Checkmating the Consumer: Passive Consumption and the Economic Devaluation of Culture

Abstract

Early neoclassical economics embodied a gendered symbolic system that devalued consumption and enabled economists to ignore a basic contradiction underlying their treatment of consumption. According to consumer-sovereignty dogma, the consumer determined which firms would survive by actively pursuing maximum individual utility. While this consumer retained the culturally masculine attributes of initiative and agency, consumption itself was devalued because, from a systemic point of view, it is not important which firms survive. At the macro level, consumption was marginalized through Say's law, which holds that excessive acquisition of commodities for consumption is potentially dangerous, because saving and investment drive the economy. The rise of mass consumption and Keynesian macroeconomics threw into question the cultural gendering of consumption – which had acquired feminine attributes like passivity and frivolity – and rendered the neoclassical devaluing of it increasingly untenable. The postwar, neoclassical synthesis and subsequent developments have reinstated the pre-Keynesian gendering of consumption and devaluation of culture.

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