Introduction
This paper will sketch the consumption side of economy in European history. The purpose of the exercise is to investigate the origins of mass consumption which are, in my view, often erroneously located in the twentieth century. What I will pursue is the motivation for the very idea of a society of mass consumption rather than just the instance of the consumption itself. Accordingly, one implication of the general line of my argument contests the proposition that it is axiomatic that production creates, or is logically prior to, consumption.
In the history of marketing literature there is little awareness that this 'history' may have commenced before the year 1900. At best Polanyi (1971) is invoked to shore up what to the modern marketer is a history of no use. Who could imagine in these days of what Leiss (1978) calls the 'high intensity market setting' that there is any traceable origin in a past where distribution and poor communications precluded the kinds of mass consumption which is synonymous with contemporary society? Similarly, if we were to accept Alexander's (1970) conclusions we would look no further than the start of the nineteenth century. Yet the evidence for growing consumption patterns and the will to promote that consumption did exist.
The received economic wisdom of all shades is that it is technological change which alters the scale of consumption by rationalising the scale and hence the costs of production. Mass consumption simply was not possible until the establishment of a technological base for the very creation of the artifacts of mass consumption. This required money capital in the first instance which was accomplished through the exploitation of labour (extremely low wages) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thereafter, wages could increase to the point where mass consumption became possible, if then, only for a limited number of the working-class.
While this scenario is accurate, it is only accurate from its own perspective, that is, within the range of quantitative economic history. It tends to reduce consumption to effect rather than coefficient cause and leaves us with a technological determinatism that defines out of
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existence some of the reasons why increased productivity came to be seen as the main goal in the first place. Those reasons, I believe, have much to do with the upsurge in consumption prior to the period when the capitalist mode of production took full effect, and that upsurge was reflected in the development of new needs.
One difficulty in arguing this case has been that the historical sources are varied as there is little collated material on the qualitative aspects of economic history:
It is simply the case that historical statistics dealing with categories such as output, production, exports, etc., are often recorded and preserved, whereas those concerning the various components of consumption and investment demand are much more rarely encountered (Roehl, 1970:108-9).
Miskimin notes that '... it was a consequence of the inequality of income distribution that the economies of the sixteenth century were able to sustain flourishing industries in spite of the thin nature of the market and the utter failure to generate an economic system based on mass consumption' (1977:85). The fact that there were 'flourishing industries' and what evidence we do have about the consumer as we know him or her gives the lie to the proposition that the consumer is a recent arrival or indeed that mass consumption, with the cultural effects it entails, is peculiar to our century, though it had not yet appeared in the sixteenth century.
An Overview
It is only within towns and cities with sizeable populations that the kinds of qualitative consumption I am talking about can occur. Their origins can be dated from the eleventh and twelfth centuries in northern Italy, central Germany and Flanders (Hilton, 1979:17), that is, within the feudal period. The towns themselves witnessed changes in the hitherto simple class structure brought about by a complex of factors which include agricultural innovation, technological change, the use of money, population growth, the resurgence of trade. These factors account for the founding of a market economy arising together with a mercantile bourgeoisie: c'est dans une charte de Van 1007 qu'ap-parait pour lar premiere fois le mot: bourgeois ... (Pernoud, 1960:21). (The term bourgeois appears for the first time in a charter of the year 1007.)
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Anderson quotes Duby and Van Bath:
A great change in productivity, the only one in history until the great advances in the 18th and 19th centuries, occurred in the countryside of Western Europe between the Carolingian period and the dawn of the thirteenth century. Medieval agriculture had at the end of the 13th century reached a technical level equivalent to that of the years which immediately preceded the agricultural revolution (Anderson, 1974:190),
and:
In the twelfth century a period of exuberant development broke out in western and southern Europe. In the cultural as well as the material field a high point was reached in the years between 1150 and 1300 that was not equalled again till much later. This advance took place not only in theology, philosophy, architecture, sculpture, glasswork and literature, but also in material welfare (Anderson, 1974:195).
