Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Part One: The Consuming Individual in Space and Time

The two introductory chapters in Part One can be read alone, although they are designed to complement each other. Chapter one introduces the reader to the work of Norbert Elias who wrote of the increasing individualisation of life in the modern world. Elias’s work is further developed by considering three views of the late modern consumer; as entrepreneur of the self; narcissist and altruistic activist. Chapter two develops chapter one by discussing in more detail the arguments made by Max Weber and Michel Foucault concerning the role rationality in modernism. A second argument, based on Karl Marx, that late modern life is characterised by flux and disorder is influenced by the work of David Harvey.

Chapter One: The consuming individual

Introduction

It is common for us to consider ourselves as unique and distinctive individuals. From the day we are born we are treated as if we are individual beings, receiving a unique name and place in the setting in which we are raised. Belief in our individuality is reinforced when we learn that this is stamped on our body, reflected in the singular nature of our fingerprints and the unique patterning of our ears, dental structure and irises. This idea of individuality is based on singular variations of themes that are common to all.

For instance every human is given a name and our name, which specifies us as being a unique individual in our family context, is probably quite commonly spread throughout our culture. Likewise, although we learn quickly to recognize individuals from our own culture, this is by no means so easy when it comes to differentiating people from cultures that are different from our own.

A key aim is to demonstrate how individuality is linked in complex ways to the social context. This is not acknowledged by the liberal ideal of homo economicus, which is so often taken as the unquestioned starting point for mainstream consumer behaviour texts. This ideal of the rational consumer does not emphasize uniqueness so much as rationality, equality and freedom of choice. This ideal image of consumers assumes that they act from their own volition, as independent, self-determining and self-conscious agents exercising freedom of choice in the marketplace by maximizing their assortment of goods. An important aim of this chapter is to persuade you that one should not assume rationality but rather that this is an achievement which is closely related to the social context. For similar reasons it aims to persuade you that one should not take the modern idea of the individual for granted.

Depending on the author’s point of view, the consumer is described as, self-controlled, lonely, anxious and prone to inner turmoil (Elias, 1994; James, 2007, 2008), egoistic, irreligious and altruistic (Beck & Beck, 2001; Inglehardt et al. 2006), or narcissistic, shallow, superficial, prone to grandiose fantasies and to rage when these are not realized (Barber, 2007; Twenge & Campbell, 2009). Clearly, it is difficult to envisage a person who can be all of these simultaneously and so you will have to make your mind up as to which description is the most convincing.

Four stories are used to illustrate different points of view and time periods. The story of Sir Gavin of Blair illustrates the individuality of the English medieval nobility. The second story moves to the modern period of the 1950s, featuring Laura Brown, who feels isolated and suicidal despite superficially living the American Dream. Laura’s story is used as a vehicle to illustrate the theory developed by Norbert Elias (1994), which explains the emergence of the modern individual as part of what he calls the civilizing process. Elias’s theory forms the basis for the subsequent discussion of two very different views of the late modern consumer, as illustrated through the story of Wai Ching. The first explanation argues that the late modern consumer is a narcissist, being highly competitive, exhibitionistic and manipulative of others. The argument, which is developed from a strand of modernization theory, is that the late modern consumer is better understood as an egocentric altruist. Finally the story of Yusuf is used to differentiate the needs-driven consumer from the late modern consumer.

Individualism and Consumption in 16th Century England

Sir Gavin of Blair

Imagine the fictional character of Sir Gavin, lord of all the lands around the ancient seat of Blair Hall, the the eldest of fifteen children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Gavin sprang from an ancient and venerable family line. He has benefitted from the careful stewardship of the land practiced by his forbears and prior to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth 1st in 1559, he spent most of his time at Blair Hall, splitting his activities between hunting, entertaining, caring for the patina of family heirlooms and engaging local artisans to craft new items for Blair Hall Since the coronation, Gavin has spent much more time in London, where he has purchased a house in order to attend Court more regularly. He has taken to wearing opulent clothing which has scandalized locals on the infrequent occasions when he returns home. There have also been mutterings about Gavin’s expensive and wasteful lifestyle at Court, not least from his siblings who complain of his frivolity and lack of attention to his heritage.

Gavin was one of a few thousand people who took part in the consumer boom described by Grant McCracken (1990) that took place in sixteenth-century England. McCracken explains that this was instigated and perpetuated by Queen Elizabeth Ist of England as a means of subjugating her nobility and aggrandizing herself,

In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a spectacular consumer boom occurred. The noblemen of Elizabethan England began to spend with a new enthusiasm, on a new scale. In the process they dramatically transformed their world of goods and the nature of Western consumption. They rebuilt their country seats to a new and grander standard, and they began to assume the additional expense of a London residence. They changed their patterns of hospitality as well, vastly accelerating its ceremonial character and costs (McCracken, 1990: 11).

Elizabethan noblemen entertained one another, their subordinates, and occasionally their monarch at ruinous expense.’ According to McCracken this ruinous round of expenditure changed the nature of the Elizabethan family and locality. Prior to this, the noble was considered to be the caretaker or curator of the family. As such, he was expected to purchase items corporately with the long-term interests of the family in mind. The prime consideration in buying goods was for their patina, that quality which indicated that what was purchased would not only last, but would become increasingly valuable in creating honour and respect for succeeding generations. Much of the expenditure of a nobleman was spent locally, to the benefit of the local community. The value surrounding this corporate, generational expenditure was destroyed by the fierce social competition of the Elizabethan era. In the face of such competition the value of patina, or the worth of goods for succeeding generations was forgotten and replaced by the idea of fashion, or the demand for novelty. Nobles such as Gavin sought to better one another through ostentatious displays of wealth and opulence in Court at London, to the detriment of their local communities. As a consequence of this explosion of consumption, the nobles developed tastes that were quite different from those of their subordinates. These changes resulted in a move away from family consumption to individual consumption, from generational value to fashion, and a dissolution of the close social relations between nobles and local communities. This shift had particular effects:

Noblemen now looked to a pan-European level of consumption, while their subordinates looked on with astonishment at their new tastes and excesses. Sometimes disdainful of superordinate consumption, subordinates nevertheless followed this behaviour with care. Thus were they primed for a round of consumer excess that would begin a century later (McCracken, 1990: 16).

McCracken explains that the next major consumer revolution in England occurred during the eighteenth century as the ‘missing half’ of the Industrial Revolution. At this time the members of the lower classes, who in the sixteenth century could only gaze in horrified fascination at the wasteful expenditure of their noble rulers, themselves became participants in the consumption feast (McCracken, 1990: 17). Enterprising industrialists such as Josiah Wedgwood took advantage of the increasingly emulative character of consumption, whereby the lower classes imitated the consumption of those above them in the social order. This was a time when the world of goods expanded dramatically to include new opportunities for the purchase of furniture, pottery, silver, cutlery, gardens, pets and fabric in addition to the frequency with which goods were bought. By this time the purchase for the self instead of for the family was well established within the lower classes, as was the growth of obsolescence through fashion change. Recognising this tendency, Wedgwood sought to fit his goods into the lifestyles of the upper classes in the hope that the demand for these would trickle down to the lower classes. Such was the intensity of consumption in the eighteenth century, that some observers claimed an ‘epidemical madness’ had taken hold of England (1990: 17). This was also a time for the development of marketing devices such as fashion plates, fashion magazines and the fashion doll.

McCracken claims that in contrast to the eighteenth century, there was no consumer boom in England during the nineteenth century because by then consumption was established as a social fact. Developments such as the department store and the emergence of new consumer ‘lifestyles’ were major features of this period. In nineteenth-century (post-revolutionary) France, McCracken notes that even ‘though the nobles were supposedly banished during the Revolutionary period, their way of life lived on, as it was aspired to by the bourgeoisie. During this period other lifestyles emerged to challenge this style. One such lifestyle was that of the ‘dandy’, which was promoted by Beau Brummel, who sought to create a new elite that was based on ‘good taste’, rather than ‘breeding’.

Discussion

The foregoing discussion raises important issues. McCracken argues for a succession of waves of consumption, with each successive wave including more people than the last. The first wave, featuring the story of Sir Gavin, involved a few thousand of the highest nobles in the land, whilst the second wave encompassed a much greater proportion of the population. Gavin’s story illustrates one of the paradoxes of this emerging individuality. On the one hand, Gavin began to experience a much greater level of autonomy from the demands of his family and local community, by spending more time at Court in London. On the other hand, he became intimately bound into an elaborate and destructive game of status competition with other nobles at Court. This emulative nature of consumption for status appeared again in the second wave of consumption described by McCracken, where opportunists such as Wedgwood took advantage of imitation by the lower classes of upper class lifestyle.

Norbert Elias: Civilization and Consumption

The story of Sir Gavin occurred during the forty-five year reign of Elizabeth 1st of England, the last of the Tudor monarchs. Although this was a time of great change, the elaborate Court Society developed particularly during Elizabeth’s reign provided stability and prosperity compared to the preceding disruption caused by the Wars of the Roses, when two rival factions vied for control of the English monarchy. Court societies such as that of Elizabeth’s are central to the theory of Norbert Elias, who argues that in Europe and elsewhere the development of centralized Court Societies played a key role in providing the conditions for the formation of the modern individual.

The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elias (1994) sought to explore the origins of the modes of behaviour that are now considered to be typical of modern Western civilization. He was influenced by Sigmund Freud to the extent that he employed terms such as ‘id’, ‘ego’ and ‘superego’ in discussing the civilizing process. He was also interested in considering how these features of the human psyche developed and changed as society itself, as bound by the relationships between people, changed. To put this more formally, his investigation required the study of psychogenetic processes (involving the structure of personality; how for example the partition between id, ego, and superego is formed over time), within the context of a sociogenetic explanation (involving changes to the structure of society over time). For Elias one cannot understand the psychological makeup of the individual independently of the sociogenesis of his or her ‘civilization’.

Let us briefly expand on the concepts of psychogenesis and sociogenesis. Following the work of the later Freud (1923), the human psyche is assumed to comprise three agencies; the id, ego and superego. The id represents the primitive self, being likened by Freud to a savage beast that demands immediate gratification of its desires. The superego is the agency that represents the external demand for civilized conduct. The ego seeks to achieve a balance between the id and superego, by reining in the id when the social situation requires it and loosening this at times when there is less external constraint. The id, ego and superego which collectively make up the psyche, persist through time, but their relative strength changes according to the prevailing social situation. Elias argues that the superego was relatively weak during the European Dark Ages but became strengthened with the growth of social interdependencies linked to the formation of court societies such as that of Elizabeth the First. In understanding the consequences of this, it is important to remember that Freud’s model of the psyche is topological, or spatial, in nature. The relations between the id, ego and superego are often depicted using the analogy of an iceberg, whereby the rational conscious self, comprising some ego processes takes up the 10% or so of the iceberg that is above water. With the growing power of the superego, the subject comes to feel ashamed of activities that he had previously taken great pleasure in. Here his explanation is different to Freud who argues that guilt is the principal social emotion behind repression. Elias argues that the ego represses shameful feelings into the unconscious, where, if they do not receive an outlet, they will build up pressure.

Elias’s (1994) research is organized into two major works, The History of Manners, and State Formation and Civilization. In these books, Elias traces developments in European history from the decline of the Roman Empire and the resurgence of tribal societies between the third and the eighth centuries, to the very gradual consolidation of society by means of feudal court systems of the sixteenth century and later the court systems of the absolute monarchs of the eighteenth century. While Elias did find a pattern in the development of civilized behaviour, this was uneven, slow and characterized by constant reversals. For example he found that modes of conduct which were characteristic of

tenth-century France were still to be found in isolated areas at the time of the French

Revolution, which took place early in the nineteenth century. To sum up this change, Elias contends that passions that were impulsively and often violently expressed in earlier times became subject to constraint by being internally contained in later times. The basis for social order changed from the exercise of external violence to that of internal self- discipline conditioned by feelings of shame at one’s own conduct and embarrassment at the conduct of others; the nature of conflict itself changed from external conflict with others to conflict within the human psyche. Furthermore, the social perception of the body and the expression of bodily functions changed fundamentally as part of this slow transition.

From the above it is apparent that the system of relations which existed between people in the Middle Ages was quite different from that which operates today. The example of road traffic described below illustrates the central points of the transition from a ‘primitive’ to a ‘civilized’ society in Europe,¹

One should think of the country roads of a simple warrior society with a barter economy, uneven, unmetalled, exposed to damage from wind and rain. With few exceptions, there is very little traffic; the main danger here which man represents for other men is an attack by soldiers or thieves. When people look around them, scanning the trees and hills or the road itself, they do so primarily because they must be prepared for armed attack, and only secondarily because they have to avoid collision. Life on the main roads of this society demands a constant readiness to fight, and free play of the emotions in defence of one’s life or possessions from physical attack. Traffic on the main roads of a big city in a complex society of our time demands a quite different moulding of the psychological apparatus. Here the danger of physical attack is minimal. Cars are rushing in all directions; pedestrians and cyclists are trying to thread their way through the mêlée of cars; policemen stand at the main crossroads to regulate the traffic with varying success. But this external control is founded on the assumption that every individual is himself regulating his behaviour with the utmost exactitude in accordance with the necessities of this network. The chief danger that people here represent for others results from someone in this bustle losing his self-control. A constant and highly differentiated regulation of one’s own behaviour is needed for the individual to steer his way through the traffic. If the strain of such constant self-control becomes too much for an individual, this is enough to put himself and others in mortal danger (Elias,1994: 446).

The above quote illustrates the complex set of changes which have taken place in society; they characterize a shift from an orientation towards the external world which is fearful and violent to one which is controlled by the ‘self-steering’ individual.

Life in the Middle Ages

In the tenth century people lived with the awareness of constant danger from both human and natural enemies. Aggressiveness was openly prized. War was the normal state of affairs for most of the population which was organized into groups of armed bands. This occurred at many different levels, from large-scale warfare to family feuds and vendettas. Warriors took great pleasure in killing and in torturing others, which was a socially permitted pleasure. As prisoners were regarded as a drain on resources in times when food was scarce, they were either killed or sent back home so mutilated that they could no longer go to war or work. With a few exceptions of those who chose to emulate men, the role of women was difficult in this warrior society. Women were regarded as the property of the warrior class, useful for procreation and enjoyment but little else.

By today’s standards of conditioning, many of the relationships and practices of medieval times are unattractive. Elias illustrates this graphically by quoting from the Diversoria (1523) where Erasmus describes a scene in a typical German inn of the time where some eighty or ninety people from all kinds of social positions are seated together:

Garlic smells and other bad odours arise. People spit everywhere. Someone is cleaning his boots on the table. Then the meal is brought in. Everyone dips his bread in the general dish, bites the bread, and dips it in again. The place is dirty and the wine is bad. And if one asks for a better wine, the innkeeper replies: I have put up enough nobles and counts. If it does not suit you, look for other quarters. The stranger to the country has a particularly difficult time. The others stare at him fixedly as if he were a fabulous animal from Africa. Moreover, these people acknowledge as human beings only the nobles of their own country. The room is overheated; everyone is sweating and steaming and wiping himself. There are doubtless many among them who have some hidden disease (Elias, 994: 57/8).

Many diseases were not so hidden. Most people were infested with lice and frequently passed worms, some through the ears and eyes as well as the more traditional routes. The most appalling disabilities were also openly displayed. During the Middle Ages people lived in and for the present and expressed their emotions spontaneously. Everything was out in the open for all to see, for instance people commonly urinated and defecated in public places and enjoyed sexual encounters publicly. Legitimate and illegitimate children were raised together, with no hint of secrecy or shame. In addition to aggression and brutality there was much gaiety and joy during this period which was characterized by an intensity, openness and lack of constraint of human behaviour that most modern ‘civilized’ people today would find shocking.²

The Transition: Development of the Court Society

Elias notes that much of what was considered to be normal and to cause pleasure in Europe during the period from the tenth to the sixteenth century would cause revulsion today. He seeks to explain why in contrast to this, citizens are nowadays expected to show a very high degree of self-control. The spontaneous outpouring of emotions characteristic of the Middle Ages has been suppressed and as a result a wall has been built between one body and another so that people nowadays avoid contact with the mere approach of something which has been in contact with the mouth or hands of someone else, and are embarrassed at the mere sight of the bodily functions of others or even of their mention and feel shame when our own bodily functions are exposed to the gaze of others. How did this happen?

In his research Elias found that the change in what he calls ‘drive-control’ (as represented by the control of the id by the ego under the influence of the superego) conduct is very closely related to the growing interweaving and interdependence of people over time. During the tenth century the vast majority of the population still lived in localities defined by independent tribal bands, which later shaped themselves into feudal and manorial units. The economy was based largely on barter; money was mistrusted and was solely used as a form of commerce with outsiders, who were generally viewed with suspicion.

