Where Stuff Comes From

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• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780415944007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135946340
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Molotch takes us on a fascinating exploration into the worlds of technology, design, corporate and popular culture. We now see how corporations, designers, retailers, advertisers, and other middle-men influence what a thing can be and how it is made. We see the way goods link into ordinary life as well as vast systems of consumption, economic and political operation. The book is a meditation into the meaning of the stuff in our lives and what that stuff says about us.

CHAPTER 1
Lash-Ups: Goods and bads

Where does it come from, this vast blanket of things—coffeepots and laptops, window fittings, lamps and fence finials, cars, hat pins, and hand trucks—that make up economies, mobilize desire, and so stir up controversy? The question leads to others because nothing stands alone—to understand any one thing you have to learn how it fits into larger arrays of physical objects, social sentiments, and ways of being. In the world of goods, as in worlds of any other sort, each element is just one interdependent fragment of a larger whole.¹

Like a toaster. It does not just sear bread, but presupposes a pricing mechanism for home amperage, government standards for electric devices, producers and shopkeepers who smell a profit, and people’s various sentiments about the safety of electrical current and what a breakfast, nutritionally and socially, ought to be. Any particular toaster also contains the trends in fine and popular art that give it a particular look and texture of operation, including—in many models—a human satisfaction in the sound and sight of the pop-up moment. There are merchandise critics, trade associations, advertising media as well as the prior range of goods and hardware within which it must fit—wall outlets for its plugs, bread slicers calibrated for a certain width, and jams that need a crusty base. There is a global system that yields a toaster’s raw materials, governments that protect its patents, a labor force to work at the right price, and a dump ready to absorb it in the end.

Somehow all the elements come together more or less at the same time and in a given geographic place that operates not just as a container, but as a crucible that yields up one particular product and not another. Miami has produced no toasters at all, but Mt. Airy, North Carolina, became, during its day in the sun, the “officially designated Toaster Capital of the World.”² Toasters are indispensable in U.S. and British households; almost no Italians have them. In terms of timing, it will not do for one needed element (like jam) to be accessible in say, the mid-nineteenth century, but then to disappear just when another element, say electric outlets, are in place. So with other products: it may not work out if the trim of a dress arrives even a moment after the designer has left the room; a computer program fragment absent at the wrong moment is death to the new software.

Somehow, everything must—and this is the crucial idea—“lash-up”³ such that the otherwise loose elements adhere; only then can there be a new thing in the world. Like a plant variety in the forest or a microbe among the animal species, a product comes about and stays around—sometimes for a relatively short time and sometimes for epochs—to the degree that the diverse elements that make it up continue to be. Electrical outlets in the kitchen make the toaster appliance useful just as the reality of the appliance incites builders to put in outlets near the kitchen table. The Anglo-Saxon support for toast continuously reinforces the existence of toasters just as such an eating-appliance habit helps mark off a particular people as distinctive. Not just having a taste for toast, people enroll, as sociologist Bruno Latour would say,⁴ in the toaster project. Their commitment becomes evident when something goes wrong (no bread? no outlet?), yielding immediate acts of restoration.

Individuals enroll, organizations enroll, and even—in a sense—objects enroll. Objects too have a life in them, maybe not as in a “Toy Story” movie when dolls and action figures leap off shelves and discuss their fates, but in the way they sustain social practices just as those practices sustain them. Any search for the source of stuff must therefore look for this continuous mutual stroking between object and action that makes a thing “interactively stabilized.”⁵ It also means a hunt for breakdown—for how elements stop working together, prompting at least a tweak in the new model if not the disappearance of a prod uct altogether. Change too is normal, maybe even inevitable. Tracing the connections in products can show how the social and the material combine to make, depending on circumstance, both change and stability happen in the world.

There have been other approaches toward figuring out where stuff comes from. Teachers instruct schoolchildren that stuff was “invented”—usually by means of a genius like Thomas Edison. The great man, through inspiration and perspiration, just does it. But even Edison depended on others’ work; he was part of a 14-person team when he “did” the lightbulb. More profoundly, he was always dependent on the surrounding web of political and cultural practices that made each of his innovations possible.

Less oriented toward a genius or even individuals at all, some see new stuff evolving through a great march of ever-improving artifacts, more or less driven by their own internal logic. One good gadget begets the next in just the way science knowledge is supposed to gather up. Engineer Henry Petroski—the rightly esteemed expert on “the evolution of useful things”—holds to this model.⁶ In economists’ view of the world, Petroski’s formulation makes sense. Markets “demand” stuff and that is what companies produce—optimal stuff, in fact. New stuff comes into being precisely because better ways are continuously being found to satisfy bidders’ tastes. Sovereign consumers place their orders and the output is what we see in the stores. But tastes and improvements cannot be taken as self-evident, and neither can their origins. What is or is not “useful” and what is or is not a “taste” also arise from the complex mixtures of enrollments and intersections always behind everything.