J. Banaji has put forward the thesis that 'social consumption' was a goal of feudal production. He writes that 'feudal wealth was subordinated to social habits of generosity, display, consumption and piety ... the Lord's consumption was the only motor-force of 'expansion in the feudal economy' (1976:304). He does not enquire into the nature of that consumption, which is the point at issue here.
It was in this period of population growth that the bourgeoisie positioned themselves between the nobility and the peasantry, a position that initially was not one of political control but nevertheless a strategic position they were never to relinquish. It is also within this period that consumption of a wider variety of commodities due mainly to trade, becomes apparent: 'In aggregate, the total market demand generated by urban inhabitants must have been of quite substantial magnitude; moreover, it grew significantly, in both relative and absolute terms over this period' (Roehl, 1972:123-4). Miskimin notes that by 1300 even a small volume of trade was 'stimulating the imagination of a traditional society in introducing variety into a previously bland array of consumption goods' (1969:117). Konig writes that it was 'during the thirteenth century, at the precise moment when the urban middle-classes began to rise' that there occurred 'a sudden and steep increase in the number of dress regulations which have continued unabated ever since' (1977:140).
The social hierarchy of a still basically feudal society then became
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nobility/aristocracy — patriciate — peasant. After this period of growth, disaster and decline set in. The causes, insofar as they are known, are held to be population growth combined with low levels of yield from over-farmed and insufficiently fertile reclaimed land: 'the very progress of medieval agriculture now incurred its own penalties' (Anderson, 1974:198). Added to this were the effects of the Black Death, a bubonic plague which struck the continent in 1384: 'the toll by 1400 was perhaps two fifths' (1974:201) of the whole population of Europe. Thereafter, feudal life was to improve somewhat for the depleted population of Europe. Braudel (1974:129) goes so far as to say that 'real salaries have never been as high as they were then' due to the scarcity of labour, and that a peasant's lot remained reasonable until the middle of the sixteenth century, though Lis and Soly (1979) question this. Miskimin points out that in the fourteenth century, 'changes in the levels of consumption were accompanied by changes in the objects desired. Northern Europeans became extra-ordinarily fashion conscious during the second half of the fourteenth century; it had become possible for more people to emulate the very rich of former times ...' (1974:91). This consumption, of course, was restricted, but the point still holds some interest for the thesis being proposed here. Ironically, Braudel's periodization of the improvement in the standard of living of the majority tallies evenly with Lopez's remark that this was precisely the period (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries) when the economy of Europe did not grow (1976:85). Lopez and Francoise Mauro maintain, as do many writers, that the industrial revolution proper was preceded by a commercial revolution which 'shook the numerical, economic and political predominance of landowners and officials and made the market, instead of the public place or the cathedral squares, the main focus of urban life' (Lopez:87). This occurs as early as the fourteenth century in Italy and Flanders.
Even so, Hilton reminds us that 'the prime mover of the economy until the sixteenth century at the earliest was the struggle for rent' (1974:74); the transition to a truly capitalist oriented economy which required extraction of a surplus, part of which was accumulated with a view to expansion of the forces of production, rather than their halfhearted exploitation as a means of revenue accomplished through forced labour and trade deals, and the kinds of consumption that that entailed, was yet to come.
It is in fact from the sixteenth century that an extended diffusion of commodity consumption begins to take place in advanced market areas of western Europe. A complex of factors, enumerated above, saw qualitative changes. Sombart, like many authors after him, attributed the changes to an enormous population increase during this
42 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
century — thirteen or fourteen cities had populations in excess of 100,000, creating the possibility for mass consumption (1976:21-2); Mauro points out that from the end of the fifteenth century we see the first industries on a European scale — textiles and mining (l966:296f.). In political terms, we are in the age of absolutism — what Anderson calls the 'parcellized sovereignty' of feudal states could no longer cope with the structural-commercial changes taking place in the economy. In another century consumption patterns really begin to widen. De Vries makes this clear:
In the early modern society, strongly held beliefs about the permanence and sanctity of the social hierarchy tended to limit the ability of merchants to foster new consumption patterns, but during the 17th century the necessary social tolerance could be found, particularly in the new metropolises, to permit merchants a dynamic market role. New commodities from Asia and America, new household luxuries, and status objects for ordinary people were being popularized and made available in retail shops (another innovation of the period) (1976:181).
