A History of Everyday Things

by Roche, Brian Pearce (Translator)

A History of Everyday Things is a pioneering essay by one of the world's leading cultural historians that sheds light on the origins of the consumer society, and thereby the birth of the modern world. Things that we regard as the everyday objects of consumption have not always been so: how, therefore, have people in the modern world become "prisoners of objects," as Rousseau put it? Daniel Roche answers this fundamental question of historical anthropology, and imaginatively explores the origins of the daily furnishings of modern life.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, 18th Century, 17th Century, France

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 1997

Reviews

[Cerebralcortext · Rating 5 out of 5]

About a third of the way into his book, in the midst of discussing philosophical discourses on luxury and morality, Roche diverts for a moment to 1789 and the cahiers de doléances from Brittany. The cahiers excoriated vast gulfs in wealth while solemnly affirming certain goods as indispensable necessities (corn, bread, salt, etc.). But consumption tout court was not under attack, as revealed by the demand that goods like powder, braid, coffee, and tobacco be taxed. “The right to little pleasures,” as Roche puts it, “constituted the other side of this condemnation of superfluity in clothing and food, superfluity in carriages and hearses and measures to beautify dwellings, all denounced in the name of the Christian heritage and of utility. A new pattern of cultural behaviour, made up of aspiration to well-being and dignity, had asserted itself” (77).

This seems to me the central premise of Roche’s argument; or, better, that the ‘right to little pleasures’ succinctly crystallizes what that transformation—through urbanization and commodification—of societal relations to things had wrought. Roche has many insightful passages on water, but one telling observation was the shift from water as a natural good, for which peasants need not pay, to water as a commodity regulated and supervised by municipal authorities. As an undeniable requirement for human survival, this change would have been momentous enough, but Roche explores as well its sociocultural ramifications in the form of new attitudes to smell and hygiene: “Water drew a new frontier between the wholesome and the unwholesome, first in the town and much later in the villages” (165). Roche also cites, but does not dwell upon, air and ice entering new circuits of exchange and, in the latter case, even becoming a form of wealth with exchange value due to the difficulty of its production and transportation to urban zones.

The line between natural goods and these new modes of consumption was tenuous enough in early modern society, but with the burgeoning availability of luxury goods came familiar refrains of moral denunciation. It was not for nothing that Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees was so provocative. One cannot help but think of certain anthropological studies in Papua New Guinea and other places regarding successful hunters and the expected duty of parceling out portions of the meat. This is not to say that there is, or was, a universal abhorrence of private accumulation of largesse as the ‘natural’ operating state of humanity, but simply to concur with Roche that a study of things should make us aware that the leap from an economy still dominated by Christian ethics to one of interest and utility was no small bound indeed, requiring and relying upon the new material culture which had arisen.

It is, of course, an argument that can feel tautological at times, though we might more generously call it synergistic. Consider this conclusion Roche offers at the end of his chapter on ‘Clothing and appearances’:

The importance of the sartorial revolution in the economic and social debate which overturned the values of the Christian and moral economy lay in the fact that it substituted, in everyday life, a number of values for the old ones which it erased. Instead of obligation to redistribute, the power of accumulation and enrichment. Instead of the weight of custom and tradition, the force of individual choice and renewal. Against belief that luxury should be reserved for manifestations of authority and rank, dictating sartorial appearances, the liberal assurance of capacities, the economic and moral utility of consumption. Thereafter, fashion inserted itself between constraint and freedom. (220)

Well, even if we accept that Christian values once prevailed, was it really the case that the ‘obligation to redistribute’ mostly existed in any form but the theoretical? The long and failed proscription against usury and its proliferating loopholes, not to mention many seigneurial practices, might suggest otherwise. Were custom and tradition so onerous that they were never sloughed off, or luxuries so confined? Yes, perhaps, but it then raises the issue of priority. If the world of objects is not “the sphere of our total alienation but the medium of a creative process, and that the relation of individuals to social reality proceeds through objectification [emphasis mine]” (7), then what does Roche mean when he writes that “[s]chool and college spread norms of social life which were also rules for the consumption of things, and a little down below that “[t]he eighteenth century saw a spread of acculturation and produced new varieties of education” (50)?

In other words, sociocultural change for Roche sometimes seems to come from the production of objects and things in the first instance, and the association of symbols, morality, and even sociality with those objects and things in the second (a Latourian argument, perhaps?*). But if objects are the medium, and objectification is the process, then the implication is also that what we call ‘change’ is best understood in the way we objectify. Why, then, when the early moderns built their new types of schools and colleges, did they decide to come to a new means of objectification? A synergistic reading of Roche allows us to see why, after certain trends developed, they created a path dependency which directed and reinforced new values. Yet there still seems to be a reluctance to commit to the question of what values might be outside of objects—for “[a] body of knowledge and a surplus of meanings are attached to all objects” (7)—and whether he really believes, as he sometimes almost appears to want to say, that the objects and things themselves are the revolution.

Objects, certainly, cannot be reduced to sheer materiality or relegated to mere instruments: they must, as Roche argues, “be set in the networks of abstraction and sensibility which are essential to the understanding of social facts” (2). Nevertheless, if we do not problematize the question of priority, we are left with an implicit acceptance of the manifest ‘fact’ of progress, such as when Roche avers in the conclusion that “[p]rogress in the control of affects was linked with the spread of objects and ways of using them” (252), because the very notion of an object itself, as employed critically with its connotations of commodification, contains within it the seeds of rampant cornucopianism. The ‘right to little pleasures’ then begins to strike a mordant tone, particularly when we consider the dilemma, best formulated by Dipesh Chakrabarty, that “[t]he mansion of freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.”** Thus, at the very end, when Roche delivers some approbation for “the road which has led my generation from those dark days to the society of growth,” he admits only that unequal distribution of objects and resources remain the adversary (255). Roche has brilliantly answered Rosseau’s question of how we became ‘prisoners of objects’; his answer, however, does not consider that even though that process had liberatory qualities, it might well have herded us into a cul-de-sac anyway.

* ‘Third Source of Uncertainty: Objects too Have Agency,’ in Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005).
** Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 208.

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a major contribution to cultural anthropology, economics and history. Unfortunately, I was just looking for a bit of cultural history of France. At this time, this book is seriously beyond me.

[Carla Oliveira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bom para quem gosta de aprender qualquer coisa mais sobre coisas que não imaginamos que possam ter qualquer tipo de história, por exemplo, a cama, o dia, a noite através dos tempos, das culturas e do quotidiano.

[Baris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unfortunately the book is more about the dry description of consumption practices in France during seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rather than engaging with the reasons for the "birth" of such new consumption practices. Simply disappointing.

[Allison Thurman]

UMD