There are critical scholars who complain about goods as nothing but bads. Sympathetic as I am with such grumbling, blanket denunciations are as overly simplistic as the product boosters’ ceaseless cheers. They too efface the production system’s actual operations. The book titles of Vance Packard’s best-selling trilogy summarize the complaining quite well. The Hidden Persuaders (1957) focused on corporate capture of consumer minds; The Status Seekers (1959) illustrated how ordinary people were made vulnerable to the manipulations, and The Waste Makers (1960) used the car industry to portray the needless destruction that resulted. These popular books echoed more sophisticated analyses by the Frankfurt School of Marxian critical theorists founded in Germany between the world wars. Such thinkers were responding to the fact that labor did not revolt or even support trade unions with any consistency. Instead, workers wanted to consume material goods and experience commercial amusement. Through capitalist capacity to enthrall with mostly useless and shoddy artifacts, the theory went, people sublimated their more rational socialist urge into consumption and the dream of goods. Consumption thus signals alienation, as people substitute dead material for control over their working conditions and the goal of more meaningful social lives.⁷ To bring all this about, producers must use gimmickry like planned obsolescence, clever advertising, and other seductions to deliberately foster dissatisfactions and build markets for still more superfluous outputs. For their part in this dreary, self-mortifying pursuit, consumers compete against one another in a game, as Thorstein Veblen put it, of “conspicuous consumption.”⁸ Once others gain access to what you have, new stuff has to be acquired in an endless cycle of unhappy waste.⁹

The bad news runs on. Each of the world’s religions sponsors its own version of asceticism, reflected in the lives attributed to its priests as well as in doctrine and ceremony. These merge, sometimes in explicit ways into contemporary environmentalist thought, with the defense of nature intrinsic to doctrines of morality and transcendental responsibility. The “throwaway society” endangers God’s plan and the natural eco-system. Corporations tend to create goods using the most esoteric chemical compounds because they are the easiest to patent. They also do not break down in nature and have unknown effects on natural systems.¹⁰ Product development thus has “a logic of digestion”¹¹ that is neither righteous nor healthy. In a feminist variation, exemplified by the traveling gallery show of home appliances called “Mechanical Brides,” merchandise “improvements” strengthen the chains that bind women to housework—with artiness (like the pastel washer) as part of the trickery.¹²

One way or the other, stuff produced and consumed by most people has been interesting to social thinkers as demonstrating a dangerous means of production and a system that misleads or dupes. A poisonous vine, the critiques imply, can produce only noxious fruit, and, thinking in the other direction, such terrible stuff can come only from a pernicious system.

Ironically enough, a good deal of the basis for such critique comes from the mouths of producers themselves. The term “planned obsolescence” was coined not by a Marxist critic, but by the industrial design pioneer Brooks Stevens, who thought it a virtue to implant “the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary.”¹³ Norman Bel Geddes, another important product developer, said he wanted to stir up a “cupidity and longing to possess the goods.”¹⁴ In a 1937 reflection, a New York ad agency executive urged his colleagues to inject “a little fear in advertising…fear in women of being frumps, fear in men of being duds.”¹⁵ A prominent business leader urged his colleagues forward with a call for “creative waste.”¹⁶ The adulatory business press repeats corporations’ visions of themselves as intelligent, effective, and powerful, with richly persuasive techniques to manipulate consumers and build demand.

The specter of a manipulative corporate hold over needs and desires is thus not a fantasy coming from nowhere. But among any group of people, there will be many voices saying all sorts of things, however inconsistent with one another. And even when they all do speak alike, that does not mean they know what they are talking about. Even right before the Great Depression as well as before the more recent collapse of the Internet boom, industrialists were still talking bullish. Businesspeople’s wishful thinking or bravado should not be mistaken for empirical reality. It just is not that easy for the corporate apparatus to fool all of the people all of the time. It takes some real effort, as I will try to show, to beat out one’s competitors and develop a commodity that will not soon end up in the dustbin of business history.

Critics do accept, even celebrate certain kinds of goods—things that apparently do not arise from corporate cunning. Handcrafted material, especially when thought to emanate from indigenous peoples’ spiritual urges, transcends evils of conspicuous consumption, planned obsolescence, and techniques of domination. Also prized are goods touched by art-historical and intellectual pedigree, like products linked to the Bauhaus school of art and design—goods consecrated for enduring functional beauty. More recently, there has been appreciation for merchandise modified by the less powerful, like low-rider cars among Chicano youth who “create the car as a site of resistance” or goods inverted in use, as when teens wear oversize pants or decrepit U.S. military garb.¹⁷

Rather than exceptions to the goods systems, I think, handmade creations, “aftermarket” customizing, and making things useful are all part of it. Handicrafts shift in and out of popularity much as machine-made goods. Diverse “outside” forces influence indigenous artifacts even in remote places. Bauhaus stuff represents, in my view, just another style—a judgment in no way intended to belittle the talent that created it. Similarly, when those from below alter goods after purchase they act in ways quite like the affluent. Wearing underpants as outer-wear is more like stretching a limo than meets the eye. Besides marking difference for their respective users, such aftermarket adaptations become immediate stimuli for new products, tailored to the newly evident tastes. With a sharp eye toward innovators, deviants, and first-adopters, companies respond to what folks do.