In her History of Shopping Davis argues that it is in the reign of Elizabeth I in London that 'retailing began to come of age and to take seriously the business of wooing the consumer1 (1966:55). Whitford's painstaking article (1976) could be used here as an appendix to that statement. He lists the goods and services advertised in newspapers and periodicals of the seventeenth century to emphasize the point that a wide variety of consumption goods was definitely available. But where did the drive to retail and consume get its impetus? Davis had no satisfactory answer.
Heckscher among others, noted that in the early mercantile period there was much conservative reaction against paying high wages to labourers for there was the danger that they would not consume proportionately, and hence would work only as much as they felt they needed to. Once distribution had improved however and laissez faire had overtaken mercantilism, consumption became an explicit social goal to which all classes were to be encouraged. Heckscher quotes Ricardo on this point: 'the friends of humanity cannot but wish that in all countries the labouring classes should have a taste for comforts and enjoyments and that they should be stimulated by all legal means in the exertions to procure them' (1935:328-9). It is interesting that economic historians of this time, such as Heckscher, assume the developing materialism as a natural and not a contingent event. This is no doubt a function, as Anderson noted, of their neat separation of politics and economics. This however complicates the task of making
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the point that acquisitiveness was on the increase, since, as it was to be assumed, it did not require particular attention. We read in a classic book on this topic, Westerfield's Middlemen in English Business 1660-1760 that 'the merchant was cosmopolitan, travelled widely, came from his voyage full of new ideas, with new customs, new goods: he initiated wants and a higher scale of living' (1968:350). Similarly, Heckscher mentions a seventeenth century merchant's hatred for Jews who said that they 'would not function as consumers of commodities, as the doctrine demanded, but preferred "to live in a slovenly and entirely mean fashion"' (1935:329). The basis of the 'doctrine' itself does not come in for discussion.
As I have said above, what we recognise as an urban culture increasingly oriented to consumption arose in the advanced cities of western Europe around 1650 (De Vries, 1976:187). By the seventeenth century 'it was no longer possible to tell a person's rank from his clothes' (Minchinton, 1972:133). Mauro would probably agree because he writes that the textile industry of the sixteenth century did occasion a mass consumption which 'lifted the standard of living of the population, engendered a new material outlook, and created new needs' (Maura, 1966:298). Unfortunately, he does not detail this opinion.
Mercer (1954) has detailed the changing patterns in ostentatious house-building of the English gentry of the seventeenth century. By 1688, the average annual increase of the wealth or general stock of England was at least two million pounds. An eighteenth century author put this down to factors including '... the extensiveness of our traffic abroad, richness of our apparel and household furniture, variety of new manufactures ...' (Westerfield, 1968:366).
The first newspaper to carry an advertisement appeared in 1658. In that period advertised goods were 'sold mainly through local outlets such as coffee houses, warehouses, and wharfs, the advertiser's own shops and those of agents, or at the Advertisement Office for Sale and Exchange of Goods', as well as at regular markets and fairs (Whitford, 1967:508).
Especially in the period before the second wave of Puritanism, there were all kinds of crazes for various commodities, as well as an increase in possessiveness generally. Some examples were the tulip manias in Holland in 1636 and 1637 (Posthumus:1969). In England, taste buds were excited by sugar, chocolate, tobacco, spices, imported wines, whisky, uncommon fish and vegetables. There were any amount of cures and recipes, one manufacturer claiming sales of 60,000 in 1637 (Whitford, 1967:510). You could even buy an artificial
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eve or tooth. Fashion is too big a topic to detail, but the use of perfumes and cosmetics 'reached unprecedented heights in Britain during Elizabeth's reign'. Necklaces, gloves, rooms, were perfumed. Elizabeth ordered 'perfumed cannon to be fired as she entertained the Duke of Anjou' (Kennett, 1975:123). Castile soap from Spain was sold all over Europe. Boiled eggs were eaten after being drenched in rose-water. Social rivalries amongst the upper classes made ostentation mandatory; Braudel says cupboards 'remained the pride of peasant and working class homes' (1974:221) and De Vries says that 'the Dutch shipped over three million pieces of Chinese porcelain to Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century' (1976:188). A hundred years later Mr. Wedgwood marketed his products with all the skill and chicanery of a current advertising or public relations man. Clearly an indication of what was to come.
