Addictive Consumption

Capitalism, Modernity and Excess

Gerda Reith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780415268264
• eBook ISBN: 9780429875649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this engaging new book, Gerda Reith explores key theoretical concepts in the sociology of consumption. Drawing on the ideas of Foucault, Marx and Bataille, amongst others, she investigates the ways that understandings of 'the problems of consumption' change over time, and asks what these changes can tell us about their wider social and political contexts. Through this, she uses ideas about both consumption and addiction to explore issues around identity and desire, excess and control and reason and disorder. She also assesses how our concept of 'normal' consumption has grown out of efforts to regulate behaviour historically considered as disruptive or deviant, and how in the contemporary world the 'dark side' of consumption has been medicalised in terms of addiction, pathology and irrationality. By drawing on case studies of drugs, food and gambling, the volume demonstrates the ways in which modern practices of consumption are rooted in historical processes and embedded in geopolitical structures of power. It not only asks how modern consumer culture came to be in the form it is today, but also questions what its various manifestations can tell us about wider issues in capitalist modernity.

Addictive Consumption offers a compelling new perspective on the origins, development and problems of consumption in modern society. The volume's interdisciplinary profile will appeal to scholars and students in sociology, psychology, history, philosophy and anthropology.

Part I
The shifting problem of consumption

In this first section of the book, we trace shifting ideas about ‘the problem of consumption’ as they emerged in the eighteenth century and were gradually transformed, in relation to changing socio-economic and political conditions, over the course of the next two centuries, into current understandings in the present day.

1
Luxurious Excess

The emergence of commodity culture

Capitalism is ‘the illicit child of luxury’.

– Werner Sombart (1913)

Introduction

This chapter argues that the system of Western consumerism was built on what could be called ‘addictive consumption’: the trade in psychoactive commodities as well as the relationships of power and domination that produced them. To illustrate this, it explores the emergence of a dualistic conception of consumption in the eighteenth century, tracing the cultural biographies of some of the goods that shaped the modern world as well as the discourses and cultures of consumption that formed around them. Doing this reveals how what were called ‘drug foods’ – alcohol, coffee, tea, sugar and tobacco – were transformed over the centuries from the rarified, luxury goods of the aristocracy into necessities of everyday life.

From the outset, responses to the new colonial commodities were deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, they were regarded as a means for the emerging middle class to demonstrate status and respectability. But at the same time, they were also subject to a range of critical discourses, largely expressed though the ‘critique of luxury’. Such criticisms articulated longstanding tensions between autonomy and dependence and expressed deeper anxieties around shifting political, economic and social relations, particularly mercantile concerns over the balance of trade. In a climate in which the mass uptake of imported goods was seen to threaten national productivity, criticisms of ‘luxurious excess’ were expressed in terms of the disruptive potential of foreign commodities to undermine or weaken the individual as well as the social body, especially when consumed by the ‘lower orders’.

In this chapter, following the trajectories of some of these commodities highlights the geopolitics of consumption, and it links large-scale processes of capitalist development with the everyday practices of individual consumers. The chapter begins by considering the unequal economic relations of dependence and slavery that the colonial project was founded on and considers the place of ‘drug foods’ as sources of both profit and subjugation within such a system. It moves on to outline the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, noting the economic impact of the colonial commodities as well as their role in generating new ideas about the self and about desire. The next section discusses the dualistic response to consumption, looking first at the ways that the critique of luxury expressed mercantile concerns over the balance of trade, as well as about social mobility, in both religious and quasi-medical discourses. It argues that, in this, it acted as a normative project that attempted to govern the consumption of the population, particularly women and the poor. The section moves on to consider an oppositional set of discourses in which the new forms of consumption were also entwined with ideas about productivity and respectability in ways that both highlighted the increasing power of the bourgeoisie and also underlined the gendered division of public and private space. Finally, the chapter briefly notes the transformation of ideas about luxury as the mercantile period gave way to an era of classical liberalism, paving the way for a recognition of the benefits of consumption for economic growth and an understanding of capitalism as ‘the illicit child of luxury’.

