Part 2: Materiality and Culture
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R: Carrier of culture carries culture // and culture is /// a certain way of living which has developed / as an answer/reaction to something /// music is culture, and the record carries the music. (…) if the record had the same form, but without a photo or music on it // then we wouldn't be talking about it now.
Indeed I would not be talking about records if they had not proven to
be related in some way to a person's lifeworld. As shown in Part 1, academic
accounts of youth nowadays have come to be centred around lifestyle and
consumption. I will here proceed to outline a range of academic thought
that explores human - technology (or subject - object) relationships in
late modernity, the everyday consumption of material things and their
relevance for identity. This accumulates with Part 1 into an impression
of why and how vinyl is consumed and by whom. The vinyl record and the
turntable (as opposed to the CD and the CD player) are here seen to take
on specific meaning for those who consume them. Consumption is loosely
defined as any act of use or discourse beyond the acquisition of the object
(Appadurai 1986, Dant 1998, Miller 1987).
Since "consumption encompasses the conditions
and the constitution of social life" (Gregson & Crewe 2003:9)
and, as a consequence, one can never say all about it, I will selectively
review literature on consumption. Again, Material Culture Studies and
the sociology of consumption share overarching questions about power,
a result of especially post-war Marxist-influenced approaches as a response
to the conflicts of modernity. A chronological account of the perceived
relationship between humans within their social worlds and the role of
material matter therein (which includes a historical view of technological
change and how this is related to the human environment related in the
introduction) illustrates this dialectics between agency and the view
of consumers as "cultural dupes" who are co-opted by the culture
industry for the project of modernisation. Without delving too deeply
into these issues (22), I want to focus on the view
of consumption as a distinctive expression of lifestyle (Bourdieu 1984,
Chaney 1996) and as a compromise that allows for inner individual motivations
as well as influences from the social environment, the shaping of habitus,
to contribute to the continual formation of identity.
Critical Theory
Academic thought in the times between the world wars and after WWII was
heavily influenced by the rise of mass popular culture, capitalist industrial
monopolisation and the resulting commercialisation of culture.
The work of the wider circle of Frankfurt School (in exile) Critical Theory,
notably the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin, understood
itself firstly as a critique of Enlightenment. The most significant influence
was a strain and critical adaptation of Marxism that concerned itself
with the relationship between culture and ideology, posing the rational
emancipation of the individual against the expanded 'totalitarian' power
of the modern capitalist state and the resulting alienation of the worker
(Strinati 1995:56, Agger 1992:58). The durability of modern capitalism
was seen in the relation between affluence and consumerism, as well as
a more pervasive and rational form of social control in the modern state,
mass media and popular culture, creating 'false needs' by which the working-class
was pacified and its revolutionary potential stifled, turning it into
an 'affirmative culture' in Marcuse's words (Agger 1992:64). Horkheimer
and Adorno's (in)famous Dialektik der Aufklärung (1987[1944])
concerns the culture industry and its practice of veiling standardisation
and cultural homogenisation by an apparent individualisation of (and through)
commodities (Martin 1995:93, Rojek 1995, Strinati 1995:62). Through these
processes of consumption, conformity replaces consciousness. Marcuse's
One-dimensional Man worships the opera ticket solely for its exchange
value that is seen to confer status, without realising or questioning
the premium of the exchange (market) value over the actual use value,
the utility or practical value (Strinati 1995:57). The Marxist notion
of commodity fetishism is used to explain this phenomenon, to discuss
consumption as a pathological effect of mass capitalism producing these
'false needs'.
Adorno's work on popular music (1941, 1968, 1973) probably illustrates
best the inherent elitism in Critical Theory. As a trained classical musician,
practising composer, music theory expert and champion of avant-garde music,
he takes popular music as standardised and 'pseudo-individual', claiming
that the structural standardisation of popular music (e.g. in blues and
jazz patterning) aims to produce standardised reactions, that audiences
are characterised by a 'regression of listening' which serves to distract
attention, a 'catharsis for the masses' to keep them in line (Goodall
1995, Martin 1995, Steinert 2003). Adorno never commented on the fact
that jazz and blues have (since the 1970s/1980s) taken on the role of
authentic music against which 'pop' is distinguished, questioning his
classification of serious and popular entertainment music ("ernste"
vs. "Unterhaltungsmusik").
Quite contrary to their intentions (the dialectical
critique of inhumanity, as perceived by them), these works were received
in a way that solidified a class-specific view on consumption, constructing
differences between popular working-class mass-culture and leisure-class
high culture. Consumption thus becomes status-dependent, motivated by
emulation of the higher classes (Ritzer 2001) that resulted in practices
of conspicuous consumption (23) (Bourdieu 1984, Belk
1995, Ritzer 2001, Stearns 2001, Veblen 1953). Critical Theory has also
been criticised for an intellectual elitism inherent in its obscure language
and lack of empirical proof of their theses, but this was justified by
the argument that were Critical Theory to fulfil these criteria, it would
cease to be a form of intellectual resistance to capitalism (Strinati
1995:80). By neglecting human (working-class) agency and creativity, seen
as being suppressed by alienating forms of production and consumption,
the pervasive elitist tendencies to rate culture as high or low (cf. Crane
1992, Goddall 1995: 53 ff.) were continued. From this perspective, the
working-class consumer was confronted with false needs created by the
culture industry that exploits them for profit maximisation.
Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (1968) can provide somewhat of a counterpoint to the
cultural pessimism (24) of Adorno, Horkheimer (cf.
1944:19) and Marcuse, claiming that the mechanical reproduction of art
frees it from its historical dependence on ritual (1936:215; cf. Strinati
1995:83) and thus changes the masses' reactions to art profoundly, points
to the democratising and participatory potential of popular culture. Furthermore,
authenticity of reproduction is shown to rest with the consumer and is
always defined in its own historical context. Warhol's art, which reflected
this employment of reproductive techniques, is an example for this re-creation
of the 'aura' of the object to fit the consumer's purposes (cf. Bolz &
vanReijen 1991).
Cultural Studies
From the 1960s onwards, these foundations were
extended by trends I here subsume under the label of British Cultural
Studies (whose approaches to youth cultures and identity were outlined
in Part1). As a (neo-Marxist) response to the cultural pessimism inherent
in earlier work, these less elitist scholars (25)
questioned these views by combining modifications of Marxist theory with
structuralist and semiotic (26) influences in order
to show the inherent resistance and subversion of dominance through infusing
everyday consumption with the symbolic creativity that produces unalienable
meaning. Thus, the power-critical thrust of Critical Theory was preserved
and refined (Agger 1992, Hall 1987).
More importantly in this context, Cultural Studies
are not a fixed method or a discrete set of objects, but a fluid and interdisciplinary
approach of largely literary theory, anthropology and sociology. The anthropological
contribution lies in a healthy dose of cultural relativism and a broad
definition of culture as anthropological lived experience and not as high
and canonical culture. Culture is not rated as good or bad, but merely
seen as the enveloping context in which identity, values and behaviour
are mediated (Niekisch 2002, Nugent & Shore 1997) by this ordering
of cultural artefacts by aesthetic judgement: elitist assumptions about
art and culture are levelled by the cultural pluralism and resistance
inherent in the concept of subcultures (Brake 1980, Hebdige 1979) and
the general tendency to use bottom-up instead of top-down approaches (Agger
1992:85). The rejection of the high-low distinction of art was indeed
the beginning of a decisive swing of the pendulum towards the other extreme,
cultural populism (27) (Lury 2000, Strinati 1995:255
ff.).
Material Culture and "Postmodernism"
In the 1980s, shifts in the organisation of capitalism
became ever more apparent (i.e. were discussed academically), namely the
increasing post-Fordist organisation of labour and production (see Baudrillard
1998, Bauman 1998:80 and 2001, Harvey 1989, Lash & Urry 1987). What
is presented as the technocracy of post-industrial information society
(Kellner 2002, Muggleton 2000:34) leads to increasing corporatisation,
the vertical and horizontal integration of the means of production and
distribution (28), that relied more and more on mass-mediatisation
to create markets and resulted in a shift in the role of the individual
from industrial producer to post-industrial consumer (cf. Jackson et al.
2000). In the notion of consumerism lies the social obligation of every
citizen to keep the capitalist system functioning. In the words of deCerteau,
it "is devious, it is dispersed, but it insinuates itself everywhere,
silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through
its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products
imposed by a dominant economic order" (1984:xii; author's italics).
Consumption, once characterised by Adam Smith as the sole end of production,
is what drives today's economy to create new markets on the basis of the
classical economic creed of ever-growing profit. Yet, at the same time,
"with the advent of 'specialised consumption' and 'market segmentation',
'lifestyle enclaves' are said to be losing their correspondence to (…)
modernist grids of class, gender, age and ethnicity" (Muggleton 2000:39),
requiring an industry in its own right (marketing research) to define
the new variables and borders of markets. As a result in these shifts
in the conditions of labour, individuals are said to experience "disembeddedness"
(2001:146) from fixed social groups, their "habit of changing habits"
(1998:82) being the main common characteristic. "Postmodern leisure",
writes Rojek (1995:7), "is (…) existence without commitment",
or, circumscribed positively, the flexibility of identity that Jameson
(1984) sees as the 'cultural dominant' of late consumer capitalism.
