A Theory of Shopping by Miller Daniel

Author:Miller, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley

Despite feminism, the transgressive element is extended by the idea of the pure profligate shopper being female, precisely because the female remains the gender which bears the mantle of responsibility for actual or potential households. The fear as to whether the female can be trusted to act as the self-abnegating consumer is given poignancy by an almost ecstatic vision of this female luxuriating in the manifold pleasures of a shopping mall in complete disregard of any kind of larger responsibility. The degree to which shopping thrills as destructive consumption is dependent upon the degree to which its agent, the shopper, is the same person who is supposed to objectify pure self-sacrifice as a housewife living on behalf of her household. In this vision spending becomes a goal in and of itself, de-contextualized from social life. The shopper is imagined engaged in pure self-indulgence following the dictates of individualized hedonism. Shopping comes to objectify a form of absolute freedom that fantasizes a separation off from being defined by any social relations and obligations. What informants constantly called ‘real’ shopping, the shopping that they feel I ought to be studying, must study, that is shopping which is never real, is an imagined act of blissful annihilation of the socially constituted self in favour of a self constructed through the process of individualistic hedonism.

For this vision, consumption must be trivial, and the giant malls must stand in our ideology as symbols of sheer emptiness, crammed full of pure ephemera that have the power to dissipate the seriousness of labour into an objectifying of nothing. The notion of primitive violence in sacrifice is overtrumped by the idea or ideal of civilization, that most sophisticated development of human kind, blown away in an orgy of spending. A favourite image is of high culture such as art torn asunder by vulgar merchandising – the Velázquez tea-tray, classic Rome turned into a shop front. The academic theory of postmodernism provides admirable service to our need for a vision of destructive consumption as pointless waste, which is precisely why, although I suspect it is almost entirely an illusion, so many academics seem devoted to representing our age as postmodern.

Although there may be potential analogies with sexuality used to project similar kinds of freedom (e.g. Miller 1994: 113–25), there was little evidence in the ethnography for the presence of any element that could be closely identified with the erotic, with violence, with death or any of the senses of destructive consumption that so exercised Bataille. Yet the potential for a relationship between these three is evident, and one need only turn to newspapers to find it realized. The sheer exhilaration and exhaustion of the fantasized bout of pure shopping easily evokes the same sense of annihilation of the self as is imagined for sexual climax. Of course, most actual sex isn’t much like this vision of excess either, but it is at the level of fantasy that the relationship holds. It is a voyeuristic vision which is most evident

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