Sad Hearts & Supermarkets: Consumer Psychology | Rachel Bowlby

[00:00:03]okay I think we should start it's a very great pleasure to welcome Rachel bobi to lecture here this evening who I don't think it's been for a couple of years rachel is currently professor of English Literature at Sussex University originally read classics dogs fed did her research it Yale went to Sussex where she produced a kind of shaming series of a number of books firstly on her graduate work the book just looking on the rise of the department store then study on Virginia Woolf and then a study really of the planners the walking woman called still crazy after all these years most recently currently shopping with Freud so it's a pleasure to welcome Rachel thank you very much one night sometime in the 1890s a Viennese lady had a dream about smoked salmon sunny Sunday closing and shopping by phone she might never have remembered it much less mentioned it but this lady happened to be seeing a doctor who had some ideas about dreams so it was that this dream went down in the epic that Freud produced in 1900 and has continued to make itself felt and heard throughout the 20th century this is the text of the dream I wanted to give a supper party but I had nothing in the house but a little smoked salmon I thought I would go out and buy something but remembered then that it was sunday sunday afternoon and all the shops would be shut next I tried to ring up some caterers but the telephone was out of order so I had to abandon my wish to give a supper party the dream is presented as being derived from a conscious desire on the patient's part to prove Freud wrong in his hypothesis that dreams always represent wishes has fulfilled look it seems to be saying here is a dream where the wish is patently unfulfilled Freud's commentary based on supplementary material from the dreamers amorous preoccupations proceeds with characteristic interpretive bravado to two distinct but not mutually exclusive conclusions from this apparently innocuous and ordinary little dream to cut a long analysis short from the additional information that the dreamer experienced a daily desire for caviar sandwich but denied herself its satisfaction supposedly on the grounds of expense Freud derives first the notion of a new and strange kind of wish the wish for an unsatisfied wish rewritten more recently in post lacanian lexicons as the desire for an unsatisfied desire secondly Freud of inferred from the circumstantial details of the patient's life that the dream conceals a movement of identity first he says the dream will acquire a new interpretation if we suppose that the personal indicated in the dream was not herself but a friend that she had put herself in her friends place or as we might say that she had identified herself with her friend this mobility of identification is indiscernible in Freud from the constancy of wishing to oil subjective life wishing for something else wishing to be something else in the final part of the interpretation of Dreams Freud describes the origins of the wishing subject in the baby who seeks to recover the remembered satisfaction of the breast such a wish to restore an earlier state of things is taken to be the paradigm and prototype of all desire but also to be the driving force of mental activity and development it provides the orientation to an imagined future when pleasure will have been granted or given back but keeps the subject moving on through what is henceforth lived in the form of linear time connecting a past a present and future wishing faces forwards and backwards at once taking a future direction from the memory of a past satisfaction the gap between the two between an imagined satisfaction and its fulfillment is constitutive not accidental paradoxically its perpetuation is essential for the continuation of active life to close it would be inertia or death in a very different mode from the interpretation of Dreams Thorstein Veblen the theory of the leisure class another turn of the century classic published in 1899 is also concerned with a relationship between desire and mobility for Valen the wish to rise socially is one of the fundamental urges of human nature and at some points it appears as the fundamental urge this disposition to mobility is based on a rivalry between men that manifests itself in the competitive exhibition of wealth the books are wonderfully ironic analysis of the social and economic Morris of the American East Coast upper classes cast in the form of an anthropological investigation of a primitive race it places at the center of human motivations and instinct 40 calls emulations such that men in patriarchal society will seek to present themselves as equal or superior to their fellows by the science of what Valen called in his famous coinage conspicuous consumption the display associated with conspicuous consumption was characteristically delegated to women who became the vicarious consumers and visible exhibit of the wealth and Status to be attributed to the man to the disposition that would later be known as the drive towards upward mobility this theory gives a primary place in what is in every sense and giving a full weight to each of the two turns a social psychology in the final decade of the 19th century Montgomery Ward's famous mail-order catalog that took consumption goods into rural areas of the United States was known as the great wish book look and you shall wish wish to have new objects and wish to be a different person the one who has what the things the book the one who has what the things has the things at the book prompt you to want for a consumption-led economy depends on assuming that man and especially that woman is or may become a wishing animal a creature whose being is bound up with unsatisfied desires and changeable persona it depends that is on being able to mold or direct the dispositions of potential buyers to push or bring them to want what they otherwise might not have sought and it was just at the time when freud and Vedran were writing that the new enterprises ancillary to the expansion of such an economy the enterprise's of marketing and advertising turned their attention and their investments towards the rapidly evolving science of psychology in order to sell more goods so the argument went it's necessary to understand the mind of the person persuaded to buy this was the beginning of the study of consumer psychology firmly firmly established is a presence in academic as well as business institutions by the time of the publication of Walter dill Scott's landmark work the psychology of advertising in 1908 and in this connection the text of the smoked salmon dream may show up under an aspect can awed by Freud it's modern consumer Lee setting this is after all at one level a sitcom site style dream of every day shopping frustrations the phone out of order and a store closed because it's sunday for readers of the late twentieth century the affluence connoted by the domestic phone and by the projected trading with a shop itself is fitted with this expensive facility is a further element that may not be immediately apparent in Freud's analysis these everyday details of the dream sink into insignificance or rather they simply remain on the surface so to just connect the connection of the wish for an unsatisfied wish with the costliness of a caviar sandwich and whether this whether he's dealing with a dream or with any other manifestation of psychic life is the common structure in Freud on the one hand he directs attention to disregard in my new t.i of everyday life and with the other hand in a second movement he takes away their significance quotidian detail proves only to have been the means to uncovering deeper buried layers of meaning it's in fact a common practice in many kinds of writing to treat consumer early practices and desires in this way as mere surface or setting beneath or behind which lie more serious and more complicated matters it's not over my intention to overturn this hierarchy by making the shopping setting into the hidden because too visible meaning of the dream for one thing that would be to stay with a two-tier division of outside and inside surface and Colonel meanings which is part of the difficulty here also although there are plenty of other dreams in the interpretation which are also about shopping there are rather more that are not but which nonetheless involved the manifestation of unknown desires and shifts of identification what's remarkable in this case is the interlocking of the two economies normally held apart what are habitually differentiated a psychic from social internal from external economies appear in this dream and its analysis in all in extra kabila t of their connections there's no need to seek for links between valence theory and consumer culture they're there to be seen in that pointedly visible designation of conspicuous consumption this is already a postmodern world of self advertisement spectacle and surfaces you are what you appear in other words what you are seen to be and it makes no difference whether or not the sign represents any actual substance or not there is also invaded in a theory of the different relations of the sexes to the mode and aims of consumption men and women are placed in particular ways are distinct and complementary in relation to the practices of consumption more than that it is their distinction in these consumer early terms which actually constitutes the difference of sexes throughout this century advertising and marketing in general have both drawn on and have both drawn on and developed psychological research in fact out of four basic models of the consumer subject identified in the literature of marketing psychology from the 20s on to are none other than the Freudian model and the Valan model the first taking from psychoanalysis the idea of repressed desires and fears for advertising to tap and a second taking from valen a generalized model of motivation through the desire for social prestige there's no clear institutional or other boundary between what might be called pure disinterested psychology and this other kind directed towards discovering how our minds work with the express intention of thereby discovering how they might be persuaded to want new things or to identify themselves with the kind of person who buys this or that commodity frequently funding for psychology departments in the United States and especially during the early years of a discipline came from marketing interests but instead of trying to gauge what proportion of psychological research was prompted by advertising and what proportion was not the problem should we put another way the development of psychology cannot be separated from the development of the consumer culture with its investment in the making or prompting of unsatisfied desires and changing identities the two things are part of one in the same process whereby subjects come to be regarded not primarily as political animals but rather is subjective individuals subjectivity as the current language has it with wishes and other feelings that go to make up more or less fluctuating and modifiable identities there is no interest from the point of view of advertising in assuming any given unmodifiable bedrock of human nature beyond or against which persuasions couldn't or shouldn't operate in the words of a british survey of attitudes to supermarkets in 1963 shoppers are on the move psychologically as well as physically no dispositions are necessarily immutable what matters is only their practical effects at the present time which may suggest it they may be that they be taken into account in the kind of advertising appeal that they that is made what may appear to be the most basic of differentials between male and female is only significant for advertising insofar as it functions pragmatically as a limit to the possible ways in which people may be invited or urged to respond as an American Advertising psychologist sharply put it in 1913 whether the difference be interpreted to mean a fundamental and inherent sex difference or merely a difference which reflects our present social organization which is doubtless an adequate explanation of all the facts has nothing to do with the present usefulness of the fact itself it's in these sorts of connections that for their own pragmatic and interested reasons advertising psychologists can in fact appear to be the most radical of theorists willing and ready to discard even the deepest held assumptions about psychological or social normality in their determination never to regard identities as fixed this author goes on to cite another of Walter Scott's books influencing men in business in which Scott declared himself inclined to question the popular notion that women are prone to react more strongly to emotional situations than our men a British writer from a little later definitively takes that line stating categorically on what he calls the question of the male buyer that he is by no means so analytical a reader as a woman and from the evidence of this man's book one would tend to infer that the same sexual distinction applies to writers to arguments mad and representations of the consumer mind have a complicated and intricate history much can be learned from the likenesses and differences between the kinds of consumer to be found in writings that are directly concerned with subject and those that appear in others that aren't there are the various hypothetical consumers whose psychology is discussed in books dedicated to the topic and there are those who make unlikely and often surreptitious appearances in for guy or more often foil girl roles in writings concerned principally with other questions and later on I'll be looking at some local examples of this in the field of general cultural criticism but the distinction implied in the quotation