The Ghosts of Consumption Past
Recently there has been a lot of talk about consumption. Everyone from social scientists to marketing gurus has taken to declaring us a “nation of consumers”, meaning consumerism drives American society and that we appear to form our very identities on the various things we consume. Since most of my money (after rent) goes to vegan chocolate cake Is to be a consumer. So I looked up consumption in the trusty OED, which gave the extremely unhelpful definition "The action or process of consuming.” I hate when dictionaries do that, so then I had to go look up “consume,” which gave me this:
Consume (verb) 1. to eat or drink. 2. to use up. 3. (especially of a fire) to completely destroy. 4. (of a feeling) to absorb all of the attention and energy from.
As one of these fabled American consumers, I looked around my apartment and tried to see how I’ve consumed the things I own. I certainly don’t eat or drink most of my belongings. I neither use my possessions up nor completely destroy them (though it would be far better for the environment if I did either or both). This left me with the last definition: to absorb all of the energy of. When you buy something (or make it, or trade it, etc.) you have decided to pick this one item out of about a million others. You decide on a specific item because it fits with some element of you. Perhaps it’s creative and you’re artistic, or it’s streamlined and you’re minimalist, or it’s trendy… you get the picture. You pick it because it testifies to your personality, and once you own the object it becomes, in a sense, a part of you; you absorb its energy. Thus, you and your new object begin a relationship.
Way back in the day, an anthropologist named Franz Boas wrote that “the familiarity established through long use of the objects may readily lead to an emotional attachment.” It seems that academics in 1927 were just as wordy as they are today, but what I think he meant was that when you have an object in your space for a long time you get used to having it there and its presence brings you comfort, even joy. So you feel its loss when it is no longer there for some reason. In some small way, you mourn its passing. A market researcher named Russell Belk gave this person-thing relationship a name: the “extended self.” According to Belk, possessions are not only things we own, they are pieces of an overall self-image that includes our bodies, our minds, our loved-ones, our home, and so forth. So take any one of these pieces away and we feel a bit less comfortable, a bit less like ourselves.
In the case of durable objects the person-object relationship goes beyond the individual. Sure I feel bad when I lose the new earrings I bought, but that’s nothing compared to the pain of losing earrings my mother gave to me, which pales in comparison to the horror of losing earrings she gave to me that her mother gave to her. My point is that we not only form relationships with our stuff, but that we also form (and maintain) relationships through our stuff. These relationships are unhindered by time and space, and even death is no match for them. Remember my vintage sewing machine table from last month’s article? The pedal still works. When I’m trying to organize my thoughts I work the pedal, which moves this big iron wheel, which, generations ago, used to make a sewing needle go up and down. Sometimes my thoughts lead me to the woman who owned this sewing machine, and who made this same motion, on this same machine, before I was even a gleam in my mother’s eye. Did she like sewing or find it a chore? Did her thoughts wander? Did she get annoyed when the pedal stuck as it sometimes does? I’ve never met her, and I’m quite sure I never will, but through this object I have a relationship with her. Cast iron is slow to decompose; sometimes I wonder about the person who might be musing over this machine in another few generations.
So returning to the topic of consumption, I’m not an idiot, I know what the market researchers mean by calling us a consumer society is that we buy a lot of stuff and throw it away with abandon to go buy more stuff, but I like my definition better – that when you consume, you absorb the energy of the item you take in and that energy becomes a part of you. In this way my table connects me to the ghost of a seamstress and my earrings connect me to my grandmother. I bet if we thought of consumption this way, we’d do a lot less of the buying and trashing variety. Start small – next time you’re out shopping, try to think about exactly what you are buying before you carry it off. I do this a lot. For example, if you buy a cheap dress from a trendy store what energy are you absorbing? A sweatshop worker’s exhaustion? A multi-national conglomerate’s profits? A tanker ship’s cargo? Get the picture? If the story stinks, say thanks but no thanks, I don’t want that to be a part of me.
