Culture of the Slow

Social Deceleration in an Accelerated World

N. Osbaldiston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230299764
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319449
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Across the world, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with the tempo of modern life. Described simply as the 'slow phenomenon', this volume explores this new brand of living that entails not simply slowing down but an embracing of alternative activities that promote meaning, thoughtfulness, engagement and authenticity.

1

The Time of Consumption

Kim Humphery

Introduction

If there is one phrase that I most dread to hear, it’s ‘price check’. We all know this term by now; it is, in fact, definitive of the contemporary landscape of everyday shopping. We all know the routine as well. As the sound of this phrase floats in the supermarket air, having been spluttered into a public address system by some frazzled kid at the check-out, everyone in the queue slumps on one leg and breathes in frustration at the fact that we are going to have to wait. Meanwhile, the cost of the offending article is ever so slowly ascertained. This is not what computerised scanning was meant to be all about. Bar codes are supposed to put a bar on delay. But, of course, they don’t; they bolster an efficiency of stock control with no promise of quick service. And in a world of fast consumption, a delay of any such kind becomes more and more intolerable. If it’s not there in the shop or online; if it’s not quickly purchasable or deliverable; it’s not worth having. If the systems and technologies of consumption fail – and the queue moves too slowly – it’s an excuse for consumer outrage.

That at least is the story so often told. Both in reality and in expectation, consumption in the affluent world apparently moves to a dizzy beat. Ours is, it would seem, a world of temporal velocity; a velocity in large part driven by the stuff we consume and the manner in which we consume it. For this reason, among others, a contemporary politics of ‘slow living’ has been both formative of and influenced by a re-energised critique of consumerism, particularly evident in the West. It is this critique, and the understanding of consumption as the thief of time, that I explore here.

In offering such an exploration, the first part of this chapter briefly surveys the field of anti-consumerist politics, particularly in relation to what contemporary critics, activists and a litany of theorists have had to say about the connection between temporality and commodity culture. In the second part I step back from this political and theoretical tradition in order to untangle and clarify the assumed connections between consumption and time. Analytically, this chapter seeks to be generative rather than merely critical; to reconstruct rather than dismiss an understanding of contemporary consumption as the vandal of a relaxed and contemplative life. Drawing on recent work in relation to social practice, it is suggested here that the doing of consumption and the doing of time are, of course, irrevocably overlapping, but that this relationship is not easily characterised through metaphors of speed. As some advocates of slow living have themselves observed, a vision of consumption as velocity threatens to relegate a politics of slow to a nostalgic critique of all that is ostensibly fast. In this context, the celebration of everything slow no doubt makes for a pithy and engaging branding of an alternative politics. Yet, this apparent alternative risks overlooking the subtleties and possibilities for change that are part-and-parcel of the very cosmopolitan world – including the practices of consumption – that it opposes.

The pace of anti-consumerism

Anti-consumerism as social critique, political activism and lifestyle change has undeniably enjoyed a big renaissance over the past decade or more, particularly in the consumer economies of the West. While there is a long tradition of academic and public intellectual critique of consumer culture, and a long history also of alternative living movements opposed to a commodification of everyday life, a renewed vigour and urgency has come to inflect debate about the ramifications and future of a globe geared to consumerism. This has been matched by an equally vigorous growth in political groupings and networks advocating responsible consumption. It has resulted also in the revitalisation of movements promoting various forms and degrees of simple or frugal living. Finally, as this book testifies, it has given rise to a renewed attention to the temporal imperatives, rhythms and pressures of consumer modernity. This too has translated into political and social action exemplified by the growth of ‘decelerated living’ movements of which Slow Food is perhaps the best known.¹

This ‘new politics of consumption’, as Juliet Schor (2000) has dubbed it, is nothing if not diverse. The critical literature – mostly journalistic and accessible in style – now ranges from scholarly but highly readable contributions, such as Schor’s The Overspent American (1998) or Robert H. Frank’s Luxury Fever (1999), to a biting polemic on the Western ‘affluenza’ of never having enough stuff (see de Graaf et al. 2002; James 2007; Lawson 2009). What aligns these and many other such works is not so much a shared political line (although a social democratic liberalism pervades) but an opposition to wasteful, careless and status-driven consumption and a deep concern about what such consumerism is doing to nature, self and society.

The same target and concerns inform the activities of a range of groupings, networks and movements (of which there are now very many) that fall within the ambit of an anti-consumerist politics; from organisations such as Action Consommation in France or the Consumer Citizenship Network based in Norway, to the Centre for the New American dream in the USA or Adbusters in Canada. To these we could add many other political collectives and coalitions whose activities fade into a concern with issues of over-consumption and consumer culture; groups like Food Not Bombs, the International Society for Ecology and Culture or The Compact. Beyond the Western world, critique and activism in relation to the global consequences of Western consumerism and the global spread of consumer culture have been prominent in the writings of scholars and commentators such as Amartya Sen (1999), Martin Khor (2001) and Vandana Shiva (2005), and in the work of radical groups such as the Consumer’s Association of Penang.²

The point to note here is that any identifiable new politics of consumption, any reinvigorated anti-consumerist sensibility, especially on a global level, evades identification as a stand-alone politics. Rather, as advocacy and activism, anti-consumerism arises out of and morphs constantly back into broader political concerns to do with environmental sustainability, global equity, democratic rights, social justice, existential equilibrium and the social and cultural ‘health’ of communities and nations.

