Consuming Places

JOHN Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415113113
• eBook ISBN: 9781134829675
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

John Urry has been discussing and writing on these and similar questions for the past fifteen years. In Consuming Places, he gathers together his most significant contributions. Urry begins with an extensive review of the connections between society, time and space. The concept of 'society', the nature of 'locality', the significance of 'economic restructuring', and the concept of the 'rural', are examined in relationship to place. The book then considers how places have been transformed by the development of service occupations and industries. Concepts of the service class and post-industrialism are theoretically and empirically discussed. Attention is then devoted to the ways in which places are consumed. Particular attention is devoted to the visual character of such consumption and its implications for place and people. The implications for nature and the environment are also explored in depth. The changing nature of consumption, and the tensions between commodification and collective enthusiasms, are explored in the context of the changing ways in which the countryside is consumed.

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TIME AND SPACE IN THE CONSUMPTION OF PLACE

INTRODUCTION

For many years I have been fascinated by what one could describe as the sociology of place. This developed out of a concern with how people actually experience social relations, both those which are relatively immediate and those which are much more distant, and how these intersect. But this concern is not in any simple sense empiricist because places are not clear and obvious entities. The understanding of place cannot be undertaken without major theoretical endeavour. To know something as apparently simple as the social relations of place and its consumption is to have to engage with a sophisticated array of social theorising. Indeed almost all the major social and cultural theories bear upon the explanation of place in one way or another. However, such theories have not begun to explain the diversities of place, and this is because they have not engaged with the sociologies of time and space, the relations between the social and the physical environment, and the interdependencies between the consumption of material objects and of the natural and built environments.

I thus seek to establish three arguments in this book: first, that the understanding of place is a complex theoretical and empirical task requiring a range of novel techniques and methods of investigation; second, that most social theories deal unsatisfactorily with the nature of place because they have not known what to do about time, space and nature; and third, that places are partly at least ‘consumed’ and that the mode of such consumption remains relatively underanalysed, involving as it does a range of human senses.

This book is entitled Consuming Places. This title is intended to indicate four claims. First, places are increasingly being restructured as centres for consumption, as providing the context within which goods and services are compared, evaluated, purchased and used. Second, places themselves are in a sense consumed, particularly visually. Especially important in this is the provision of various kinds of consumer services for both visitors and locals. Third, places can be literally consumed; what people take to be significant about a place (industry, history, buildings, literature, environment) is over time depleted, devoured or exhausted by use. Fourth, it is possible for localities to consume one’s identity so that such places become almost literally all-consuming places. This can be true for visitors, or for locals or for both. This can produce multiple local enthusiasms, social and political movements, preservation societies, repeat travel patterns, the pleasures of strolling around and so on. It is the contradictions and ambiguities revealed by these four dimensions of the consumption/place relationship that I shall principally examine in this book (see Sack 1993, for a related examination of place and consumption).

I am also concerned with the changing analysis of place, and especially with the notion of ‘restructuring’. The use of this term signifies the shift in understanding of place that occurred from the late 1970s onwards. This was the result of two processes: the extraordinary economic transformations of almost every place that occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s; and the concurrent revival of political economy approaches within the social sciences which brought out the need to theorise and to research the rapidly changing economic base of place. Later in this chapter I will examine in more detail the intellectual shifts in the 1970s and early 1980s that transformed our understanding of place. I will also go on to consider how in the later 1980s the sense of restructuring changed, as politics and culture came also to be seen as central to the structuring and experience of place. In particular I will concern myself with the consumption of place, especially visually, and I will endeavour to link some notions in the analysis of the consumption of goods and services to the consumption of place.

The turn towards culture was prompted by two further conceptual transformations. First, much more attention was paid to how one’s sense of place is not simply given but is culturally constructed. Second, attention has also been directed to the economic bases of such cultural transformations, to what elsewhere I have termed the ‘economy of signs’ (Lash and Urry 1994). This has led many studies to be concerned with the so-called culture industries— arts, tourism, leisure—which have become crucial to the economic and cultural transformation of different places.