about analytical and emotional readers has been used in various permutations to differentiate two types of consumer all through this century and usually along gender lines in the opposite direction from those her ethically suggested by Scott and his followers the consumer viewed as passively open to all the emotional appeals of advertising and marketing is normally feminine just as the rational analytical judge is normally mask it's the first emotional type that's collectivized as the passive deluded population of that state called consumer society which reached the heights of its discursive import on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades after the Second World War in broad terms these two versions of the consumer have structured theories of series of and arguments about consumption and advertising for the last half century the distinction extends to and shifts about in a whole range of familiar opposition's between the agent in control of his thoughts and interests and the powerless victim of an advertising's onslaughts between masculine feminine or mature and infantile dispositions between the saver and the spender in terms of British history the analytical type is personified in the intended reader of which who's sensible buying behavior deliberately counters the opposite associations in the late 1950s consumer as dupe hapless victim of the blandishments of the new television advertising it was this foolish passive consumer whose image was dominant until during the 1980s in an extraordinary turn about consumers were all of a sudden invested with every positive attribute and promoted into being the very standard bearers of citizenship itself patients parents voters students and others were all subsumed under the general heading of consumers with the designation now rhetorically endow in them with the rights and rationality of which their predecessors by implication had been deprived in the implied narrative here the political animal finds its highest development in the mode of rational consumer this is this is a striking example of a forceful deployment of the category of consumer in areas not wholly or primarily initially associated with with market transactions I say initially because one of the effects of using a language of consumer choice is precisely to push the practice concern towards actually becoming now as though by natural destiny area another aspect of the alternation of rational and non-rational models of the consumer concerns their relation to individual or collective psychology just before the war works on advertising particularly those published in Britain started to include defensive arguments to distinguish its methods from those that were increasingly becoming associated with Nazism and fascism collective persuasion is perceived as being inherently more insidious in its effects because somehow less amenable to resistance than the one to one model of selling which predominates in salesmanship manuals and consumer psychology before this time in discussions of two personal encounters the active passive polarity is seen as relatively flexible the upper hand can move about between salesman and buyer during the process leading up to the sale but the notion of the mass in a psychology of mass consumption tends to involve in sump shins assumptions of the involuntary renunciation of a firm and primarily active individual subjectivity through capitulation to a collective feeling assumed to be automatic and mindless in the same way as the techniques which bring it about in critiques of advertising in Cold War period this forceful and idiosyncratic conjunction of the collective the illegitimate and the effective was further reinforced by the implied comparison with communist Russia and brainwashing becomes the ominous shorthand for the insidious techniques attributed at once to the secret police and to the manipulators of Madison Avenue in the rest of the paper and what I'd like to look at a particular strand of this 1950s configuration using the springboard some essays by the American poet randall Jarrell a sad heart at the supermarket is the title he gave to his contribution to a symposium on contemporary mass culture in 1959 at which he along with James Baldwin and others were included as representing the creative artists among a group of intellectuals it may seem a kind of special pleading or special choosing to focus on a literary perspective on consumer culture however this error is not a sideline in the general field of debates about consumption indeed it could be argued at katies both for and against something called consumer society or consumer culture have regularly not just occasionally been constructed in relation to idealized or denigrated notions of a more authentic artistic or literary culture 14 if the other way around is also true that arguments about the place and value of art have typically presented themselves through some kind of rejection of consumer culture or mass culture thereby represented as monolithic and homogeneous mediocrity and conformity are the fate of those who succumb to or powerless to keep aloof from the overwhelming forces of the grey or gaudy surrounding consumer world now for my money the locus classic us in this matter and indeed the key to all media studies mythologies past and future is an extraordinary footnote near the beginning of coloriages biografia literaria in 1817 which reads as follows this is a very long quotation for us to the devotees of the circulating libraries I dare not complement their past time or rather kill time within of reading call it rather a sort of vaguely daydreaming during which the mind of the dream of furnaces for itself nothing but laziness and a little mortgage sensibility while the whole material and imagery of the doe's is supplied from the outside brr sort of mental camera obscura and manufactured at the printing office which for the time being fixes reflects and transmits the moving phantom phantasms of one man's delirium so as to people the barrenness of a hundred other brains afflicted with the same trance or suspension of all common sense and all definite purpose we should therefore transfer this species of amusement if indeed those can be said to retire from the muses who were never in their company or relaxation be attributable to those whose boughs and never bent we should distinguish it from the genus reading to the component to the comprehensive class characterized by the power of reconciling the two contrary yet coexisting propensity zuv human nature namely indulgence of sloth and hatred of vacancy in addition to novels and tales of chivalry and prose and rhyme this genus comprises its species gaming swinging or swaying on a chair or gate spitting over a bridge smoking snuff taking tete-a-tete quarrels after dinner between husband and wife calling word by word all the advertisements in the Daily Advertiser in a public house on a rainy day etc etc etc this note itself furnishes material for pages of commentary but for the moment the point i'd like to take from it is that right at the beginning of the period in which it's been plausible and conventional to draw a psychological distinction between active purpose and distracted relaxation with the latter manufactured or supplied from the outside his Coleridge has it the primary commodities targeted at the source of such substitutive pleasures of books in the form of the ephemeral literature of the circulating libraries the psychology of reading and the psychology of consumption here the mass consumption of 100 other brains afflicted with the same trance develop together from the start Gerald's sad heart piece is a later development of this post romantic genre in which the artist is represented in more or less melancholy isolation within and from a world of rapid consumption with little or no place for genuine creativity the supermarket makes no direct appearance in Gerald's text but its role in epitomizing a bland standardization attributed to the people and the habitations of mid-century American society is itself at the time a standard one as a matter of cultural history the supermarket occupies in ideas of the development of 20th century consumer culture a place analogous to that of a department store in the 19th both a large scale retailing institutions run on principles of fast turnover low prices and economies of scale at the level of both suppliers cutting out the middleman and outlet the large selling space but the difference is mark out the dominant story of changes in shopping over the past hundred years one sells primarily clothes the other primarily food once a ready distinction between luxury goods and necessities or between the aesthetic and the functional the department store I'm just repeating the standard story represents the emergence of a bourgeois democratization of luxury bringing aristocratic fashion and sophistication to the ladies of the middle classes whereas the supermarket is convenient standardized and for the masses the department store involves the pleasure of an excursion a visit to the city the supermarket is part of a dull suburban routine the department store is French and exotic supermarket is blandly American the first half of this last comparison is patently false since department stores began simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic that of course doesn't alter the force of the European connotation of department stores the American roofs of the supermarket on the other hand is a historical fact supermarkets began as a makeshift experiment of the Depression years when empty warehouses and factories in out of time sites were rented out and used as depths from which customers came in there Ford to pick up a cheap supplies of food and other goods not only did they have to travel outside their own neighborhoods they also picked up the goods themselves instead of asking for what they wanted would counter despite risk givings as to whether people would be prepared to do their own distribution and wait on themselves in this unprecedented way the idea caught on rapidly and soon self-service was enshrined as the great 20th century innovation in retailing practice after the war supermarkets and self-service were exported to Europe quite consciously as American inst innovations and accompanying accompanying other related changes pre-eminently the increasing importance of brand-name goods also identified as thoroughly American even when it's in this case they weren't in Gerald's late 50s version the supermarket at that time associated with a relentless materialistic brio readily offers itself as the negative terrain in which to isolate the poetic critic of contemporary society the sad heart in the supermarket are set up in stark semantic contrast derived from utterly incompatible psychical intent and historical landscapes soul and economy depth and superficiality duration and ephemerality the authentic and the artificial the personal and the anonymously massive the vocabulary of the melancholy heart has no place in the brightly modern psychology of the female masses of soup supermarkets their hypnotic transit supplied from the outside by the motivation scientists poetic feeling and mass consumption are apparently worlds apart on one side pathetic anachronism and on the other the false materialism of progress they're still atomized voice of a private cell phone on one side and on the other the loud electrical forces that are and make the masses Gerald's essay includes a critique of a production of driven consumers a protest which he characterizes in terms of the severus functionalism of organized mass psychology what does our society need he says for us to need or it needs for us to do or be many things to be workers technicians executives soldiers housewives but first of all last fall it needs for us to be buyers consumers beings who want much and will want more who want consistently and insatiably find some spell to make us no longer want the fur stoles the records and the weapons and our world will change into something to us unimaginable find some spell to make us realize that the product or service which seemed yesterday and unthinkable luxury is today an inexorable necessity and our world will go on a wanting consistently and insatiably focused on things to buy is engineered to ensure the perpetual motion our world will go on of an economy constantly working it's bad psychological magic this world of consumer compulsion is explicitly characterized as feminine it's a standard joke of our culture says Darrell that when a woman is bored or sad she buys something to make yourself feel better but in this respect we are all women together and can hear complacently the reminder of how feminine this consumer world of ours is when imagined as a characteristic dialogue of our time an interview in which someone is asking of a vague gracious figure a kind of mrs. America but while you waited for the intercontinental ballistic missiles what did you do she answers I bought things what lies behind a comparison or identification between femininity and desperate therapeutic shopping shopping to distract or to counter an anxiety the femininity of consumption is apparently at one level the last joke for a culture in which buying has become the end-all and Beall so much as we will become women that we don't even mind that we are it was becoming increasingly common at this time to speak of the contemporary cultural developments associated with mass or consumer culture in terms of a feminization the expression the expression implies a straightforward and pathological movement from activity rationality and control to passivity and a susceptibility to things that falsely present themselves as desirable or necessary the trashcan of the popular sociology of the 50s and 60s is stacked high with the debris of this feminization story