If this trend was international in scope, it had a particular thrust in the United States. It was no accident that the man most responsible for streamlining conveyor-belt mass production was also in the vanguard of collecting ordinary objects made by ordinary people: Henry Ford, the father of the Model T automobile. Ford started to gather mundane stuff in 1906. By 1929, his collection had grown into a museum of junk, a kind of Smithsonian of the common man, and is still open to the public today, in Dearborn, just outside Detroit. Edith Roosevelt, wife of President Theodore, was another ‘junk snupper’. These years saw the ‘transubstantiation of junk’, in the words of a leading scholar of collecting.16 The yard sale was born. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collecting prized objects from afar had been a way for kings to show the global reach of their power.17 Around 1900, cosmic kingship was being democratized. Everyone could be a collector.
Here was one source of Taut’s despair. Unlike for many later critics of ‘consumerism’, for Taut the problem was not that of a ‘throwaway society’. It was that people were not throwing away enough. One person’s attic became another one’s living room.
The diffusion of goods around 1900 disrupted established codes of status. Accumulation and display were a way to reassert social hierarchies. In 1899, the heterodox Chicago economist Thorstein Veblen christened this phenomenon ‘conspicuous consumption’. In his Theory of the Leisure Class, he focused primarily on the super-rich and their use of costly entertainments and fine arts to distinguish themselves from those below. For the elite, ‘vicarious consumption’ was a way to assert their high station in life at a time when goods were becoming available to the many.18 The pivotal figure in this competitive game was the lady of the house. Through her leisure, her jewels and a tastefully assembled interior, she could demonstrate the high reputation of the middle-class family, and its distance from the grubby world of work.
As Veblen showed, much of this was a charade. The lady of the house was not necessarily idle. Domestic work was simply disguised to uphold the ideal of leisure. Real comfort and leisure, Veblen argued, were never the goal, and it was ‘a more or less fortuitous circumstance’ if they were achieved. All these exercises followed what he called ‘the great economic law of wasted effort’. Instead of turning resources to productive use, ‘conspicuous consumption’ wasted them on accumulation, display and imitation. While Veblen directed his sharpest, most cynical observations at the new American elite, he stressed that this status-fuelled rivalry also continued ‘at a lower point in the pecuniary scale than the requirement of vicarious leisure’. The cult of comfort and decency compelled all wives to ‘consume some goods conspicuously for the reputability of the household and its head’.19
In an age of progress, none of this made for very happy reading. Veblen was no Darwin or Spencer. Social evolution was regressive. Consumption was merely the latest chain in man’s enslavement of woman. The wife had evolved from the ‘drudge and chattel of the man . . . [as] the producer of goods for him to consume’, into ‘the ceremonial consumer of goods which he produces’ – an ‘unfree servant’.20 For feminist reformers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Veblen provided authoritative support, notwithstanding his own notoriety as a womanizer who was constantly trying to seduce his students and his colleagues’ wives; his own wife eventually divorced him. It was because ‘playing house’ was the one thing that women were allowed to do, Gilman wrote, that women indulged in decoration and stuff. The home was a material monster that ‘grows by what it feeds upon’ and kept women from contributing to the real world. The only limit to this ‘senseless extravagance’ appeared to be ‘the paying capacity of the man’.21
Lust for distinction had been the stuff of satire and literature since ancient times. Veblen’s originality was to make it the engine of an entire social system. The argument’s simplicity is the key to its continuing appeal, but also its fundamental weakness. For Veblen, human nature was pretty much a constant. He saw goods as instruments of social reputation and power. People put up a picture or bought furniture more to impress others than for their own personal pleasure. The use of things was directed outwards rather than inwards. Those who, like Veblen and Taut, championed plain living ignored or belittled the feelings, meanings and memories that objects often carried. Taut mocked the ‘emotional fetishism’ of the housewife who could not let go of a little craft object made by her son – ‘our darling Billy made this, do you remember, Hubby, when he was just . . .’22
While some consumption was (and remains) conspicuous, Veblen’s contemporaries were also increasingly turning to possessions and hobbies for self-fulfilment. In part, this compensated for an increasingly regimented world of work. By 1900, hobbies were advertised as a cure against boredom and nervous exhaustion. Yet hobbies were more than a retreat. They were also a way of exploring and affirming the material dimensions of the self.