The Development of Marketing
Initially we should note again that advertising had its origins in the seventeenth century and I return to Whitford's discussion of those origins to demonstrate the continuity between what was then a 'new mode of selling goods and services' (1967:496):
Competing for the reader's attention, these [newspaper] advertisements for the first time in history substantially supplemented the multifarious handbills, posters, broadsides, tradesmens' tokens, shop signs, printed catalogues and lists, books and word-of-mouth advertising by public criers and chapmen (1967:504-5).
Many forms of rhetoric were used to move products: litotes, comparison, superlatives: 'A favourite and approving adjective with Restoration copywriters was "curious"':
Books were 'curiously bound'; the late King's head was 'curiously done' in marble; a wax effigy was 'curiously done to life'; playing cards were embellished with 'curious and lively figures'; and there was even a curious way of preserving dead bodies' (1967:606).
There were appeals to the exotic and the very latest in fashion: 'convenience, comfort and durability were all selling points in these advertisements' (1967:608). Snob appeal and prestige were also used as selling points, testimonials were cited and exaggerated promises were made, especially for cures: 'Eloquent was Mr. Elmy's descrip-
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tion of his "Most Sovereign head-pill": It strengthens the Memory and disburdens the Brain of all offensive humours, thereby rendering the Understanding more clear and
Vigorous.' A forerunner to the aspirin.
The development of a marketing mentality must have gone hand-in-hand with what Weber described as the 'spirit of capitalism'. However we might define that hazy notion, there is an essential grain of truth in his thesis that capitalism required a new kind of animal: 'men who had grown up in the hard school of life, calculating and daring at the same time, above all temperate and reliable, shrewd and completely devoted to their business; with strictly bourgeois opinions and principles' (Weber, 1978:69). But it was not only on the production side, the marshalling of labour and materials, that they flourished. That enterprise had to be matched on the consumption side by the entrepreneur who by the eighteenth century needed expanding markets to maintain his business. The kind of 'calculating and daring' that was once only needed in the manufacture and distribution of basic essential goods such as textiles, for which historically there had always been sufficient effective demand, now turned its attention to creating demand for new products which previously had had no markets or markets restricted to a small range of well-to-do consumers. This was a significant shift in emphasis. Just as the skilful entrepreneur had raised the ante on the competitive production and distribution of goods, as Weber noted, attention was now turned towards generating something quite novel: the competitive sale of goods on a grand scale which required the encouragement of new needs. Marx, to my knowledge, made only one reference to this shift:
Each capitalist does demand that his workers should save, but only his own because they stand toward him as workers; but by no means the remaining world of workers for they stand toward him as consumers. In spite of all 'pious' speeches about the need to save money he therefore searches for means to spur them on to consumption, to give his wares new charms, to inspire them with new needs by constant chatter etc. It is precisely this side of the relation of capital and labour which is an essential civilizing moment, and on which the historical justification, but also the contemporary power of capital rests.
I think that Marx did not comprehend fully the significance of the process he described here despite the final weighty sentence in this quotation, for he goes on to say:
These are nevertheless all exotic observations, relevant here only in so far as they show the demands of hypocritical bour-
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geois philanthropy to be self-contradictory and thus to prove precisely what they were supposed to refute, namely that in the exchange between the worker and capital, the worker finds himself in the relation of simple circulation, hence obtains not wealth but only subsistence, use value for immediate consumption (1973:287-8).
Marx considered the manipulation of worker into consumer as a consequence of the production process. What needs to be rescued however is how the marketing mentality actually worked, what its social implications were, and in Josiah Wedgwood we find the marketing equivalent of Weber's Benjamin Franklin.
Enter the Salesman
In an excellent account of Wedgwood's activities, McKendrick points out that he quickly realized that his improved techniques and styles in ceramics could be reproduced by rivals and sold more cheaply: 'Having once achieved perfection in production, he must achieve perfection in sales and distribution' (McKendrick, 1960:414). Throughout his long and successful career Wedgwood used every trick in the book, inventing a few along the way, to move his merchandise.
