The Authority of the Consumer

Nicholas Abercrombie, Russell, Whiteley Keat, Russell Keat, Nigel Whiteley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415089180
• eBook ISBN: 9781134879090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Authority of the Consumer explores the implications of `consumer society' - charting its meanings in particular circumstances and analysing this way of understanding the relationships between `providers' and 'recipients'.

Part One

Social change and consumption

Chapter 1
Scepticism, authority and the market

Russell Keat

This chapter explores some philosophical issues raised by current debates about the desirability of protecting cultural practices from the effects of unregulated market forces. In particular, it considers the implications for these debates of relationships between forms of social authority and epistemological theories, that is, theories about whether, and in what ways, various kinds of knowledge-claims can be justified.¹

I start by noting what strike me as some significant features of the theoretical and political alignments that often emerge in these debates:

1. Those who try to defend the special status of cultural practices, to exclude or protect them from the market domain, are frequently accused of being (cultural) elitists, of displaying a contemptuous attitude towards the tastes and judgements of ‘ordinary consumers’. This antielitist rhetoric seems often to be used both by the bosses of multinational media empires and by ‘radical’ cultural theorists who otherwise have little in common with them.
2. Many economic theorists, including those who are especially keen to promote the virtues of the market, are subjectivists about the epistemological status of value-judgements (see Plant 1989, Roy 1989). That is, they regard such judgements—about ethical, aesthetic and similarly ‘evaluative’ matters—as no more than the expression of individual tastes or preferences, and hence as having no rational or objective mode of justification. In doing so they espouse a particular form of philosophical scepticism.
3. ‘Post-modernist’ social theorists—by which I mean those who celebrate, rather than merely chart, the supposed emergence of a radically new form of social and cultural life, and are correspondingly disparaging about its predecessor, modernity—are sometimes accused of complicity with the (capitalist) market and/or its ‘consumer culture’ (see Jameson 1984, but cf. Selden 1991). Such theorists tend also to endorse the kind of scepticism about knowledge to be found in post-structuralist philosophy and literary theory; and one reason for their celebration of post-modernity is their belief that the social ‘authority’ of such knowledge and its bearers in modern societies is now waning (see Bauman, 1987).

Whether or not these ‘observations’ are correct, they serve to indicate the main questions that will be explored in this paper. Do arguments for the exclusion of cultural practices from the market require the defence of certain forms of social authority for cultural ‘producers’, and a corresponding rejection of the authority or ‘sovereignty’ of consumers? Are such arguments undermined by scepticism about particular forms of knowledge or judgement? And does scepticism about values—commonly termed ‘meta-ethical’ scepticism—itself justify the use of the market for any products about whose value, according to such scepticism, no justifiable knowledge-claims can be made?

I shall now explore the first point in more detail, which may make its connections with the second and third, and its bearing on the questions just noted, a little less opaque. I shall then go on to examine what is involved in the ascription of sovereignty to consumers in orthodox economic theory, and to present a (partly) hypothetical example of how such sovereignty might be seen by cultural producers as challenging their authority. I shall conclude by sketching an argument for the protection of cultural practices from the market, and considering how this would be affected by meta-ethical scepticism.

ELITISM, AUTHORITY AND MODERNITY

When those who work in non-market cultural institutions try to resist their subordination to market forces, they often claim that the effect of this would be to compromise the integrity of their practices,² to distort their proper character, to undermine the quality of what would become their marketable ‘products’, and so on.

So, for example, academics often argue that the pressure to compete for students will undermine their conception of what is educationally worthwhile; television producers, that the deregulation of broadcasting will lead to a decline in the quality of programmes; subsidized theatre and dance companies, that the commercially modelled criteria for funding imposed by the Arts Council will inhibit artistic innovation; and museum curators, that being reduced to the status of a leisure industry will put at risk the proper purposes of their collections.

Such objections are often met with the charge of elitism. For surely, it is said, the essential feature of the market is the sovereignty of the consumer, and hence the exercise of control by the judgements of consumers over what is produced? If so, to resist such control can only indicate an elitist contempt for consumers’ judgements, tastes, intelligence and so on, and a corresponding insistence that they should instead defer to the authority of a cultural elite.

Yet many who oppose the commercialization of cultural practices in these terms do not regard themselves as elitists. So how might they rebut this accusation? Clearly, a good deal depends here on how ‘elitism’ is defined; and although this term is often now used to convey little more than content-less political abuse, one can still identify at least two relatively clear and distinct senses of it, which I shall call ‘elitism of access’ and ‘elitism of judgement’. In the case of cultural practices, the former might be expressed in the slogan ‘high culture is only for us, the few’, the latter in ‘high culture is what we few who can judge these matters say it is’.