There was little mixing between different classes; the warrior elite generally held the impoverished peasantry in contempt. However, towards the end of the Middle Ages, during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, new forms of consolidation emerged as some warriors gradually gained predominance over others across a more extended area. The residences or ‘courts’ of these new rulers became a focus for the concentration of armed forces, for a new band of administrators (the forerunners of the bourgeois class) and also became the homes of musicians and other entertainers who could attest to the prestige of the ruler. The development of these centralized courts, which required a degree of interdependence between different groups of people, led to the demand for greater restraint of emotions and the exercise of foresight in exploring the consequences of actions. Elias says that:

‘Here, for the first time in secular society, a large number of people, including men, lived together in constant close contact in a hierarchical structure, under the eyes of the central person, the territorial lord. This fact alone enforced a certain restraint on all dependants. An abundance of unwarlike administrative and clerical work had to be done. All this created a somewhat more peaceful atmosphere. As happens whenever men renounce physical violence, the social importance of women increased.’(ibid.: 326)

Within the strictly hierarchical and restricted court circle, and encouraged above all by the presence of the lady, who was the spouse of the sovereign lord or ruler, more peaceful forms of conduct become obligatory. While knights or troubadors (musicians) could act with brutal violence towards their own wives, or women of lower rank, they were expected to act delicately with respect to those above them in rank, and particularly with respect to the lady of the territorial lord. The demand for stricter control of impulses and emotions was thus first imposed by those of high rank on their social inferiors. To begin with, restraint on the expression of desires was imposed only when in the company of others. For example one author admonished people not to pare their nails, fall asleep or expose themselves by not being properly attired ‘except among people before whom one is not ashamed’ (ibid.: 114). First it became a distasteful offence to show oneself exposed before those of higher or equal rank. With inferiors such behaviour could be seen to be a sign of benevolence. Over many centuries as society became more equal, so such behaviour came to be seen to cause general offence.

The development of the court as a centre for the concentration of armed force and as an administrative and commercial centre worked in particular to benefit the sovereign ruler. The courts were at the centre of a money economy which grew primarily as the result of taxation but also due to the need to buy things which could not be produced locally. This increased the relative power of the sovereign ruler over other warrior nobles, because these other high lords or chieftains were paid either in barter or in fixed rents while the king’s taxes were paid in monetary form. With the increased power of sovereign, more of the warrior nobility were forced to rely on the financial support of the sovereign, with the result that the dependent court nobility of the sovereign grew larger. In this process a very important development took place whereby these nobles were transformed from being a class of warrior knights to being a class of courtiers. Elias sums up the process,

The closer the web of interdependence becomes in which the individual is enmeshed with the advancing division of functions, the larger the social spaces over which this network extends and which become integrated into functional or institutional units – the more threatened is the social existence of the individual who gives way to spontaneous impulses and emotions, the greater is the social advantage of those able to moderate their affects, and the more strongly is each individual from an early age to take account of the effects of his own or other people’s actions on a whole series of links in the social chain. The moderation of spontaneous emotions, the tempering of affects, the extension of mental space beyond the moment into past and future, the habit of connecting events in terms of chains of cause and effect – all these are different aspects of the same transformation of conduct which necessarily takes place as the result of the monopolization of physical violence, and the lengthening of the chains of social action and interdependence. It is a ‘civilizing’ change in behaviour (Elias, 1994: 448).

Elias argues that despite this capacity for the self to reflect on action, this was not equivalent to the modern superego or conscience. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the process of differentiation of functions and the increasing interdependence of a larger number of classes accelerated. As the money supply increased more quickly the wealth of the aristocracy declined more sharply. During this time the new court nobility in Britain and in France found their status increasingly challenged by the rapid rise to power of a new bourgeois class whose members emerged initially as scribes, counselors and tax administrators for the sovereign and as merchants in the newly expanding towns. An example is Thomas Cromwell who was born the son of a blacksmith in1485AD, but became a brilliant lawyer and politician, rising to power as the highest administrator in the court of Henry VIII of England. Cromwell, along with the entire bourgeois class he represented was detested by the court nobility. This differentiation between the court nobility and bourgeois administrators effectively initiated the class system, with the court nobility representing the ‘upper class’ who strove to differentiate themselves from usurpation by the bourgeois.

Disciplinary Mechanisms

Elias’s thesis is that the transition of warriors to courtiers is one of the most decisive events within every civilizing process (ibid.: 467). In the particular context of sixteenth century Europe, for those knights who became courtiers, the rules of life took on a new meaning and the entire personality gradually changed. This initiated a lengthy process which involved the development of powerful internal disciplinary processes of self control linked to emotional responses of shame and embarrassment.

Psychologization and Rationalization

Elias argues in the transition from knights to courtiers the entire personality of the nobility changed as nobles were reduced from their position warrior knights to being dependent courtiers. Whilst the old warrior nobility showed no compunction to use extreme physical violence, particularly towards those of lesser rank, this was not an option for the new court nobility. In the closely interdependent setting of the royal court, members of the nobility had to be extremely careful to avoid using overt violence against detested bourgeois administrators such as Cromwell, for fear of inciting the wrath of the sovereign. Competition among the court nobility for the patronage of the sovereign was intense. Individual nobles gained rank by associating themselves with others of higher rank. As the fortunes of these favoured nobles frequently changed, there was a constant vigilance and struggle for favour. Strategic behaviour such as plotting and intrigue came to the fore by masking and suppressing one’s true feelings. Vigilant self-control and perpetual observation of others became extremely important for the maintenance of one’s social position.

Psychologization describes the progressive focus on the psyche within the court society. A ‘psychological’ view developed as a person’s social position demanded vigilant self-control involving careful observation and analysis of one’s own behaviour and of that of others in relation to a complex series of motives and causal connections. Conflict, which previously would likely have been expressed directly in terms of physical violence, gradually became a matter of internal reflection and calculation. Elias detects this process occurring also in the increased demand for books during this time, as the skills required to read a book demand a well-defined ability to transform and regulate the emotional drives. The reading of fictional narratives of the lives of others in books allows the reader to play out in fantasy those tensions which hitherto would have found release in the resort to direct violence and to imagine the consequences of following an alternative course of action.

Rationalization is similar to the concept of calculation. Where the warrior knight had resorted to impulsive and violent action, the dependent courtier sought to work primarily through reason to influence those in power. As opposed to the knight, the courtier had to use foresight in calculating how to achieve his ends. To Elias this ‘courtly rationality’ played an even more important role than the urban– commercial rationality and foresight instilled by functions in the trade network in the development of the eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’.

Shame and embarrassment

Elias develops Freud’s (1895) argument that shame and disgust are the two prime causes of repression, to argue that these played a crucial role in the development of the civilizing process. Shame is associated with the breach of social constraints. It is a form of conflict, not with someone outside, such as social opinion, but with a part of the person’s own personality, a part of himself that represents social opinion. In feeling shame as a conflict within his own personality, a person fears the loss of the love or respect of others, to which he attaches value. Elias argues that feelings of shame emerged more clearly with every spurt of the civilizing process, finally coming to predominate over the physical fear of others. Elias defines embarrassment as, ‘displeasure or anxiety which arises when another person threatens to breach, or breaches, society’s prohibitions represented by one’s super-ego.’ (ibid.: 495). To witness the unseemly conduct of others provoked an excruciating sense of disgust or repugnance alongside embarrassment in those who observed such behaviour. Explained in Freudian terms, the increased capacities for experiences of shame and embarrassment signaled the increased power of the superego and the role played by the ego in regulating the id was also considerably strengthened (ibid.: 493/4).

The development of a more psychological inner reflection and rationalization in the courtier was linked to the heightened capacity to feel shame and embarrassment. To avoid shame the court nobility learned to exercise more differentiated foresight and to develop of a long-term view by comparison to their warrior predecessors. Such restraint was necessary in the increasingly differentiated court society where, given the power of the sovereign, the direct expression of physical violence was no longer an option.

Development of Manners through Class Struggle

The demand for self-control increased as courts grew ever larger and chains of dependency between courtiers became more complex with the increasing division of functions. As the contrasts between noble and bourgeois classes diminished, so the greater was the sensitivity to nuances of conduct and the more finely attuned people became to minute differences in gestures.

As mentioned above, the emerging court nobility were contemptuous of those of a lower rank, particularly the bourgeois class. This was due to increased tension caused by status competition between the relatively impoverished noble courtiers who were largely dependent upon the sovereign for financial support, and the rising bourgeois class of administrators such as Cromwell who threatened to usurp their position. Such tensions, which had been apparent from the beginnings of the emergence of the bourgeois class intensified. The warrior knights who were the forbears of the court nobility would have shown little compunction to use physical violence. However this was not an option for noble courtiers who feared incurring the wrath of the sovereign on whose favour they depended for financial support. Their anxiety over loss of status was channeled instead into a new form of status competition where manners and politeness became the stakes in the contest between the two classes. The court nobility created social distance between themselves and the bourgeois by expressing revulsion towards anything that ‘smells bourgeois’(ibid. 394). Courtiers modified their speech, gestures, social amusements and manners in a bid to distinguish themselves from the bourgeois class. This precipitated a game of ‘catch-up’; as courtiers developed a particular style of dress or manners in order to create social distance from the ‘vulgar’ bourgeois, so the bourgeois adopted the self-same practices. As one and then another of the ‘distinctive’ courtier styles became adopted by the bourgeois, so each style progressively failed to perform its function as the basis for distinction between the two groups and new styles were developed.

Discussion

Grant McCracken’s (1990) study of the court of Queen Elizabeth I of England described at the beginning of this chapter serves as an example of an early court society. The developments within Elizabeth’s court involved her fostering greater competition between nobles to gain her favour. The growing individualization and distinctiveness of the Elizabethan nobility, were not unique but formed an early high-point of a progressive pattern towards the establishment of formal court societies across Europe. Elias describes how in French society competition between the court nobility and the hated bourgeois became transmuted from overt violence, to displays of manners and politeness. As described by McCracken, what mattered at Elizabeth’s court was the ability of the nobleman to maintain his prestige by living up to the prescribed standard, often at ruinous expense. Individualization occurs in the context of social comparison and competitiveness between individuals, or classes. McCracken captures that point in English history when nobles are transformed to courtiers and where consumption began to substitute for violence in relation to status competition.

The trends described by Elias, towards an individualism where the psyche is disciplined and deepened by psychologization and rationalization, linked to emotional triggers of shame and embarrassment, are part of the process of modernization. Modernism celebrates rationalism over the emotions, the mind over the body and science over superstition. The French Revolutionaries were fired with enthusiasm to rid society of everything that seemed irrational, re-ordering administrative districts and even the streets of Paris along strictly rational lines. Similarly, scientists have been concerned to dispel myth and illusion and to found a rational basis for the discussion of physical and social phenomena.

The Changing Habitus: From “We” identity to “I” Identity

Elias’s analysis is sociogenetic and psychogenetic; in other words changes in the topology of the psyche reflecting the relative power of the superego over the id (psychogenesis) are related to changes in social organization, (sociogenesis). Changes in society during the late medieval period involved the establishment of a centralized authority, urbanization and the growth of a money economy. He theorizes identity in relation to “I” or “We” identity. “We” identity accentuates those situations where the “I” focuses on what it shares in common with others. In contrast “I” identity focuses on what differentiates us from others. In pre-modern Europe, where “I” is related strongly to the “we” of the family, or clan, this involves a quite different form of identification to that of the individual in the modern nation-state where “I” identity is removed from “we” identity. In this latter context the person identifies with more abstract entities such as their country. In contrast to the pre-modern person the modern individual feels separate, isolated and alone, no matter how much proximity there is to others. The “I”-“We” forms part of what Elias refers to as the social habitus. This emphasizes their interdependency;

Something grows out of the common language which the individual shares with others

–a more or less individual style, what might be called individual handwriting that grows out of the social script. (Elias, 1991: 182).

The habitus represents the articulation, or joining together of social and psychical structures at a given point in time. In the habitus of premodern Europe, the social structure was relatively flat, comprising small warring clans. This social structure was linked to a particular psychic configuration whereby the ego and superego were relatively weak by comparison to a relatively unconstrained id. Within this social context the person was intimately linked to and identified with the immediate group upon which her or his survival depended. There was no concept of an individual self that was separate from the group. Identity in this specific form of habitus was largely based on the “we” identity of the group who dwelt and ate together. In contrast, following the establishment of court societies, the social structure became centralized and hierarchical, with absolute power being vested in the person of the sovereign head of state. This particular form of habitus gave rise to the psychic structure evident in the early modern individual whose id was more powerfully constrained by the internalization of shame and embarrassment than their premodern counterpart. Modern citizens today are assumed to be autonomous, where the differences between people, their “I” identity, is valued more than the “We” identity they share in common with others.

Development and progress

Elias’s focus on interdependency highlights the remarkable nature of global interdependency today. Although the world population is around seven billion people and is estimated to reach nine billion by the year 2050, this massive diversity is contained within less than two hundred nation-states. These new and powerful forms of organization required a wholesale shift of identification by individuals, from the tribe, clan and city-state to those more complex forms based on longer chains of interdependency, represented by the nation-state and by supra-national agencies such as the European Union – although this is still some way from the concept of “world citizen”.

Elias points out that concepts that are nowadays taken for granted, such as “person”, as in “self-contained individual”, and “development”, were unknown to the ancients.i The signifier used by the ancient Greeks to describe the notion of a private contained self was idiotus, signifying the modern word “idiot”. Modern terms such as “person” and “development”, accentuate “I” identity such that we imagine ourselves as pure individuals, where the true “me” is isolated, dwelling in an internal space that is somehow separate from a society which somewhere out there, beyond “me”.

The “Self-Steered” individual

Elias makes a very important contribution to thinking about the antecedents of modern consumer society by linking changes in the psyche (psychogenesis) to those in the social structure (sociogensis). All forms of natural bodily functions and their descriptions, including urinating, defecating, scratching, copulating, passing worms and self-exposure, which were treated as more or less normal parts of everyday life in medieval times, were progressively hidden behind the scenes, first from the gaze of those who are considered inferior in status to the self and then as differences between classes become more refined, virtually completely removed from the social scene. What is striking is the huge degree of control or self-discipline required to enforce such a rein on the emotions. This is more so when one considers that the distance in behaviour and in psychical structure between children and adults increases in the course of the civilizing process. Elias likens the medieval character to a child. In learning how to be competent and self- disciplined adults in today’s society, Elias argues that children today must experience and absorb, in a few short years, the progressive civilizing disciplines of hundreds of years.

At the risk of complicating Elias’s explanation, it can be argued that this plays down the influence of religion, notably, Christianity. The belief that each person has an immortal soul which will be called to account on the Day of Judgement and the belief that despite their social rank, each individual is equal before God, can be understood as important antecedents to the development of the modern nation state, which holds that all citizens are equal and requires individuals to be accountable to society for their actions (Siedentop, 2014).

Mind-Body Dualism

Elias paints a picture of loneliness and of separation. The modern individual who must act with calculation and control comes to think that the real “me” dwells within a mythical private space inside their mind, a space where they can reflect on themselves, as if they were standing above themselves on a spiral staircase. This idea derives from the philosophy of Descartes. Thinking this way affects perception of the body and of the social. If one equates the “real me” with the mind alone, then this gives rise to the sense that one dwells outside of one’s body, such that one acquires a body in just the same way as a garment (1991: 195). For moderns “my” body is separate from “me”, taking on the appearance of a thing, like a diving-suit that one inhabits. In like manner, by appearing to dwell in this private space of the mind, the self can appear to itself as self-contained and therefore to have little need for the bonds provided by family or community. In this way the reality of other people and our reliance upon them appears ephemeral and insubstantial. People come to believe that they are individuals, based on the individual face, thus forgetting the social dimension of faces.

Uneven Development

Elias’s thesis is that, despite differences in the patterns of development between countries, one can discern a glacial mainstream of movement towards civilization. To draw upon the glacial metaphor, while the ice of civilization sometimes retreats, the mainstream of movement over centuries is in one direction. Within this general movement each country develops structural characteristics of its own corresponding to the different social structures and the specific ways in which the emotions are regulated. For example he argues that by comparison to France, England had a short courtly absolutist phase. The English nobility and bourgeois classes struck a form of alliance much earlier than in France; however the amalgamation of upper- and middle- class behaviour took place over a longer period than in France. In contrast to England and France, Germany was decentralized and relatively poor following the Thirty Years War. Germany had a long period of absolutism, exercised through a few small courts. He argues that in Germany differences between bourgeois and nobility were much more pronounced. Compared to England, the German military culture played a huge role in moulding the population. Elias argues that in Germany the bourgeois became habituated to a strong external state authority, resulting in a ‘command–obedience’ relation to self-control, as opposed to the form of ‘teamwork’ which evolved in England. In contrast England’s role as a colonial power aided the development of a differentiated form of ‘self-steering’ or self-control. Although Elias focuses on Europe, his idea of the civilizing process can be extended well beyond. Chinese history is replete with examples of phases of civilization and its reverse. One of the highpoints in Chinese development occurred when the Ming Dynasty ruler Zhu Di (1402-1424) ruled over one of the most formidable court societies comprising orderly government and social stability that the world has seen (Reischauer, et al. 1960).

Economy: Consumption and Capitalism

Capitalism requires the existence of rational self-controlled individuals, who are each capable of acting with calculated foresight and judgment in making decisions and who can envision their lives as developmental projects. Although not dealing specifically with industrialization and the rise of capitalism, Elias argues that the civilization process acts as a precondition for this. Centralization of authority in the person of the monarch and the existence of a state monopoly of violence, create the necessary stability required for industrial expansion. In Europe, this enabled growing chains of interdependency between individuals which facilitated the development of a division of labour and the complex mechanisms required for industrial development involved in the eighteenth century industrial and consumer revolutions.

Is this explanation sufficient? It was briefly mentioned above that Elias’s discussion of the development of the self-steered individual may place too much emphasis on changes to social structure, such as the establishment of a state monopoly of violence and pay insufficient credit to the role played by religion and culture.