Furthermore, the rapid developments of industrialisation and technology
have increased the complexity and range of different things with which
we have social relations. Dant (1998:199) notes that "while the ways
in which we interact with objects have changed, we still interact with
them as reflections or extensions of ourselves and our bodies or as reflections
and extensions of other people - sometimes of those other people collectively
as a culture". Material Culture has become an important part of the
social world, affecting our values, actions and lifestyles; "all
objects are social agents in the limited sense that they extend human
action and mediate meanings between humans" (Dant 1998:13;
author's italics). Appadurai (1986:3) underscores this recent perspective
by attributing 'social lives' to commodities. This extension and mediation
of the human by the material here becomes especially relevant in the context
of music production and consumption. As regards the production of music,
music technology has brought changes for both the performance and the
recording of music. New digital technologies allow for creativity through
technology (Bennett 2001, Frith 1999, Reising 2002, Warner 2003). Our
attitudes towards the processes of production have changed too; anti-capitalist
protest movements from Seattle to Adbusters
Media Foundation and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (URL) illustrate the role of mediatisation
of formerly restricted, privileged or otherwise specialised knowledge,
especially in the role of the internet (Loader 1997, Miller & Slater
2000, Warp & Grimes 1997).
Material Culture Studies as an interdisciplinary
project of economy, sociology, anthropology, and archaeology emerged out
of the acknowledgement of new techniques to comprehensively deal with
these developments: "It has never really been a discipline - it is
effectively an intervention within and between disciplines; translations
from one realm into another" (Buchli 2002:13; cf. similar views of
Cultural Studies in Hall et al. 1987, Hall 2000, Niekisch 2002) and shifts
attention to the consumption of material artefacts and their role in everyday
life. Capitalising on anthropological pioneering efforts as a foundation
(29), this range of thought established its goal of
discovering how people make sense of the world through physical objects:
psychology realises this as 'object relations' for identity formation;
sociology sees in these processes the physical manifestation of culture;
anthropology deals with it as objectifications of social relations. These
approaches consider consumption "as a process having the potential
to produce an inalienable culture" (Miller 1987:17), yet Miller (ibid:91)
also notes that not everyone possesses the ability and knowledge to appropriate
alien forms. In order to unearth these processes from social interaction,
"anthropology would therefore seek to identify those conditions which
seek to promote […] the development of the positive forms of consumption
as a process" (ibid:18). Acknowledging these views, Material Culture
Studies "focuses on how things have gone through all these stages
[design, making, distribution, consumption, use, discarding, recycling
and so on] as part of the mediation process between people and the physical
world at different stages in their biographies" (Attfield 2000:3).
The smallest common denominator to various approaches
to consumption is to interpret it as the production of meaning. The shift
from production to consumption with a respective growing importance of
the imagination also relates to our engagements with material things.
DeCerteau (1984:xii) sees a productive effort in consumption, Bourdieu
(1984:100) echoes this thought by calling consumption the 'labour of identification
and encoding' and the following 'labour of appropriation'; Baudrillard
(1998) reflects a similar stance in calling consumption 'social labour'.
The main change seems to lie in the role of the imagination, "our
consumption is now a matter of imagination, not need" (Frith 1996:2069,
as Appadurai (2000) and Anderson (1983) illustrate by their notions of
'imagined communities' (30).
At the populist end of the academic continuum we find approaches that
emphasise agency in this reproduction of meaning. Dant (1998:18 ff.) as
well as Douglas and Isherwood (1996) see the material things we consume
as a meaning system for the communication of social structures. In similar
ways, various other authors deal with the modes of consumption and introduce
terminology to express consumers' agency and appropriation: the notion
of sublation/reabsorption, where Miller (1987, 1995) adopts the Hegelian
concept of 'objectification' to challenge the equation of consumption
with homogenisation and loss of sociality and authenticity, argues for
a leading role of consumption in the constitution of things and persons
through the processes of appropriation and recontextualisation. Quite
often, though, these processes are reduced to the textual level: "the
term recontextualisation implies the concept of text which is itself open
to many readings" (Miller 1987:176), where Hall's Encoding/Decoding
model (Hall et al 1987) could be applied to illustrate the individual
factors in the process of translating intended into preferred meaning.
Because late modernity is distinctive (Baudrillard 1998), Featherstone
(1992) examines aesthetical (and conspicuous) consumption that is seen
as emulation of status (Ritzer 1991:210 ff.) or corresponds to uses-gratification
approaches as found in cultural sociology (Agger 1992). Thus emphasising
consumer's agency, it is shown that objects can surely function to carry
meaning (Appadurai 1986, Baudrillard 1998, Dant 1998, Douglas & Isherwood
1996, Lee & Munro 2001, Miller 1987), but Douglas and Isherwood are
criticised for somewhat reducing the whole problematic to the communicative
functions of objects: "goods are part of a live information system"
(1996:xiv). To them, objects are cognitive categories that distinguish
and reinforce cultural categories. But they emphasise the autonomy of
their views and disregard notions of power (especially concerning commercial
institutions and the media, cf. Thornton 1995b) and so disregard the fact
that the meaning of artefacts lies both on the material and on the cognitive
level. Frith (1996) notes a homology between material and cultural forms
in musical fields, pointing to a structural relationship between form
and meaning. Appadurai (1986) focuses on the social uses of artefacts
that can be imbued with political meaning expressed by distinct tastes.