What thus traverses the new politics of consumption, at least in its dominant Western manifestation, is a sense of the fourfold impact of consumerism and consumer culture. Environmental concerns are certainly primary, especially in terms of the impact of consumption on the depletion of resources and the production of consumer waste. Yet a contemporary anti-consumerism is not simply a politics of sustainability. The global inequities and the remaking of local economies wrought by the corporate globalisation of consumer capitalism animate the work of networks and movements oppositional to over-consumption just as forcefully as do environmental concerns.

Importantly also, it is the socio-cultural and personal ramifications of consumption that have occupied the work of many contemporary Western critics and inform the activities of alternative living movements in the affluent world. I have elsewhere observed the irony underlying a good deal of contemporary anti-consumerist polemics in which the environmental damage and the global injustice of high levels of Western consumption are resolutely acknowledged but most attention is then directed to the supposed impact of consumerism on the well-being of the Western individual and the moral state of the Western social fabric (Humphery 2010, p. 144).

Leaving aside this particular irony, and now bringing this discussion into clearer focus with the theme of this book, the new politics of consumption has tended unmistakeably to give renewed salience to certain abiding suppositions about the workings and consequences of a ubiquitous Western (and increasingly global) consumer culture. In both socio-cultural and existential terms, anti-consumerism connects a never satiated drive to consume, especially in affluent societies, to the dissolution of social and communal bonds and to the manufacture of a sense of self that is lost in a spendthrift and workaholic temporal maze of materialistic desire and status envy.

There’s nothing especially out of the ordinary here. Public intellectuals and social movement activists have, after all, consistently and over many decades argued along these lines. So too, though through recourse to the conceptual armoury of mass modernities and postmodernities, have social and cultural theorists. In doing so, both the polemicists and the theorists draw on a common-sense logic of individualistic and acquisitive consumption as ultimately culturally destructive; a perspective that accords with how many Western citizens themselves feel about the ‘consumer culture’ in which they continue to live, despite economic downturn. Thus, while almost all consumption critics and activists now talk of the need for an environmentally sustainable mode of living, many also focus intently on how the consumerism driving the continued, if currently more muted, over-consumption of the affluent world undermines our sense of well-being and happiness; contributes to an ethos of overwork, haste and instantaneous gratification; underscores a bland, cultural homogenisation of life; and fragments communities and social relationships. This is a story of consumption that is both familiar and appealing to many. As such, it is not only meaningful in that it speaks of the felt reality of living in a consumerist society, but also politically useful in that it offers a narrative of destruction and the need for change that has motivated people to act – both individually and collectively – in opposition to a commodification of life.

This is why certain academic objections to the current anti-consumerist narrative of consumption as destruction, especially from those who insist that consumption is a complex activity, have little traction with consumption critics and activists outside the academy. Many of us working across disciplines such as sociology, geography, cultural studies and anthropology share in the political critique of consumerism. Yet we continue to insist that consumption and peoples’ participation in it is not simply to be understood as mindless, meaningless and damaging. We might insist also that there is no simple connection to be made between contemporary affluent consumption and a supposed increase in rampantly materialistic and individualistic values, an apparent loss of caring communities or a straightforward temporal acceleration of everyday life.

But, so what? Right now, these interpretative nuances seem to detract from the need to raise the alarm; to demonstrate that a world geared – through good economic times and bad – to endlessly increasing levels of wasteful and unequally accessed consumption is not how we can or should live. The truth of the grand narrative – whether offered by polemicists, activists or theorists – of our consumption activity as highly damaging to nature, self and society remains far more readily accepted by those opposed to consumerism than a less morally cut-and-dry narrative that sees consumption as a material practice to be understood, not simply critiqued.

This kind of tension between what we might call an oppositional versus an interpretivist politics of consumption is well exemplified in relation to consumption and time. Alongside the central belief that contemporary consumption in the affluent world undermines the maintenance of lasting communities, consumerism has come for many to equal a loss of temporal sensibility and control. In fact, the new politics of consumption is very much a critique of the temporality of the consumer market place, not just of an obsession with stuff. Overwhelmingly, for anti-consumerist critics and activists, a culture of consumerism is essentially a culture of speed. As de Graaf et al. (2002, p. 39) insisted a decade ago, the consumer society creates a sense of ‘time famine’ driven by the acceleration of the (efficiency-oriented) pace of work and everyday life demanded by a consumer economy.