which was not unavailable to a feminist version too if we are all women now that is not so the argument goes because women are naturally passive or susceptible but because those deceptions are so powerful that they are depriving they are depriving men as well as women of the full of humanity that rightly and rightfully and potentially belongs to both sexes and to which women more than men have been denied access by culture in the past while the feminization argument can be straightforwardly misogynist attributing all the degenerate tendencies to one sex in its feminist version the assumption is that there's fundamentally no difference between the sexes and that such differences that have that have come to be significant am merely contingent capable of reversal or redirection towards a neutrality that must be preferable for both sexes this feminist critique shares with the marketing methods its objects to a disparagement of femininity not femininity seen not as nature but as fabrication but even so the relentless gendering of shopping seems at times to be seems at times even when the overt emphasis is that of critique to be inseparable from a sense of the attractiveness of the despised feminine identity here we might compare the sad heart essay with a poem of Gerald's in which the speaker describes herself describes himself some time quotes sometimes watching on television my favorite cereal a sad heart at the supermarket story of a woman who had everything what's interesting here is the ambiguously ironic interest on the part of the masculine and poetic subject in the soap opera and the specification of the sad heart at the supermarket as a woman's in the context of the use of the phrase is an essay title its different resonance here as the effect of blurring the edges on the one hand between the mass culture of the TV audience and a different culture of the artist and on the other between masculine and feminine identifications on one or other side of this hypothetical divide in another of his essays on mass culture the taste of the age jarrell elevates literary consumption to a paradigm status in the general field of consumption the greatest American industry he says why has no one ever said so if the industry of using words we pay tens of millions of people to spend their lives lying to us or telling us the truth or supplying us with a nourishing medicinal compound of the two all of us are living in the middle of a dark wood a bright technical and forest of words words words it's a forest in which the wind is never still that isn't a tree in the forest it's not for every moment of its like its lives and our lives persuading or ordering or seducing or overhauling us into buying this believing that voting for the them and yet the more words there are the simpler of the words get the professional users of words process their product as if it would baby food and we babies all we have to do is open our mouths and swallow most of our mental and moral food is quick-frozen predigested spoon-fed here where verbal production is made the exemplary and the principal industry in what's characterized as a general economy of persuasion the image is not so much one of feminization as of infantilization there's the commonplace comparison of the consumption of goods to the literal intake of food and in this instance it's exemplification in baby food is particularly intriguing baby food is avowedly like the words that are simpler and though this might suggest an image of organic naturalness instead like the bright technical aid forest it's transmuted into the opposite an image of manufactured artifice quick-frozen predigested the illusion here to the labels on processed food this is from the early 50s when this was big news is in turn related to the mentioned earlier in this section of an instant literary food he goes on when season stores ordinary old-fashioned oatmeal or cocoa and side by side with it another another kind called instant cocoa instant oats most of our literature and used the word in its broadest sense is instant literature the words are short easy instantly recognizable words the thoughts are easy familiar instantly recognizable thoughts the attitudes are familiar already agreed upon instantly agreeable instantly acceptable attitudes there's this a lowest common denominator objection the instant is where no one has to think twice because it's already it already corresponds in a recognizable way to what they think Darryl's critique also collective IDs the responses it's two majorities or minorities that appeals are made and the mind that react is a collective us not that of an individual again this is characteristic of representation to the period and is in keeping with the explicit feminization of consumption by which they are often accompanied the techniques of persuasion techniques suggesting both efficiency and artifice act upon a mentality that's uniform across individual manifestations and that can be assumed to be constant and completely predictable in its responses this is a mentality that does not think that merely takes in text in impressions without working on them or modifying them where in mind is taken to be what does work on or modify its materials this mental operate sorry I read that wrong where a mind is taken to be what does work on or modify its materials this mental apparatus is mindless as are the mechanical techniques that address it or manipulate it it's at this point where the mindless masses of consumers match the mind of techniques that operate upon them that the prevailing image of mental and social engineering brainwashing derive that it's force such images are already cliched in their own time as though in reinforcement of the automatism they described as the apogee of American capitalism as individual freedom comes to be regularly not just wave woodley represented in the image of its ideological inverse the cold force of communist thought control Gerald's complaint against instant literature takes up many aspects of these contemporary representations in this usage given separately by the dictionaries of a processed food that can be prepared for use immediately the word instant enters the language entered the language specifically in the context of brand name consumer goods and the vocabulary of package labeling the first Oxford Oxford English Dictionary citation is for a 19-12 advertisement in The Ladies Home Journal in the second from a book published in 1915 where the quotation is I wish I had drunk less of that hogwash that my wife cause instant coffee not only does this neatly reflect the association of distasteful consumer goods with women the wife somehow becoming identified with hogwash because she's dumb enough to advertise it as having some resemblance to coffee but suggestively enough the quotation is taken from from a strikingly early philosophical discussion of psychoanalysis Edwin be holds the Freudian wish and its place