Home improvement was self-improvement. Few captured this creed better than George and Weedon Grossmith in The Diary of a Nobody, the greatest satire on the suburban home in the English language, first published in Punch in 1888. Mr Pooter and his wife Carrie had barely moved into their six-room, semi-detached ‘villa’ in one of the new suburbs in north London, just around the corner from where the Arsenal football stadium stands today, when Pooter was caught by the bug of home improvement. Nothing was quite as good in Pooter’s life as he aspired for it to be – the house was in a decent neighbourhood, but the back garden ran down to the train tracks, saving him £2 in rent. He was intent on putting it right. Pooter’s motto was ‘Home, Sweet Home’, and it was within its four walls that he found his pride. Carpets had to be nailed down, curtains put up. Pooter was unstoppable. After painting some flower-pots in the garden red, he went upstairs and painted the servant’s washstand, towel-horse and chest of drawers. ‘To my mind it was an extraordinary improvement’; that the servant disagreed was ‘an example of the ignorance of the lower classes’. What drove him on was not the opinion of others but a feeling of accomplishment. One project fed the next. Pooter got more red enamel paint – ‘red, to my mind, being the best colour’ – and painted the coal scuttle and the backs of his Shakespeare plays. He even painted the bathtub red – ‘delighted with the result. Sorry to say Carrie was not, in fact we had a few words about it.’ In the end, Pooter was punished for his folly, when, two days later, he rose from the bath in a fright, with what looked like blood running down his hands.23
THINGS ARE US
Such satires are entertaining, but they also contain a serious point, forcing us to reconsider what still is an influential interpretation of the years around 1900. Veblen and Taut, in their different ways, looked on the advance of goods as alienating. In this, they stood in a tradition that stretched back to Marx and Rousseau, and which continued with many socialists and consumer advocates into the twentieth century. These thinkers did not have a single ideology. What they shared was an instinctive suspicion that consumption was estranging people from their true selves. Modernity, in this view, destroyed an organic unity between man, things and nature. People became divorced from the products of their own hands, science and reason from nature and emotion, and the male public from the female private sphere. The result was disenchantment, inequality and conflict.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), Max Weber offered one influential version of this story. Modern people were alienated from the world. All they cared about was their own salvation and success. People, Weber wrote, were sucked into an ‘objectified economic cosmos’, fuelled by exchange and the desire for goods. In the process, they lost the authentic, full experience of life enjoyed by the peasant and the warrior. The peasant was able to die ‘saturated with life’, like Abraham, having completed the full cycle of their being. Modern civilization spat out so many cultural goods that one only ever tasted a slice of life. To counter this ‘devaluation’, people made the pursuit of culture a ‘calling’ (Beruf). But with more culture came more goods and
greater comfort. It was a vicious cycle. At best, Weber concluded, modern man could hope to die ‘weary of life’.24
Many historians who have written about the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have slotted their story into this grand scheme, as another chapter in the growing divide between self and things.25 In his brilliant study of the changing image of abundance in modern America, T. J. Jackson Lears presents this period as a culminating stage in the ‘dematerializing of desire’. Advertisers nurtured a restless self. There was always another new product around the corner promising greater self-fulfilment. New stuff was scarcely unpacked before it was left behind in the purchasers’ never-ending journey to find themselves. Consumer culture, in this view, completed the Enlightenment project associated with Descartes: the creation of a self separate from the physical world, and master of it.26
Disenchantment, it is worth stressing, is an interpretation of modern history based on assumptions about human nature, rather than an account of how people actually engaged with the material world. If we are concerned with the latter, another story emerges. Rather than ongoing dematerialization, the 1890s–1920s witnessed a renaissance of the material self. The enlightenment story continued, albeit in a different key. The language of the passions, of sociability, refinement and sympathy gave way to a more hands-on, more private relationship with things. Mr Pooter, collecting, crafts and home furnishing, these were all elements of a renewed appreciation of the role of things in the development of the self. The self was not sealed off from the material world. It was touched and formed by things, while things in their turn carried the imprint of an individual’s character and culture. Artefacts came to be seen as passageways into the self.27 The world’s first open-air museum, in 1891, was Skansen, on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm, where visitors could take a stroll through centuries of old houses, farmsteads and artefacts. In New England, ‘living history’ museums started to bring colonial households back to life. Anthropological exhibitions displayed living tableaux of indigenous tribes. In politics, contemporaries began to notice how flags, posters and badges created emotional ties that transcended the model of the sober, reasoning citizen.28 Meanwhile, researchers of childhood were stressing the importance of toys for cognitive development. Societies were in the grip of a material turn – and this included literature, psychology and philosophy.
In 1890s America, this moment had a name: James. It came in two parts: Henry and William. The James brothers had their finger on the pulse of the passion for consuming. Henry, the younger by sixteen months, had dabbled as a playwright before shooting to success with The Spoils of Poynton in 1897, a sensitive exploration of the power of things. The novel captured the collecting craze of the period. Poynton was more than a house. It was a temple of objects carefully built up by the widow Mrs Gereth over the years. Her life and her identity have become inseparable from her collection. ‘Yes, it is a story of cabinets and chairs and tables,’ James wrote, but they were not ‘magnificently passive’. They had a ‘power in them’, felt by a collector at first sight. Having, beholding and touching objects over the years reawakened those earlier ‘passions’ and ‘faculties’.29 Mrs Gereth’s goal was not ‘conspicuous consumption’ – if only. Poynton was an object of private devotion that destroyed the most intimate relations around her. The problem was that her son was engaged to Mona, who appreciated the worth of Poynton enough to make its handover a condition of the marriage but who was blind to the soul of things. Mrs Gereth cared for her possessions as if they were her children. They had grown up with her, just as she herself grew with them. To hand them over to Mona was like sending off one’s darlings into the charge of strangers. The novel follows Mrs Gereth’s strategies to sabotage the marriage by building up the more aesthetically sensitive Fleda as a rival. The ‘spoils’ of Poynton spark a bitter and destructive war between the characters. In the end, Poynton goes up in flames.