Elias’s Relation to Max Weber

In developing his theory of self-discipline and control, Norbert Elias was strongly influenced by Max Weber. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1905) asked why capitalism specifically arose in England and not in other parts of Europe such as Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain? For capitalism to flourish required a social character congenial to the calculative logic of market pricing. Catholics were not good prospects, because at that time most European Catholics lived from day to day according to traditions that were attuned to the rhythms of the seasons and contentedly, so long as their daily needs were provided for. Catholics also constituted poor prospects for capitalist accumulation because of Church teaching that those who accumulate wealth and love money for its own sake will be damned to hellfire for eternity.

Weber found his social character, conducive to market pricing among the Puritans, a Northern European minority of non-conformist Protestants. Whilst Catholics taught that a person can be saved from hellfire by confessing one’s sins, the Puritans believed in predestination, the frightening idea that every soul is judged by God in advance, as either saved and destined for eternal glory, or damned for eternity, and there is nothing on this earth that one can do about it. Against this intolerable idea, there developed the belief that the Puritan believer could find evidence of God’s blessing in two outward signs. Firstly, individual wealth and prosperity came to be seen as a sign of God’s favour, thus effectively reversing the Catholic teaching, that accumulation of wealth is evil. A caveat was that the Puritan believer should not enjoy the wealth he created. The second sign was engagement in charitable works towards the less fortunate.

If the accumulation of wealth was a sign of God’s blessing, as the fruit of an industrious life dedicated to the glory of God, then the time spent devoted to this enterprise could be measured in money. Thus developed the view that time equals money. In this interpretation, time, which for Catholics is a matter of relative indifference, became crucially important for the Puritans; time should be spent wisely, it should not be wasted. The Puritans placed great store on the idea of the ‘calling’, a duty by which a person was called by God to live an industrious and productive life; to wish to be poor was to be unhealthy. The unequal distribution of goods was thus interpreted as a sign of the bestowal of God’s favour.

Puritan life was rationalized, being subject to constant calculation. To prove that they were indeed saved the believer faced a maze of self-imposed sanctions and prohibitions. Anything that did not add to the glory of God was to be strictly avoided, including ‘idle’ talk, over-sleeping, sexual activity outside of procreation, sports, dancing and other idle entertainments such as music. The acquisition of wealth was thought dangerous only insofar as it might encourage idleness. When employed industriously and wisely, wealth was taken as an undoubted sign of God’s blessing.

Although small in number, the religious non-conformists had a huge impact on the development of industry in Britain, involved in banking (Barclays); manufacturing, of chocolate (Rowntrees, Fry’s Cadbury’s); biscuits (Huntly & Palmer); Matches (Bryant and May) and shoes (Clarks); extending to planned communities around Saltaire and Port Sunlight, amongst others. The ‘Plymouth Brethren’ were named after the ship that carried them from England to the North American colonies. Expelled from their country of birth, these migrants brought a powerful Puritan ideology of rugged individualism that valued hard work, thrift and investment, ascetic self-denial and delayed gratification. The character of John D. Rockefeller embodied the paradoxical combination of ruthless rational calculation and philanthropy. Although his father was a described as a charlatan and bigamist, Rockefeller’s mother raised Rockefeller according to the Protestant ethic of strict religious observance, thrift, hard work, and philanthropy. With his brother and others, he launched Standard Oil in 1870. Within ten years the company controlled ninety percent of all oil refined in the USA. Rockefeller’s name became a byword for ruthless ambition, demonstrated in relation to the scope of his vision, the elimination of competition and price-fixing. Rockefeller equated wealth to salvation, regarding those who failed in business as spiritual failures (Worden, 2010: 243). His grandson David Rockefeller argued that his grandfather’s “great religious faith’ enabled him to consolidate the American oil industry (ibid.: 242). Rockefeller became the world’s richest person, some say the richest person who has ever lived. He retired early and spent the last forty years of his life engaging in philanthropy and good works.

Norbert Elias and Herbert Marcuse

Elias worked in the same building as Herbert Marcuse and others who belonged to what is now known as the Frankfurt School, although apparently, they belonged to different groups and did not socialize much.³ This is interesting given that his preoccupation with the emergence of the modern disciplined body is shared by Herbert Marcuse (1964), who subscribes to a similar Freudian psychoanalytic conception of the psyche. Marcuse goes further than Elias to argue that in late modernity the power of the ego has been so colonized by social forces such as advertising as to become ineffective, amounting to little more than a channel for the powerful superego, thus constituting a one-dimensional self.

Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault

It is important to mention Michel Foucault’s alternative explanation of the emergence of the disciplined body, as his argument is more fully described later in this text. Whilst agreeing that individuals are increasingly subjected to bodily discipline in early modern Europe, Foucault differs in almost every other respect from Elias and Marcuse. He dispenses with a psychoanalytic explanation and consequently has no use for concepts such as the id, ego and superego which are key to a psychoanalytic explanation. It follows that he abandons any notion of the self as a pressure cooker filled with repressed desire.

The Modern Consumer

The second story featuring Laura Brown is used as a vehicle to discuss the modern consumer and specifically, the US suburban city landscape in 1949. You may ask why choose the USA in 1949? Laura’s case occurs at the beginning of a period of unprecedented prosperity in the USA brought about by the application of reason to human problems through science and technology and through mass manufacturing, otherwise known as ‘Fordism’. Laura’s case is used as a basis to differentiate an explanation based on the arguments of Norbert Elias from the radical explanation provided by Stuart Ewen.

Story Two: Laura Brown

Laura Brown, one of the central characters in The Hours, seemed to have achieved all that a young woman of her time might desire. The Second World War has ended and millions of Americans have moved to live in the newly created suburban sprawl (Ewen & Ewen, 1992: 174-181). By comparison to the fun-filled “roaring twenties”, the USA in 1949 was beset by anxiety and trepidation, following the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the paranoia fostered by McCarthyism and the Cold War. The suburbs were portrayed as refuges, places where women and children could experience a tranquil, idyllic life removed from the male-dominated commercial hubbub and squalor of the city centre. The story unfolds as follows,

Married to Dan, Laura has an adorable young son called Richie and is pregnant once more. She lives in the perfect nest for a nuclear family, comprising mom, pop and (almost) two kids; a suburban bungalow, with all modern conveniences, including a car and a large refrigerator. But all is not well. In one scene, Laura is shown baking a cake for Dan’s birthday and views the results of her efforts with dismay. The cake hasn’t risen properly and the icing is all wrong. As she is doing this the doorbell rings, but instead of answering the bell, Laura gazes anxiously into a mirror, trying hard to smooth her hair and dress. Richie runs to the door and then returns to tell her who it is. The bell rings again and Laura opens the door to her neighbour Kitty. They exchange pleasantries, but it is clear that the atmosphere is strained. Kitty comes into the kitchen. The narrative continues;

Kitty: Oh, look, you made a cake!

Laura: I know. Kitty: Didn't work.

Laura: I thought it was gonna work. I thought it would be better than that.

Kitty: Oh, Laura, I don't understand it why you find it so difficult! Laura: I don't know either.

Kitty: Everyone can make a cake - it's ridiculously easy. I bet you didn't grease the pan.

Laura: I greased the pan.

Kitty: Alright. You know, you have other virtues. And Dan loves you so much he won't even notice. Whatever you do, he's gonna say it's wonderful. Well, it's true!

During their ensuing conversation they talk about their husbands, Dan and Ray and the book Mrs Dalloway, by Virginia Wolf that Laura is reading. At one point Kitty asks Laura if she can feed her dog, because she has to go to hospital for an operation on her uterus. She had been trying to conceive but now there is a reason – she has a growth. The conversation continues;

Kitty: You’re lucky Laura, I don’t think you can call yourself a woman until you’re a model. The joke is, all my life I could do anything, anything really, except the one thing I wanted.

Kitty begins to cry and Laura embraces her, kissing Kitty on the forehead and face, then fully a lingering kiss on the lips. Laura recoils, though Kitty murmurs, “You’re sweet”.

Once Kitty has left, Laura bakes another cake, which turns out better than the first. Later she drives across town to leave Richie to stay with Mrs. Laitch, his caretaker, while intending to go shopping for the family dinner.

Instead Laura checks into an hotel and it soon becomes clear that she intends to kill herself by taking an overdose of pills. But then she starts reading Mrs Dalloway. She falls asleep and waking, leaves the hotel and drives to Mrs. Laitch’s place to collect Richie. Together they return home where they celebrate Dan’s birthday.

Married, with one child and pregnant with another, living in a spacious new suburban home with all modern conveniences and owning a car enabling her freedom to go wherever she pleased, Laura would have been the envy of many women of her time as living the American Dream. Instead her story is a mixture of anxiety, loneliness, lack of self-worth and repressed sexuality, which led her to the hotel where she came close to committing suicide. How could it be that a person living a lifestyle envied by millions of others could be despairingly close to suicide? One might better understand Laura’s predicament by exploring the internal space that comprises her psyche, which is of a modern individual neurotic consumer. To understand this more fully the elements of Norbert Elias’s theory are first outlined below.

Norbert Elias: Laura Brown as Modern Neurotic Consumer

Laura’s story might be considered a good fit to the description of the modern neurotic consumer, who by pre-modern standards enjoyed unprecedented independence and freedom (Elias, 1991: 149). Her isolation was physical, given she spent most of her time caring for Richie in her suburban home. From Elias, we learn that Laura would have felt isolated no matter how much physical company she had. Like all modern individuals Laura’s isolation was much more profound than was implied by her physical situation. She was isolated because she believed that her real authentic self dwelt alone in the private world constituted by her thoughts. However her actions were a mystery to this private self. Laura was shocked by the breakdown in her self-control when she found herself kissing Kitty on the lips. This incident brought her up short, to wonder what repressed desire might lurk beneath the surface of her self-composure?

When considered from a psychoanalytic perspective, the story is full of symbolism. Laura’s relationship with Kitty is paradoxical. The symbolism of baking is deeply entwined with fertility and reproduction; for instance “bun in the oven” is a colloquialism to describe a woman who is pregnant. Laura had a child and was pregnant with another, but could not bake a cake. Kitty, on the other hand, for whom baking a cake was “ridiculously easy”, could not have children and was being admitted to hospital to have her uterus removed. The “forbidden” kiss between Laura and Kitty invites consideration that perhaps this enabled Laura for the first time a glimpse of homoerotic desire she had hitherto repressed in seeking to conform to the ideal of the American Dream.

The feminist author Betty Friedan (1963) might well have presented the simpler explanation that Laura, as a typical American woman of her time, was caught within a patriarchal double-bind. To Friedan, Laura found it impossible to reconcile her assigned role as perfect housewife, with the unspoken desire that her life comprise a purpose greater than that provided by husband, child and home. Friedan wrote from bitter personal experience; she graduated from college in the 1950s and considered a career in psychology. Instead she quashed her ambition and conformed to social expectations by marrying and having children in a similar suburban setting to Laura; an experience which provoked her to subsequently write one of the landmark texts on feminism. Whatever the reason for her malaise, Laura’s story focuses attention on the contrast between her superficial self-presentation of control and her inner being, marked by a scarcely contained terror she could not acknowledge.

Stuart Ewen: Laura Brown as Modern Rationalized Consumer?

A radical explanation of Laura Brown’s situation goes further than Elias to argue that Laura Brown illustrates the modern rationalized commodity self. By the time of Laura’s story in 1949,what Stuart Ewen calls consumerism was well established in the USA. Ewen’s idea of consumerism is of the reframing of needs by mass advertising away from traditional means of satisfaction such as home baking, towards the purchase of mass produced commodities in the marketplace (Ewen, 1976: 70, 108). Ewen’s account was influenced by several authors, most notably Max Weber and Herbert Marcuse.

From Weber the focus is on how every aspect of Laura’s situation was meticulously programmed by industrial planners. The aim was to extend the penetration of commodities into every aspect of life. The spaces Laura inhabited were purposefully designed in the interests of rationality, efficiency, calculability and control, from the house and the suburban sprawl she lived in, to the automobile she must have if she were to travel. The size of Laura’s kitchen depicted in the film is larger than the “galley” kitchen that was typical of many suburban homes, which, At 10 by 12 feet, was adapted from industrial use to serve the needs of the nuclear family (Ewen, 1976: 166). When baking the cake for her husband, Laura probably used one of the latest electric machines produced by General Electric, or Westinghouse who had been educating women as to their use since the 1930s.

Marcuse developed his psychoanalytic argument that for modern women such as Laura, the supposed “American Dream” of suburban bliss was in fact a nightmare (Ewen & Ewen, 1992: 180). In this explanation Laura’s ego was overwhelmed and alienated from her true nature by a superego that represented the artificial society of the commodity.

Ewen locates the rise of consumerism in the USA in the 1920s when advertisers sought to stimulate mass consumption in order to dispose of the vast surpluses accumulated through the development of the mass production assembly-line process. Madison Avenue advertisers employed psychologists such as Floyd Henry Alport and J.B. Watson in to help them develop powerful emotional appeals that were specifically targeted toward women. The focus was on the creation of a ‘social self’, that Alport describes as, ‘My idea of myself is rather my own idea of my neighbour’s view of me’. During this time the woman’s self became ‘the object of continual and harsh social scrutiny’. The idea of the social self is that the individual feels that they are on show all of the time. Advertisers devised products designed to be antidotes to the shame experienced by the social self,

Each portion of the body was to be viewed critically, as a potential bauble in a successful assemblage. Woodbury’s soap was offered as a perfect treatment for the “newly important face of Smart Today”; another product promised to keep teeth white: “a flashing smile is worth more than a good sized bank account, it wins friends.” After she has used Caro Cocoanut Oil Shampoo, a dashing gentleman informs the lady, “I’m crazy about your hair. It’s the most beautiful of any here tonight (Ewen, 1976: 47).

If we take the above at face value then we would not be surprised to learn that that when the doorbell rang, Laura gazed into the mirror to see herself as Kitty saw her, to find herself wanting. Following Ewen’s argument, Laura would constantly scrutinize herself against the paradoxical ideal of womanhood offered by advertising. The paradox was that while advertising might open up the vista of a world beyond patriarchy for women such as Laura, it maintained them within that world. On the one hand advertisements appealed to her traditional role as mother and caregiver for Richie; on the other, it dangled the promise of emancipation from drudgery. Advertised to as the purchasing manager of the household, Laura was empowered, but at the same time advertising reinforced the traditional idea that she should be dainty and weak. Advertisers were careful to point out that although women were powerful in buying, they should play a secondary role to men, by acting in the position of quartermaster rather than as general of the mutual organization that was marriage. According to Ewen it was clear that the directive power behind this was really industry and that the woman was little more than a factory operative or, as Christine Frederick put it, ‘the woman is no longer a cook, she is a can-opener’.⁴ Additionally, whilst the suburban dream offered Laura the prospect of individual autonomy and space away from the noise and dirt of the city, the reality of suburban life was of monotony and repetition; “here was the language of “individualism” carved out of slavish conformity (Ewen & Ewen, 1992: 178).

Ewen argues that although women gained some sense of status through advertising, this came at a price whereby their traditional ideal role which celebrated values of thrift, careful husbandry of resources and make do and mend, was subverted by advertisers so as to enable the penetration of industrial commodities into the home. Advertising promoted the use of commodities to immigrant groups as part of a ‘civilizing’ influence. It promoted new values based on the use of consumer goods as a means for expressing a unique ‘American’ identity, based on the market, while simultaneously discouraging traditional values and lifestyles. Traditional baking in the home was seen as the greatest impediment to progress confronted by the cake and biscuit industry. By 1952, not long after Laura Brown’s failed attempt to make her cake, the big brands had made successful inroads into this traditional realm. In that year General Mills launched the Betty Crocker range of instant cake mixes. Initially, the range did not sell as well as and the company hired Burleigh Gardner and psychoanalyst Ernest Dichter as marketing consultants to see what could be done. Focus group research suggested that women felt guilty about using the instant cake mix, a process which they felt lacked creativity and authenticity. Dichter, recognizing the links between baking and procreation, recommended that consumers should be instructed to add two eggs to the cake-mix, advice that was taken up by General Mills, with apparently spectacular results.

Peering anxiously into the mirror after the doorbell rang twice, Laura might rightly have worried about Kitty’s judgement of her looks and of her cake. The suburbs were hotbeds of emulation, offering their residents a miniaturized mass-marketed version of the country estates of the landed gentry (Ewen & Ewen, 1992: 174). Pressure to “keep up with the Jones’s” was a cliché of suburban living and Laura’s neighbours would likely have passed judgement on everything from her dress sense, to her child-rearing habits, the company she kept, the make and year of her automobile, her homemaking skills and the extent to which her lawn and her own person were properly manicured. The suburban lifestyle was, “an arena of appearance, spending and retreat” (Ewen & Ewen, 1992: 179).

When considered alongside Norbert Elias (1994), Ewen’s (1976) claim that the “social self” was initially developed by advertisers during the 1920s is somewhat inaccurate. If by the ‘social self’, one means the ability to experience shame and embarrassment and to monitor closely and in minute detail the behaviour of others in addition to one’s own behaviour, then Elias demonstrates came into existence long beforehand. In light of this it is more accurate to say that during the 1920s in the USA advertising exacerbated an already-existing social self.

