You don’t need to be Alexis de Tocqueville to ‘divine in one glance’ that the consumer landscape in America has reached a point of saturation in its gilding over of a clearly dissipated creative force.

But I wouldn’t say the answer lies in a backward directed glance to Mary McCarthy’s brazen formulations demarcating for Simone de Beauvoir’s edification the difference between a “crassly, meanly”, “acquisitive” “buying impulse” and “the exercise of a spiritual right” among certain others whose purchasing power is more purely aligned with their innermost convictions.

In her 1947 essay, “America the Beautiful,” McCarthy rejected as “manifestly untrue” the “pseudo-equality” “standardization” consisting in a “worldly interpretation of an unworldly assumption that all men are created equal.” She maintained this ‘equality of persons’ would spell the “logical end of democracy”:

The immigrant or the poor native American bought a bathtub, not because he wanted to take a bath but because he wanted to be in a position to do so. This remains true of many fields today; possessions, when they are delivered, are not wanted for their own sakes but as tokens of an ideal state of freedom, fraternity, and franchise. (Reprinted in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XI, No. 4)

Those contentedly versed in the splittings of the psyche according to kinds of “souls” in the Aristotelian sense might appreciate McCarthy’s gesturing. Called up today, the essay affords the easy lesson that one ought not be caught up in the mindless acquisition of material goods, as appears to be the case with disposable consumerism.

Yet, there’s something too ready at the hand off in arriving at the conclusion that the obliteration of distinctions in kinds of souls, e.g., vegetative, appetitive, acquisitive, is the basis for runaway mass consumption. Besides which, what am I to do with dime-store deductions that follow from it, i.e., “you are what you eat” or “you consume what you produce”? Besides which, how else do penny pinchers think the conquest of poverty is really accomplished in an overarching, historical sense? Certainly not by way of their lack of contribution.

More fundamentally, if McCarthy’s hail Mary pass ever held any water, worldly or otherwise, her anti-utilitarianism extended to include America’s acquisition of the atom bomb would ostensibly have been directed by a similar nobility of spirit, i.e., in its never having actually been used.

Pierre Bourdieu’s 1977 writings on symbolic capital seems to fill these foundational cracks between reason and practice. According to Bourdieu, the “practical efficacy” of a group’s “spiritual point of honor” remains “a true description” of acceptable behavior “as is intended to be acceptable,” “even if it were contradicted by everyone’s behavior, like a rule to which every case proved an exception” (“Structures, Habitus, Power: Basis for a Theory of Symbolic Power”).

As a whole, Bourdieu’s account is one that seems to be superglued on top of Indian philosophical tradition. The lynchpin of his argument – that naked self-interest and exploitation must be misrecognized for capitalist exchange to function – echoes the misrecognition by which the supreme reality of Brahman presents itself. The avidya or unawareness of Brahmanism is mirrored in Bourdieu’s “interested fiction” which offers the worker “an honorable representation of his condition,” while the creative force or maya that is spent in order to continually maintain the illusions covering over the ultimate reality of Brahman finds parallel in Bourdieu’s account of a “wastage of social energy” whose cost is the condition for the “permanence of domination.”

It’s hard to know whether Bourdieu’s authority is enhanced by his building on an originating narrative that claims to speak on behalf of all that is knowable in a supreme and ultimate sense. But it is fitting that an account of communal complicity with exploitation finds close parallel with a sacrificial religion. The analogy can also be used to consider the extent to which a caste logic persists in kinds of labor and kinds of ‘souls’ to perform them. The labor of objectification and of euphemization of said exploitation, for instance, seems to be another kind of equally necessary labor by which Bourdieu says “official truths” find their juridical legitimization. Also, I think more than one form of legitimate accumulation can be inferred (and if not, why not?) in the domains of art and culture, marked in Bourdieu as sites of “pure” consumption.

These last two points are to say a conscious and organized consumer class is possible with or without more just economic relations to the extent that all are “in on the joke” of a kind of market economy that runs mostly on incompetence misrecognized as perfection, for some reason, and that is premised on an ongoing devastating disregard for the planet and all sentient beings who share it. So, it isn’t the case that a lack of collective buy in is what’s getting in the way of a conscious and organized consumer class.

In place of the complicity that blanketed Bourdieu’s analysis such that “when the group lies to itself in this way, there is neither deceiver nor deceived,” a more complex set of antagonisms was put forward by Karl Marx in relations as he saw them between Irish and English workers:

The Irish worker sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. (Letter, 1870. Reprinted in Lapham’s Quarterly, Vol. XIV, No. 3)

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