The emergence of commodity culture

Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the spectre of consumption haunted the West. Claims over its first sightings are disputed: some have argued for fifteenth-century England (Mukerij 1983) and others for seventeenth-century Dutch culture (Schama 1987), whereas some saw it in pre-industrial eighteenth-century Britain (McKendrick et al. 1982; Smith 1992). By the eighteenth century, there appeared to be little doubt of its presence, however, with a number of scholars pointing to the emergence of a large-scale desire for consumer goods stimulating trade and acting as a motor of economic growth (McCracken 1988; McK-endrick et al. 1982; Smith 1992).¹ During this period, shifting political, economic and social relations were turning the world upside down and bringing new ways of being into existence. The development of global trading networks based on colonial exploitation and oceangoing commerce, the increasing influence of the merchant bourgeoisie and the rise of modern state bureaucracies generated new structures of power. A new, speculative spirit of commerce was encouraging the growth of new kinds of financial institutions and abstract entities, such as ‘the market’ (Reith 1999). Meanwhile, the shift of large numbers of the agrarian, rural population into urban centres created new forms of social organisation, expressed in the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres, as the middle classes became increasingly powerful, and women became more visible in public life (Matthee 1995, 25). Consumption was at the vanguard of these changes, both driving, and driven by, developments in the world around it. It played an integral part in the development of capitalism in the early modern period, as we shall see in this chapter.

‘Psychoactive revolutions’: colonialism, drug foods and power

From around the sixteenth century, exotic new commodities had trickled into the West from the distant lands of the ‘New World’ of the Americas, the Middle East and Asia. Spices and sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate, distilled spirits and tobacco as well as textiles and fabrics made their way into the homes of the ruling elites of Europe.

Their rarity and expense initially limited these commodities to the aristocracy, where their conspicuous consumption acted as both material and symbolic means of displaying wealth and status. At the same time, their stimulant, psychoactive properties encouraged consumption for medicinal purposes, earning them the label ‘drug foods’ (Mintz 1985). They were panaceas for a range of ailments, with tea used for colds and scurvy, coffee taken to reduce tiredness and chocolate lauded for its restorative benefits. Tobacco was considered to possess divine properties and was known as the ‘holy herb’ for its abilities cure a wide range of illnesses, from toothache to chest ailments and cancer. Sugar was renowned for its soothing properties and its ability to clear the blood, calm the stomach and strengthen the body and mind. Distilled spirits – aqua vitae, or ‘water of life’ – were consumed for a variety of ailments, such as plague and gout, and sold in apothecaries. For a long time, the line between drug, food and medicine was not clearly drawn, lending these commodities an indeterminate status as they circulated around the courts of the European aristocracy.

The consumption of these new goods also had political significance. These were the commodities of colonial exploitation, whose circulation linked the globe in trade and supplied the raw materials for the development of capitalism. For Fernand Braudel, these relationships were responsible for creating the modern world system as well as the Western diet. As he put it in his sweeping three-volume analysis of Civilization and Capitalism (1979), the foods that we eat today are a direct result of the dominance of the food preferences of powerful nations, and as such, ‘the success of a food is the success of a culture’. And indeed, their legacy remains today as the forerunners of some of the world’s largest and most powerful industries, such as ‘Big Tobacco’ and ‘Big Sugar’. The fact that many of these commodities were, from the outset, regarded as drugs, and are today still regarded as problematic and sometimes even ‘drug-like’ is key for this study of addictive consumption.

An alternative reading of history describes this period, in the phrase of David Courtwright (2001), as one of ‘psychoactive revolution’. A number of writers have noted the correspondence between the development of capitalism and the emergence of global trading empires based on the production, exchange and consumption of psychoactive or intoxicating commodities (Withington 2011; Bancroft 2009). In his study of the political economy of opium, for example, Carl Trocki states that ‘the entire rise of the West from 1500–1900 depended on a series of drug trades’ (1999, xii). It was a trade that had more than mere commercial significance, because it also served as a ‘means to control manual labourers and exploit indigenes’, as Courtwright (2001, 3) puts it, and as we will see in the following sections.

