Are you a romantic consumer? Perhaps hearing this question you’re imagining the intimate candlelit dinners, bountiful bouquets of roses, or luxury weekend spa breaks in the Cotswalds your partner hasn’t surprised you with recently. (Sorry to bring that up, I don’t want to cause any strife. Or, if they have – great! Buy them some chocolates to show how thankful you are – you know – those luxury Thornton’s ones. They cost a bit more than Roses, but that just shows how much you care.)
There’s certainly no doubt that our romantic desires to meet, mate and maybe even marry that special someone are a big aspect of our culture and driver of the economy. Particularly around Valentine’s Day, it can seem positively abnormal to be single, and the cornucopia of cards, cuddly toys and ‘kiss me’ covered kitsch vended for Valentine’s can make you feel romantically inadequate if you’re with someone, and undesirably isolated if you’re not. But, is there a deeper sense, not only of what it means to be romantic, but also in the way our romantic desires drive the economy?
A brief history of romantic desire
Because there’s much more to being Romantic than candlelit dinners and the Cotswalds. Think less candlelit dinners and more, well, candlelight. Less Cotswalds, and more Carpathians. More mountains – preferably distant and snow peaked. But, to really understand what it means to be Romantic, we need to understand what movements in history Romanticism was responding to.Beginning in the early 19th Century, Romanticism was a reaction to The Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, two events in 18th Century Western Europe that profoundly altered people’s relationship with society and with nature; and the emphasis on rationality and social conformity that helped bring them about – The Enlightenment prized human Reason as the way humanity would cast off the shackles of superstition and religion and auger in a new ‘enlightened’ age.
In the case of the French Revolutionaries, inspired by the thinker Voltaire, The People would no longer be governed by the Tyranny of Kings, but have self-determination through the principles of ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’ – these principles being those self-evidently arrived at through Reason. At the same time, the living standards of the majority of people would be greatly improved by the application of scientific knowledge to their material conditions.
But, by the early 19th Century, some of the Enlightenment’s shine had worn off. In Britain, The French Revolution, in an orgy of blood letting and guillotining, was seen by many as replacing the Tyranny of Kings, with The Tyranny of the People. At the same time, The Industrial Revolution, inspired in part, by The Enlightenment, had considerably worsened the working population’s living conditions. In Manchester, the average life expectancy of a working man fell to as low as. And, as the industrial cities expanded over the green English countryside, covering everything with smog and acrid soot, The Enlightenment project took on a nightmarish dimension. William Blake’s ‘Dark, Satanic Mills’ loomed large, with a sense in which something precious was being lost
So, Romanticism, associated particularly with the thinker Rosseau, evolved as a response to this sense, and sought a way back to a lost rural idyll, which had probably never existed and therefore could never be found. Wandering like Wordsworth in mountains and, for the expanding middle classes who could afford it, trips to the countryside, attemptedto satisfy this longing, which was also reflected in architecture, art, poetry and prose. The classical lines and forms of Georgian Neo-Classicism – e.g. the Royal Crescent in Bath, were replaced by a Neo-Gothic style that attempted to recreate the shape and style of the churches of Medieval Europe. The Houses of Parliament are perhaps the most famous example.
The writing of Mary Shelley also reflected this fear and frustration at the dawning of the machine age. Frankenstein was a cautionary tale for adults, warning of the dangers and consequences of humanity’s technological hubris. Galvinism – the reanimating of dead animals and at times human corpses raised the spectre of man ‘playing God’, at a time when the power of electricity had only just begun to be harnessed, and was poorly understood. So, Romanticism involved longing – a longing for something distant, something lost. A sense of longing, even of lack, was inbuilt in Romanticism from its inception.
This longing did not confine itself to the past, or the countryside. Union with a loved one – one who would uniquely understand you, and your individual potential became interwoven with the Romantic sensibility. Romanticism represented a revival and rebirth of the desirability of desire as life’s driving force, in opposition to what came to be seen as the undue privileging of cold ‘rationality’ espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.
This return to desire, rejected the emphasis upon social conformity and the celebration of ordinary life – the guiding principles of Western European societies since the Reformation -for philosopher and historian Charles Taylor – Calvinism, in particular, was suspicious of desire – Calvin believed the image of God in man had been entirely corrupted. Virtue, for ‘The Elect’, at least, consisted in the demonstration of one’s state of grace through acts of good work expressed in ordered living. Famously, for Max Weber, the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ that arose from this belief was key the to the development of modern Capitalism when writ large across societies.
By contrast, Romanticism emphasized the importance of listening to one’s inner voice, and authentically expressing this unique calling through a creatively chosen life path. Being Romantic meant finding and choosing one’s own way through life, by paying heed to one’s particular intuitions, dreams, desires and moral inclinations. As Taylor explains, following this subjective turn (turn towards the self); ‘the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.’ Perhaps ironically, since the Romantic impulse became embedded in the Western collective consciousness, we are all seeking to be ‘true to ourselves’, each of us pursuing individual dreams of how we can be uniquely us.
Why we could all be Romantic consumers
I hope the fundamentally romantic nature of consumerism is becoming clear. The privileging of subjective expressivism as way of constructing identity is actually fundamental to the consumer capitalist economy. We are all constantly being urged to create and recreate ourselves, by expressing our unique identities through consuming a plethora of products, and curating and creating ourselves through doing so. Social media has only added to the need to present ourselves as a uniquely self-sculpted individual. We look beautiful, but are isolated and alone. We are purportedly in the process of becoming our best selves, yet are trapped in a gilded cage of our own making.
Romanticism, consumerism and economic imperatives are therefore closely interrelated in Western societies, as Colin Campbell makes clear. As Campbell contests; ‘Modern individuals inhabit not just an ‘iron cage’ of economic necessity, but a castle of romantic dreams, striving through their conduct to turn the one into the other.’
Consequently, the reorientation of individuals towards less consumptive lifestyles is more of a challenge than often supposed. What we are really talking about is developing a new basis for human identity.
By Damian J. Hursey
Joy in Enough 