This point, one made also by Schor and others, has heavily informed the perspective of movements advocating downshifting and simple living. It has translated as well into an ancillary political movement through which American citizens have been urged to reclaim their time by refusing the pressure of increased working hours and the ‘over-scheduling’ of everyday life that arises as people attempt to juggle a plethora of work, social and consumption-oriented activities (de Graaf 2003). What has marked this North American discourse of contemporary anti-consumerism, particularly given the long tradition in the USA of transcendentalist frugality (and, indeed, of Puritanism), is a sense that consumption itself is merely a necessary activity that must be made subordinate to the ‘real’ pleasures to be derived from the non-material cultivation of the life of the mind and the emotions – and from the acceptance of our fundamental obligations to nature. All this is, in part, to be achieved through an awareness of time; through a re-awakening to its flow and through a concomitant reclaiming of considered action (Elgin 1993; Andrews 1998; Etzioni 2003).

A similar sensibility can, of course, be found elsewhere. For the now iconic and predominantly European-based Slow Food movement – arguably the major progenitor of a resurgent, late twentieth-century concern with consumption and time – a globalised consumer culture has been the chief harbinger of ‘fast life’. As the chapters in this book document, the need to take purposeful control of the runaway speed of consumer modernity has from the outset informed the politics of slow. The Slow Food Manifesto (which has changed little since its adoption in 1989) is uncompromising in connecting the frenzied, industrialised consumption of the current era – emblematic of which is Fast Food – to a changed way of being; one enslaved to velocity (Petrini 2001). This perspective inflects the sister group CittaSlow, which extends the philosophy of Slow Food to the life of provincial towns. CittaSlow thus advocates for a return to a pre-globalisation governance and organisation of local communities that re-enlivens urban public space, connects townspeople to local, sustainable production and businesses, and emphasises a form of pleasurable living (including consumption) that is, above all, quiet and unrushed.³

This talk of pleasure – of ‘quiet material pleasure’, as the Slow Food manifesto puts it – unmistakeably tends to distinguish the advocacy of slow from that of the (predominantly US-based) promotion of downshifting and simple living. This contrast between the politics of slow and the politics of simplicity can no doubt be overemphasised (while it is equally clear that downshifting movements have taken hold in many countries beyond the USA). Nevertheless, a philosophy of slow does, in contrast with much talk of frugality, promote consumption as a continuing source of enjoyment and social connection. Rather than cast moral suspicion on the desire to consume, a politics of slow seeks to remake our consumer pleasures. Where simplicity and slowness thus intersect, and deeply so, is not in their approach to consumption per se but in their mutual critique of the manic, work-and-spend culture of consumer economies. That is, both the simple and the slow fundamentally reject the pace of consumer modernity.

It might be observed that few contemporary anti-consumerist arguments and perspectives are actually all that new. What is novel, however, is the particular sense of urgency with which we must now deal with consumption and its consequences in the face of both climate change and a clearly faltering global capitalism. The new politics of consumption is thus an of-the-moment redevelopment of long-held critical perspectives on consumerism. In this, it is a politics that rests easily with a now long tradition of social theoretical scholarship. This is especially so in relation to notions of fast consumption.

A vision of consumer modernity and its late or postmodern permutations as privileging a culture of speed is and remains one of the core assumptions underlying and shaping nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory (not to mention successive literary and artistic movements). In his influential study of the experience of modernity, Marshall Berman bounced off and explored the evocative sentiment of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who insisted in the mid-1960s that modernity is ‘cut off from the past and continually hurtling forward at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root, that it merely survives from one day to the next ... ’ (Berman 1983, p. 35) Consumption – or, more exactly, capitalist exchange – as a kind of motor of modernities has long been implicated (from Marx onward) in this hurtling forward. As the defining practice of contemporary economic and everyday life, consumption thus seemingly turns at the same rapid pace as ‘modernity’ itself.

This assumption has remained rock steady in the four decades separating the work of two of the pre-eminent Western theorists of consumption: Jean Baudrillard and Zygmunt Bauman. Prefiguring the edifice of postmodernity, Baudrillard by 1970 was insisting that ‘We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession’ (1998, p. 25). For him, time occupies a privileged place in consumer society, not least because time itself – or rather abstract, measurable time – arises out of and has become one with commodity exchange. Time in ‘primitive societies’ (to use Baudrillard’s term) does not in fact exist; it is simply the ‘rhythm of repeated collective activities’. Time itself is thus invented as a commodity and for a commodity system. As such, it is earned (through work) and consumed (as the performance o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Slow Culture: An Introduction
• 1. The Time of Consumption
• 2. From Fast Fashion to Connected Consumption: Slowing Down the Spending Treadmill
• 3. You Eat What You Are: Cultivated Taste and the Pursuit of Authenticity in the Slow Food Movement
• 4. Consuming Space Slowly: Reflections on Authenticity, Place and the Self
• 5. Alternative Hedonism: The World by Bicycle
• 6. Downshifting or Conspicuous Consumption? A Sociological Examination of Treechange as a Manifestation of Slow Culture
• 7. Sensuality, Sexuality and the Eroticism of Slowness
• 8. Creativity Takes Time, Critique Needs Space: Re-Working the Political Investment of the Consumer through Pleasure
• Conclusion: Departing Notes on the Slow Narrative
• Index