Appadurai in the Morning Mail?!
As I was browsing the Brown Morning Mail yesterday, I came across the following announcement:
Got Stuff? Make a Clean Break!
In partnership with the Rhode Island Donation Exchange Program, Society
of Saint Vincent de Paul and Cleanscape, EcoReps and Facilities
Management have arranged to put used stuff to new use. Thirteen
donation stations will be erected around campus from May 6th through
May 8th for the convenience of departing students.
Upon reading this, I was immediately reminded of our earlier discussions on Appadurai. Such an advertisement speaks to the perpetually fluctuating nature of the commodity, and the various types of value that a commodity is invested with as it progresses from one state of its social life to another, a phenomenon defined by Appadurai as “convertibility”. Here, our used and no longer useful objects become another man’s treasure, for a time, until they again lose their status as objects of interest and pass on to a new “moment in a longer social trajectory” (Appadurai 15). In Appadurai’s words, “Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom…” (15). This announcement reminded me of the myriad ways in which objects in our society acquire new value. There are examples all around us, in every day life. The Salvation Army, the used thrift store on Thayer (full of designer brands, nevertheless), and now this. Prior to taking this course, such a broadcast in the Morning Mail would have passed beneath my eye with barely more than a moment’s acknowledgement; Now, however, I find I have become acutely aware of the role that objects play in our everyday lives. I can attribute this hypersensitivity to all that I have learned in this class, so thanks again, Sarah.
What’s more interesting to me are the moral and political statements that are attached to an object’s second, third, or fourth life. Consider: an old T-shirt from a 90s band is donated to one of the above bins by the initial owner who bought it at the concert (middle class); it is then given to the local Salvation Army where a single, working mother buys it for her son (lower class); years later, the son sells the shirt on E-bay, where a wealthy (upper class) but eccentric fan buys it for a tidy sum of money, declaring it to be a valuable first edition of a now-rare T-shirt design and hangs it on his wall. What does this say about class structure? Do objects have a tendency to move down and then up? It seems like old things are for the poor, but things that are older still are heirlooms and belong to the wealthy.
Also, there’s something a little gross about people making lives out of what “we’ve”
decided is trash, no?
Some wealthier public schools, when they get new textbooks, donate the older version to poorer public schools in the area. What does that say about society’s priorities and imperatives? Maybe that poor people are only worth what we can spare them, but that’s a dangerous claim, and one that angers me.
- N.S.
Nicole and Nupur,
Both of your examples do something interesting with Appadurai’s notion of convertibility that’s worth pointing out, and that exposes a possible limit to Appadurai’s argument. While things may be convertible (between uses, class positions, etc) they are nevertheless rendered obsolete, or otherwise unusable.
Consider the textbook example: perhaps one of the things that “angers” you, Nupur, is that books given to poorer school districts are not only outdated, but that the knowledge they contain is also assumed to be obsolete (old-fashioned, quaint, choose your euphemism here).
How does something like obsolescence pose a challenge to Appadurai’s argument about the convertibility of commodities? In what cases do things (theories, ideas) fail to convert?
This may not exactly answer your question, Sarah, but Nupur’s reference to textbooks and your proposal of “obsolescence” brings to mind my own recent experience at the Brown Bookstore. Last week, I entered the bookstore hoping to sell back several biology textbooks from the past two years, excited by the prospect that I might acquire a little extra cash, maybe go out for dinner…But no, the man administering textbook buybacks informed me, these books were outdated, older editions, and he could not offer me even a small fraction of the hefty sum I had originally paid for them. Needless to say, I was peeved—went home, prepared to sell the books on Ebay—and found that even there, they were worth little to none of their original value. I suppose that this might be an example of a way in which obsolescence renders an object “un-convertible”—once its original form is modified into a new, more innovative model, the original loses its once coveted exchange-value. And here is an example of Marx’s commodity fetishism, and the ways in which society overlooks “use-value” in favor of “exchange-value.” Although these Ivy-League biology textbooks still contain invaluable knowledge that may educate countless people, the fact that their exchange-value has diminished means that they are no longer of use to me or the Brown University bookstore. Or, for that matter, to the millions of web-surfers that browse Ebay on a daily basis. The books will sit in my closet until, perhaps, they once again acquire exchange-value—but this is doubtful, based upon the immobilizing effects of their obsolescence.
Obsolescence seems to be chiefly an artificial category that is fabricated and promoted by manufacturers and retailers in efforts to prompt further consumption. People rarely ever discard items because they are no longer functional. It is almost always the case that an object’s utility outlasts the owner’s interest in using that item. I’m thinking specifically of ‘fast fashion’ businesses like H&M, Zara, or Forever 21 that can afford their ‘cheap-chic’ approach due to the rapid turnover in fashion trends. As Appadurai observes in The Social Life of Things, the fashion industry clearly reveals how demand, in our late capitalist society, is a “socially regulated and generated impulse, not an artifact of individual whims or needs” (32).
If purchases in our modern consumerist society are no longer dictated by necessity, then we must presume that they are driven by desire, which, in turn, is influenced by mass media and advertising. However, this assumption is complicated by Beth’s previous post on ‘Indeterminate Desire,’ which discusses how Perec’s and Godard’s characters are incapable of identifying a specific object to their longing, yet continue buying compulsively. While it is true that the media assaults our senses with a constant barrage of novel products, I’m not sure that the confusion generated by an abundance of options can suffice to explain the indeterminacy of desire. Perhaps consumers’ indeterminate desire might arise from their being consistently thwarted in the attempt to achieve non-material or intangible ends (i.e. immunity from death in White Noise) by material things?
Hi Caroline,
You’re absolutely right to point out that obsolescence is produced. One could go even further to say that it’s a necessary condition of capitalism. A very interesting, readable book on this topic came out in 2007: It’s called Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in Americaby Giles Slade. Here’s the blurb, off of the publisher’s website (Harvard UP). What I find interesting is the turn at the end of the blurb, from object to human subject, used to user (also used?):
“If you’ve replaced a computer lately–or a cell phone, a camera, a television–chances are, the old one still worked. And chances are even greater that the latest model won’t last as long as the one it replaced. Welcome to the world of planned obsolescence–a business model, a way of life, and a uniquely American invention that this eye-opening book explores from its beginnings to its perilous implications for the very near future.
Made to Break is a history of twentieth-century technology as seen through the prism of obsolescence. America invented everything that is now disposable, Giles Slade tells us, and he explains how disposability was in fact a necessary condition for America’s rejection of tradition and our acceptance of change and impermanence. His book shows us the ideas behind obsolescence at work in such American milestones as the inventions of branding, packaging, and advertising; the contest for market dominance between GM and Ford; the struggle for a national communications network, the development of electronic technologies–and with it the avalanche of electronic consumer waste that will overwhelm America’s landfills and poison its water within the coming decade.
History reserves a privileged place for those societies that built things to last–forever, if possible. What place will it hold for a society addicted to consumption–a whole culture made to break? This book gives us a detailed and harrowing picture of how, by choosing to support ever-shorter product lives we may well be shortening the future of our way of life as well.”