Colin Campbell: The Romantic Spirit of Capitalism

Alongside marketing academics Morris Holbrook and Elizabeth Hirschman (Holbrook & Hirschman, 1982; Hirschman & Holbrook 1982), the sociologist Colin Campbell (1987) might well be annoyed by the above story of the rationalized life led by Laura Brown. In, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Campbell argues that Weber’s account is partial, firstly, by focusing solely on production and ignoring the consumer revolution and secondly, by developing an overly rationalized account of the human subject, which fails to mention the central importance of emotion and fantasy in consumption experiences. Campbell wants to explain the development of mass consumption by the Protestant bourgeoisie, those small merchants and shopkeepers who were the dynamic force behind the eighteenth-century mass consumer revolution, who must be distinguished from their forbears, the haute bourgeois class of administrators described by Elias. Additionally, how did the norm that one’s consumption needs are fixed, give way to that where wants are regarded as insatiable? In particular, he wants to solve the conundrum as to how the Puritans, who believed that the accumulation of wealth is permissible so long as one doesn’t enjoy it, became transformed into rampant hedonists?

According to Campbell, these changes happened over a considerable period of time, partly as the result of changing Puritan beliefs. For instance, the Calvinist philosopher John Jacque Rousseau argued that humans are intrinsically good and that society corrupts them, raising the possibility of the perfectability of human being. Hedonism became regarded as permissible by means of the argument that it is permissible to take pleasure in alleviating the suffering of others and the centrality of pleasure in experience was developed by the Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Keats. The Romantics in turn influenced the development of the Bohemians,

Each period witnessed a ‘moral revolution’ in which a new spirit of ‘pleasure’ emerged to challenge what was identified as a restrictive ‘puritanism’: a spirit most evident amongst the educated young, who sought pleasure and self-expression through alcohol, drugs, sex and art, whilst an intense moral idealism went hand-in-hand with unrestrained commercialism (Campbell, 1987: 206).

Campbell notes the irony that the Romantics, who rejected the materialism and rationalism of the emerging capitalist society, hugely influenced the development of unrestrained consumerism, where;.

self-illusory hedonism is chacterized by a longing to experience in reality, those pleasures created and enjoyed in the imagination, a longing which results in the ceaseless consumption of novelty. There is a characteristic dissatisfaction with real life and an eagerness for new experiences (Campbell, 1987,, 205).

What does it mean to be “Modern”?

From the above, the idea of the consuming individual that is nowadays taken for granted is not a given of nature but rather an achievement gained as the result of a lengthy process of individualisation. Elias links individualization to the civilising process initiated in early court societies. Ewen draws on the work of Max Weber amongst others to argue that this process intensified as a consequence of the rationalization of everyday life in modernity. Prominent social theorists such as Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman, whose work is discussed later in this section, agree that modernity has had a major influence on individualisation. However, they disagree with Ewen’s argument that the modern individual has been rendered passive by abstract modern processes to emphasize the reflexivity of modern processes, institutions and individuals. Before discussing this further it is necessary first to say something more about modernity.

The term “modern” is a complex adjective to describe a set of ideas, a time period, a style and an institutional context. Whilst changes in perceptions of time and space are discussed more fully in chapter two it is important to mention here the shift from the traditional perception of time as circular, being governed by the seasons, to its modern conception as an arrow, moving from the past which is perceived to be behind us into a future that is in front of us. This is linked to the perception of the past as backward and the future as progressive. Modern ideas are portrayed as progressive, being future oriented, arguing for the overthrow of outmoded institutions based on tradition and patronage and their replacement by new ones constructed along rational meritocratic lines. Most agree that the modern era began when feudalism ended in Europe. However as Elias argues in relation to the civilization process, modern ideas and modes of behaviour did not develop uniformly but rather advanced and retreated over the years. Modernist thinking does not solely consist of the search for rational solutions to human problems, but is fundamentally reflexive, involving reflection on and radical questioning of the status quo.

The beginnings of modernity in Europe date to the late medieval period. The invention of mass printing encouraged the critical questioning of the authority of traditional Catholic teaching which had argued that the Bible should only be made available to the population in Latin as interpreted by priests. The printing of the German and English translations during the 1520s usurped the authority of priests and stimulated the Protestant Reformation. From the time of the European Enlightenment (also called the Age of Reason) to the present day, traditional institutions such as the church, the state and the family constantly come under scrutiny and attack from modernist reformers and abolitionists. Reflexivity inheres as a dynamic principle in modern institutions of education and science, where it is taken for granted that present day orthodoxies should be questioned through rational investigation and overturned if evidence is found to support an alternative explanation. The modern individual consumer is continuously called upon to act reflexively by taking responsibility for their individual project of the self, not only by taking into account the latest developments in science and technology, but also as author of their own story.

Modernity can broadly be divided into three phases. The first dates from the end of feudalism in Europe to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporary social theorists are more interested to discuss the second and third phases. The second phase, from the Industrial Revolution to roughly, the 1980s is referred to as ‘high’ (Giddens, 2001), or ‘heavy’ (Bauman, 2001) modernity, whilst the third phase dating to the present day is referred to as ‘late’ (Beck, 2001; Giddens 2001) or ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2001).

Early Modern Institutions

Zygmunt Bauman’s (2001) use of the term ‘heavy’ is appropriate to describe the institutions of early modernity which in Europe were dominated by vast bureaucracies of the nation-state and heavy industries of engineering and shipbuilding.

The Nation State

The antecedents of the modern nation state can be found in Christian institutions which preached that all souls are equal before God and in the Court societies described by Norbert Elias. The power of rule by an absolutist monarch was challenged by a series of cataclysmic events, including the American and French Revolutions, which initiated a slow process of transformation leading to the creation of the modern democratic nation-state. was a more coherent entity than the court society, involving the creation of foundational myths and the construction of national symbols and rituals of identity such as national flags and costumes. In more fragmented regions of Europe such as those encompassing modern-day Germany, Italy and Turkey, the nation state was forged by the integration of territories previously controlled by rival factions through the influence of charismatic leaders such as Otto von Bismarck, Giusseppe Garibaldi and Kamal Attaturk. Guarantees of individual citizens rights assumed key importance in the US Constitution and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The ideal was proclaimed that all citizens should be free to have an equal say in who was to govern them and should be treated equally before the law. Despite these high hopes demands by the French Revolutionaries of 1789 for ‘Liberté, égalité and fraternité’ have yet to be realized. In the USA discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion and sex was outlawed in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, yet racism and sexism persist.

Education and Science

Modern thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were optimistic that a better world would arise through mass education and the application of reason to salient problems confronting humanity. The progressive rise of modern science enabled the power of nature to be controlled and harnessed to serve human ends. Michel Foucault (2008) studied how the scientific method was applied to the understanding of crime and to physical and mental illnesses in the hope that these would one day be eradicated. These were systematically examined and catalogued by a new professional elite working in the emergent fields of medicine and psychiatry. These developments led to the sequestration, or removal, of large sections of the European population from family life and their enclosure in institutions. Modern institutions included schools and colleges to discipline and train future citizens; prisons to reform offenders; and asylums and hospitals to treat those were deemed mentally and physically ill.

Foucault explains that the overall aim of the process of sequestration was to separate out and enclose those considered as potentially deviant or abnormal from the mass of normal citizens. This action was motivated by the belief that children could be educated and so made reasonable, prisoners could be reformed and those who were ill, cured. This process required systems to enable individual behaviour to be identified, monitored and recorded. Individuals were examined and graded and those deemed abnormal were confined within the space of the orphanage, prison, insane asylum or hospital. Sexual deviance, which was regarded premodern times as a behavioural quirk of nature came in the early modern period to be judged as an enduring individual pathology. This is further discussed in the chapter on power.

Capitalism

Capitalism is an intrinsically modern form of industrial organization. Work began to be sequestered from daily family life from at least 1769, when Richard Arkwright established a factory of 300 workers to operate his new spinning frame. Frederick the Great (1740-1806) transformed Prussia into a modern nation-state, whose model army was an exemplary fighting machine where strict discipline was imposed and tasks were broken down into their component parts. Alongside other modern institutions such as the army, industry became subjected to rational organization, monitoring and control. Capitalists recognized that similar modern methods could be harnessed to increase profitability through greater efficiency. ‘Fordism’ is named in honour of Henry Ford for his development of the mass assembly-line process in 1908, when 10,000 ‘Model Ts’ were produced.

Karl Marx argued at one point that one’s social class is materially related to one’s economic position. Capitalism produces two social classes comprising, the dominant class of bourgeoisie capitalists who own the means of production (which should be differentiated from the high bourgeois class discussed by Elias, which predated capitalism) and the proletariat, who constitute the class of workers, free to sell their labour to the capitalists. In early modernity social class provided a ‘heavy’ anchor for the identity of the new mass of industrial workers who moved to the cities. The two classes might live in relative proximity but inhabited entirely different social worlds. Thus, in Britain during the 1950s, there was a degree of accuracy to the stereotype of the working-class man who was expected to leave school at sixteen, work in a manual occupation, belong to a trades union, live in a council estate, drink beer in a public bar, go to the football on Saturday, wear a flat cap, go on holiday to Blackpool or Brighton and read the Daily Mirror. Similarly, his upper-class counterpart would have been expected to graduate from a good University, work in a profession or business management, belong to a Gentleman’s club, wear a bowler hat, live in a leafy suburb, drink gin and tonic in a saloon bar, play golf on a Saturday, go abroad on holiday and read The London Times.

The Nuclear Family

The rise of the modern nuclear family and the gradual decline of the traditional extended family paralleled the period of rapid industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries. As witnessed more recently in Latin America, China and Africa, millions of individuals were drawn to work in the rapidly expanding cities, beyond the support and control of their extended kin network. The family came to be organized in a similar way to that described in relation to Laura Brown, as a unit comprising the husband, who spent long hours working away from home, his wife, who was expected to be homemaker and caretaker for him and their two children.

The nuclear family provided a solid, heavy, basis for identity. Identity was extrinsically defined in that gender roles were tightly monitored and policed by neighbours, organizations and by society in general. The babies of teenage girls who had “accidents” were taken from them and placed for adoption or in orphanages. Family members who exhibited behaviour considered unusual, which deviated from social expectations could find themselves transferred to a mental institution for correction. If the kiss between Laura Brown and Kitty had occurred in seventeenth century Europe and been witnessed by others this might have been commented upon as sinful or inappropriate, but otherwise regarded as being of no real consequence. However, attitudes changed during the early modern period when sexual behaviour, particularly that of the middle classes, came under increasing scrutiny from the emerging field of psychiatry, whose practitioners were keen to differentiate deviant from normal from behaviours. If the kiss between Laura and Kitty had been observed in Britain or the USA in the 1949, Laura might well have been sent for assessment by a psychiatrist, who would have judged whether the kiss counted as evidence for homosexuality, which was then considered as an enduring and perverse identity structure. If judged a homosexual, Laura could have been sentenced to a prison term or more likely, been committed to a psychiatric institution until her “condition” was “cured”.

Late Modernity

It has been argued that changes in technology and social organization since the nineteen seventies have been so profound, that particularly for those who live in the Western world, the modernist project has imploded and that consumers now live in a postmodern era. This view was advanced by Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francis Lyotard and Fredric Jameson in social theory and is associated with the work of Stephen Brown in marketing. Whilst arguments advanced by postmodernists are discussed later in this text, this section discusses the different argument associated most prominently with Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, who argue that while late modernity is in many respects quite different from early modernity, this remains a modern era. Late modernity broadly refers to that period from the early1980s following the election of the neoliberal governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to the present day. Zygmunt Bauman’s (2001) term “liquid modernity” describes the changes wrought by the globalization of politics, technology, trade and risks. The quote, “all that is solid melts into the air” was coined by Karl Marx to describe the dynamic and destructive nature of capitalism. Bauman refers to the melting away of traditional institutions that had bound individuals in solidarity and physical proximity, such as religion, family, community, social class and a stable career, in late modern societies that are now governed by the ideology of the marketplace.

A key difference between early and late modernity is with respect to what Ulrich Beck calls reflexive modernization. Beck argues that the rational systems developed during the early modern period to solve the most pressing problems confronting humanity are nowadays themselves a major part of the problem. Although modern science, industry and technology have brought many benefits to society these now pose existential threats to human existence, such as global warming, nuclear war, and the unknown threats posed by biological and nano technologies. Reflexive modernization also poses problems for the construction of individual identity by undermining the basis of the solid institutions which persisted into the early modern period to provide extrinsic anchors for identity. Ulrich Beck argues along similar lines to Norbert Elias, that individualization is a profoundly social structure that has undermined the traditional basis for social coexistence’ “it means the paradox of an ‘individualizing structure’ as a non-linear, open-ended, highly ambivalent, ongoing process. It relates to a decline of narratives of given sociability” (Beck & Beck, 2001: xxii). By this he means that the late modern individual lacks stable anchor-points for identity that were once provided by religion, nationality, gender and social class. Intensification of individualization in late modernity is propelled by a constellation of factors; the extension of human rights discourse to end discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and gender; provision of individual paid employment and the provision of specific institutions and technologies targeted specifically to the individual. The fictional character of Wai Ching is introduced below to provide some grounding for these rather complex arguments relating to the late modern consumer. Wai Ching is differentiated from Laura Brown in order to illustrate some of the key differences between early modern consumers and their late modern counterparts.

Institutions in Late Modernity

Story 3: Wai Ching: Late Modern Consumer

Wai Ching arrived in the UK from Hong Kong to study, then found a job as an IT sales consultant. Preferring her European name “Maggie”, she lives with her Canadian boyfriend in a rented apartment in London’s Docklands.

Before the first COVID lockdown in March 2020 Wai Ching had avidly attended auction sales of ancient Chinese artefacts, acquiring bargains that are prominent displayed in her apartment. Having lived in Europe for so long, she no longer feels particularly Chinese, preferring to describe herself as a “world-citizen”. Wai Ching spends a lot of time online with her friends who are from a diverse range of nationalities, none of them too close, who also work for multinationals based in the City of London. She is an avid user of social media and since the COVID lockdowns averages ten hours a day working remotely and during gaps uploading the latest data and images about her virtual self, particularly her nails, recipes, workout performance and sleep patterns. She considers herself a high-achiever and is proud that she was recently given a large bonus as top sales representative for that month. However, while several of her colleagues are friends, she feels envious of those, particularly women, whom she considers smarter, or better looking. Recently she massaged her sales data to make this appear better than it actually was by including promises of future sales and not actual orders, in order to come out on top once more.

Wai Ching has no time for “big” politics and closely guards her opinions. However, she is supportive of gay rights, having cared for a friend who contracted AIDS. She is also strongly opposed to the rise of authoritarian politicians and feels scared and threatened by the increasingly sexist and racist comments by some of her colleagues who have been emboldened by right-wing politicians. Like many of her compatriots she is a regular user of skin lightening creams. To the horror of her family, she has expressed the desire to change her nose to make the bridge higher, so as to make it more “European.” She feels a sense of loyalty to her parents, but indignantly rejected their recent suggestion of a potential wedding match. While her parents are religious, she likes to think of herself as agnostic. In any case she argued that it would not be a good idea for her to return to Hong Kong right now. She would eventually like to settle down to have children and is considering having her eggs frozen to enable her to reproduce later in life

The Nation-State vs Capital

Bauman’s “liquid modernity” (2001) differentiates the “solid “institutions of early modernity such as the nation-state and the nuclear family, from the global mobile and flexible “liquid” institutions of late modernity. One might object that the nation-state, family and social class are very much with us today. Beck refers to these as zombie institutions because they are dead but still alive (2001: 204/5). The nation-state is an early-modern creation, constituting a solid structure that is localised and rooted in a particular place. The reach of the nation-state has lessened as the

In the political arena the power of the individual nation-state has waned as regional blocs have developed. This trend is likely to continue with the emergence of global terrorism which operates across and beyond national frontiers. In the economic sphere, the nation-state is fixed to a given territory, whilst global capital is fluid being mobile across territories. The organizational processes proper to the nation-state such as law and regulation are ponderous and slow moving by comparison with the mobility of capital which can flow from one place to the other in milliseconds or even nanoseconds. The very idea of ‘place’ is itself insufficient to capture the nature of transactions in the era of Cloud computing.

The Family

The early modern nuclear family, such as that comprising Laura Brown, her husband Dan and their children, is a thing of the past in the age of liquid modernity. A host of more complex familial arrangements such as that enjoyed by Wai Ching are now commonplace resulting from the interrelation of a number of factors including; more easily available abortion; an increase in employment for women, lower rates of marriage, the legalization of gay marriage; and the reduction of the stigma on single parents.

The family has been transformed from early to late modernity due to a number of developments relating to the importance attached to individual rights. Decline in marriage has led to an increase in long-term “common law” arrangements. Where marriage persists, divorce and re-marriage are common. Family composition is made more complex following the legal sanction of civil partnerships and gay marriage. There is no longer a stigma placed on women working and indeed the opposite is argued to be the case where women homemakers feel that they are treated as social pariahs. The approach to deviance in general in late modernity is quite different to, if not turned on its head, when related to what preceded it. In many countries homosexuality no longer bears the stigma it once did and all kinds of sexual practices once deemed perverse now feature routinely in mainstream programming, mass advertising and social media. While the stigma linked to deviant behaviours has been removed, the number of officially described behaviours has dramatically increased. For instance, consumption-related disorders contained in the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) includes Substance-Related Disorders, ranging from Caffeine Intoxication to Alcohol Intoxication Disorder; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; Anorexia; Bulimia and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Institutional Trust

By institutional trust, Anthony Giddens (2001) means that the late modern citizen consumer trusts those remote abstract systems that we take for granted, which organize our daily lives. Developments in science, technology and industry have considerably improved life prospects for Wai Ching who is safer, better fed, more comfortable and longer-lived than her premodern or even early modern counterparts such as Laura Brown. The citizen-consumer of late modernity assumes as a minimum, the provision of good quality housing, clean water, efficient waste disposal, ready availability of an abundant variety of fresh food safe to eat from far flung continents, light and controlled temperature at the flick of a switch, reliable and punctual transport and ready access to communications technologies. Unlike her premodern counterpart who was largely reliant on her local community for the satisfaction of her needs, the protective cocoon that envelops Wai Ching requires coordinated action by a huge number of workers and technologies organized by abstract systems across space and time. Giddens places special emphasis on the psychological importance of trust to human subjectivity and so these abstract systems provide considerable trust and reassurance for the late modern individual.