Mercantilism and slavery

The new colonial commodities were produced through a system of mercantilism that was founded on slavery and various forms of unfree labour. Mercantilist policies attempted to make trade favourable to nation states – an aim that from the sixteenth century onwards was increasingly bound up with imperial geopolitical relations. Aware of their position in the world economy, Western states attempted to gain political power and economic influence by limiting imports from weaker, peripheral states to raw materials and food supplies, and increasing their own industrial production and output to compete with strong, core states. In this way, they used policies of economic protectionism to attempt to establish their dominance and sustain their autonomy by restricting the flow of bullion out of the country as well as by subsidising exports and by imposing tariffs and quotas on imports. They also relied heavily on slavery, and in this, the colonies played a particularly important role. As well as supplying labour, these peripheral settlements also provided raw materials and markets in an unequal relationship that allowed the core states to avoid the worst excesses of dependency upon each other. The system operated on a triangular route linking the western European powers with the West coast of Africa and the West Indies in the Atlantic Slave Trade. European dealers traded goods for African slaves, who were sold and transported to the sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations.² These supplied raw materials to the core states, who then turned them into finished – profitable – commodities through manufacture (Braudel 1979). Meanwhile, to the east, the British East India Company acted as a proxy government and presided over unfree labour in the tea plantations in India. A vast, global system of dependence – namely, slavery and various forms of unfree labour – thus underpinned the mercantile system, and over a four hundred-year period, more than eleven million slaves were transported within it, with almost half as many again dying in the process.

Distilled spirits are entwined with the history of slavery, both as products of that system and as agents for the control of individuals within it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, the production and consumption of potent alcohol increased substantially, as spirits found a new role as the currency of slavery itself. European traders used a variety of products in exchange for slaves, such as textiles and metals, but the most popular amongst African slaves were spirits, in particular, brandy and rum. The latter was made from molasses, a by-product of sugar production itself, and came to be used not only to purchase slaves but also to control them. Regular rations were given to slaves, upon which they were encouraged to become dependent to help them to blot out the intolerable conditions of enslavement, and to make them docile and controllable. The production and consumption of rum was thus integral to the system of slavery in the foundation of commodity capitalism, and it is in this role, Tom Standage writes, that ‘rum was the liquid embodiment of both the triumph and the oppression of the first era of globalisation’ (2007, 205). Other spirits were used in similar ways on indigenous peoples. Whereas British colonists used rum, the French spirit of subjugation was brandy, and the Spanish one mescal. The Spanish conquistadors also exploited South American Indians’ consumption of coca leaf when they realised that chewing the plant enabled their slaves to work longer with less food, so turning a native form of consumption against them. British colonists involved in the tea trade regularly gave opium to plantation workers to allow their undernourished bodies to better tolerate hardship, with one official admitting ‘this country [India] could not have been opened up without the opium pipe’ (in Griffiths 2011, 97). Such a blunt statement articulates the more general role of intoxicating commodities in the imperial venture, which were deliberately used as a means of both alleviating hardships the colonists themselves had imposed and creating a state of dependence that made the labour force more controllable.

The trickle down of ‘infinite desire’