in ethics instant corroboration if you like of the collections in the early part of this century between the wishes analyzed by consumer psychology and by the interpretation of dreams from these two early instances of instant the OED jumps to the late 1950s when it appears in an almost paradigm paradigm role as your grand new world of jet airplanes nylon stockings frozen food instant coffee again and brainwashing this heterogeneous list as a mode of characterization is itself indicative of the developments that Gerald summarized in the notion of innocent literature and that the OED entries go on to exemplify in entries from the early 60s referring to debates about intriguing topics such as instant history and then instant sex such a list in addition to its associations of speed modernity consumer abundance and high technology derives its rhetorical force from its own deployment of the linguistic devices of quick fire brand name advertising with the keyword or buzz words it stands metonymic Lee for a cultural attitude that in fact consists so the language suggests only in the sum of such multifarious and constantly moving parts instant is such a word both in its history its recognizably derived from 20th century consumer culture and in its meaning the instant product abolish is the gap between origin and end wish and satisfaction abolish is time altogether in its reduction to the infinitesimally small unit the cessation of time is also the end of current causality and connection there's nothing left except series of unrelated instance the instant product also has connotations of a speed and efficiency that a funk that a data that are to function in the face of time conceived of as rush and hurry too much to do avoidance of waste is the usual and acceptable criterion for efficiency in classical economic theories and time is one of the quantifiable resources to which is applied in the transfer of this model of times a scarce resource from production to consumption from the factory to the home the consumer is placed in an equivalent position to the entrepreneur she's addressed as someone who in the interests of maximizing efficiency has no time to lose in advertising terms this working and it's working analogy is also a way of warding off the adverse associations that might be attached to the notion of an instant food as to labour saving as avoiding the effort which the house might ought to be putting into her productions much ink as well as many yolks was built in the 50s over the introduction of cake mixes which were first of all marketed with all the ingredients already mixed in a single packet then in a just add an egg variety the reason supposedly being that housewives preferred to think of themselves as supplying some necessary time and creativity to the preparation looked at from another angle instant also has associations not so much of efficiency as of magic the product simply is with no evidence of a process of time or labor involved in getting it either into the smooth hygienic neatness of its package or from its package into the container for its consumption the instant product just pops up is no sooner here than vanished but always potentially available to satisfy your every random whimsical want no residue no residue of guilt just as the thing itself can be thrown straight away there's nothing left over on the side of the subject or the object both of which are represented in identical terms this is the point at which the instant product meets the impulse buy in the full-power instance of their perfect psychological match the impulse purchase a cornerstone of every day supermarket psychology in the manuals and trade journals and aimed supermarket managers is derived from an assumption that actions can be straightforwardly divided into the planned and the unplanned from this point of view the ideal customer is normally thought of as the one who comes in unprepared without a list and whose passage through the store related we'll take her through unfamiliar or unnecessary paths where she may be diverted by the attraction of products she came in with no intention of buying the impulse which prompts the picking up of the product is the exact subjective correlative of the instant object it appears as an immediate response to the sighting of the object whose acquisition instantly lays it once again to rest the very transference of the impulse from purchaser to purchase in the expression impulse buy which can refer either to the act or to the thing board but never to the buyer who's impulse it is his indicative of the exactness of the correspondence impulse purchase an instant product are two sides of the same coin in which consumers and commodities come to be possessed of identical psychological attributes in the imaginary of supermarket literature nothing limits the proliferation of new products to attract and then satisfy a never mobile range of co-ordinated desires that come to meet them from one disconnected instant to the next people and products from this point of view as well are identical categories in each of which new attitude new attributes must be found or invented to keep the flow of both of them moving through the store to gain a place on the shell products must be able to be represented as new meaning different from all the rest which may include the fact of newness differentiation can be announced according to categories that are themselves capable of infinite modification and supplementation and which come and go with the fluctuations and Wars of cultural values that they also contribute to shaping modern neuroscience dated new is perennial and low low cholesterol low fat low tar and so on rates ever hire an American study of product innovation in the mid-60s for a period of just three years trying to distinguish the really knew from the not really new according to three categories of newness which were the innovative genuinely new or the distinctly new sort of new manufacturers had to do some proprietary research and test marketing and thirdly the me to new only in shape the size the flavor the fact that this company is making it rather than another one so on according to this particular set of standards the following products were found to be truly innovative dehydrated flaked potatoes or purpose instant flour frozen juice and synthetic juice concentrates liquid diet foods instant nonfat dry milk re cooked rice semi moist dog food powdered non-dairy creamers three types of cold breakfast cereal pre sweetened nutritional and with dried fruit soft margarine freeze-dried soluble coffee boiling the bank vegetables and frozen dinners since then study adds to others could be added dry cocktail mixes and space food sticks 30 years on the list reads like a sort of surreal him to 60s sci-fi fantasy instant high-tech space age at the same time the American critic Leslie feeler was concluding his latest conspectus of american cultural prospects were