Paralleling these innovations have been some changes in the perceived relationship between society and nature. Sociology, as the study of society, was premised upon the radical distinction between society and nature. This reflected the transformation of nature and its conceptualisation as a realm of unfreedom to be tamed or mastered by humankind, by society. But in recent years this sense of nature as ‘out there’ and subject to control and mastery has been subject to both intellectual and practical critique (again see Lash and Urry 1994: Ch. 11). The environmental movement in particular has transformed our comprehension of nature, which in many recent formulations is to be regarded as embracing both society and the physical environment, what can be characterised as an ‘integral nature’.

In this chapter I shall be concerned mostly with time and space, issues that I have been investigating for some years now (see Urry 1981b; Gregory and Urry 1985). In this chapter I shall show that these are centrally significant notions within contemporary social theory, but that they have not always been so. The history of social theory in the twentieth century has in some ways been the history of their singular absence. But it will also be shown that this was an absence that could not be entirely sustained. Here and there time and space broke through, disrupting pre-existing notions which were formed around distinctions which had served mainly to construct an a-temporal and an a-spatial sociology. Societies were typically viewed as endogenous, as having their own social structures which were neither temporal nor spatial. Furthermore, societies were viewed as separate from each other and most of the processes of normative consensus, structural conflict or strategic conduct were conceptualised as internal to each society, whose boundaries were coterminous with the nation-state. Apart from aspects of urban and rural sociology there was limited recognition of the processes of internal differentiation across space. What was therefore investigated by much twentieth century sociology was a system of independent societies whose social structures were viewed as consistent over space, and where there is little analysis of diverse social times or that places and organisations are in important senses timed.

It has also been argued that this academic neglect was more marked in the case of space than time. Soja notes the paradox that in the 30 or 40 years around the turn of the twentieth century there was a series of sweeping technological and cultural changes which transformed the spatial underpinnings of contemporary life (1989). These included the telegraph, the telephone, X-ray, cinema, radio, the bicycle, the internal combustion engine, the aeroplane, the passport, the skyscraper, relativity theory, cubism, the stream-of-consciousness novel and psychoanalysis (see also Kern 1983). But Soja argues that these changes were not reflected in much social theory at the time. Such spatial changes mainly came to be the province of a separate and increasingly positivist science of geography which set up and maintained a strict demarcation and academic division of labour from its neighbours. Soja suggests that an historical consciousness became inscribed within social theory such that the ‘historical “imagination” seemed to be annihilating the geographical’ (1989:323). And yet in fact this historical imagination, reflected in much twentieth century Marxism, remained relatively impervious to the precise significance of time and especially to how social relations are irreducibly temporal, and to the fact that there are different social times implicated within particular social structures.

In the first part of this chapter I shall provide relatively brief summaries of some of the early twentieth century writings on time and space. In the second part of this chapter I show what it was in the 1970s and 1980s that changed all this, that brought space and time into sociology and social theory more generally. In the last section, analysis will be provided of the 1980s emergence of what one could describe as a research programme of ‘time-space’ sociology and social theory. Attention will be directed to some of the main works which have taken on board how social structures and cultural processes are necessarily timed and spaced; and how these timings and spacings are intrinsic to the powers and impact of such structures and processes.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME AND SPACE

I will begin here with sociological approaches to the investigation of time. Although the very word time designates disparate concepts most sociological accounts have presumed that time is in some sense social. They have adopted a version of the ‘French’ school’s approach, following Durkheim. He argued in Elementary Forms that only humans have a concept of time and that time in human societies is abstract and impersonal and not simply individual (1968). Moreover, this impersonality is socially organised; it is what Durkheim refers to as ‘social time’. Hence, time is a ‘social institution’ and the category of time is not natural but social. Time is an objectively given social category of thought produced within societies and which therefore varies as between societies.

A similar emphasis upon the qualitative nature of social time was developed in Sorokin and Merton (1937). They distinguish between societies based on whether there is a separate category of clock-time, over and above social time. The Nuer for example do not have a sense of time as a resource. Time is not viewed as something that passes, that can be wasted, that can be saved (Evans-Pritchard 1940). Where there are expressions of time, these take place by reference to social activities based on cyclical ecological changes. Those periods devoid of significant social activity are passed over without reference to time. It has also been noted that while most societies have some form of ‘week’ this may consist of anything from three to sixteen days (Colson 1926). In many societies such divisions reflect some particular social pattern. The Khasi, for example, have an eight-day week since they hold a market every eight days.