The orientation towards consumer taste in the creation of markets reflects
the fact that the consumer is very much capable of informed decisions
about what to consume and how. As (potentially) free agents, depending
on the degree to which their dispositions allow for critical views, consumers
tailor commodities to their needs and express individual or collective
attitudes (cf. Laing 1990, Luger 1991).
More importantly, late modernity is characterised by a loss of faith in
master narratives and grand theories (Rojek 1995:6); or, in other words,
as the acceptance of the ephemerality, fragmentation and discontinuity
of postmodern life (Harvey 1989:44) and the fragmentary nature of scientific
knowledge (cf. crises of representation in Part 1). As a critical side
note, the dissolving of the opposition between subject and object (Miller
1987, Lury 2002) is noted, allowing for theorisation beyond the constructed
mental borders between subject and object. Over the last decade, the contradictions
arising out of these new ways of economic, political and social organisation
that have been subsumed under the labels of post-modernism and globalisation
led to a re-examination of the concept of culture itself and the realisation
of aesthetics as an important influence in decisions over consumption.
Late modernity is seen to be characterised by a shift from Adorno's aesthetic
modernism (Agger 1992:83) to an aesthetic influenced by instability and
mobility, the "fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that
celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification
of cultural form" (Harvey 1989 in Ritzer 2001:181, see also Attfield
2000, Bauman 2001:142, Slater 1998, Whiteley 2001) that are brought about
by post-Fordism (Harvey 1989) or disorganised capitalism (Lash & Urry
1987). Contemporary music is, in this respect, "marked by a trend
towards the overt and explicit mixing of styles and genres of music in
very direct and self-conscious ways" (Strinati 1995:233; cf. Frith
1987, 1996), underscoring Muggleton's suggestion that "postmodernity
entails an intensification of these aesthetic characteristics,
which have always been present in the development of subcultures"
(2000:50; author's italics). Featherstone refers to the sum of these developments
as "the aestheticization of everyday life" (1991:25, 66 ff.)
with tangible effects for the social environment. Pragmatism, especially
the work of Dewey, emphasises the experiential character of aesthetics:
aesthetic significance lies in any everyday experience and cannot be measured
by high-low distinctions, in this sense every experience in contemporary
life is aesthetic (Nagl 1998:137). Aesthetics or taste as its individual
expression is a configuration of an individual's values, mediated by the
everyday interaction within his/her social environment and often assigned
to objects (Baudrillard 1974, Bourdieu 1984). Contemporary theory uses
the notion of an anti-Kantian aesthetic (Miller 1987, Bourdieu 1984) or
'grounded aesthetics' (Willis 1990), which means that concerning the use
of objects the prime reasons or motivations are direct entertainment,
enjoyment and a fulfilling experience.
Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital (1984, 1998) hints at the aesthetic
dimension of consumption that gives them a coherence that is more than
simply a sign of status or identity but a more encompassing lifestyle,
a bricolent combination of ideas, signs by the individual social agent.
But, as Appadurai cautions, consumption is agency, but does not necessarily
equate with freedom: "Where there is consumption, there is pleasure,
and where there is pleasure there is agency. Freedom, on the other hand,
is a rather more elusive commodity" (2000:7) and inextricably linked
to contemporary organisation of the individual in contexts of production
and power. As an example, this new aesthetic makes it possible that businessmen
may be more likely to get loans from a bank for a second hand record shop
than for one selling CDs: second hand vinyl counts as an antique in the
eyes of bank managers and promises more economic potential than already
widely available digital technology (Blue 168).
Immense power in forming trends and fashions - and thus offering material
for bricolent lifestyles - lies with the media in the form of corporations
capable of transforming the latest subcultural impulses into best-selling
commodities. "The media is an essential component in the material
culture of subcultures providing novelty, stimulation, reassurance and,
in general, access to cultural data" (Rojek 2000:98; cf. Bauman 1998,
Dant 1998, Featherstone 1991, Rojek 2000, Slater 1997). It is also observed
that the media are actually studied more closely than the consumption
practices of the dominant classes. Seen as an additional layer of material
culture, media choices and consumption relate significant material for
the constant rebuilding of individual identities (Ritzer 1991, Rojek 2000,
Thornton 1995a). The sheer limitlessness of media presence in our everyday
lives, though, does not only imply a variety of choices, but also the
possibility of more powerful influences overriding them. This takes us
to the Neo-Marxist argument that exploitation has become invisible by
the hedonism of commodity consumption, the heritage of Critical Theory
from which contemporary 'organic intellectuals' in popular art and media
criticism profit (cf. Behrens 2003, Holert & Terkessidis 1997, Büsser
1998). Media spectacles and their consumption today may assume bizarre
forms and are discussed as consequences of alienation. It appears that
people crave goods that have partially or completely lost a constructive
meaningfulness in becoming commodities; "the glamour and value of
escape activity makes it an object of investment for entrepreneurs. Leisure
activity which begins as a spontaneous attempt to deny social boundaries
becomes commodified" (Rojek 2000:95). The other side of the coin
is that, in spite of all the lures and offers of the culture industry,
consumers are not reducible to easily influenced and mindless commodity
addicts. As Douglas and Isherwood (1996:xiv) put it: "goods are neutral,
their uses are social: they can be used as fences or bridges". This
emphasises Rojek's notion of interplay (1995, 2000) which suggests that
there is always and inevitably an interdependence of consumers and corporations.
