Malewitz - The practice of misuse : rugged consumerism in contemporary American culture

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Malewitz, Raymond, author.

The practice of misuse : rugged consumerism in contemporary American culture / Raymond Malewitz.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-9196-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. American literature20th centuryHistory and criticism. 2. Consumption (Economics) in literature. 3. Material culture in literature. 4. Consumption (Economics)United States. 5. Material cultureUnited States. I. Title.

PS228.C65M35 2014

810.9'3553dc23

2014008593

ISBN 978-0-8047-9299-8 (electronic)

THE PRACTICE OF MISUSE

Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

Raymond Malewitz

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For Emily

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the contributions of a number of generous and vibrant readers, colleagues, family members, and friends. In particular, I would like to thank my editors and anonymous readers at Stanford University Press for their careful attention to my arguments. I also thank Neil Davison, Amy Hungerford, Steve Railton, Janice Carlisle, Evan Gottlieb, Meghan Freeman, Dwight Codr, Zak Fisher, and Mike Kelly for reviewing elements of my chapters and for supporting my work. Earlier versions of have appeared in PMLA and Contemporary Literature, respectively. My greatest thanks go to Emily, whose tireless support colors all aspects of this project.

Misuse: From Aesthetics to Practice

[T]he street finds its own use for things.

William Gibson, Burning Chrome (1981)

The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define, the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which theyve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.

Jonathan Lethem, The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism (2007)

Of the many insights that sociology has brought to bear upon the study of literature and culture, no idea has received more attention than the notion that the human body is socially, rather than naturally, constructed. Arguments for the social construction of race, class, and gender are well known. To these categories Queer Theory has added sexuality, Disability Studies has added health, Fat Studies has added body shape, and Animal Studies has added species. Such perspectives maintain that our identities are determined not by our natural biological origins but rather by our contingent, nurtured interactions within and between cultures, which, as Roland Barthes observes, establish Nature itself as historical (101).

It is therefore unsurprising that recent material culture scholars have used similar methods to understand the diverse objects that populate our world. That such objects are socially rather than naturally constructed is not, of course, a compelling new subject of critical inquiry. Nearly a century and a half has passed since Karl Marx introduced his theory of historical materialism in Capital (1867), and critics still look to it and to Georg Lukcss nearly century-old History and Class Consciousness (1923) as powerful accounts of the ways in which commodities conceal their production histories beneath a reified sheen of ahistorical presence. But what is newly compelling about this sociological analogy is the notion that objects, like people, are subject to the contingencies of a continuing history rather than to the determinist logic of origin.

In place of perspectives centered on the collective production of goods, the new thing theorists probe what Arjun Appadurai calls the social histories of modern commodities, drawing attention to objects individualized fates after they pass beyond the site of initial market exchange. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1980), for example, Michel de Certeau argues that the rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production that constitutes late capitalism seems to leave the modern public in a position of collective passivity, but he insists that such a grim outlook overlooks the ways that consumption can operate as a productive and subversive act. This tactical form of consumption (what he calls la perruque, or the wig) is characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its products (where would it place them?) but in an art for using those imposed upon it (31). Likewise, Ken Alder insists that even if an objects origins are known, its social value need not be yoked to the conditions dictated to it by its assembly:

[A] history of things encompasses much more than an account of what they can do for us, if only because the purposes things serve are unanticipated by those who design, make, and market them. Hence stories about things involve more than stories of generic utility. To reduce an object to its function involves more than a failure of attention; it is a slur on the ability of human ingenuity to

To correct these problems, Alder presents a thesory of materialism devoted to what he calls thick things. As the phrase suggests, Alder bases his investigation of material artifacts upon the methods of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who argued that only thick descriptions could capture the diverse layers of meaning with which different human agents imbued their actions and those of their fellows (Making Things the Same, 503504). In Geertzs well-known argument, closing ones eye can signify either a wink or a twitch: The two movements are, as movements, identical; from an I-am-a-camera, phenomenalistic observation of them alone, one could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first taken for the second knows (6). Along similar lines, within Alders thick thing system, the significance of a given object is not dependent upon its preassigned function or upon its resemblance to other, identical objects that have been put to human use. Instead, its tactical meaning emerges as a function of a particular social situation or context that cannot be easily anticipated or abstractly modeled. Put simply, if I needed to bind the leaves of this chapter together, I could use a paper clip. If my Internet router stopped working, I could unbend that same paper clip and push it into the routers reset hole to correct the problem.

Alder supplements this analogy by foregrounding the fungible nature of material substances: The material world is lumpy, recalcitrant and inconsistent. Connections come apart; parts wear out; things break (503). When an object breaks down, it cannot function in the way that its creators intended. As related scholars in the field of rubbish theory suggest, in the moment at which an object sheds its original use-value and is classified as waste, it effectively disappears from the socioeconomic landscape. Michael Thompson explains this phenomenon in his discussion of the difference between what he calls transient objects, which seem to lose their value over time, and durable objects, which preserve or even gain value as they age: