Study Task 04 - Summarising and Paraphrasing 02

Here are some of the key points I took out from Daniel Miller's Material Culture and Mass Consumption.

The book sets out to investigate the relationship between society and material culture, and to assess the consequences of the enormous increase in industrial production over the last century. Miller talks in a point of view of the British society, commenting that the average inhabitant of Britain is exposed to a large range of material goods such as clothing, furnishing, technology, buildings, etc.

• It is argued that contemporary society consists of a series of extremely abstract arenas of social and material order, including commerce, academia, the state and other major institutions. pg16
• Simmel's essential argument is that money is the prerequisite for, and major instrument in, the accomplishment of freedom and potential equality. pg73
• In a close knit society, the sense of personal obligation is overwhelming. Such obligations, usually based upon kinship relations, are highly specific as regards both the actions demanded and the identity of the individual subject to them. That is to say that every individual lives according to highly structured set of personal obligations which he or she must continually fulfil. This condition is characteristic of societies dominated not only by kinship but also by feudalism or slavery; it is also characteristic of the peasant village. pg73
• Money as abstraction is understood by Simmel to be the root of impersonal relations between people. In a monetarized regime, the individual may be under obligation to a far larger range of poeple than was hitherto possible, through mortgages, tax systems and so on. Money extends a concept of equality, in so far as the perception of inequality becomes based upon differences in the possession of money, rather than on an essentialist  notion of the intrinsic differences in persons. pg73
• Culture is derived as a historical force prior to the existence of any individual subject, but is only realizable through agency. It is therefore the means by which the individual is socialized as a member of a given society, and is, in turn the form of all individual and social creativity. pg81
• The phenomenon of certain mundane objects becoming so firmly associated with an individual that they are understood as literal extensions of that individual's being was discussed in some detail by Levy-Bruhl (1966: 100-27). In many societies, the clothing, ornaments and tools belonging to an individual may be considered so intergral to him or her that to touch or do harm to these inanimate objects is considered indistinguishable from taking the same action against the person. Such property is identical to the person may stand for that person in his or her absence. pg119
• What makes an object fashionable it is ability to signify the present; it is thus always doomed to become unfashionable with the movement of time. Fashion usually operates within a system of emulation and differentiation in knowledge, such that it uses the dynamic force of object change as a means of reinforcing the stability of the social system within which it is operating (Miller 1985: 184-96; Simmel 1957). pg126
• Most artefacts are either the product of mass production, in which case they are identical to all other items produced by the same process, or else are intended as equal copies of a normative cultural notion. pg127
• Emulation is increasingly significant as a strategy by means of which people lower in social hierarchy attempt to realise their aspirations towards higher status by modifying their behaviour, their dress and the kinds of goods they purchase, since it now becomes possible to mistake a poor nobleman for a wealthy trader. Emulation in turn simulates the desire to retain differentials, which often becomes based upon access to knowledge about goods and their prestige connotations. Fashion emerges as the means for continuing those forms of social discrimination previously regulated by sumptuary rulings. pg136
• In Simmels analysis (1957: 308-15), Simmel argues that fashion plays a major part in many peoples attempt to live out contradictory pulls of this perceived duality. Fashion demands an individual conception of a conventional style, thereby allowing the preservation of a private world, a self-conception which is saved from exposure by the expediency of convention. Fashion then provides a surface which is partly expressive but which also in part protects individuals from having to expose their taste in public. pg174

Further reading

Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B. 1980 The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen and Unwin. 1986 Sovereign Individuals of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin.
Works by Levi-Strauss
Simmel, G. 1957 'Fashion'. American Journal of Sociology, 62, 541-58.
and other works by Simmel.