Bilateral influences between the media and subcultures result in the production
of novel commodities. The role of music video channels for the music industry
must not be overrated, a lot of music is judged 'cool' and 'authentic'
because it cannot be seen on television. Round-the-clock availability
of music through the internet does not only generate profits, it is also
fertile ground for the development of alternative practices and market
niches, as I will relate later. We like to think of ourselves as free
agents, and indeed, the majority of us (living in Western economies) potentially
are. Many consumers actually want to be seduced and enjoy their (often
not insubstantial) spendable income, and those that do not have it may
find other ways to appropriate objects to fit their wants and needs and
express their ideas.
Social Practice
One pervading influence of the fields of Cultural
Studies and Anthropology on sociology, as well as the realisation that
focusing on subject or object by itself is inadequate to reveal social
facts, is the view of culture not statically as subjects, objects and
institutions, but as both processual experience and practice. What is
studied then are not just cultural artefacts in the texts, images or messages
by themselves, but "the practices and processes of production, distribution
and reception comprising the cultural totality of a society" (Agger
1992:84; cf. Bauman 1999). The emphasis on everyday practice gained importance
and momentum in the 1970s, especially with Bourdieu's Outline of a
Theory of Practice (1976) (31) as a continuation
of the 'ethnographic turn' and the further development into a model of
the generation of aesthetic judgement in Distinction (1984), working with
shared aspects of lifestyle to construct 'taste cultures'. Bourdieu translates
hegemony into the social field, ideology herein becomes aesthetical value
judgements resting on taste that positions the individual in a web of
power relations. "If social relations are constituted in social practice,
then our sense of identity and difference is established in the process
of discrimination" (Frith 1996:18; author's italics; cf. Gilroy
1999). The fluidity and the dynamics of identity in late modernity, the
flexible identification processes that are influenced by risks and insecurities
(Bauman 2001b, Beck 1986, Herzfeld 2001), are described by Bourdieu's
use of the notions of lifestyle and taste that cause the mobile positioning
of taste cultures as the sum (or least common denominator) of their participant's
interests. These value judgements are generated in the mode of a 'practical
sense' (32) (Bourdieu 1987, 1998) , meaning "judgements
and decisions made in the manner of a virtuoso social and political actor"
(2001:2), an intuitive knowledge on how to act in specified contexts.
In this sense, a dimension of my informants' habitus is shaped by and,
in turn, generates the practice of record collecting. Subcultural knowledge
is utilised with 'practical sense' in order to produce social interaction
with other people or objects, communicated meanings that establish differences
and thus situate the agent. To be able to describe the mechanisms and
the conditions of their use in Part 3, I will first have to outline the
practices hat define record collecting as a social practice.
Collecting as Social Practice
Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colourful,, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
(Hornby 1995:73)
Consumption does not end with the purchase (or
acquisition by other means) but is the beginning of a process of recontextualisation
(Dant 1998, Douglas & Isherwood 1996:36, Miller 1987:190). A purchased
or otherwise acquired record enters the collection of the new owner's
other records and it is given its place that determines how often it is
played and what meanings it takes on. Since nearly all informants would
(with certain restrictions) define themselves as collectors, and some
of them in ways that makes 'collector personalities' out of them (Blue
141, Black 180, Olive 69, Red 221), I will first define what distinguishes
the practice of collecting from other forms of consumption, and collecting
records from other forms of collecting. Using Belk's (1995) work on individual
and institutional (33) collectors, I posit music collecting
as a certain kind of consumption that is more passionate and therefore
more tightly connected to individuals' life histories; "collecting
is consumption writ large. It is a perpetual pursuit of inessential luxury
goods. It is a continuing quest for self completion in the marketplace"
(Belk 1995:1; cf. Eisenberg 1987:26). The preceding parts related the
base of vinyl users' attitude towards the object as a part of habitus,
which is described 'in action' in the following. Collecting is not only
an act of consumption but also one of production; "collectors create,
combine, classify, and curate the objects they acquire in such a way that
a new product, the collection, emerges" (Belk 1995:55; cf. Dant 1998:147,
Frith 1996, Thornton 1995a). Gregson and Crewe write about second hand
markets and consumption where they see gifts and collections as "bounded
objects", both are "locked into a time-space freeze" (2003:173),
extracted from the mass of objects that end up as waste (like a burger
or a tram ticket) - by virtue of the meaning attached to them. Belk sees
in collecting a 'metaphor for our times', the "production of 'the
collection' by an 'empowered (priestly) collector" (1995:183) implies
meaningful consumption beyond objects that are 'used up' and discarded.