Firstly, to overcome price-cutting rivals he sought royal patronage and thereafter deliberately kept his prices high; then he turned to the gentry and nobility. Using their vanity as a lever he produced expensive one-off commissions 'entirely for their advertising value':
By appealing to the fashionable cry for antiquities, by pandering to their requirements, by asking their advice and accepting small orders, by flattery and attention, Wedgwood hoped to monopolize the aristocratic market and thus win for his wares a special distinction, a social cachet which would filter through to all classes of society (1960:414).
But the latter needed a lead and Wedgwood was quick to provide it. He named his pottery after his patrons, sometimes in anticipation of their patronage so that others might associate themselves with these names through his products; he changed styles overnight to fit in with whatever was in demand. He cashed in on the neo-classical turn and was the first to use art as an advertising medium, commissioning painters to paint his pottery on canvas and supply pottery to other fashionable artists with the aim of their including it in the details of their paintings.
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The public relations exercise expanded. He opened a London warehouse in 1765 and initiated the technique of effective display which enabled him to move merchandise that had been previously difficult to sell; he initiated a self-serve operation for his slightly inferior goods; he pandered to upper class women with all the obsequiousness he could muster and 'success was immediate' (1960:420). Showrooms were then set up around the country with provincials imitating city styles. He capitalized on current events: 'the rise of Methodism, the Slave Trade controversy (with a kneeling slave on a jasper medallion asking: 'Am I not a man and a brother?') and the Peace with France were all given ceramic expression' (420). He used newspaper advertising when it suited his purposes and solicited flattering articles about his wares; when demand fell off temporarily he was the first to employ the 'satisfaction-or-money back' policy. He was the first to put sales representatives into the field and by this time he had the English market sewn up.
Wedgwood then turned his eyes abroad. From his factory which he had re-named 'Etruria' during the neo-classical turn he plotted the conquest of Europe. McKendrick points out that this was as much necessity as anything else: 'They needed a larger market to move their stock, to exploit the capabilities of their production machine and to swallow old lines which had exhausted their selling power in England' (426). To accomplish this, Wedgwood turned to his country's Ambassadors 'by flattery and presents he readily won their allegiance'. He thereby had introductions into the courts of Russia, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Turkey, Naples, Turin and even China. It turned out that the Ambassadors were 'magnificent evangelizing agents for Wedgwood's wares ... like malaria-carrying mosquitoes they carried Wedgwood's name abroad, to convert the world to what Wedgwood called 'the True Belief in his product' (427).
Next in line were the 'middling People'; 'Simply by cheapening goods which he had already made fashionable Wedgwood immediately opened up a great new market'. This 'clearly required different market techniques from those used to seduce the upper classes' (428). Instead of appealing to their vanity, he appealed to their loyalty. Cameo medallions were made for the people: 'Popes for Italy and Spain, the Saints for South America, Mohammed for Turkey'. He exploited fashion preferences in different countries, giving them what they wanted. When demand exceeded supply he bought his oppositions' imitations of his work and sold them at a profit. He died in 1795 with an estate worth 500,000 pounds and with his name synonymous with ceramic products.
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The significance of all this is fourfold — by a combination of novel-tv, sophistry and Machiavellian politics, Wedgwood created the very ideal of marketing as an end in itself. He helped to create a division of labour at that point of the economic cycle. He realized that salesmanship was a game of manipulation. He paved the way for what Marx called the 'civilizing' of society through a wider distribution and consumption of goods unwittingly aiding the process of secularization.
There had been some mass consumption in the eighteenth century and deliberate manipulation of consumption through low prices where alcohol was concerned. Literacy was later exploited through the 'popular' press. But Wedgwood was amongst the first, if not the first, to turn large numbers of people into consumers, seeing that as a legitimate aim of business endeavour, an attitude that is now assumed as a perfectly natural way of doing things rather than what it really was and is: premeditated manipulation.