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the expansion of a world system of trade dramatically increased the supply of these psychoactive commodities, as well as other new goods such as fabrics, ceramics and homewares, while the development of mass production lowered their costs. Calico and porcelain, muslin and cotton, spices and silks now entered the homes and brightened the everyday lives of larger sections of the population, creating enduring relationships with material culture as they did so. This movement eventually reached critical mass in the eighteenth century when, for McKendrick et al. (1982), an ‘orgy of spending’ ushered in the ‘consumer revolution’, and for Braudel (1982), an influx of foodstuffs oversaw the ‘dietary revolutions’ of the West. In particular, tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco soon became western Europe’s ‘licit drugs’ of choice: mildly psychoactive substances that became integral to the culture of everyday life (Goodman 1993). Their stimulant properties ensured their speedy popularisation, both as pleasurable substances in themselves and, especially amongst the working poor, as palliatives that would relieve hunger and tiredness, provide an energy boost and generally ease the harshness of everyday life. In this, they went some small way to alleviating the austerity and monotony of the pre-modern diet and easing the conditions of working life for many. In Sidney Mintz’s (1985) neo-Marxist interpretation, these were ‘the people’s opiates’, linking the consumption habits of the poor with the colonial enterprise. Their pleasurable stimulations increased workers’ productivity, meaning that they ‘figured importantly in balancing the accounts of capitalism’ (1985, 148).

The economic impact of the global commodities was enormous. Between the start of the seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, annual per capita consumption of tobacco increased from 0.01lb to 1.94lbs (Goodman 1993, 60). At the end of the eighteenth century, per capita sugar consumption had risen by a staggering 2,500 per cent over the previous one hundred and fifty years (Mintz 1985, 73). In a similar period, consumption of the stimulant drinks and sugar products comprised ten per cent of the British population’s total expenditure on foods (Shammas 1990, 137), and by 1885, taxation from alcohol, tea and tobacco made up almost half of the gross income of the British government (Courtwright 2001, 5). The psycho-active consumption habits of Western consumers fuelled the new global economy, meaning that, as Courtwright puts it, ‘Drug taxation was the fiscal cornerstone of the modern state, and the chief financial prop of European colonial empires’ (2001, 5).

Just as important as their economic impact was the role of the new commodities in the generation of new mindsets amongst European consumers. Mintz describes the colonial transfer of ‘shiploads of stimulants, drugs and sweeteners for the growing urban populations of Europe’ as a process that generated ‘a critical connection between the will to work and the will to consume’ (1985, 64, 5). In this, they generated desires for new forms of consumption in sections of the population that had previously never experienced such things and reoriented them towards a culture that was based on ‘commodity gratification’ (Goodman 1993, 135).

This period of modernity heralded new relations between the individual and material culture based on ideas about autonomy, freedom and selfhood (McCracken 1988; Campbell 1987). Material goods had broken free of their roles as reflectors of fixed status and became more fluid vessels for individual self-realisation. The emergent concept of ‘the self’ was the medium of these new ideas, whereas the notion of fashion represented an ideal in which identity was constructed – not ascribed – through the consumption of goods. Indeed, McCracken argues that ‘with the growth of fashion grew an entirely new habit of mind and pattern of behaviour’ (McCracken 1988, 19). These habits and patterns were lived out through consumption, where the fashionable quest for ‘the new’ was nothing less than the quest for self-creation through material culture. The consumption of the new colonial goods brought enjoyment into the lives of many, and it introduced the population to the pleasures of commodity gratification and self-expression for the first time (Courtwright 2001). Perhaps most of all, they brought expression to the modern notion of desire as that which was potentially infinite. Up until now, the concept of desire had been of something that was limited, after Aristotle’s teleological concept of eudaimonia (desire), which he described in Nicomachean Ethics as the goal of the good life, and which was regarded as an end in itself. (Nich Eth 1097). Those who attained it existed in an ideal, ‘desire-less’ state (Berry 1994, 113). Now, however, a new conception of desire as something potentially unending, and open to fleeting satisfaction through continual engagement in commodity culture, developed. It was also within this emergent worldview that ideas about desire as a driving force of consumption, as well as the concept of consumption as both a reward and an incentive for industrial labour, so widespread in contemporary Western societies, were forged.

The dualism of consumption: respectability and luxury

From the outset, responses to the new colonial commodities were deeply ambivalent. As the luxuries once restricted to an elite minority trickled down the social hierarchy to increasingly mass consumption, their meanings changed, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of images
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: consumer capitalism and addiction
• Part I The shifting problem of consumption
• Part II Addictive consumptions: drugs, food, gambling
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index