In general, collections of popular culture artefacts tend to function
as a reverse effect of fashion obsolescence (Belk 1995:66), objects become
collectible only after they have stopped being fashionable within a mass-market
circulation. By this, he supports Appadurai's claim that the modern hedonist
concentrates more on emotions than on sensations, the "key to pleasure
is the imagination and fantasies that create or expand desire" (2000:4).
The deep personal meaning that can be attributed to collections says more
about that person's emotions than about the thing itself. Bauman claims
that "consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations;
they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative
sense" (1998:83; author's italics).
Collecting is a common practice for children. Everyone
probably remembers collecting something in their childhood: A very common
practice from my school age was collecting the stickers of football players
to fill the albums provided. Reaching the status of a male (34)
adult, though, collecting needs to be legitimised, this need is satisfied
by making legitimising value judgements (Belk 1995:54 ff.). Thus, adult
collecting is equated with an earnest hobby as "serious leisure";
"because hobbies are often seen as being closer to work than leisure,
they provide a guilt-free activity that supports the work ethic and offers
more self-control and reward than a corporate or factory career"
(ibid, 55). In this sense, collecting is also a competitive activity that
offers some reward for the one who fills his football album the quickest
or has the rarest records.
To become a collectible, an object has to fulfil certain criteria. In
the case of vinyl, for instance, the contemporary release of a mainstream
album does rarely fulfil these criteria, whereas an album released decades
ago and found in a second-hand record bin, or one acquired in or as a
formative experience in most cases does (Yellow 311, Black 185). Belk
(1995:66 ff.) describes two characteristics of mass-produced commodities
that make them suitable for collecting. One characteristic is seriality,
concerning items that are produced in identical multiples like stamps,
coins, beermats, and also vinyl records, and commonly produces a collector
of type A, the "ordering collector" produced by the Enlightenment
(ibid:60). Type B collectors are "aesthetic collectors" (ibid:63)
that feed from an abundance of the objects in question. This refers to
collections that are not pre-ordered and requires an element of surprise
('the hunt') as a major incentive. Since vinyl is also characterised by
abundance and therefore vinyl collectors may be found in both of these
groups, I would view these tendencies as a continuum with the majority
of record collectors leaning towards the second group (Blue 151, 169).
Personal aesthetic judgement and the pleasure derived from appreciation
(especially of the music) is more important for 'true' collectors than
it is for people who practice an ordering possession by classifying and
cataloguing objects. Since musical taste never arrives at a point where
it is thought of as 'complete' (there will always be new music to discover),
there can exist no finality in a music collection.
The group illustrates a second notable point about collecting in general,
namely acquisition as a key process, the active process of personal selection
of items with an aesthetic dimension, is described as a distinctive mechanism
below. What can be noted in general, though, is that simple acquisitive
accumulation disqualifies the 'ordering collector', it is seen as senseless
hoarding. On the other side, Eisenberg (1987) likens his acquaintance
Clarence to a scholar, preserving music more out of altruistic motivations
for posterity than for himself, a "steward[] of treasures that are
only temporarily [his]" (Belk 1995:73). What is self-evident is that
acquisition implies serial consumption and temporally unrestricted possession
(cf. Red 220).
Undoubtedly, the possession of these acquired artefacts
is, in contrast to the instant and temporally limited everyday consumption
of things and events that cannot be captured to the same degree like food,
rollercoaster rides and soap operas on TV, essential to define a collection
(35). Baudrillard (1991) assigns two functions to
objects, to be used and to be possessed. Possession of the record means
in many ways possession of the music. Frith notes that this sense of possession
extends well beyond the owning of the record, illustrated by the reaction
of fans to music criticism. The mail bag full of responses to his denigration
of Phil Collins' later music expressed the feeling that he "was deriding
their way of life, undermining their identity. The intensity of this relationship
between taste and self-definition seems peculiar to popular music"
(1987:144) and seems to be inscribed in the object.
Belk notes that things comprising a collection are taken out of ordinary
everyday use. This is certainly true for collections of accessories with
a relatively fixed meaning like antique paintings or statuettes, but does
not necessarily extend to the majority of vinyl collectors. For this reason
Belk's otherwise excellent definition needs to be reworked to fit the
social field of vinyl consumers. He states that "collecting is the
process of actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring and possessing
things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical
objects or experiences" (1995:67). I would argue here that "ordinary
use" is too vague to allow for the use value reported by all informants
(see below), I would rather speak of a removal from first hand cycles
of consumption and from the alienated process of production. Gregson and
Crewe note that collections-in-use are "embedded in practices that
blur the conventional association of collecting with non-use" (2003:175).