In more theoretical terms, the former concerns the potential social range of distribution of various valued forms of experience, appreciation, enjoyment and so on—the elitist of access claiming that this is necessarily, or at least desirably, highly limited. By contrast, the latter concerns the social location of the judgements which, as it were, confer value on such items—the elitism of judgement claiming that this too is necessarily or desirably limited to some specific social group.³

It seems clear that resistance to the market need not involve commitment to elitism of access. For whilst cultural practitioners may fear the effects of competition to satisfy existing consumer preferences, they may none the less believe that pretty well anyone who wishes to is potentially capable of experiencing and appreciating the ‘products’ of these cultural practices. What is more problematic is elitism of judgement: can the kinds of claims noted earlier about the potentially damaging effects of the market be made without commitment to this form of elitism? My answer to this is: ‘Yes—but only if one is not an epistemological sceptic, and not without appealing to some form of social authority.’

That there is no necessary commitment to elitism of judgement might be argued as follows. The relevant judgements here can be supported by forms of reasoning and argument that are open to anyone to understand and evaluate; and the criteria by reference to which they are made can likewise be rationally justified, or at least intelligibly and openly contested. Hence they are not necessarily the judgements of an elite group which declares, in effect, ‘these things are valuable, true, etc., just because we say so’. Indeed, it might be said, to reject this argument would imply that simply to believe that rationally defensible judgements are possible is elitist—and this is absurd.

This argument is quite persuasive as far as it goes. But it fails to engage with a further set of problems which are perhaps what those who make the charge of elitism (of judgement) often have in mind, even if their concerns are not best expressed through this particular concept. To see what may be involved here, I will briefly consider an apparently extreme example, that of science, and the judgements made by the members of a scientific community.

This case is ‘extreme’ in that, of all forms of intellectual inquiry—and also of cultural practices, if one may regard such forms of inquiry as belonging to this broad category—science can be seen as having the strongest claim to operate at least potentially in accordance with rationally justifiable criteria (via rules of evidence, hypothetico-deductive theory-testing, etc.), so that scientific judgements are open to essentially impersonal and objective standards of assessment.

Indeed it is precisely this feature of science that makes it the paradigmatic instance of modern knowledge. In particular—and the same story can be told of, for example, ‘modern’ philosophy—its practitioners typically represent this discipline as originating, historically, in the overthrow of all appeals to ‘authority’, that is of all attempts to justify scientific claims by reference to the beliefs or judgements of particular individuals, social groups, members of religious institutions, etc. Such appeals to authority were to be replaced by reliance upon canons of reasoning and the proper use of empirical evidence, regarded not only as the epistemologically relevant criteria for assessing scientific claims, but also—at least in Enlightenment thought, and closely related to its ideal of individual autonomy—as depending on, and made possible by, human capacities which everyone either possesses, or can in principle acquire and exercise.

Yet however convincing this account of modern science is epistemologically, it is potentially misleading sociologically. For both the conduct of scientific research, and even more obviously the education of scientists, require complex forms of social authority, in which particular individuals and groups are accorded, by virtue of their supposed expertise, training, etc., the right to make judgements about the merits of others’ scientific work, and legitimate power to enforce these. Similar points apply to the ways in which the judgements of a scientific community are themselves accorded such authority when its ‘knowledge’ is practically employed or relied upon outside that community.

So even if it is true that ‘anyone and everyone’ can in principle reconstruct and evaluate for themselves the lines of reasoning and evidential support for any scientific claim, both the internal conduct and external role of science would be impossible if this were the social process through which the validation and application of such claims actually took place.⁴

At the risk of hasty generalization from this particular case, one might then suggest that every social practice which either depends upon, or issues in, knowledge-claims—whether these are scientific, aesthetic, moral, philosophical, etc.—requires some relatively coherent and effective forms of social authority. And, relatedly, one might also distinguish two different kinds of criticism that may be directed at specific exercises of such authority. First, it may be claimed that the authority has been abused, in that the judgements made fail to accord with the practice’s own criteria as a result, for instance, of the intrusion of their authors’ particular social interests.