Risk Society

The idea that late modernity comprises a risk society (Beck & Beck, 2002) seems strange in light of the above given that the late modern world is considerably safer than what preceded it. The risk society arises because of the modern drive to colonize the future, by anticipating and controlling risk. Assessing risk so as to anticipate it and control it is intrinsic to the reflexive organization of modern processes. Beck (1992) points out that many significant risks today, including those posed by global warming and nuclear disaster are the product of the modernization process itself. This is ironic given that risk assumed importance in the first place because of the modern impetus to contrive rational solutions to anticipate and control future risks. The prediction of risk is the impetus behind diverse industries including genetic screening, volcanology, the development of technologies to locate and destroy meteorites and bio-monitoring devices. Individual consumers are expected to act reflexively to manage the risks they confront.

Risk assessment is a constant factor in the life of Wai-Ching who has a heightened awareness of macro-level risks facing all humanity and their relation to her personal risk factors. While consumers such as Laura Brown are portrayed by Stuart Ewen as passive in relation to the forces determining her identity Wai Ching is active, reflexively managing perceived risks by daily monitoring and uploading data on her diet, sleep pattern and exercise regime. Wai Ching attempts to colonize the future by considering having her eggs frozen in anticipation that she will be less fertile at the point in the future when she feels economically secure to conceive. Much of her life, including her diet and exercise regimes are organized in line with her perception of risks to her health and job success. Wai Ching’s perception of risk is influenced largely by traditional and social media. Recently there have been renewed reports that another flu pandemic is imminent, of two unexplained plane crashes and terrorist attacks in European beach resorts. She has consequently bought vials of the latest flu vaccine and cancelled her beach holiday in Europe. She drives a car, even though the chances of serious injury in a car accident are much greater than those of being caught up in a terrorist event or a plane crash.

Identity

The reflexive nature of modernization has undermined the authority of institutions based on nationality, social class, religion, gender and ethnicity to act extrinsically to shape the identity of individuals. As the influence of these extrinsic anchors for self-identity has waned so the individual in late modernity is cast free and made responsible for the construction of their own self narrative. The self in late modern society thus engages constantly in a process of reflexive self-monitoring and change.

Laura Brown’s life was dominated by the social expectation that she set aside her academic ambitions to conform to the image of a model white middle class wife, mother and homemaker. From Giddens, one might assert that Laura’s identity was embedded in the context of the specific place she inhabited, where her freedom of choice was heavily constrained by the extrinsic expectation to conform to the lifestyle of a woman of her social standing (Giddens, 2001: 17/18). The concurrent expectation for her husband Dan was that he devote his life to the development of a successful career. The Browns were expected to follow consumption and leisure activities appropriate to their class position, purchasing the “right” kind of car and joining the “right” kind of country club. In contrast, even though born from in Hong Kong where filial piety is still celebrated as an important value, Wai Ching resists her family’s suggestion to marry and has free choice over her career, lifestyle and friends. In contrast to Laura, Wai Ching’s identity is disembedded, in that she has been lifted out of the context of life in Hong Kong and the social expectations that go along with that life. Being removed from this traditional context her identity is more intrinsically self-determined as she is free to be the author of her own identity.

As is discussed below in relation to narcissism, the freedom to be the author of one’s own identity has positive and negative aspects. The positive aspect of freedom of choice is readily understandable. Most late modern women would regard Laura Brown’s life with a degree of horror. Yet as Bauman argues, the late modern consumer has no choice but to be the author of her identity; she cannot choose to change the rules of the game. If problems of choice are difficult for Wai-Ching they are more so for her cousins who live in the Peoples Republic of China, which in less than a generation has been transformed from a collectively planned economy where identity was largely determined by the state, to the situation today, where much of life is subjected to the operation of market forces;

And so the problem of ‘identity’, haunting men and women since the advent of modern times, has changed its shape and content. It used to be the kind of problem which pilgrims confront and struggle to resolve: a problem of ‘how to get there?’ It is now more like a problem with which the vagabonds, people without fixed addresses and sans papiers struggle daily, “Where could I, or should I, go? (Bauman, 2001: 147).

As a career man in the 1950s Laura Brown’s husband Dan would be described in Bauman’s terms as a pilgrim who followed a steady career path, whose only problem was to calculate how to succeed in making it to the top. In contrast Wai Ching is acutely aware of the precarious nature of her employment, living with the anxiety that her performance may not match expectations, or that she might be asked to relocate, or her employment terminated. Although paid largely on commission she is thankful that she has a fairly steady job and is not an unpaid intern or employed on ‘a zero hours’ contract. Given the precarity of her position, Wai Ching has no sentimental feeling for objects such as the artworks she has purchased, viewing these purely instrumentally as investments which she will keep so long as they continue to rise in value (Bardhi, et al. 2012) Who knows what might happen? Perhaps she will have to sell them and start life afresh in a new country? Returning to Bauman’s metaphor of the road to describe late modern identity,

The task is to pick the least risky turn at the nearest crossroads, to change direction before the road ahead gets impassable or before the road scheme has been designed, or before the coveted destination is moved elsewhere or has lost its glitter (Bauman, 2001: 147).

The Late Modern Consumer: Entrepreneur of the Self

The idea that the late modern consumer as an entrepreneur of the self derives from neoliberal arguments. The antecedents of neoliberalism, which are discussed in chapter four, can be traced to the end of the Second World War. These ideas were first implemented in the USA and the UK following the election of the governments of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s and have since been disseminated throughout the world by the IMF and the World Bank amongst others. Neoliberal ideas represent a particular form of social Darwinism linked to the ideology of the marketplace. This assumes that society is simply an amalgam of naturally competitive individuals who seek to maximise their profit.

Neoliberalism champions the idea of the responsible individual. This assumes that humans act like what Daniel Kahneman (2011) calls econs, or rational, calculating machines (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994) who should be judged as responsible for their success and failure in life. Individuals are presupposed to respond to incentives when making informed choices between alternatives. This argument can be taken to extremes. Kahneman for example attributes to the famous neoliberal economist Gary Becker, the argument that obese people choose to be obese because they believe that one day a cure for diabetes will be developed and some people choose to become criminals, not because of a difference in motivation from others, but because their benefits and costs differ (Kahneman, 2011: 412; Becker, 1968: 176).

Neoliberals believe in a small state, arguing that state bureaucracies are inefficient, being prone to nepotism through control of resources by cliques of privileged individuals. From this they argue that the proper role of government is to interfere as little as possible in daily life, except by changing incentives where this is deemed necessary and to stimulate competition and ensure that this is fair. They advocate that vested interests be broken up and efficiency improved by the establishment of a competitive meritocracy. They seek to achieve this by creating quasi-markets in areas such as education, healthcare and prisons, motivated by the belief consumers will instil market discipline by exercising freedom of choice between different competitive offerings. Quasi-markets require the establishment of criteria that substitute for money, operating as benchmarks to measure success, the routine measurement of these criteria and transparent reporting of the data of competing individuals.

The uptake of neoliberal ideas has led to the “rolling back” of the state by privatising state monopolies, reduced government regulation of business and introducing market based systems of accountability and control into areas previously thought of as part of the public sphere. “League tables” have been constructed to act as market signals to enable consumers to choose, not only between hospitals, schools, universities, courts and social-service providers, but within these to signal the best (and worst) individual surgeon, teacher, professor, lawyer and social worker. By creating a more transparent system based on quantified objective data, neoliberals presume that consumer choice will enhance accountability by acting as a powerful disciplinary force on employees and business. Governed by the idea of meritocracy those who succeed are considered deserving of their success while those who fail are judged losers who are responsible for their failure.

Meritocracy is the idea that the most able person can succeed despite their background and provides one rationale for the extension of the market beyond the confines of the economy. The individual is presumed to be responsible for the outcome of the failure of his or her personal enterprise. Success is attributed to the management of one’s talents by developing a personal brand to win over the competition. Meritocracy can be a force for good by seeking to overturn privilege and nepotism sustained by protectionist institutions. Combined with the idea of the capitalist free market, this suggests that those who succeed should be respected as deserving of their success. By extension those who do not succeed are labelled as being responsible for their predicament. As a consequence of the implementation of these ideas it is argued that social problems that were once thought to be the responsibility of the social system, such as crime, poor health, or unemployment, has been shifted onto individuals, who are blamed as being too weak, lazy or stupid to successfully manage their personal enterprises (Verhaeghe, 2014).

A difficulty in explaining the acceptance of neoliberal ideas in the Western world is that their underlying message is contrary to the centuries old message of the Christian gospels. The parables told by Jesus Christ insisted that the poor in spirit and the meek would find a secure place in the afterlife, warning the rich that they had the same chance of entering heaven as a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. Such stories served a very important purpose in premodern times when class mobility was low. In those days when all believed in a just God, the poor gained some solace from their otherwise miserable plight on earth, being reassured that one day they would gain their just rewards in heaven, whilst the rich for whom they toiled, would roast in hell (De Botton, 2011). The powerful message conveyed by such stories was considerably weakened with the appearance of a new narrative that spread the opposing message, that wealth is good and poverty is bad. Max Weber argues that this message was disseminated during the seventeenth century with the rise to power of the Puritans, a Christian sect who formed the early bourgeoisie in Europe and played a major role in the development of capitalism in the USA. In an argument that is discussed in more detail in chapter two, Weber claims that due to their belief in predestination, the Puritans effectively reversed the traditional Christian message to argue instead, that wealth and riches can be understood as signs of God’s blessing, so long as they are produced in the course of an observant, industrious and fruitful life. Conversely those who are poor, ill, criminal or mad show no sign of God’s blessing were believed likely to be condemned to hell.

The neoliberal story, that the rich deserve their wealth and the poor their lot is similar to that promulgated by the Puritans, except that it lacks any allusion to religion. Another powerful contribution to neoliberal ideas was contributed by Charles Darwin’s cousin Herbert Spencer, the father of Social Darwinism. Darwin (1859) wrote of the “struggle for existence’, noting the importance of reproductive success by those who leave the most copies of themselves to future generations. From this, Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest”. When applied to the economy, this can misleadingly be read to imply that the wealthy are naturally so, having been selected as “fit” by the blind process of evolution. Taking Bill Gates, who is perhaps the richest man in the world as an example, this implies that the extraordinary success of Microsoft is entirely due to his individual endeavour, underpinned by his superior genetic endowment. As is discussed more fully in chapter three, the meaning of fitness in evolutionary theory relates to the ability of an organism to survive and produce viable offspring, so that one’s fitness increases to the extent that more offspring survive. Given that Bill Gates has three children, anyone on the planet with four children who themselves reproduce is arguably fitter in evolutionary terms.

It should be noted that some evolutionary thinkers disagree with Social Darwinism arguing that this at best provides a partial explanation based on false assumptions; firstly by reducing society to a collection of individuals and thus ignoring the importance of groups; and secondly, by downplaying the significant role played by cooperation in evolution. However during the past fifty years neoliberals have argued that the capitalist economy itself constitutes an evolutionary domain within which economic outcomes are optimized by maximising efficiencies through competition, whereby some mutations fail and others succeed and spread. With ready access to policy makers, belief in the perfectability of the market led to a huge increase in the development of quasi-markets from the 1980s onwards. The myth of the all-powerful market reached its zenith in the period prior to the financial crash of 2007 when the entire system came close to collapse (Roscoe, 2014). While this prompted French President Nicholas Sarkozy to proclaim in 2008 that the idea of an all-powerful market was mad and dead, belief in the market persists. Perhaps on this basis it should be added to the list of zombie institutions mentioned by Ulrich Beck (2001).⁵

The neoliberal story, that the wealthy are deservedly so and vice versa, remains as the dominant narrative today, when it is common to believe that the rich deserve their success and the poor are responsible for their plight (Dorey, 2010). Linked to this is the belief that social and income inequalities are inevitable. The rich consider themselves entitled to their wealth (Piff, 2014), despite that they tend to act more unethically than the average citizen (Piff, 2012). On the other hand encouraged by media reports, the belief is widespread that poverty is explicable as a character deficiency intrinsic to the individual, such as lack of willpower, an inability to budget, or simply due to laziness and scrounging. Is this fair? Quoting from Ulrich Beck (1995), Zygmunt Bauman describes the overall effect of this tendency to regard the situations of the rich and the poor as deservedly so as surplus manipulation (italics in original);

…when the blame for socially produced imperfections and wrongs is pushed onto the individual. A system for overcoming problems is transformed to one for causing problems; “you are on the one hand, made responsible for yourself, but on the other hand are ‘dependent on conditions which completely elude your grasp (Bauman, 2001: 5).

The reality of poverty is different. Similar to Pierre Bourdieu, Bauman laments the precariousness of life for workers in a neoliberal society. Successful employees such as Wai Ching may suddenly find themselves joining the ranks of the poor, with no power to resist if their job disappears due to calls for increased flexibility, de-layering or relocation of the business in the interests of efficiency. Once a person is reduced to poverty it is likely that they will remain so because resource scarcity severely impedes a person’s performance, leading them to focus exclusively on what is immediately scarce and to avoid other important factors (Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014). Neoliberal policies of low taxation have created huge wealth disparities such that the top eighty billionaires in the world own more wealth than three and a half billion people, or fifty percent of the world’s population. In this context it is noteworthy that for the past thirty years a majority of US citizens have believed earnings distribution to be unfair and that currently a majority supports the idea of increased taxes on the rich.6 The rich have responded to this by paying billions to Public Relations firms to lobby politicians to reduce the Federal Budget and to keep taxes low. As a consequence some billionaires pay no tax at all.7 There is some evidence that the neoiberal consensus has begun to fracture in stagnating Western economies, particularly since the 2007 financial crash, as the result of growing social inequality, increasingly precarious employment and falling real wages. However much of the anger of those who have fallen victim has been directed against migrants who are scapegoated as the source of all manner of social ills in response to an imaginary call to make the country “great” once more.

What are the effects of neoliberalism on the psyche of the individual? Following Norbert Elias, clues can be found in changes to the social context. It is argued that by comparison to the early modern era the social scene today is dominated by social inequality, competition between individuals, transience, flexibility, accountability, anxiety, fear and envy (Verhaeghe, 2012). A major longitudinal study of British civil servants from the 1960s to the late 1980s found that even within that relatively homogeneous occupational grouping, those at the bottom of the status hierarchy were three times more likely to suffer chronic heart disease than those at the top. Those in lower grades reported heightened anxiety related to a lack of control over jobs perceived to be mundane, demanding and lacking in support from colleagues.⁸ Given increased job losses and efficiency drives across the public and private sectors in the two decades since this study was conducted, it is reasonable to assume that such anxieties have intensified. The cross-national study conducted by epidemiologists Wilkinson and Picket (2009) concluded that countries with higher social inequality experience major negative effects on a range of health outcomes, including life expectancy, literacy, obesity, teenage births and drug and alcohol abuse. ⁹ In particular, they argue that trust is lower and envy is greater in more unequal societies where humiliation and shame are more prevalent. From Gilligan (1996: 110) they contend that this finding is worrying, because those who suffer humiliation and shame often resort to violence against others as a means to reinstate wounded pride.

It is understandable within a work context how the constant division of the workforce into winners and losers will be a source of pride to those judged as winners and of humiliation and shame to those judged losers. In the field of consumption the combination of the idea that wealth is an end in itself with the meritocratic argument that everyone can succeed, leads to what the French philosopher Rousseau calls amour propre (Blackburn, 2014: 87). Rousseau differentiates amour de soi, or self-interested behaviour based on the desire for food, safety and health, from the more dangerous amour propre, which is the fiercely competitive desire that arises in relation to social status. Because wealth acts as an index of success in a neoliberal society, so material goods achieve symbolic importance as status markers. Translated into Maslow’s (1970) terminology amour propre corresponds to esteem and status needs. Goods are desired, not for their functionality, but as status markers which are jealously guarded by their owners and enviously desired by those who feel ashamed because they lack them. This is linked to materialism, defined as a collection of three personality traits: envy, nongenerosity, and possessiveness (Belk, 1985). One explanation of materialism argues that this destructive trait arises as the consequence of poverty, insecurity and deprivation in early childhood which then persists as an orientation into adulthood (Belk, 1988).

Social theorist Rene Girard argues in relation to the experience of shame and envy, that what matters is not inequality as such, but rather the extent to which inequality is accepted as legitimate. It is important to first sketch the elements of Girard’s inter-individual theory. Girard focuses on the relationships between individuals to argue that one does not simply desire an object for its own sake. Rather, as is also emphasized by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, desire is desire of the other. Desire has two aspects; it is for the other in that we crave to be like those we admire, whom we take as our models; in its second aspect desire is of the other in our wish to be recognized and desirable by others. We take as our models those we admire, because of the objects they possess. An object need not be a physical thing but can include anything that explains a model’s attractiveness to the subject, perhaps by conveying some intangible quality such as good looks, or style. We admire and envy those we take as our models who possess the object we desire, coming to believe that their success is due to their possession of the object and furthermore, that if only we possessed the precious object, then we would surely be equally, if not more, successful than them. This in a nutshell is the basis of Girard’s theory of mimetic desire which is motivated by the desire to be like the person whom we take as our model, who also as a rival.