DJs draw from their collections to compile their sets, listeners choose
records to emphasise certain feelings, and the non-user disqualifies himself.
Irrespective of the ends that the collection is defined to, collecting
remains a materialistic pursuit that is tied with "the importance
a consumer attaches to worldly possessions" (Belk 1995:69) that does
not only require money, but also specific forms of knowledge to pursue:
(115)
Orange: at the beginning (I bought) only scene stuff / and at some point / one started to realise that there's more music out there outside the scene // well, and then it was sort of a snowball effect, you got to know this, a cross-reference to that and so on
Green: a bit of rummaging around your parents' cellar where you find stuff
Orange: well, and at some point you possess a (spectrum), when you know there's good records in every genre, but to collect / if you listen to all these records that's not collecting, that's just / having records ///
Green: Yes, but it's also a bit about // there's no denying that it's also / to own the thing
Orange: well yeah, it is a possession, you can buy it and that's the corresponding worth of course
Green: a capitalistic process.
I: The purchase as such?
Green: The purchase, the possession, the collecting / it is materialistic.
The economic value argument extends the range of users as "the possessor,
controller, and sometimes saviour of the objects collected" (Belk
1995:68 ff.) by the 'investor'. In addition to its idealistic value, a
record has a material value that increases with 'auras' of authentic rarity.
Thus, the collection "a creative way of regulating exchange"
(Miller 1987:175) not only in the symbolic sense that shows differences
by the use of subcultural capital, but also in the material sense. A record
collector can be situated at any point between the extreme ends of the
continuum between heroically preserving valuable objects and profiting
materially. To outline my informants' position on this continuum, I use
Belk's adopted categories (1995) in a less exclusive sense and with the
added category of the 'acquisitor': Many record collectors acquire far
more records than they would be willing to part with, and often keep records
they rarely use as 'dead capital' in the economic sense.
The group of acquisitors (White, Purple, Blue, Yellow, Pink, Grey) questions
materialism as prime motivator simply by its existence. Almost any record
has some kind of value, even if it lies in giving it to someone else.
'Merchants' like Red (222, 223), Brown, Olive, and Black (181) aim to
increase the subjective quality of their collection by swapping records.
Preferably, these interactions take place within their social circles,
and may often take the form of reciprocal gifts. Brown and Olive scour
flea markets and Ebay (internet auction site) not just for their
own collection, but also for friends and for records that they know has
market value among collectors on Ebay, subtly crossing over into 'investor'
attitudes. Silver (297) attributes an intrinsic economic value to records.
This cannot be discarded, yet Yellow remarks how exchange value for even
the rarest records seldom exceeds a few hundred Euros (318). Pink (75)
notes how charity shops' second hand vinyl sections as a reflection of
discarded household items stock only "rubbish" because there
are so few records that are actually significant in economic terms (cf.
Red 224). The 'speculator' needs high degrees of specific knowledge to
be able to assess profit margins correctly. What characterises the speculator
most is the willingness (and often explicit aim) to exchange records for
profit and the resulting positioning at the far end of the continuum,
dangerously close to appearing a non-user and, even worse, not to be interested
in the music at all (Brown 47, 48; Olive, Red 224).
Figure 2: the informants on a continuum of collector models
The collection and its 'aura' may be dissolved, but the "ritual of collecting, the consumption practice" (Belk 1995:87), remains. Yellow (317) and Pink (78) both lost or had to get rid of their collections at some point in their lives, which has not stopped them from buying vinyl again. The intrinsic worth of records that extends beyond the material value is illustrated by stated facts that records are for some too precious to DJ with (Pink 78, Brown 28), and that favourite albums might be bought a second time as a 'backup' copy (Red 225). These facts are shown by the following discussion about how value is attributed to records and to what ends, but it will also show a most noteworthy point made by Belk: "collecting is not the same as ordinary consumer behaviour. It is extraordinary primarily by virtue of its passion, focus, and commitment" (Belk 1995:148). I know for a fact that all of my informants love music in the sense that they love whatever it is their music gives them - or rather what they make out of it. "Perhaps the best analogy for this kind of behaviour […] is romantic love." (ibid). Belk identifies this behaviour as 'agapic love', characterised by the partners being emotional rather than rational, idealistic rather than pragmatic, and altruistic rather than egoistic. The record 'gives' in currencies of emotion and ideals without wanting anything in return and vinyl users tend to reciprocate (Blue 171). The discourse that creates images of noble sacrifices and heroism thus feeds into the differences record collectors constructed by word and deed, based on the specific tastes of these individuals.