I hold off on judging what is a good or bad product and certainly offer no expert opinion of what is good design. But I will be trying to show just how one product possibility takes hold compared to another, opening the opportunity perhaps to then know how it really could have been different. What I hope to avoid throughout is making common cause with those who condemn the lack of quality and individuation in what people seem to want. Though not oblivious to the dangers of goods, I bracket the specifically destructive tendencies of modern markets. Too much judgmental artillery has made it hard to see the artifacts through the smoke, much less touch them, turn them over, look inside, and ask questions about how they came to be and how they fit in to lives and economies. “The materialists are not interested in the material,” anthropologist Francesca Bray succinctly remarks about so many past analyses of goods.¹⁸

Related to my agnostic strategy, I interchangeably use terms like “stuff,” “commodities,” “artifacts,” “things,” “products,” “merchandise,” and “goods” despite their differing ideological and intellectual nuances. Among the multiple forces at work in determining stuff are elements that can be found in almost any economic or social system. Figuring out what those might be, including the search for thrills, distinction., and solidarity, may help us disentangle the predicaments of our own time.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSUMPTION

Whatever its antiquarian flaws, classical anthropology still has much to teach. It may be that prior generations of ethnographers were guilty of uncritically using their own cultures’ assumptions as a basis for understanding and judging those who were unfamiliar—“othering” them, as we now can say. But the visitors to exotic places did treat material and nonmaterial aspects of life as together making up their subject matter. A culture, anthropologist Robert Redfield said, consists of “shared understandings made manifest in act and artifact.”¹⁹ As a matter of routine, such notions motivated ethnographers to study goods as a route into the whole social world. The spirit was empirical and, at least compared to those doing goods analysis among modern peoples, often conducted with a lighter load of theoretical baggage. At their best, scholars examined the actual procedures—the “deeply embedded operational sequences”²⁰—including the technical, functional, spiritual, and artistic elements that enter in at each phase of history of a people and in the making of a single artifact.

We can advance an understanding of the analogous contemporary process by working through the details of goods, thinking of them as playing a more or less similar role in lives today as they did in pre-capitalist eras. Douglas and Isherwood’s original—and largely unheeded—call for a contemporary “anthropology of consumption” rests upon such presumed continuities with pre-modern settings. “Consumption,” then as now they cogently argue, “is the very arena in which culture is fought over and licked into shape.”²¹ “Consumption uses goods to make firm and visible a particular set of judgments in the fluid process of classifying persons and events,” with goods acting as “markers” of social location and collective pasts and futures.²² Decisions about what precisely to make and acquire, and when, where, and how to do it involve “moral judgments about what a man is, what a woman is, how a man ought to treat his aged parents…how he himself should grow old, gracefully or disgracefully, and so on.”²³

In her analysis of some home furnishings in late imperial China (seventeenth through nineteenth centuries), Bray points to such things as the marital bed, the chair (an idea imported from foreigners), woven fabrics, and most especially the household stove as each embodying relations of gender, nation, and kinship. “The Stove God was as much a symbol of family unity as the ancestral tablets” (there were also “stove scriptures”).²⁴ Even among the poor and under conditions in which extended kin shared other aspects of dwelling space, every family (even when headed by brothers) had its own stove, imperative given the larger role the appliance played in situating individuals within the cosmos.²⁵ The orientation to home furnishings as embedded in larger meanings parallels attitudes toward the house itself, including its major elements of architectural form, dimensions, and siting. Chinese houses have, in Bray’s phrase, an “invisible architecture” that was made explicit in imperial China but that remains—and here I move toward my modern application—as an implicit feature of design and consumption routines more generally. There are tacit “rules,” or at least sensibilities, in contemporary life that determine the social meanings that surround a thing’s acquisition and use—who has rights to sit where and on what occasion, or to adopt which posture on what kind of goods. People work their physicality and “furnishings” as a cultural ensemble of their time and setting. In the extreme, they deliberately deform their bodies to meld with their merchandise. Kayapo men of Brazil install large ornamental wooden plates in their mouths to hugely stretch their lips; the Ndebele women of South Africa elongate their necks with braces that gradually push their shoulder bones down several inches. Ear piercing, foot binding, diaphragm constricting, and breast cinching are other examples of reworking bodies—women’s bodies in most cases—into larger ensembles of goods using makeup, jewelry, tools, and clothes.

The “identity work” of goods does not occur in a single instance of consumption, nor even at particularly important rites of passage, although some happenings an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Where I Come From
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Lash-Ups: Goods and bads
• Chapter 2 Inside Stuff: How Professionals Do It
• Chapter 3 Form and Function
• Chapter 4 Changing Goods
• Chapter 5 Venues and Middlemen
• Chapter 6 Place in Product
• Chapter 7 Corporate Organization and the Design Big Thing
• Chapter 8 Moral Rules
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index