Dancing with Stuff

So, Carolyn and I have had an ongoing discussion for years about ‘stuff.’ She generally argues against ‘stuff’ and I always argue for ‘stuff.’ We’re not too crazy or vehement in our ‘discussions’ but sometimes there’s something real at stake like whether or not I get to keep the pile of little bits of wood and metal that has been accumulating in the carport. Practically it’s about my shop, my studio, the carport and the things in them but philosophically and sociologically the issue is what role ‘stuff’ plays in our lives. I’ve got a book called The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Halton which is all about domestic things we accumulate and why we do so. I’m not sure these guys have really captured the essence of the issue, but on the psychological level they do understand the fundamental role that things play in our lives. A cursory search of the Amazon website will bring up other sources too on things and their importance. It’s no mystery to me that there are television programs about ‘hoarders.’ It’s also no mystery to me that in listening to hoarders (who are most often described as mentally ill or close to it) the biggest reason they give for hoarding and being so reluctant to give up any of their shit is that they would be lost without it. They ARE their shit. All the meaning they have been able to squeeze out of life is tied up in their piles and heaps of junk. They would feel absolutely naked and vulnerable without being surrounded by their mountains of crap. How in the hell have we come to this as a species? Well, that’s not a mystery to me either. It’s built into our very culture, into ourselves. It hasn’t always been that way, but it sure is now. We need things, psychically and socially. ‘Our’ economies are built on things. We ‘bond’ around things and their production.


Our society (more global by the day) is based on the production (and control) of commodities and services. Commodities are things, but not just any things. Commodities are things that are produced specifically for sale on a market. Commodities are products, but not all products are commodities. To put it simply, If I go into my shop and build a table using my tools and my hands, then carry that table into the house and use it to sit at and eat my dinner, I have created a product, not a commodity, because my intention was to use the table, not to sell it. If I built the table with the express purpose of selling it, I would be producing a commodity. On a grander scale, when Ford Motor Company builds Ranger pickups or any of its many makes and models of automobiles, it aims to sell them on the market and thus, it is producing a commodity. Ford could not care less if the truck that just left the car lot in Delaware actually gets used or not as long as it gets sold. In fact, if someone in Wilmington, Delaware drives a pickup truck off of a dealer’s lot, gets a couple of blocks down the road and gets broadsided by a Volvo transport truck and gets totalled, Ford couldn’t be happier. It now, potentially, has another customer, if the driver of the pickup wasn’t killed in the collision with the Volvo he or she will be in the market for a new truck. Ford is not in the business of using its products but of selling them. The more trucks that get pounded into telephone poles the better. Ford is a commodity producer.

Ironically, so are you when you have a baby. The value we have as humans in our society is predominantly determined by the market, just as the value of Ford’s products is determined by the market. Families are little factories for the production of a commodity called labour-power. Ironically again, as parents, we cover all the costs of producing labour-power (potentially in our kids) but we don’t get to sell it when it’s ready to go to market. In our world, when the labour-power we work so hard to create gets old enough to sell, we don’t get to sell it. Our kids do, because now, magically, it belongs to them. It was different when families were production units. Then families could buy and sell the labour-power of their children. This is still the case in some parts of the world, but not here. Now, individuals are production units. (That’s why we have such a fixation on individualism and the ideology of ‘doing your own thing,’ but that’s a story for another day) When you enter the ‘labour market’ (more properly called the labour-power market) what are you really doing? What are you agreeing to in the contract you sign with your new employer? The answer is that you are selling something, of course. You are selling your time, your life, for a fixed amount of money, you are selling your ‘power‘ to work, your labour-power, your own personal commodity which you put up for sale. The amount of money you accept as payment for your life on the job is called the exchange-rate of your labour-power. What you actually do on the job is labour. What you sell when you contract with an employer is your labour-power.