Girard (1976) uses Cervantes’ medieval tale Don Quixote as an example to illustrate his point about desire and envy. Don Quixote and his faithful servant Sancho Panza lived at a time when class divisions between the aristocracy and serfs were absolute. Although the Don and Panza shared the same physical space, their symbolical relation was strictly hierarchical. Girard describes their relation as one of external mediation. Each occupied a very different symbolic world such that Panza would never have dreamt of desiring objects possessed by the Don. In contrast, those who advocate modern meritocratic principles argue for the abolition of class hierarchies, encouraging individuals to inhabit the same symbolic world as their models, so that they come to desire the same things. Girard calls this state, where both subject and model form part of the same symbolic world, a relation of internal mediation. Premodern subjects such as Sancho Panza did not consider the rich to be of the same species as themselves and so did not seek to imitate their desires, nor to envy their wealth. However it is argued that the declining influence of the Christian stories about the respective fates of the rich and the poor, together with the growing influence of the meritocratic ideal, have led to the situation today where every individual is encouraged to consider him or herself as good as, or better than, everyone else. With the dissolution of symbolic hierarchies the brake imposed by external mediation has been released and a state of internal mediation prevails where the consuming individual today can identify their desire with whomsoever they please. Envy is encouraged by the widespread use of celebrities in advertising and in the media more generally as models for emulation for those less fortunate. Reality genres encourage the belief that talent is not a necessary prerequisite to celebrity.

In sum, the neoliberal individual, whether at work or consuming, is perpetually on show as the constant subject of monitoring by the self (known as self-reflexivity), or by others. Leisure time, far from providing respite intensifies the endless activity of self-promotion on social media where one’s ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ must be checked constantly. The sense of being on stage feeds paranoia, or ‘the unrealistic belief that other people want to harm us’ (Freeman & Freeman, 2008: 23). Indeed it may actually be true that unknown others really do wish to harm us, as in reported cases of the actions of internet trolls. The inspiration for Figure One is drawn from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1966a; 1966b), who describes ‘seesawing’ as part of the formation of self-identity during the mirror stage. This essential but destructive phase of self-development occurs somewhere between six and eighteen months and remains as a continuing aspect of the self in later life. A new aspect of the self called the ideal ego is formed when the infant identifies with her mirror-image. This identification is compelling as the infant lacks coordination and motor control. The downside is that this image constitutes a source of rivalry and tension, in being “me”, but at the same time “not me” because it is an image in the mirror that is outside the self. In the mirror stage the infant regards herself from one of two positions; at bottom from her internal experience of weakness; at the top from the perspective of the powerful mirror image. In Lacan’s explanation the alienation and rivalry of the mirror stage is overcome to an extent when the infant finds a relatively stable cultural identity. However neoliberalism accentuates the ‘seesaw, aspect of the self as depicted in Figure One. Individuals oscillate between two positions. When judged a winner, perched at the top, one proudly looks down on the inferior other with contempt; when judged a loser, one reacts to humiliation and shame by looking upwards with loathing and envy. In the neoliberal society shame is everywhere, reported in relation to celebrities such as Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong, politicians, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Francois Hollande, the entire population of Greece, and anyone who is unsuccessful or poor, or who regrets that post on social media that seemed so apt and witty at the time.

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Two Visions of the Late Modern Consumer

The discussion of late modernity to this point has focused on ideas that are shared by several authors. However there are different visions of the late modern consumer who is described by some as a narcissist or as an altruist. While there is a possibility of agreement that the consumer is an entrepreneur of the self, the different claims made with respect to narcissism and altruism are clearly incompatible and are explored further below.

The Late Modern Consumer as Narcissist

In the ancient myth Lirope, the mother of Narcissus, asks the blind seer Teresias if her son will have a long life. Teresias replies enigmatically that unless he fails to recognize himself he will have a long life. Narcissus was beautiful and rejected all those who sought to court him, amongst them the nymph Echo. One spurned suitor prayed that if Narcissus should love, he should be denied what he loves. The god Nemesis heard this prayer, following which Narcissus was led to bend over a placid pool in a peaceful grove, into which he gazed as he bent to quench his thirst. Entranced and transfixed by the image, he grasped in vain to possess the beautiful image which disappeared before him. His cries were heard by Echo who came near and repeated all he said. Rooted to the spot, Narcissus turned into a flower.

The myth of Narcissus has inspired artists and poets for centuries and is used as a figure to illustrate the arguments that society today is dominated by a character who is empty, amoral, manipulative and obsessed with his or her self-image.

The narcissist is held up as the ultimate end-product of the neoliberal consumer society. Narcissism, which used to be classed as a personality disorder more often today described as a disease. Twenge & Campbell (2009) describe narcissism as a plague, or epidemic, that is sweeping through the West, which threatens to engulf the entire world. In a similar vein late modern consumers are described as infected by “affluenza” (Hamilton & Denniss, 2005), or “selfish capitalism” (James, 2008). The narcissist is described as a shallow, exhibitionist, who by lacking a solid base of achievement, free rides on the hard work of others, who are treated instrumentally as means to achieve his ends rather than being treated as deserving of respect, as ends in themselves, relying on superficial looks and charm to ease himself out of otherwise difficult situations. Some liken the narcissist to the more dangerous character of the psychopath because each lacks the ability to make a moral connection to others. Oliver James (2008) illustrates this trait in his description of Sam, a young multi-millionaire who inhabits an enormous Manhattan apartment from where he orders teenagers for sex just like pizza. However, narcissism is a complex topic for which there are several explanations. While one argument is that narcissism is an extreme form of self-love, a contrary position is taken by others who claim that it represents a difficulty in constructing a boundary around the self and is a defence against overwhelming shame. This points to potential links between the purported epidemic of narcissism and the emergence of the neoliberal self. Authors differentiate between pathological narcissists who have trouble in everyday life and the level of narcissism in the general population. Regarding the latter group the argument is that the narcissist is a mirror of the society that he or she is born into.

Although the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus is familiar to most people, the modern study of narcissism is most closely associated with psychoanalysis. Freud did not devote a great deal of time to explaining narcissism, distinguishing primary narcissism as a necessary phase in child development which he argued, if reappearing as secondary narcissism, could become pathological in adults. He explained secondary narcissism as a failure by the infant to develop a coherent boundary around the self by adequately separating from the mother. Competing explanations were subsequently developed by the European psychoanalysts Erich Fromm, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan, and by American ego psychologists, Otto Kernberg and Heinz Kohut. Kernberg’s work influenced the development of the trait-based Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI) which is designed to measure narcissism in the normal population (Raskin & Terry, 1983). Research conducted using the NPI forms the basis for the argument made by Twenge & Campbell (2009), that the USA is experiencing an epidemic of narcissism.

Psychoanalytic Explanations of Narcissism

An important question addressed by psychoanalysts is how humans develop and maintain a separate sense of self? They believe in the primary importance of events early in life. In particular it is argued that self-identity, including the belief that the body one inhabits is one’s own, is not a biological given but must be achieved early in the course of development. Self-identity requires a sophisticated capacity to shift perspective between self and others. This is important when using language, which assumes the ability to use subject positions such as “me”, “you”, “he” and “she”, “us” and “them”. A separate self-identity is also necessary if one is to have the capacity to empathize with others. Two psychoanalytic explanations are advanced below.10

Lacan: Narcissism and Mirroring

The first explanation is based on the early work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose early work provided the inspiration for Figure One. Lacan’s argument draws on the myth of Narcissus to the extent that the individual remains seduced by the captivating lure of images which offer an illusory sense of unity (Evans, 1996: 84). Lacan’s theory which is explained in more detail later in this text, posits three orders of human existence, the Real, Imaginary and Symbolic. Narcissism is a key feature of the Imaginary realm and is brought about by means of the development of fixation with the body-image in infancy, which persists as an order of being in later life (Lacan, 1966a). Identification with the external body-image is essential for the formation of self-identity, laying the basis for the development of the ego, constructing a boundary around the self as contained within our skin. The mirror stage, which occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months, is thus of key importance in the development of embodied self-identity.

Lacan argued that humans are born prematurely compared to other animals, lacking the ability to coordinate their movements. Newborns do not have a distinguishable sense of a self that is separate from their mother and human infants have no conception of a unified self but rather incorporate loved aspects of the mother and other caretakers into the self, whilst violently repelling those aspects which cause discomfort. He uses the pun ‘(h)ommelette’, to illustrate the self of the infant which initially spills beyond the contours of his body, just as an egg does when broken into a pan. In his earlier writing Lacan argued that during the mirror stage the infant is spontaneously captivated by his mirror image which is identified with by a gestalt. The gestalt psychologists famously illustrated the human tendency to close off meaning, showing how we use rules such as proximity, similarity, continuity and closure to perceive whole objects rather than perceiving them as the sum of their parts. For example, a person is more likely to perceive a line or series of lines as a common unit if they appear to form a shape, even if part of the shape is missing (Heider, 1977). For Lacan identification with the ideal-ego through the device of mirroring creates a powerful, if illusory, gestalt that is rounded and holistic, despite that the infant lacks the ability to coordinate his actions and subjectively experiences the world as fragmentary. The ideal mirror-image is compelling because it provides a sense of unity and control that are lacking in the infant’s body. However, although perceiving himself to be contained within his skin, Lacan notes that the infant cannot see the back of his head!

In his later work Lacan placed less emphasis on the formation of identity as the consequence of a spontaneous gestalt and more on the role played by the mother and other important caretakers in mirroring the infant’s identity. Fundamental to each explanation is that the imago, or identification with the image in the mirror, forms the prototype for the ideal-ego. The ego continues to form and reforms as the infant identifies with ideal-images of objects he loves such as his parents, or those he wishes to control and develops through life by means of further identifications with ideal objects. The mirror image, while compelling, provokes acute anxiety for the infant. This is because it involves a doubling of the self. Taking the perspective of the controlling image, the uncoordinated weakling at the other end of the seesaw is viewed with contempt. From the perspective of the fragmented self, the controlling image is viewed with envy and aggression (Lacan, 1966b). Thus whilst the mirror image provides the basis for self-identity, this is also alienating; the image is me, but it is outside me and therefore is not me. From the point of view of the subjective self the powerful mirror image appears to possess something which it lacks and is the object of desire. This provokes feelings of envy, rivalry and competition. Lacan (1966a) mentions the transitivity of infants during this period, when they confuse the boundary between self and other, as when one child falls and cries and the others near them also cry. The mirror stage is a fiercely competitive world of doubles constituting winners and losers (Lacan, 1966b).

In Lacan’s early work the formation of the ideal ego during the mirror-stage provides the basis for the infant to begin life as a symbolic person who is subject to the rules of culture. If this stage is successfully negotiated then the infant has the ability to switch perspective between self and other, establishing a boundary around the self which acts as a precursor to the development of language. Insertion into the symbolic system of shared culture provides something of a respite from the aggression of doubling in the mirror. Culture cuts or clips the body One used to find stabilising anchors for identity provided in the wider culture by one’s place in the family and in expectations surrounding one’s gender, the occupational-status of one’s parents, their religion and political affiliations. However, in recent years as social expectations and prescriptions linked to religion, gender and class have lost traction, the individual must now largely be the author of her own identity.

Lacan argued that narcissistic mirroring is not simply a developmental stage but represents an order of existence that stays with us for the rest of our lives. Rene Girard argues along similar lines that mimetic rivalry plays a constant, pernicious role in everyday life. The film Mean Girls (2004) provides a good illustration of the spiral from mimesis to aggression in a context where symbolic constraints are lacking. Consumer culture feeds us with idealized images that simultaneously compel us as they alienate us. Although one may consciously deny this, images operate as lures which offer the illusion of power and control. As mimetic machines humans are extremely sensitive, not only to those images remotely channelled through mass media but especially to those projected by the real people in their immediate surroundings, including family members, friends and colleagues, who act as models for emulation and distancing; we emulate those we consider successful and try to maintain a suitable distance from those who seek to emulate us.

Mirroring and doubling are ever present in routine daily encounters. When one bumps into a friend one has not met for some time one judges their general state of wellbeing and health in milliseconds following a quick scan of their waist. On the roads one frequently observes escalating narcissistic duels fought by car drivers as one seeks to punish another for their careless or reckless driving; supermarket checkouts often act as battlegrounds between the cashier and the customer, where the customer wins if they manage to load their bag faster than the cashier can scan items; on leaving a plane some passengers will enter into a duel with others, sometimes going to ridiculous lengths in seeking to get into the arrivals lounge first; drivers in carparks take more time to vacate their space when they know someone else is queuing¹¹. Steve Hall and his colleagues (Hall, Winlow & Ancrum, 2008) use Lacan’s imaginary as a lens to understand the narcissistic criminal culture of a working-class neighbourhood in the North-East of England. They argue that as the symbolic power of traditional working-class values to restrain criminality has waned, the seductive imagery of the marketplace is now triumphant, beckoning individuals to enjoy the pleasures of the marketplace now, without deferring gratification. This feeds seething discontent and criminality. Those working in local government are sneered at as “stupid cunts” (ibid. 47) as are those who go to university. Instead, youths model themselves on an ideal-ego based on the ‘cool’ successful individual performer in the market (ibid.: 182-183), each imagining the lucky break that will come their way when they finally get to cut the deal of their life with a Columbian cartel. Consumer goods play a key role in the dog-eat-dog rivalry between youths who engage in car theft, burglary and shoplifting to acquire and display them. Stevie says;

I liked, just storming in the shops and blagging loads of gear. Fuck the match, get the gear. It was all designer swag at the time, Fila, Lacoste, Tacchini, Freud Perry was popular as well as smart trousers, Farah, and that, Diesel jeans, Nike Air Max or Kickers. You had to have the proper gear as well (Hall et al., 2008, 32).

Karen aged 24 says;

Look, it’s like this: I want nice clothes, I want to get my hair done, I want nice bags and all the other shit. I’ve got no qualifications, I don’t know anyone who works and gets real cash, and I wanted to live in a nice place. How the fuck else was I gonna get all that?....At the end of the day, I’m a fucking sex worker (Hall et al, 2008, : 34).

Lacan’s explanation strongly linked to the visual and to the doubling of identity; when judged from the perspective of the powerful ideal-ego, the ego is judged as weak and pathetic, whereas from that of the ego the ideal-ego seems overwhelming and threatening. Anxiety plays a role in relation to fears of dismemberment by the powerful image. Lacan does not directly mention shame in his discussion of the mirror stage, although this can be implied. This is important to mention given the earlier discussion of shame and embarrassment in Norbert Elias’s explanation of the civilization process and in the discussion of neoliberalism. Elias relates shame to the developing power of the superego, arguing that in early modernity the experience of being shamed by others provided a powerful impetus for self-control and in reining in the emotions. It should be clarified in relation to child development that it is more accurate to state that rather than constituting the superego, early experiences of humiliation and shame lay the foundation for its development. The second explanation described below emphasizes the importance of shame in narcissism.

An Object Relations Based Explanation of Narcissism

Shame is the most powerful negative social emotion, which plays a necessary role in development, especially when dealing with its effects. Shame has a public quality and is directly felt in the body; one blushes with shame. This explanation looks to a similar period to that of Lacan, from six to eighteen months. In the early part of this period, it is argued that as mother and infant attune to each other they form a self-object unit, a rhythmic emotional circle including mirroring through face-to-face communications, where eye contact plays a major role. This period is argued to be very important in enabling the infant to attune emotionally and empathically to others and to develop basic trust in (Schore, 1991; 1994). At a certain point in time the unity between mother and infant is broken. This might occur following weaning, the arrival of a new sibling, or for any reason that diverts the mother’s attention from the infant’s demands. The infant looks to his mother for approval but she fails to respond. Her lack of response comes as a major shock to the infant who may seek to compensate for this by compulsively seeking to attract the mother’s attention. The mother’s continuing refusal to make eye-contact evokes feelings of rejection, humiliation and shame in the infant. To feel shame, one must see oneself from the outside;

The ashamed person doubles by perceiving herself from outside, i.e., being the perceiver and the perceived at the same time. She looks with the eyes of the others at her embodied self which has become ridiculous and ashamed.” (Fuchs, 2003: 229)

This primordial experience of shame involves loss of face for the infant before a model, the mother. This initiates a process of doubling which unfolds in a manner that is similar to that described by Lacan in relation to the mirror stage. Whilst shameful experiences are inevitable, the challenge for mother or caregiver is to minimize negative emotions such as pain and anger by soothing and pacifying the infant and to maximize positive emotions such as joy, by being available and offering predictable and consistent care. The infant treated in this way learns to respond positively re-establishes trust. However, when the mother fails in this capacity by acting coldly or abusively, the effect can be to traumatize the infant, who experiences dissociation and fragmentation of the mind-body self. The key characteristics of narcissism, including superficiality, lack of empathy, a mechanical relation to the body and a sense of inner emptiness develop because of this failure of attunement in the first year of life. The character that subsequently emerges is not adjusted to the demands of reality, living in an imaginary world with a sense of self that is grandiose, shallow, fixated by images of perfection, lacking in empathy and developing an instrumental relation towards others, as defences against the aggression provoked by inner emptiness and shame. Before concluding this section it is important to point out that that not all narcissists are grandiose exhibitionists and that covert narcissism is a different response (Brookes, 2015).