called waiting for the end published in 1964 on an ambivalently ironic positive note with a rather different version of product innovation this involved a striking transposition of the literary into the supermarket for a long time Fiedler says the index of literacy has crept inexorably upward paperbacks and supermarkets have proliferated until there's scarcely room for bread and milk and the boards of directors of large corporations have invited intellectuals to lecture their junior executives on Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard and Freud this fantasy of food for thought displacing ordinary staples literally off the supermarket shelves should not mask a minor historical fact which may or may not have been filed in the open stacks of Eva's mind just as the circulating libraries are forerunners of fast turnover consumer institutions of the 19th century so in the history of shop design its book shops strangely enough which are the precursors of supermarkets they alone of all types of shop were laid out on shelves that were not behind counters not always with the goods arranged for casual browsing and for what was not yet called self-service also at a time when brand-name goods and their accompanying packages were only just beginning books already came in a comparable form they had covers that were designed it wants to protect the contents and to entice the purchaser they were proprietary products with identifiable authors and new and new titles not just any novel but the latest sound Gerald doesn't imagine the unlive the aisles of the imaginary supermarket is Amelia for poetry but that's perhaps the ironic point of Allen Ginsberg's mid-fifties poem a supermarket in California in which the speaker in my hungry fatigue goes shopping for images in the aisles full of bright fruit and happy families spotting the spotting locker down by the watermelons and Whitman poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing grocery boys I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you and followed in my imagination by the store detective we strode down the open corridors together in our together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes possessing every frozen delicacy and never passing the cashier something more than a deadening mechanical anti poetic economy is being activated here as though this impulse poem from how could remake the figure of the poetic flaner in the fantasy of a deviant shopper but in both these images of following and being followed and of having it all and encountering no barrier Ginsberg in fact neatly captures or falls in with what are themselves already well-worn paths in the annals of supermarket psychology is not of supermarket poetry first the surveillance not only by detectives but also by the assigned surveyors mapping shoppers movements around a store and second the solitary fancy that the self-service to and fro plan is deliberately designed to foster it's the model consumer as well as the transgressive one who drifts about filling the trolley with all the things that in the reversal by which ordinary language so accurately puts it take her fancy until the arrival at the barrier the store is like a fantasy space where you really can have anything and everything you want letting the trolley piled high with whatever happens to find its way in with Knoblauch to purchase this cold contrast between the dreamy drift around the aisles and a hard frustrating lines at the checkout has been the subject of a continuous stream of supermarket literature which reached its height in a spate of PhD theses in business studies or economics at the turn of the 50s and 60s on the subject of how to hasten customers passage passages past the tills and therefore give them a more contented exit not until the 80s did concede computer technology provide a breakthrough in this perennial check out and pass with the invention of barcodes but still my feminine heart goes out to the man whose youth was passed in the research for a cornell PhD on a comparison of the turnover per customer rate of check out between three ithaca supermarkets 1959 261 my heart goes out even more to the gratefully acknowledged young wife who typed a thing up there's much more to be related of the strange features of the supermarket exit has indeed after histories of supermarket psychology on one side the research to find ways of increasing sales and on the other the implied psychology of those with different interests from poets to consumer activists to social critics my suggestion has been that the putting together of these different histories can not only illuminate local details of a history of shopping but also given the social and psychological significance of the culture of consumption and the ways of thinking associated with it shed light on aspects of our thinking about identities collective and both collective and individual as a final check out sample I'd like to offer one more illustration from just before the post-war heyday in this country of consumer society in 1948 in this country John Newsom published with Faber a little book called the education of girls proven ly prefaced by Rab Butler a chapter of the book is addressed to a question entitled women as purchases which in the light of part and future arguments and assumptions about women consumption and political or national identities is quite a remarkable text on its own terms as well the chapters confusions and contradictions in all these areas are revealing Newsom begins from the empirical fact of women being by far the principal purchases and are less obviously accurate premise that it is therefore they who largely determined the quality and nature of goods produced more than for instance the producers for their promoters from this further assertions follow there are absolute aesthetic standards and if women are not up to them then not only the beauty of our homes but also our national economy will suffer he says the position of women as purchaser is of great importance by her standards or lack of them will be decided the type and quality of goods produced goods which will adorn the homes and bodies of millions of English people provide satisfaction or irritation to those who live with them and affect the value of our export trade she it is in fact who determines our standard of living it is it is too much to expect the average manufacturer to design to quite distinctive articles for home and foreign consumption and however poor our domestic criteria there is a strong probability that foreigners will be expected to liken by the same products unfortunately foreign buyers are no longer restricted to the purchase of British manufactured goods and if they disapprove of our quality and design they will go elsewhere it is of national importance therefore that's home should be critical of earthliness and inefficient commodities not only because they will desecrate our own homes in