Modern societies are generally viewed as being more reliant on clock-time than are pre-modern societies. Time in modern societies is not principally structured in terms of social activities. Clock-time is central to the organisation of modern societies and of their constitutive social activities. Such societies are centred around the emptying out of time (and space) and the development of an abstract, divisible and universally measurable calculation of time. It is clear that the first characteristic of modern machine civilisation was temporal regularity organised via the clock, an invention that was in many ways more important even than the steam engine. Thompson famously argued that an orientation to time becomes the crucial characteristic of industrial capitalist societies (1967). People were viewed as having shifted from an orientation to task to an orientation to time although the historical evidence now suggests that this distinction was less clear cut than Thompson suggested, since some features of a ‘modern’ time consciousness pre-dated industrialisation.

Thompson’s argument depended upon the classical writings of Marx and Weber. Marx showed that the regulation and exploitation of labour time is the central characteristic of capitalism. The exchange of commodities is in effect the exchange of labour times. Capitalism entails the attempts by the bourgeoisie either to extend the working day or to work labour more intensively, as Marx says: ‘man is nothing; he is, at most, the carcase of time’ (Marx and Engels 1976:127). If the working class is not able to resist such pressures, competition will compel capitalists to extend the work period beyond its social and physical limits. There will be ‘over-consumption’ of labour-power and it will be in the interests of the bourgeois class as a whole to introduce limits on continuous extensions of the working day. However, this collective need does not ensure that reductions on the length of the working day will in fact be realised. Capitalist competition has to be constrained in its own interests (and in those of the workforce). Hence during the history of the first industrial power, Britain, factory hour legislation, the intervention of the state, was particularly important in preventing continuous extensions of the working day and heralded the shift from the production of absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value production. And it is this form of production, with what Marx calls ‘denser’ forms of work as compared with the more ‘porous’ longer day, that led to the staggering increases in productivity that have mostly characterised capitalist industry since the mid– nineteenth century.

However, what Marx did not pursue further is how this dominance of clock-time transforms people’s subjectivities. Various processes in modern societies constitute people as temporal subjects, as having both an orientation to time, and being disciplined by time. Weber provided the first sociological analysis of such processes. He said of the Protestant ethic:

Waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins. The span of human life is infinitely short and precious to make sure of one’s own election. Loss of time through sociability, idle talk, luxury, even more sleep than is necessary to health…is worthy of absolute moral condemnation.

(1930:158)

The spirit of capitalism adds a further twist to this: as Benjamin Franklin maintained ‘time is money’ —to waste time is to waste money. People therefore have taken on the notion that it is their duty to be frugal with time, not to waste it, to use it to the full and to manage the time of oneself and that of others with the utmost diligence. Not only work but also leisure is often organised in a similar fashion. It is planned, calculative, sub-divided and worthwhile, ‘rational recreation’ in other words.

Alongside this rationalist analysis there has developed a more phenomenologically oriented social theory of time. Heidegger was concerned to demonstrate the irreducibly temporal character of human existence. He stresses in Being and Time that philosophy must return to the question of ‘Being’, something that had been obscured by the Western preoccupation with epistemology (1962). And central to Heidegger’s ontology of Being is that of time, which expresses the nature of what subjects are. Human beings are fundamentally temporal and find their meaning in the temporal character of human existence. Being is made visible in its temporal character and in particular the fact of movement towards death. Being necessarily involves movement between birth and death or the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past and present. Moreover, the nature of time (and space) should not be confused with the ways in which it is conventionally measured, such as intervals or instants. Measurable time-space has been imposed on time-space relations in Western culture.