Socio-Cultural Explanations of Narcissism

Despite differences, there are similarities between the two psychoanalytic explanations outlined above. Each focuses on the earliest period of life, where vision, embodiment, construction of a boundary between self and other and doubling, are important aspects of the explanation. One difference is that Lacan does not mention shame. However his explanation can surely accommodate the idea that when confronted by the image of another who is perceived to be more powerful, one may experience a sense of humiliation and shame, every bit as much as anxiety.

Psychoanalytic accounts influenced social theorists such as Christopher Lasch, Richard Sennett, Anthony Giddens and Jacques Derrida. Lasch (1976) was influenced by the psychoanalysis of the object-relations theorist Melanie Klein to discuss the onset of narcissism as a split in the self of the infant that develops in relation to the good and bad aspects of the mother. The infant cannot stand ambivalence, so splits his image of the mother in two. There is on the one hand the mother who feeds and nurtures him, whom he loves. On the other hand is the bad mother who does not attend to his needs whom he hates, towards whom he directs intense aggression. In the normal course of development the infant eventually comes to understand that the good and the bad objects are not separate but are aspects of the same person. On realizing this he feels guilt and depression about his aggressive treatment of the mother. In contrast, the narcissistic infant persists in rigidly separating the internalized good and bad images of the mother, which are also self-images. His anger is so intense that he cannot admit his feelings of intense rage against those he loves. He feels gravely threatened by aggressive images that he projects onto others, which he then internalizes again as “monsters”. He tries to compensate for feelings of rage and envy with fantasies of wealth, beauty and omnipotence. These fantasies together with the internalized images of the good mother become the core of a grandiose conception of the self. The narcissist is protected by a kind of “blind optimism” and constantly projects all bad self-objects against which good images are used defensively. Splitting makes it impossible for the narcissist to acknowledge his own aggression, to experience guilt or concern for objects or to mourn for lost objects. He experiences intense feelings of emptiness and inauthenticity (Lasch, 1976: 71-103).

Lasch argued that narcissism was encouraged by the forms of social organization and media communication that were prevalent in the nineteen seventies when he conducted the research for his book. Much of his focus in the book is on the big bureaucratic organizations of the time where shallow, superficial characters were promoted through the ranks. These characters maintained a rigid positive self-image which formed a shell containing violent aggression, who focused on the manipulation of appearances to obtain their goals. Lasch argued that the mass media also contributed to narcissism by encouraging constant self-scrutiny by promoting images of perfection. Lasch presciently drew attention to the role played by the nascent video technology in self-surveillance. One wonders what he would have written today in the presence of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tinder and the selfie. Lasch also associated narcissism with the tendency to avoid competition, for instance in schools which began to reward all the children who participated in a sport, regardless of whether or not they actually won.

Anthony Giddens (2001) argues that the roots of narcissism lie in the infant’s failure to achieve ontological security and basic trust in others. This occurs particularly when the child cannot achieve a sense of psychic separateness from the primary caregiver. Basic trust, which is established by means of a series of routines engaged in with caretakers is fundamental to overcoming the infant’s anxiety and is a prerequisite to engagement with social reality. Basic trust develops what Giddens calls the protective cocoon which enables the infant to negotiate the hazards of everyday life. The protective cocoon acts as the basis for the individual to engage with the ‘not me’ by actively engaging with others, thus courting the risk of rejection (ibid. 40-41). Relating this to Lacan’s seesaw of desire described earlier, the adult individual oscillates between two positions; when at the top of the seesaw, experiencing a sense of omnipotence and contempt for the miserable being at the other end; when at the bottom experiencing the reverse emotions of humiliation, shame and envy. Giddens foregrounds the importance of the body and the worship of appearances in narcissism. Lacking the tools to meaningfully engage with others, the narcissist falls back on their looks and charm which can work, up to that point when others detect a certain lack of substance. Giddens is not suggesting that society today is confronted by an epidemic of narcissism but is rather one of the pathologies of the body promoted by society. Additionally, cultivation of the body is very much a core part of the reflexive project of self-identity in neoliberal society. Thus although narcissism is a feature of life today, this should not be used as an appellation to label an entire generation.

A Trait-Based Explanation of Narcissism

Although influenced by psychoanalysis the US trait-based approach to understanding narcissism distances its explanation from this. Measurement tools are of central importance to this explanation, particularly the Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI), developed by Raskin & Terry (1983) which has been extensively applied to American students as proxies for the general population, in exchange for course credit. Narcissism is defined as;

Self admiration that is characterized by tendencies toward grandiose ideas, exhibitionism and defensiveness in response to criticism; interpersonal relationships are characterized by feelings of entitlement, exploitativeness and lack of empathy (Raskin & Terry, 1988: 896).

The NPI divides narcissism into seven components to measure traits associated with narcissism including; vanity; authority; superiority; grandiosity, exploitativeness, exhibitionism and entitlement. On the basis of NPI data Twenge & Campbell (2009) argue that an epidemic of narcissism has swept through the American Millennial generation, born between 1982 and 2002.¹² They contend that narcissism does not only describe white rich kids, but also applies to inner-city youth. In their view narcissism carries a host of problems, constituting a trap that is costly for the narcissist, his relations and friends and for society at large. Narcissism can certainly be advantageous in the short run; it feels good to look into a mirror to say, “I’m so hot”. On the other hand there is the difficulty of having to live with a reality that does not confirm the narcissistic image. One way in which narcissists seek to manage this reality deficit is by stealing credit from those others who really deserve it. They also manipulate others in ruthlessly seeking their own ends and thus find it impossible to form meaningful relationships.

Twenge & Campbell argue that narcissism is a cause of materialism, in that narcissists love to show off about their high-status possessions (ibid.:161). There is a focus on “stuff”, visible goods such as the handbag that costs $5000 and the average US kitchen costs $57,000. Materialism is constantly fed by advertising which constantly reminds the consumer of their uniqueness; “you deserve the best.” The desire for ever more expensive material goods trickles down to lower social groups fuelled by the media who tell the relatively disadvantaged what others have and that they should have it. The disease model is not restricted to Twenge & Campbell. In the best selling Affluenza (2007), Oliver James argues that material accumulation is a disease. Twenge & Campbell base their claim of an epidemic of narcissism in the USA on longitudinal analysis of NPI data whereby in 2008-9 one third of all respondents exhibited narcissistic tendencies. Furthermore, during the same period, the more extreme Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) accounted for 6% across the US population, extending to 9% for those in their twenties.

Table 1.1: Central Constructs of the Narcissism Personality Inventory

Self-sufficiency
Assertiveness, independence, self-confidence, need to achieve

Entitlement
Ambitiousness, need for power, dominance, hostility, toughness, lack of self control, lack of tolerance for others

Exploitativeness
Rebellious, non-conformity, hostility, lack of consideration for others

Superiority
Status

Vanity
Physical attractiveness

Authority
Dominance, assertiveness, leadership, criticality and self-confidence.

Exhibitionism
Sensation-seeking, extraversion and lack of impulse control

Source: Derived from Raskin & Terry, (1983).

As measured by the NPI, Wai Ching is more narcissistic than her parents’ generation. However she does not score highly on all traits; Wai Ching judges herself and others based on their income and property and conveys not so subtle symbolic meanings through her expensive clothing and accessories; She does not like to show off although her bosses reward those who constantly draw attention to their achievements; She can be instrumental and manipulative but does not think she is coercive of others; She is confident, but not overly so. In sum, Wai Ching does not score highly on the NPI. Oliver James (2007) argues that the extrinsic values associated with selfish capitalism, although developing amongst Asians, are not as pronounced as for Americans and Europeans.

Twenge and Campbell locate the origins of the narcissism epidemic in the USA. Whereas American culture traditionally placed a high value on rugged individualism this was quite different to narcissism. American individualism originally focused on freedom from tyranny and on equality, as enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which emphasized independence not narcissism. This was reflected in strict rational self-control and an ethic of hard work and independence associated with the Puritan Protestant Work Ethic. The authors contend that the shift to narcissism had several root causes. Firstly self-centredness increased during the 1960s economic boom when teenagers began to believe that they were at the centre of a world that revolved around them (2009: 63). Secondly, it was influenced by the rapid growth of the self-esteem and self-expression industry. This was influenced by Abraham Maslow’s idea, realized in the Human Potential Movement that, by improving self-esteem, individuals could realize their true potential. Self-expression was popularized as an ideal during the 1970s, when hundreds of thousands of Americans attended Erhard Seminar Training (EST) and as a successful advertising slogan for a range of products. The effects of these developments were observed in differences in the clients who presented themselves for therapy. Before the 1970s most clients were treated as neurotics who repressed their desires. However throughout that decade therapists noticed that their clients were predominantly individuals who experienced too much self-expression and self-centredness.

Twenge and Campbell (ibid.) differentiate their explanation from a psychoanalytic understanding of narcissism. They do not seek to explain narcissism in relation to changes in the psyche, by employing psychoanalytic concepts of id, ego, or superego. Consequently, they do not explain narcissism as a form of regression to an infantile state. They disassociate themselves from the earlier argument that narcissism is a defense against overwhelming shame or that narcissists are low in self-esteem.13 They argue that this is wrong because extraverted narcissists score high on self-esteem scales; ‘deep down inside, narcissists think they’re awesome (ibid.: 27)”. They thus disagree fundamentally with psychoanalytically inflected arguments that narcissism acts as a cover for underlying shame (Schore, 1994). Despite this there are resemblances in relation to characteristics of narcissism such as shallowness, belief in self-containment, fantasy and oral-fixation.

If the focus on self-esteem and self-expression formed the context for increasing narcissism in the 1960s and 1970s, what are the causes of this today? Twenge and Campbell attribute parenting as a prime cause. Parents encourage their children to believe that they are extraordinary, by constantly telling them how special they are. This is exacerbated by a culture of over-praising of children that is fed by advertising and the media. Advertising plays a role in producing overconfidence in children. Firms market educational products to parents that promise to provide their children with an edge over the competition. The media promote narcissistic personalities such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The media also foster the impression that one can become famous, via reality TV, without having to work for it; for instance 31% of American High School children expect to become famous someday (Twenge & Campbell 2009: 95). The situation has been made worse through the rapid development of social networking internet sites where traditional loyalties based on the reciprocity between family and friends give way to shallower forms such as “unfriending” to be found on Facebook. The situation is exacerbated by the general celebration of youth in Western culture. This has led to the anomalous situation where parents no longer value obedience in their children but rather, there has been a role reversal, where parents look up to their children and apologize to them for their own shortcomings. The authors also attribute the growth of narcissism to the decline of traditional religion, which acted as a brake.

Twenge & Campbell argue that there is convincing evidence to support the contention that narcissism causes aggressive and even violent behaviour. Consequently, there is the fear that the increasing level of narcissism amongst a population will lead to rising levels of incivility and rude behaviour. The authors argue that this occurs because narcissists love themselves so much and believe that their needs take precedence over others. They lack empathy for other people’s pain and often lash out when they do not get the respect they feel they deserve. The authors cite experimental evidence to argue that, believing themselves to be superior to others, narcissists show little compunction in aggressing against others who block their goals, starting fights because they believe that they will win (Baumeister Smart & Boden & Smart, 1996).

Modernization Theory: Consumer as Identity-Seeker, Activist and Altruist.

Modernization theory can be used as a broad label to describe anyone who believes modernity is generally a force for good. Early modernization theorists on the left and right of politics were united in the optimistic belief that the development of modern rational institutions in education, the sciences, politics and the economy would quickly improve the human lot and so do away with tradition and superstition. In relation to the story of Laura Brown, modernization theorists would focus on her increased autonomy, freedom of choice, health provision, life expectancy and economic security relative to her forbears and relative to those living in more traditional societies, to argue that due to modernization, consumers in Laura’s time never had it so good. They share with Elias the broadly teleological view that despite backward steps, human social organization consists of progressive development towards greater interdependency and a better future. This optimism waned for a time following the carnage of the great wars of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the use of the atomic bomb. During the Cold War modernism split into two competing forms consisting of communism and capitalist liberal democracy. Rostow’s (1960) stage model of development was avowedly pro-Western, advocating the global spread of individualism based on capitalism and democracy as ideal forms of social organization. Despite deep reservations felt about modernization theory during the slump of the 1970s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 led Francis Fukuyama (1992) to proclaim that the scene was now set for the “End of History” with the ultimate global triumph of liberal democracy and the capitalist marketplace. Reflecting on more recent events, it seems that Fukuyama was rather premature. One wonders will modernization theorists such as Ronald Inglehart preserve the optimism that was fuelled by the clamour for democracy following the heady events of the Arab Spring, in the new era of Jihad, by explaining the latter as a momentary backward step against the advancing tide of modernism? Given recent shocks to the Western liberal consensus, perhaps the pendulum now swings towards an era of fragmentation.

Prominent modernization theorists disagree fundamentally with the neoliberal presumption of the free market ‘self-entrepreneur’. Ulrich Beck takes a similar line to Norbert Elias, to argue that the individual is a product of the institutional context. Beck says that he finds no evidence in the communities, families and work contexts of late modern society to support the existence of the isolated, selfish, individual presumed by neoliberals. Instead of the neoliberal individual Beck calls for a social scientific understanding of the individual as ‘self-insufficient and increasingly tied to others at the level of world-wide networks and institutions’ (Beck & Beck, 2001: xxi). The presumed self-sufficiency of the neoliberal consumer is false because it implies the disappearance of social obligation. Beck argues instead that the fundamental incompleteness of the late modern self requires individuals to form bonds with others and to tolerate difference.

This point has been developed in a series of longitudinal worldwide conducted by World Values Researchers led by Ronald Inglehart and Welzel. Inspired by Abraham Maslow, they theorise a progression from an early phase of consumption, where consumers were driven largely by the requirement to fulfil their basic physiological and safety needs, towards a later period where post-materialist values become salient. This has important implications for the understanding of materialism. It was argued above in the sections on neoliberalism and narcissism that these consumers are intensely materialistic. However Inglehart (2004) restricts a materialist orientation to the needs driven consumers living at the bottom of the pyramid, who of necessity must prioritize lower-order needs for comfort and safety, over higher-order needs such as self-expression, belonging and aesthetic satisfaction (Inglehart, 1990: 66-68). Those motivated by higher-order needs he calls post-materialists. Wealth and property remain important to post-materialists but other things matter more, such as protecting freedom of speech. Yusuf, whose story is told below, provides an example of a needs-driven consumer. From the modernization theory perspective espoused by Inglehart et al. (2004), Yusuf is primarily preoccupied with seeking to satisfy basic needs by providing economic security for his family.

Story 4: Yusuf: Needs-Driven Consumer¹⁴

On arrival into Lagos from his outlying village, Yusuf started work in the vast Olusosun dump in Lagos, Nigeria, one of the fastest growing mega-cities in the world. He works from daybreak until dusk alongside a thousand or so other “informal” workers. Yusuf buys metals such as aluminium, brass and zinc from scavengers, which he then sells to upstream buyers. He likens himself to a stockbroker, because his fortunes vary according to the relative strength of the US dollar. He lives contentedly with his one wife Zaynab and their two children in a one-room shack. Yusuf is shocked and scandalized by the corruption of high officials in his country and by the decadence of Western culture. He and his family are deeply religious, firmly believing that Allah will provide. They are socially conservative, believing in strictly traditional roles for men and women and are against homosexuality and abortion.. Their house is stocked with all manner of reclaimed goods, gleaned from the dump. Their lives are dominated by self-sacrifice, in hope of a better future. Determined that their children will not have to live as they do, they save every penny they can for their children’s education. Their dream is that their children will enjoy the home comforts of modern life such as constant water and electricity supplies, air-conditioning and perhaps even a car.

The lives of Laura Brown and Wai Ching would likely be incomprehensible to Yusuf and Zaynab. Although Yusuf is a big man on the dump, he and his family are at the bottom of the pyramid, living in Africa’s most populous country, which itself comes close to the bottom of world rankings, coming 140th out of 169 on the United Nations Human Development Index.15 Yusuf has a very strong achievement motivation. However he is deeply embedded in his local community, sharing his co-religionists conservative orientation to issues such as women’s rights, homosexuality and freedom of expression. When visiting the mosque over the last few years Yusuf has experienced challenges to his belief in the positive power of education as a means to betterment and his desire to attain material success. A minority have begun to argue that education is false indoctrination in Western values and that there is a need for a return to true Islamic values. Although he and Zaynab are deeply religious, they also long for those things that signify comfort, progress and status, represented by material goods such as washing machines, refrigerators, phones and cars. As a devout Muslim he would ideally like to live within the framework of Sharia law. However he works alongside Christians and is aware that they have different aspirations and so does not think it right that such a system be imposed on others.

In contrast to Yusuf, who is preoccupied with providing for his family on a daily basis, Wai Ching, who takes such security for granted, is motivated instead to satisfy higher order postmaterialist needs for self-expression and freedom of choice. Inglehart et al. (2004) equate this shift from materialist to post-materialist concerns with a parallel shift from modernization to postmodernization (Inglehart, 1997: 5). This can be better understood by exploring differences in the habitus of Yusuf and Wai Ching. Although Yusuf’s small nuclear family lacks the powerful communal support of the extended kin relations of the village community he left when they moved to Lagos, common family goals take precedence over those of the individuals who comprise it. If Yusuf falls ill, Zaynab will have no choice but to find work herself in order to support her family, or they may even have to return to their village if she cannot make ends meet. Yusuf is embedded into the “we” of community in several ways; he shares a sense of solidarity with those others who labour alongside him, who would be quick to point out if he began to behave inappropriately by engaging in behaviour considered unfitting. He is also very much part of the mosque community which seeks to influence his attitudes concerning important social issues such as abortion, gay rights and the appropriate roles for men and women in society. Yusuf’s sense of allegiance is thus first and foremost to his family, his co-workers and his mosque and he has little sense of a more abstract national identity. Although separated in space and in time from Laura Brown whose story was discussed earlier, they are both, if not equally, subjected to the constraints imposed by social class, religious affiliation, gender roles and ethnicity.