Henry James laid bare the psyche of the consumer as collector. His portrayal of Mrs Gereth anticipates some of the psychological groundwork on repression and displacement by Sigmund Freud in the next generation. Goods as fetishes have an erotic quality. Things, not people, monopolize Mrs Gereth’s love and desire. More than that, however, James described accumulation as an organic process of physical care. The widow had ‘waited’ for her treasures, ‘worked for them, picked them over, made them worthy of each other and the house, watched them, loved them, lived with them’.30 Through them she had created her personality. And by caring for them and setting them in relation to each other, she had breathed life and value into them.
Mrs Gereth is a pathological case, but what Henry James so brilliantly conveyed was a material outlook oriented towards possession but transcending the conventional portrayal of the consuming self as if it was separated from things. Desire here was more than the short-lived fix of buying yet another novelty. Collections gain in emotional investment the larger they grow and the longer they are cared for. It would be difficult to draw a clear line between Mrs Gereth’s identity and her possessions. This way of looking at things could not have been more different from Rousseau’s or Marx’s. In the hands of a Mrs Gereth, a Mr Pooter or any ordinary person, things could be used to build social identities and relations, not just to obscure their connection to labour.
The Spoils of Poynton did not supplant Das Kapital, but it captured the broadening sensibilities at the time. Simply because people no longer made most of their own things, they did not automatically jump carelessly from one new item to the next. An opposite trend was also gaining ground. In their homes, people increasingly invested their selves in their possessions. This trend – the creation of value through consumption, not just production – is often associated with a switch from industrial society to consumer society that has taken place since the 1950s. It was already under way in the late nineteenth century.
When Henry James first thought of his story in 1893, his older brother, William, had just completed his two-volume Principles of Psychology. A professor at Harvard University, William James was an intellectual giant of the American scene, one of the founders of pragmatism. He tackled big subjects: truth, religion and the relationship between mind and matter. William had studied painting as well as medicine, and this, together with repeated bouts of depression, probably encouraged an interest in the emotional flow between people and things. To favour either thought or matter, he believed, was foolish and unnecessary. The two could not be separated; this point had been forcefully made by the German idealist Friedrich Schelling earlier in the century and was reiterated by James’s contemporary C. S. Peirce. The self and the material world seeped into each other, with emotions and experiences running between them. A ‘man’s Self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his,’ James observed. This did not mean ‘only his body and his psychic powers’ or his family, work and reputation, but also ‘his clothes and his house . . . his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account’. All these gave an individual ‘the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they wane and die away, he feels cast down.’31 People had a ‘material self’ as well as a social and spiritual self, and a pure ego.
The home was the nursery of that ‘material self’. ‘Its scenes are part of our life,’ William James wrote, and it awakened ‘the tenderest feelings of affection’. Any writer on domestic harmony could have written this. James went further. People, he wrote, had a ‘blind impulse’ to find a home and improve it. They had an ‘equally instinctive impulse’ to collect possessions, which became ‘parts of our empirical selves’. This explained ‘our depression at the loss of possessions’; it felt like ‘a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness’. This was precisely Mrs Gereth’s fear.
With the material self came an emphasis on habit and doing. The world was a place of action, not pure sentiment. William James, who by all accounts was an exceptionally caring father and a generous teacher, scorned Rousseau, ‘a nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer’ who spe
nt his life in a ‘weltering sea of sensibility and emotion’ while packing off his kids to a foundling hospital.32 A lot of ordinary consumption was tied up in habits. There was ‘no more miserable human being than the one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision’ and to whom ‘the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup’ was a matter of deliberation and choice. It was vital, therefore, James concluded, to make as many ‘useful actions’ automatic and habitual as early as possible. The more bits of daily life were handed over to ‘the effortless custody of automaticisms’, the more ‘our higher powers of mind’ were set free for higher tasks.33 At the same time, people needed to keep alive their ‘faculty of effort’, for example by voluntarily abstaining from something – an ‘insurance policy’ for hard times. Here was a new view of ordinary consumption as something positive.
What the two Jameses were up to was a larger reclamation of the mundane in early-twentieth-century culture. Few philosophers would dare mention Martin Heidegger, the dark prince of twentieth-century philosophy, in the same breath as William James – indeed, Bertrand Russell felt it was best not to mention him at all.34 There were fundamental differences between the philosophies and politics of the two men. James was a pragmatist, Heidegger an existentialist whose embrace of Nazism in the 1930s has cast a long shadow over his ideas. James practised radical empiricism; Heidegger believed that old Germanic words contained hidden wisdom: the very word ‘thing’, he noted, was originally connected to the Ting, or ‘moot’, a local assembly coming together to deal with a case.35 William James, like his brother, was a transatlantic man, travelling a dozen times to Europe. His home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a comfortable villa with plenty of armchairs for his many visitors. The world looked very different from Heidegger’s retreat in the Black Forest mountains, where his rustic cottage overlooked a working farm with its black-and-white cows grazing in a meadow.36
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