countryside but because they will react on our trade bands there are wild swings here from the lyrical to the mundane she it is who determines our standard of living or from the apocalyptic to the pathetic they will desecrate our homes they will react upon our trade months quite literally this passage is poised halfway or rather at both extremes between poetry and economics there's a lurking inversion of popes the rape of the lock with the mop heroic style not so much with a woman being satirized here not so much for her narcissistic adornment with all the exotic creams and perfumes and jewels of colonial trade what Pope calls the various offerings in the world but rather being mocked for her failure to on criticized for her failure to perform as a competent export agent or to provide an aesthetic environment for the masses goods which will adorn the homes and bodies of millions of English people from another point of view this is a 20th century rewriting of ruskin's of Queens Gardens in the ruskin essay the woman is responsible for the sweet ordering of domestic life and also in an area negative sense responsible for all social ills including war because it's up to her to have prevented such outbursts of masculine aggression in Newton's version both aesthetic and moral duties of find a new place in the field of consumption she has a responsibility for the success of her country's economy it's her fault too of it if it doesn't work and also a responsibility for the beauty of the domestic media much could be said for which there's no time now about the relationship of Newsome's discussion and in particular what he goes on to claim about advertising in the female psychology to ideas about mass consumption and femininity that would be much bandied about in the following decades of the consumer society a further dimension of the argument is thrown into relief by developments much later when the public rhetoric of the 80s elevated the figure of the consumer so it's hitherto unattained status as the embodiment of rational citizenship considered as a matter of individual interests and rights in the light of this character reasonably seeking a reasonable and efficiently delivered deal for himself in every department of life the Newsome female consumer is revealed as we representing a rather different model of citizenship involving ideas of collective responsibility as well as a feminine culpability and some concern for social welfare as well as for national interests in 1948 the British housewife hadn't yet stepped into a supermarket and more things were to appear in the local town center and later the out-of-town greenfield site then were dreamt of in her philosophy more types of consumer to in their devious and rational and stupid and infinitely mobile ways but our people the discourses at the late twentieth century with their familiar or phantom like and often amazing forms for by now in the 1990s the phones are rarely out of order and the shops are open on Sundays what now many different ones I mean it's quite it's quite interesting how the male chopper has been very explicitly targeted recently as a supermarket shopper for example and in particular and which would fall in with the general way that I mean that advertising marketing is indifferent to gender or any other sort of distinction if it sort of sees a new category that or a possible category that can be turned into a consumer in line with that identity that's been targeted then it'll go for it and mail this man is a fairly obvious available one but many of the other identities are partly created by advertising like the 30-something shopper a few years ago was was a big sort of new image in magazines and so on and it seems almost as if the 30-something started to identify themselves as 30-somethings by way of that imagery but the male gender thing is very interesting because it is a major shift in and obviously ties in with a whole lot of other changes in masculine identities did the way the supermarkets are targeting the father for instance the new man father most of those baby friendly out of the supermarkets are putting around we'll make a point of having the farther out with the baby not the mother to show how modern they are ya yes hmm that's true mmm yes but again only recently I think because some of this in this country some it's been going on in America for some time I think some of the super always happily have singles nights where you deliver in London now too yes but it's quite a recent thing that they've cottoned onto as a possibility and this quite a lot about it in sapé Armistead Maupin stories San Francisco things if they became a theme and then it's as if it was in in literature and films and so on before it became a thing super market themselves tried to cultivate but yes I mean it it's almost that thats related to to the way the supermarket can become a sort of interior street and they was always represented architectural e in by planet as as a street with it with a traffic flow and so on and it's again it's a remarkable that is taken them decades to get get into the idea of having the street as fantasy as well as the street as efficiency or movement of goods and people through which is not say it hasn't been used in that way all the time but certainly there so you think oh sorry had cut me off Oh one of the things that seem to have raised by below is the language antagonistic critiques of shopping come to get it I suppose you could say like the photo critique is to exist the short object is a substitution yes yeah artificial yeah bizarre thing about kind of shopping and cages is that that very boutique the cave as it were internal distant part of the motor or shopping yes so there's a high degree of self-consciousness yes within substituted act far from Calvin were bad like that it always begins to advertise itself on the basis that is a substitute to kind of activity and therefore less dangerous I mean okay so it's a substitute Oh by grief which Constitution but we have experienced cars here we should have three days oh yeah yes yes a lot of displacement anything yes but I think you're right that people are very conscious of that as well I mean it's what distinguishes shopping from many other kinds of activities and people will endlessly discuss their own shopping behavior as mildly pathological in a way they wouldn't discuss anything else that they do in that way so there's an element of the idea of shopping with being a place where we act funny we when we act quite simply we're not being ourselves but we are being odd that is it's a little part of daily life from part of the way people but I mean everybody has theories about shopping and about themselves as shoppers in a quite a dis distant way that this tunez dwai that they don't have about other things whether it's sex or eat anymore and anything else in order to deploy it starts from the assumption it is indeed substitution yeah yeah