There are somewhat similar themes in Bergson. For him, time proper is the time of becoming. He argues against a spatialised conception of time and maintains that time or duration must be viewed as ‘temporal’ (1910). People should be viewed as in time rather than time being thought of as some discrete element or presence. Furthermore, time is inextricably bound up with the body. People do not so much think real time but actually live it sensuously, qualitatively. Bergson further argues that memory should not be viewed as a drawer or store since such notions derive from incorrectly conceptualising time spatially. Memory must be viewed temporally, as the piling up of the past on the past which has the effect that no element is simply present but is changed as new elements are accumulated from the past. In Bergson’s analysis time is viewed qualitatively but space as abstract and quantitative. In the critique of the ‘spatialised’ conception of memory as a ‘drawer’, Bergson privileges time over space and views the latter as abstract (see Game 1994).

Mead also adopts a consistently ‘temporal’ viewpoint. He focuses upon how time is embedded within actions, events and roles, rather than seeing time as an abstract framework (1959; Adam 1990). Mead regards the abstract time of clocks and calendars as nothing more than a ‘manner of speaking’. What is ‘real’ for Mead is the present, hence his major work on time is called The Philosophy of the Present. What is in the past is necessarily reconstructed in the present, each moment of the past is recreated afresh. So there is no ‘past’ out there, or rather back there. There is only the present, in the context of which the past is being continually recreated. It has no status except in the light of the emergent present. It is emergence which transforms the past and gives sense to the future. This emergence stems from the interaction between people and the environment, humans being conceived by Mead as indissolubly part of nature. This emergence is always more than the events giving rise to it. Moreover, if the present is real, the past and future are ideational or representational. They are only open to us through the mind. Mead’s view is fully twentieth century in that he emphasises the relative nature of time. There is no universal time standard but any standard is viewed as relative to the organism undergoing the measuring. However, as Adam (1990) notes, his rejection of abstract time means that he reproduces the distinction between durée and time (by concentrating on the former) rather than trying to overcome it as some more recent writers have endeavoured to do.

I now turn to a short history of space. The sociological classics dealt with space but in rather cryptic and undeveloped ways. Marx and Engels were obviously concerned with how capitalist industrialisation brought about the exceedingly rapid growth of industrial towns and cities. Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1969) provides an illuminating urban sociology of 1840s’ England. More generally in The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Marx and Engels describe how fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away, all newly formed relations become antiquated before they can ossify; all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. Marx and Engels argue inter alia that capitalism breaks the feudal ties of people to their ‘natural superiors’; it forces the bourgeois class to seek markets across the surface of the globe and this destroys local and regional markets; masses of labourers are crowded into factories so concentrating the proletariat and producing a class-for-itself; and the development of trade unionism is assisted by the improved transportation and communication that capitalism brings in its wake. In his later works Marx analyses how capitalist accumulation is based upon the annihilation of space by time and how this consequently produces striking transformations of agriculture, industry and population across time and space.

Some similar processes are analysed by Durkheim although the consequences are viewed quite differently. In The Division of Labour in Society (1984) it is argued that there are two types of society with associated forms of solidarity: mechanical (based on likeness or similarity) and organic (based on difference and complementarity). It is the growth in the division of labour, of dramatically increased specialisation, that brings about transition from the former to the latter. This heightened division of labour results from increases in material and moral density. The former involves increases in the density of population in a given area, particularly because of the development of new forms of communication and because of the growth in towns and cities. Moral density refers to the increased density of social interaction. Different parts of society lose their individuality as people come to have more and more contacts and interactions. This produces a new organic solidarity of mutual interdependence, although on occasions cities can be centres of social pathology. Overall, Durkheim presented a thesis of modernisation in which local geographical loyalties are gradually undermined by the growth of new occupationally based divisions of labour. In Elementary Forms Durkheim also presents a social theory of space (1968). This has two parts: first, since everybody in a given society represents space in the same way, this implies that the cause of such notions is social; and second, in some cases at least the spatial representations literally mirror the dominant pattern of social organisation.

It is a paradox that Max Weber made very few references to space since his brother Alfred Weber was one of the seminal contributors to the theory of industrial location. Max Weber was relatively critical ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• 1: TIME AND SPACE IN THE CONSUMPTION OF PLACE
• PART I: SOCIETY AND SPACE
• PART II: RESTRUCTURING AND SERVICES
• PART III: CONSUMPTION, PLACE AND IDENTITY
• PART IV: CONSUMING NATURE
• BIBLIOGRAPHY