Of course, as you might have guessed, there’s another side to this equation. If you sell your labour power, more or less successfully, on the labour market, you are selling it to someone or something. That something could be a number of things including a government, a police force, or a business, corporate or not. The point is that for there to be a seller of labour-power there has to be a buyer. Who has the most power in this equation? It depends on the market, but generally the buyer of labour-power has more power than the seller. That’s why sellers of labour-power have often tried to band together and form unions to give themselves a bit more power in the face of the overwhelming power of the buyers of the only thing they have to sell, and that’s their labour-power.

The point of all of this is to note that commodities are at the very core of our world. We are the embodiment of a commodity called labour-power, but ‘things’ are at the very core of our world, material things. They make our world go round. That’s why economists are so fixated on ‘consumer confidence’ and their insistence that the economy must grow and the only way for it to do that is for people to buy things. And more things. They get very fidgety when we stop buying things. They also get fidgety when we borrow too much money to buy things, but that’s another story. They love it when we borrow just the right amount of money. Economists seem to thrive of contradiction.

So do we. We love things but in some ways they trap us in a cycle of dependency. We need them to give us self-esteem as much as an addict needs drugs. Because our world runs on commodities and we’ve granted them virtual sacred status, we feel the best when we go out shopping, when we have the money (or borrowing power) to buy shit. Our personal value derives from how much stuff we have or how much money we have in reserve to buy stuff, including vacations in exotic places. We feel saddest when we’re broke, when we have no money to buy anything. We then feel immobilized. We are immobilized. And, of course, the most extreme form of immobility is death. So poverty equals death. It’s no coincidence that in the current spate of zombie movies, most zombies resemble street people caricatures.

The anxiety we feel about having things and enough real or potential wealth to “feel good about ourselves” as heroic members of our society is best exemplified in a song by Janis Joplin from the 60s:

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a color TV ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?
I'm counting on you, Lord, please don't let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a night on the town ?

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends,
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/janisjoplin/mercedesbenz.html

Janis is right on. We need things, even a night on the town, to make us feel good and to make us feel a part of society, to give us a sense that we are contributing members of something big, much bigger than us: our country, our economy. We feel stronger, more righteous, bigger, every time we see a panhandler or someone sleeping on a park bench wrapped in newspaper. Money equal life, the lack of it equals death. If we don’t have money we like to pretend that we do. We never want people to know if we’re poor. If they find out, we may be shunned like street people. As an aside, Janis probably hadn’t read Emile Durkheim’s book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life written in the early 20th century when she wrote her song in the 60s, but Durkheim argued that gods are personifications of society itself. She probably didn’t realize that when she was asking the Lord for all these wonderful things, she was actually pleading with her society itself (America) to come across. Then again, maybe she did.

Well, all this is fine and dandy. We are a commodity-based world, obsessed with things. Our societies depend on markets for prosperity. No surprise then that we like to hoard things. Psychologically, things provide us with insulation (or the illusion of it) against poverty and death. No wonder people like Donald Trump surround themselves with such big things! Maybe they have BIG insulation too! Probably not so much. There’s no escaping death, right Steve? But there’s another dimension to all of this too.

As Csikszentmihalyi and Halton point out in The Meaning of Things, things can also be traps to some extent. They create their own form of immobility as can easily seen by peaking through the front door of a hoarder’s house. Donald Trump has many people that depend on him. That’s a huge responsibility. He can’t just do as he pleases without compromising himself and countless other people. When we divest ourselves of our ‘baggage’ of material things, and release ourselves from the need to show others what we have as a necessary condition for our self-esteem, we may have more possibility for spontaneous individual action. We sure as hell have more space to move around. We may be able to ‘dance’ a little more to the tune of our own drum without banging into a random piece of extraneous furniture. But I still like my pile of wood and metal, and my shop full of tools and stuff. Yes, it’s a bit of an anchor sometimes but I like to make stuff just for the sake of making stuff, and my little piles of crap here and there in the yard are sometimes little treasure troves of raw material for making new stuff. So, stuff is good, but I’ve learned that compromise works best for social relations and that sometimes, throwing a little shit away goes a long way to making relationships go more smoothly. And I get to keep a fair bit of shit, really. It’s all good.