal role in their shaping become further possibilities. If this shaping boils down to artifice, then not consciously but as a logic of a practice, this artifice can be enjoined.
Preexisting social representations are meanings systems and, therefore, find their way into, indeed are always already part of, meaning commodities. There is an exciting possibility here. Embedded as they are in cultural commodities, they are therefore equally subject to the latter’s internal contradictions, double-naturing, and openness to symbolic work. The commodity form here operates to limit and disturb the meaning content of social representations, sloughing away the naturalness of their origins, preventing a naturalization in their destinations. Social representations therefore need not be resources only for dominant groups; cultural commodities, or their creative uses in context, must be understood as bearing a wider social valency as well as a semiotic one. The meanings not only of commodities but also of wider systems of social representation can to some extent be challenged, borrowed, and adapted to purpose in the workings of informal cultural production.
All consumption is cultural to some extent (and therefore to do with meaning, and therefore to do with social representation), but cultural commodities are more related to the sensuous, the tactile, the micro-emotive—to the direct sculpting, changing, and projecting of the human body and its intimate styles of being and relating. These somatic contacts of consumption as well as associated modes of symbolic work must therefore work through the particular nature of solid warm bodies and their differences. The points of contact of this sensuous immersion may overlap with, but are not the same as, the theorist’s drily classified categories: race, class, gender. They are points on a personal map of positive distinction from others and materials toward possible personal constructions (body out, not society in) of the self as powerful, not placed; as sexy, sexual, and desirable, rather than controlled. Or at least materials toward shifting the balances from the latter to the former of these terms. There is a sensuous basis here for social subversions of received, allocating, and repressive regulation of instrumental labor power, its putative formation of a narrow sensuousness of the body. Informal symbolic work can be a somatic working outward against—or at least holding or ironically embarrassing—external domination and social positioning.
The age of commodity domination has brought all kinds of defeats, disruptions, and distortions, but it also makes unstable received systems of cultural identity and social representation, rendering highly problematic instrumental and labor-oriented versions of these things. The unstable energies of the double enigma taken up into concrete practices create unexpected channels for identifications to slither, for readaptations, for turnings back, for ironizations of official and regulated models. A cutting edge of subversion arises from the instability of the commodity in relation to the differentiated subject as expressive self. New mobilizations and self-representations of the expressive self may be “dirty,” rather than politically correct. They may be packed with ironic and unintended consequence, but they make old-fashioned and visibly repressive the instrumental and nonironic disciplines and technologies of the attempted production of instrumental labor power.
We may also find in these considerations more productive ways to approach the stale antinomies of the question of the quality of arts and cultural activities. Not what is the best because most beautiful, perhaps, so much as what is best because most symbolically productive, most promoting of a popular and practicized capacity for symbolic work, what in practice shifts rather than reproduces narrower versions of the powers of the self.
The closest approximation to this is to sell the product before it is made—El Dorado! This is certainly one of the driving forces behind modern production technology and the sporadic arrival of post-Fordism: i.e., advance orders for cars, which are made only to specification and with a customer waiting. But it is much more difficult to sell cultural commodities before they are made; and once made, there are enormous dangers of the product staying in the warehouse. Negative and uncreative responses to the danger include market flooding and repetition: producing lots of items almost randomly in order to maximize the odds of producing at least one winner and repeating, ad nauseam, the formulas of the occasional winners, namely, the standardized genres and clichéd visual imagery that surround us. From here flow tendencies toward the much-discussed homogeneity of capitalist culture, toward the restriction of choice, and toward the leveling down to lowest common denominator. There are, however, countertendencies, which should not be underestimated, arising form the pressure to sell and to find new markets.
This point was suggested to me by Phil Corrigan. This chapter has benefited in numerous other ways from his detailed comments on draft versions.
There are of course rules for the consumption of cultural commodities, including possession of cash and, not least, concerning legal purchase and ownership and conformity with the requirements of copyright law. Compared with the norms and requirements surrounding the consumption of high-cultural items, these are at least explicit, visible, and simple and are frequently their own incitement to transgression.
Street drugs (marijuana, amphetamines, LSD, cocaine, crack, ecstasy) may be a particular kind of quintessential modern, “sticky,” cultural commodity, the more so because of their illegality. It is reliably estimated that the United Kingdom is heading toward a plateau of drug-taking, in which about 50 percent of its young people will have some direct experience of drug-taking and 10-20 percent become regular, usually weekend, users. This follows the pattern in the United States very closely, though lagged by a few years. It is a mystery to professionals in the area why the trend has been so inexorable. It is certainly remarkable that drug use has risen in tandem with the rising saturation of society by cultural commodities and the media. Possibly, young people’s general experience of a commodity society makes them more open to the mysteries and promise of drugs, which are seen as similar to cultural commodities.
Drugs offer a maximum of suggestive openness with an unspecified but powerful internal dynamic. The pharmacological effect, “the buzz,” offers all the metamorphoses of the cultural commodity but in a swift, programmed, and automatic way. There is no evident connection to other sites, histories, authorities, or dependencies (i.e., the inbuilt fetishistic nature of drugs). The act of taking drugs, therefore, helps to cut the individual and group loose from these anchors. At the same time, a powerful experience and meaning do seem to be on offer yet in a way that is “anchorable” by users in their own memories and experiences as well as in the rituals and practices of drug-taking itself.
No matter what the pharmacology of the particular drug, the common denominator seems to be a productive tension related to this double nature: powerful but unspecified external determinations and individual personalization of the actual experience. A common metaphor is of a film slipped onto the projector of the mind whose images and content are supplied by the user’s own personal history, mental set, and setting. (Statistics here are drawn from Russell Newcombe, presentation at Young People and Drugs Conference, organized by the Youth Affairs Service of Wolverhampton Metropolitan Borough Council, October 21, 1994.)
This is not an attack on the avant-garde per se, only on its sociology (or lack of it) and on the irony of its frequent social misdirectedness. Avant-gardist practices certainly batter the illusions and auras of bourgeois culture, but they do not recognize, or adapt their messages for, other cultures. And they do not recognize or disdain the possibilities of these same living practices in different (subordinate) locations and contexts, so devaluing their embodied potentials for coherence and reconstruction.