Alternatively, however, it may be claimed that the authority in question is ill-founded, in that the criteria upon which these judgements are based are themselves defective in various ways. The most radical version of this second kind of criticism is the sceptic’s, according to which there are no criteria by which these judgements can be evaluated, no way of justifying any claims to knowledge in this particular domain. Scepticism, that is, necessarily delegitimates any form of social authority in the domain of knowledge to which such scepticism is thought to apply. The exercise of such authority must then appear as no more than the arbitrary exercise of power, as the concealed expression of its bearers’ social interests.⁵

If this is so, and if what underlies current charges of cultural elitism is hostility to certain forms of social authority, one would expect to find a correlation between anti-elitist rhetoric and scepticism about the relevant form of knowledge or judgement. This seems to be confirmed by the current prevalence of such rhetoric in the aesthetic domain, where scepticism is probably at its strongest. One would also expect to find a tendency to regard anyone who is not an aesthetic sceptic as a cultural elitist—a view which, whilst conceptually somewhat confused, may none the less express a significant social insight.

Furthermore, this account may explain (if any explanation is necessary) why post-modernist social theorists, who tend to be sceptics about the possibility of ‘foundations’ for any kind of knowledge or judgement (except perhaps their own, which they often seem happy to impose on their students through their authority as academics) tend also to represent modernity and the Enlightenment as ‘authoritarian’—a charge that scientists and others of a ‘modern’ frame of mind find especially distressing, for the reasons indicated above.⁶ Again, whilst conceptually confused, this may have the virtue of encouraging such ‘moderns’ to acknowledge the necessary role of social authority within their intellectual practices—even if, rightly unconvinced by such scepticism, they continue to regard this authority as legitimate.

CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY AND THE AUTHORITY OF CONSUMER PREFERENCES

I turn now to the concept of consumer sovereignty, and explore its relationship to the issues about scepticism and authority presented above. Although one is unlikely to find much explicit discussion of this concept in standard textbook accounts of a market economy, I shall suggest that its implicit role in these has considerable significance for arguments about what kinds of activities and goods are suitably located within the market domain. I begin with a sketch of how the free market system is supposed (that is, theoretically) to operate which, whilst highly simplified, is I hope recognizably related to neo-classical economic theory and to influential justifications for the market which draw upon this.

In a market economy, rival producers compete with one another in pursuing their overall aim of profit-maximization. Their success or failure in this task is ultimately determined by their relative ability to meet, in a cost-effective manner, the demands of actual or potential purchasers of their products: that is, to satisfy the wants or preferences of consumers, where these preferences are indicated by the consumers’ willingness to pay for the products on offer. Consumers are free to choose between the producers from whom they will make such purchases; and thus the failure of any producer to satisfy these preferences is typically met by the ‘exit’ response of taking their custom elsewhere. Likewise, new firms are free to enter the competitive process at any point, and/or existing firms to develop new products, etc. But their success in doing so is always subject to their relative ability to satisfy the preferences of consumers.

This picture of how the free market is meant to operate is closely related to an influential justificatory account, that is, one that tries to show why the market is a better set of mechanisms, procedures, institutions, etc. than any other (for example than a state-controlled system, a feudal/guild one, a hunter-gatherer one, and so on). This consists in claiming that a market system is the most efficient, in the sense that for any given set of resources, it maximizes the total amount of preference-satisfaction that can be obtained from their use.⁷

But what exactly is meant by a ‘preference’ here? The brief answer is anything, or at least anything that may incline someone towards the acquisition of a product, and is expressed by their willingness to pay for it. Both the specific character and possible bases of such preferences are matters of complete indifference on this account of the market: that is, there is no concern about either what they are preferences for, or what if any reasons might support these preferences.

This conception of consumer preferences is sometimes taken to imply that they are to be seen as ‘mere’ or even ‘arbitrary’ in character. But this is potentially misleading. The use of such terms would normally imply some contrast with, say, well-founded or reflectively formed preferences. But consumer preferences are not necessarily ‘mere’ or ‘arbitrary’ in this sense, either in (economic) theory or in practice. Rather, the concept of preference should be understood in an essentially neutral or ‘agnostic’ way, so that it can refer both to ‘mere’ and ‘not mere’ preferences, without any distinction being made between these (cf. Sheffrin 1978, and Norton 1987: ch. 1).

This use of the concept is related to the way that economists see it as no part of their business to make any ‘value-judgements’ about consumer preferences—in any way to ‘discriminate’ between them on the basis of their aesthetic, moral or political character, of the soundness or otherwise of the reasons which may underlie them, or indeed of the extent to which their satisfaction contributes to the consumer’s own well-being, a point to which I shall return in the penultimate section.

The refusal to make such judgements is typically justified by an appeal to the methodological ideal of value-freedom or value-neutrality, together with the claim that, to the extent that one is concerned only with constructing predictive and/or explanatory theories of the market, there is no need to discriminate in this way between preferences. But it is often further supported by inv...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Social Change and Consumption
• Part Two: Consuming Culture
• Part Three: Consuming Public Services