(22) These issues have easily filled countless books, as the wealth of Material Culture readers testifies (e.g. Appadurai 1986, Buchli 2002, Collins 2002, Dant 1998, Graves-Brown 2000, Miller 1995, Myers 2001) and, in turn, proves the fruitfulness of interdisciplinary approaches. (back)
(23) Veblen saw conspicuous consumption in the consumption patterns around him in 1912, and interpreted these as habitual thought and expression (1953:88). The differences to earlier times are related to the shift from (medieval) sumptuary laws which were essentially mechanisms avoiding envy, to modern envy-provocating forms of consumption that are meant to display high social status (Belk 1995:3). (back)
(24) The cultural pessimism in Horkheimer & Adorno's work is hardly surprising considering the ends to which industrialisation and communication were pu to by Nazi war industry and propaganda, and their forced exile as Jews (Steinert 1998, 2003). As essential reading for the following generations academic thought, this pessimism found its way into Chicago School approaches and was later somewhat neutralised by work on hegemony and ideology in Anglo-American Cultural Studies (cf. Hall et al. 1987; Hall 2000). Later, ideas about post-colonialism, ethnicity (cf. Gilroy, Hebdige 1987), gender (cf. McRobbie 1984, 1999) and age refined the discussion (Agger 1992). (back)
(25) S.Hall as West Indian immigrant and diasporic academic took over as head of the department in 1964; his work (among others) propagated the 'ethnographic turn', studying and participating in 'low' culture and narrowing the cleft between sociology and anthropology (Hall 2000, Niekisch 2002). (back)
(26) This represents a shift from Althusser's economic determinism to Gramsci's culturalism (Agger 1992). Semiotically, objects are seen as signs representing hegemonial ideology. Barthes (1982), for instance, analyses art and consumer objects as myths offering imaginary solutions to real contradictions within society. (back)
(27) J.Fiske, whose emphasis is the empowering potential in lifestyle and consumption, is the prime target of this criticism. In spite of their one-sidedness, these views were an important contribution to the acknowledgement of consumer agency (cf. Winter & Mikos 2001). (back)
(28) Ritzer (1998:3) refers to these processes of rationalisation as McDonaldisation (cf. Kellner 2002). (back)
(29) Malinowski's description of Kula exchange,
Mauss' work on the gift (1974), Lévi-Strauss' analysis of Kwakiutl
masks, Strathern's study of Melanesian ritual objects and garb (Buchli
2002, Douglas & Isherwood 1996, Miller 1987:128, 193). (back)
(30) Cf. Dracklé (1996b:10), who sees the
anthropology of Europe as one that analyses such an imagined community.
(back)
(31) Bourdieu's anthropological contribution in his
study of the Kabyles in Outline of a Theory of Practice (1976)
is not the only work that concerns itself with praxeologic approaches,
but an important influence on the general trend and my choice of instrument
to interpret my data; cf. Ebrecht & Hillebrand 2002, Fowler 1997,
Herzfeld 2001:16 ff., Ortner 1984. (back)
(32) cf. Flyvbjerg's (1998) use of 'phronesis' as
the conceptional tool social science should use more than relying on episteme
(scientific knowledge) and techne (technical knowledge). (back)
(33) Redrawing the historical development of consumer society, Belk puts forward the expansion of world trade, the Industrial Revolution, and sumptuary legislation (as well as strategies to circumvent these laws) as the key factors that influenced the formation of "collecting cultures". Having brought Asia and the Americas to Europe - mostly by anthropologists or colonial administrative officials and missionaries - inspired the World Exhibitions of the 19th century and gave rise to the department store, merchandising and advertising (cf. Miller 1987). Here, the main shift in emphasis in the role of art was from sacred to secular through dis-embedding from the original context and re-embedding in the European context of consumption. One of these contexts is the museum; Belk covers in notable detail its collecting practices and the bias that influence it (1995:152 ff.; cf. Buchli 2002). (back)
(34) This account will not deal with feminist issues since the collection and use of vinyl records seems to be largely restricted to males. Women composed only 8% of the survey we used 3 years ago and since, then, I have not met a female record collector. According to Lange, sound media are consumed first and foremost by males (1997:70). As I remarked in the introductory notes on ethnography, I am dealing not only with a restricted sample, but also with a very restricted group in general. Still, I asked most of the informants why they thought this was the case and received answers that hinted at processes of socialisation that would have to be investigated (Ar, He 152, White 259, Silver 304):
(97)
R: Basically everything that's got to do with music /// or with art in general […] / I know a couple of women that deejay / and I know quite a few that would be up for it // I think it's got something to do with their socialisation, that men have more of an active thing and so take on more public roles (…) / I know female DJs / and they deejay better in their own way than men (…) the moment they do it it's more down to personality.
(35) In the case of individuals who tape and collect every episode of Star Trek, this statement is of course not true. But it illustrates that the boundary between a media event and a related object is in fact permeable and fuzzy. (back)