Giddens’ concepts of disembedding and abstract systems are useful to compare and contrast the lives of Yusuf and Wai Ching. Those living in a traditional community are embedded in being physically proximate to each other in place and time. The development of disembedding mechanisms which has been one of the key developments of modernity, has enabled social practices to be progressively removed from the immediacy of communal place to stretch over large expanses of time and space. Yusuf’s life is disembedded to the extent that he uses his mobile phone not only to contact business associates and friends, but also to conduct financial transactions. Wai Ching’s life is more radically disembedded by abstract systems of technical knowledge which permeate her entire existence, from the food delivered from the supermarket and the remote technologies she uses to pay for this, to the networks of transport she uses to travel at home and abroad and the technologies she uses to communicate with her remote friends which also monitor her bodily rhythms. These systems are reflexive, to the extent that in each sphere expert systems compile her daily routines into long term behavioural patterns which are sometimes communicated back to her and otherwise sold to corporations in order to enhance her experience of shopping, banking, travelling, communicating and indeed life in general, in pursuit of the overall aim of profit.

Yusuf works with materials, alongside a thousand others in a dangerous working environment whilst Wai Ching works with immaterial symbols and information from her home, where she communicates remotely with her clients, forming part of what is called the “knowledge” society. Like the vast majority of the British population, Wai Ching considers herself to be middle class.16 Living within the umbrella provided by the British welfare state, Wai Ching takes for granted the provision of the food that Yusuf and Zaynab pray for daily to God.

Yusuf remains committed to his religion although he is increasingly aware of the authority claims of modern science which are viewed with increasing suspicion by his co-religionists. Wai Ching has abandoned the religion of her parents, but retains an interest in spiritual matters and teaches Tai Chi. One of the major issues separating her from Yusuf relates to sexual liberalization and gender equality. Yusuf is less permissive than is Wai Ching towards divorce, homosexuality and abortion and is also less concerned about equal rights for women. Inglehart and Norris (2003) argue that stances common to Wai Ching’s, are part of a broader syndrome of tolerance, trust, political activism, and emphasis on individual autonomy that constitutes ‘self-expression values’. They cite World Values Survey (WVS) research to argue that there is a strong relation between support for gender equality and a society’s level of democracy. This is not to say that Yusuf values democracy any less than Wai Ching. This is also confirmed by WVS data, which indicates that, taking into account variations in economic and political development, with the exception of Pakistan, support for democracy was just as strong in Muslim countries as in the West. This also supports the view that economic prosperity, rising emphasis on self-expression values and the strengthening of democracy form a coherent system of human development. A common theme underlying all of these economic, cultural and political changes is ‘human choice’, which tends to grow as people gain more material and intellectual resources and place more emphasis on self-expression (Inglehart, et al. 2004: 6).

Ulrich Beck argues that the ‘me’ generation that Wai Ching forms part of finds conventional politics extremely boring. Young people have discovered something for themselves; fun; “Fun, fun sports, fun music, fun consumption, fun life (Beck & Beck 2002: 159);

Freedom’s children practice a seeking, experimenting, morality that ties things together that seem mutually exclusive; egoism and altruism, self-realization and active compassion.

In Wai Ching’s late modern world, individualism exists alongside massive social inequality. Close connections between people have disappeared, as the market has entered into all aspects of life. The late modern scene is a risk culture which demands that everyone be an individual, in that they have no choice but to make choices (Inghelhart, 1997). Amongst billions of others Wai Ching is appealed to by mass media to solve socially produced risks, such as those factors influencing climate change, by changing her individual consumption of energy and commodities. Many of the risks she confronts have been commodified and she is subject to sales pitches from commercial offerings that measure everything from her cholesterol level to the risk she might develop Alzheimer’s disease and from others that offer her protection from a myriad of visible and invisible dangers. By comparison with Wai Ching, Yusuf doesn’t believe that he has much choice in his world because he must labour for six to seven days a week in order to provide food and shelter for his family, whereas Wai Ching’s collection of fine art constitutes an end in itself. Yusuf forms part of what Beck calls a “community of need”, which means that in the last resort, family members depend absolutely on each other for support and no-one can expect the intervention of a benevolent state. On the other hand the late modern period emphasizes quality of life, personal choice and self-expression. Choice is apparent in all aspects of life including, ‘mate selection, gender roles, child-rearing goals, work-habits, religious orientation, consumer patterns, civic action and voting behaviour” (Inglehart et al. 2004: 7).

Wai Ching has the choice of deciding whether to marry or not; if she does marry, she and her husband must negotiate who works; herself? her husband? Both? They must negotiate between them as to how to divide household tasks, who is to do the shopping and whom the maintenance? Given that she has had her eggs frozen, when would it be a good time to have a child? All of this choice comes at a price; consumers like Wai Ching are free on pain of economic disadvantage (Beck & Beck, 2002: 163). By comparison to Yusuf’s embedded individuality, Wai Ching is disembedded from the influence of family, religion and class and thus is condemned to choice. Being cut adrift from traditional markers of identity she is the author of her own identity.

Wai Ching is to some extent free of dependence on family and close friends, as she lives in a welfare state where her health and social security needs will be taken care of for a time. Being no longer dependent on a community of need, Wai Ching is free to choose her friendships based on “elective affinities”, representing her personal choices based on those who share interests and lifestyle in commonly (Beck & Beck, 2002: 85). The bonds that connect her to others are weaker than the glue that binds the traditional community together through ties of kinship. Instead her sense of “community”, if that is the correct word for it, applies to the affinity she feels with those others who take an interest in the same cultural pursuits as she does, enjoying similar music, art and literature, who share her taste in clothing, own the same brands, pursue similar intellectual pursuits, political issues and politics, to name but a few. In this respect Wai Ching exemplifies the idea of the postmodern tribal consumer described by Maffesoli (1997). Maffesoli argues that those individuals who live in advanced consumer societies are not the rational, isolated, self- disciplined individuals that Elias’s conclusion would lead one to expect. He argues instead that people are joined together by powerful emotional bonds and are ‘connected’ through a variety of diffuse and fleeting encounters, ranging from those that bind together people who live in city neighborhoods and ghettos, to the swarms of consumers that populate city-centre high-streets and shopping malls; the temporary crowds that lie on beaches, attend rock concerts or that constitute the television audiences for mass media spectacles; or the virtual communities that inhabit the Internet. In this view cities are not spaces where individuals freed from the constraints of community can make rational relationships, but are themselves communities which are constructed out of a multiplicity of small enclaves and interdependencies, where people are bound together by proximity and some form of ‘emotional glue’.¹⁷

Maffesoli suggests that the transformation in late modernity signals much more than the reconnection of one individual to another. Just as individuals are becoming connected to one another, so the connection is not simply between people but is also experienced as a form of connection within the person and in particular with respect to the body. During the modern age, the body had been perceived to be separate and distinct from the mind which disciplined and ruled over it. Maffesoli suggests that the current age is associated with a re-integration of body and mind. As a result, he claims that the present concern in consumer societies for appearance and for adorning and working on the body is by no means superficial. He argues that as the individual body is the foundation of the social body, so the frivolity of the new consumer society and its fascination with bodily concerns, such as fashion, design, eating and drinking and anything that expresses the cult of the body, are fundamental to this reconstructed sense of community. He also argues that what is predominant in present society, what ties people together, is aesthetic experience, the ability to feel emotion together, to share the same ambience.

In Maffesoli’s radical interpretation, the growing individualism, rationalization and abstraction of everyday life in present-day society has reached such a level that these forces have collapsed inwards on themselves. The new sociality is a reaction to the modern process of progressive abstraction in the spheres of work, politics and daily life.

Regardless of how we see Maffesoli, Wai Ching also experiences a strong sense of lack of real community. Whilst she enjoys and indeed demands freedom of choice, a paradox is that she also longs for a sense of authentic community, which is missing and which may explain the long hours she spends on Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media (Beck & Beck, 20022: 158).

Table 1.2 Summary of Changes from Modernity to Late Modernity

Table 1.2 Summary of Changes from Modernity to Late Modernity

Discussion

The above discussion of the neoliberal, narcissistic and late modern consumer raises several issues. Firstly, there is more resonance between the descriptions of the neoliberal consumer and the narcissistic consumer than between either of these and the late modern consumer.

Individual vs Community

The narcissistic consumer is often described as lonely, lacking the bonds of community. In contrast modernization theorists and consumer researchers argue that communal forms of association are important to late modern consumers. This raises the question of the definition of what constitutes a community. Muniz & O’Guinn (2001) argue that in brand communities one can find a shared consciousness of kind, shared rituals and traditions and a mutual sense of moral responsibility between members. Rather than focus on community as consisting of something that people share in common, Richard Sennett In The Fall of Public Man (1977) argues in contrast to this superficial explanation that real community, community that matters, emerges through contestation, disagreement and discord.

Materialism vs Post-Materialism

Neoliberal and narcissistic consumers are described as materialistic, whereas late-modern consumers are described as post-materialist.

Selfishness vs Altruism

Each of the explanations summarized in Table 1.2 focuses on a different aspect of the consumer. Authors go beyond that, for instance when Beck and others argue that the consumer is fundamentally altruistic whilst others disagree by arguing that consumers are self-interested and self-serving. Ulrich Beck can be thought to extend Elias’s argument, by contending that postmodern individualism is a task that is no longer given, or imposed by membership of a group, but instead be seen as a task in progress. He makes his position on the narcissistic hypothesis (Twenge & Campbell, 2009), scathingly clear;

It is particularly the apostles of the status quo who grumble that individualization means egocentrism: this explains more about themselves than those whom they claim to criticize. While in the old values system the ego always had to be subordinated to patterns of the collective (also always designed by individuals), these new orientations towards the “we” create something like a cooperative or altruistic individualism. Thinking of oneself and living for others at the same time, once considered a contradiction in terms, is revealed as an internal, substantive connection. Living alone means living socially” Source: Beck & Beck, (2002: 162).

The idea of an individual who is egocentric and altruistic is paradoxical; how can one be both self-absorbed and interested in the welfare of others? Beck explains this paradox as the outcome of a process of individualization through time, whereby identity has become gradually disembedded from the traditional “we’ relation to an “I” relation. In order to understand this, one must first trace the logic of this argument which flows from the construct of the modern to the postmodern consumer.￼

Table 1.3. Narcissist vs. Egocentric Altruist

Table 1.3. Narcissist vs. Egocentric Altruist

Modernization theorists such as Beck are informed by Abraham Maslow’s theory about the development of human needs. In his book Motivation and Personality, originally published in 1954, Maslow (1970) argues forcefully for the development of a permissive society which, through cultivation of what he calls higher-order needs, will not only lead to a more a more caring and tolerant society, but will allow its members to reach their full potential. Maslow reverses Freud’s argument that civilization must tame the beast within us by insisting that all human needs, even those we would consider to be social, such as needs for respect, esteem and belonging, are to an extent innate. Maslow argues that although these are innate, they are also fragile and must be protected from powerful social forces that may destroy them. Furthermore, some needs are pre-potent and must be satisfied before other, higher-order needs can be cultivated. A person who is lacking food, safety, love and freedom will probably hunger for food more than for anything else. This is not to say that higher order needs are not important to them, but rather that they have to focus on the pressing demands of surviving from day to day. This is the primary goal for Joseph, whose story is recounted above. According to Maslow, once someone such as Joseph has gained a level of economic security, having sated their pre-potent physiological needs, they are now motivated to satisfy higher-order needs, which both they and society find most valuable. Once they have learned the value of love, belongingess, respect and freedom, they may come to value these needs even more than life itself. Modernization theorists argue, from Maslow, that the needs for freedom of choice and for self-expression, represent such higher order needs.

Reflective Summary

The world is now a very different place from when this chapter was first published.. The chilling forces of recidivism that once seeming more spectral than real now appear definitively in resurgent impulses towards disintegration, retrenchment, authoritarianism, protectionism and heightened conflict. Against which backdrop arguments from Elias, for the existence of a “civilizing process” can seem hopelessly optimistic and idealistic. However, while a superficial reading of Elias might suggest that his argument is teleological, by positing an inevitable upward movement, this is anything but the case. We should not forget that Elias based his arguments on historical research and indeed, one of the tasks he set was to unlearn much of what passed for sociological orthodoxy in his day.¹⁸ It is also noteworthy that Elias’s account of the development of self-regulation in early modernity bears direct comparison with Foucault’s (1978) discussion of the rise of the disciplinary “carceral” society and that his concept of habitus was taken up by Pierre Bourdieu.

Perhaps a more telling critique might be directed towards claims that a particular generation is more narcissistic or whatever, than its forbears – such epithets are rarely complimentary. I have used this material in teaching as a goad to provoke my students in order to spur them on to conduct their own studies and to reflect critically on the evidence presented by those middle-aged academics who seek to pass judgement on their generation.

Perhaps the main difference between my generation, which is now dying off and those born since the Millennium, is the all-pervasive impact of technology which mediates every aspect of engagement with reality and offers the prospect of entire immersion envisaged in that film beloved of many Gen Z’ers, The Matrix. Yet this is still just a potential prospect.

Publications such as I-Gen invite a more detailed and nuanced discussion of the factors that explain changes in people’s attitudes and behaviour over time. Period effects represent social changes across all age groups; Life-cycle effects describe changes that occur as we become older, from our first day at school to our retirement; Cohort effects describe those changes that are specifically shared by a specific generation. Duffy (2021) is highly critical of the excessive attention he believes has been devoted to cohort effects as opposed to period and life-cycle effects. There may be some truth to the cliché that today’s radical will transmute to tomorrow’s conservative. There is also merit in Moran’s (2022) assertion that accusations by Twenge and Campbell (2009) and others that post-millennials are

individualistic and materialistic are lifecycle effects that young people grow out of as they develop their careers and form lasting relationships. Perhaps more debatable is Moran’s assertion that while young people are twice as likely today to say they feel more lonely than do older people, “loneliness cuts deep” at this stage.

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¹ Elias is very careful to use the term ‘civilization’ in a non-judgmental way. Each society represents a patterning of social relations which presents opportunities for the patterning of the psychological apparatus and social conduct that are different from all other societies.

² Such behaviour persisted despite religious calls sexual discipline and chastity (Karras, 2005).

³ Van Krieken, (1998: 18).

⁴ Ewen, (1976: 171). Quote attributed to Christine Frederick.

⁵ Source: Vucheva, Elitsa (2008) Laissez-faire capitalism is dead, says France. Euobserver.https://euobserver.com/political/26814

⁶ A 2015 Gallup survey found that 63% of US citizens believed that wealth distribution was unfair, with 52% arguing for higher taxation of the rich. Source, Newport, Frank (2015) Americans continue to say US wealth distribution is unfair. Gallup: http://www.gallup.com/poll/182987/americans-continue-say-wealth-distribution-unfair.aspx

⁷ Source: OXFAM (2015) Wealth, having it all and wanting more. January: 9. OXFAM Issue Briefing, http://www.OXFAM.org

⁸ Source: Marmot et al. (1991).

⁹ These findings are disputed by Snowdon (2010) who argues that they are based on a highly selective use of data which omits data for countries which is contra-indicative. Wilson and Pickett defend their findings against these claims and others here https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/authors-respond-questions-about-spirit-levels-analysis.

¹⁰ Kahneman’s (with Amos Tversky and others) work, summed up in his 2011 book is critical of the background assumptions relating to rationality made by neoliberals. His research on the operation of heuristics and biases in relation to Prospect Theory which dates to the 1970s, provides a large body of evidence to support his argument that humans, whilst reasonable, are not rational. For a stronger argument see Arielly (2009) who argues that humans are irrational. Tooby & Cosmides (1994) provide grounds to defend the neoliberal position. Their evolutionary argument attunes well to the individualism presupposed by neoliberalism, that human cognitive architecture operates efficiently to calculate the difference between its current state and its goal state in maximizing its utility. They criticize Kahneman’s method from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that humans did not evolve a capacity to think in abstract terms using probabilities but rather that the ancestral environment involved the calculation of frequencies. Kahneman and Tversky (1996) have replied to this critique.

¹¹ Source: Ruback and Julieng (1997).

¹² http://www.narcissismepidemic.com/. Accessed October 21st, 2010.

¹³ They also distance themselves from what they call the “Freudian” view which argues that narcissism is a defence against an “empty” or “enraged” self that is low in self-esteem (Twenge & Campbell, 2009: 25).

¹⁴ Source: Inspired by Will Anderson’s documentary, “Welcome to Lagos”, a three-part documentary which aired in 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s3bmx

¹⁵ Source: UN Human Development Report 2010.

¹⁶ A UK study found that 7 out of 10 people believed themselves to be middle-class. Source: Renfoul, John and Matt Chorley (2011) Seven in ten of us belong to Middle Britain. Independent on Sunday: 13.

¹⁷ Maffesolli was fascinated by the study carried out by Milgram (1967) which demonstrated that links between any two people living at opposite corners of the USA could be connected by five or six relayers. He argued that this effect was possible because each person forms part of a micro-milieux which is connected to other milieu.

¹⁸ Morrow, (2009: 218).