There is no doubt that the middle-classes were the bearers of the oncoming materialism. To say that the mass of people were untouched by this process at the same time is to assume that poverty was the lot of the majority at all times and in all places over a 700 year period. The facts of poverty in European history are incontestable (Lis and Soly, 1979); but the argument for this impoverishment often rests on a false quantitative contrast with the mass consumption of our own period.
A way of illuminating the issue of a developing materialism in the absence of more precise data is to consider the fortunes of religion as the market society expanded. It is no coincidence, I would argue, that the well-documented process of secularization occurs when western culture was becoming materialistic. Consider the concluding remark from Weber in the Protestant Ethic: 'since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history' (1978:18l). The suddenness of this transition questions the very idea of asceticism.
It is striking that Sombart, a contemporary of Weber, could write two books published around the same time as the Protestant Ethic which contradict Weber. The contrast is illuminating. Sombart researched areas that Weber thought unfruitful. He said 'The whole precapitalistic and early capitalistic culture ... is entirely compatible with respectability to spend money, but not to earn it1 (1967:15).
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He further asserts that 'the very great need for luxuries on the part of the nouveaux riches initiated a craving for enjoyment and a striving for pleasure which swept over Europe like a plague' (1967:81) in the seventeenth century. Sombart's timetable for this process of 'the development of modern luxury' brought on by the ever-rising middle-classes was: Italy fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Germany fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain and Holland seventeenth century, France and England eighteenth century. What this entailed Sombart says, was 'the vulgarization of the noble families and their immersion in a spirit of materialism' (1967:84). He commences his original chapter 'The Secularization of love' with the statement:
I know of no event of greater importance for the formation of medieval and modern society than the transformation in the relations between the sexes which occurred during the Middle Ages and through the eighteenth century (1967:42).
The concept of love, in terms of sensuous affection, replaced the concept of love outside marriage as 'sin'. Noble women came out from behind their grey castle walls to take price of place in the courts. The era of the courtesan, the mistress and the cuckold commenced. Sombart said that his 'fundamental thesis' was to 'ascertain the extent to which women, especially women as objects of illicit love, have influenced the life pattern of our age' (1967:43). Women are then characterized as both passive consumption objects and active consumers, who, by the use of their innate charms, are able to influence the course of events. They did this in two main ways: lavish expenditure on everything from clothes to castles which the nouveaux riches slavishly imitated, and their access to power through their relationships to authority. The tempo of consumption was speeded up as luxury consumption was taken out of the public sphere and individualized: 'Woman has little patience; a man in love has none' (1967:97); 'For Louis XIV every new love affair was a signal for a new outburst of riotous spending, eclipsing the previous one' (1967:73).
It is not difficult to see here the origins of woman as sex object, in the sense of being a commodity, something with desirable properties, something to fawn over and consume. As Padgug points out, the his-torv of this crucial transition is vet to be written, though Freud noted
it2
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Conclusion
This paper has argued that increases in consumption did occur in what Sombart called the 'consumer cities' of Europe and that 'consumerism' can be dated back to these times. After all, utiliterianism, the ideology Weber saw as the next step after Puritanism (1978:259 n.3; 265 n.33) was concerned with the most good for the most people, even if the idea was not lived up to in practice.
But there is another factor that blinded both Weber and Sombart to the full meaning of the materialization of western culture. Both were bourgeois critics of mass society. Weber quoted Goethe: 'Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved' (1978:182), and mentions with distaste the 'catastrophic degradation of taste in the style of articles of everyday use' (1978:200 n.26). Similarly, Sombart informs us that the eighteenth century 'vulgar par-veneux' had to 'conform to the tenets of good taste which, in its essence is possessed only by the few' (1967:92). Sombart blamed the 'great advances in technology' for the 'heavy over-valuing of material things' and condemned the consequent trend toward 'the lower instincts in man, his delight in unhindered pleasure, his sense for comfort and good living [which have] stifled every ideal impulse' (Mitz-man, 1973:259). In both cases, prejudice which prevented them from coming to terms, theoretically, with what both agreed was the fate of western culture.
Max Wallace teaches at the Canberra College of Advanced Education.
Notes
1. For Sombart 'precapitalist' and 'early capitalist' periods were char
acterized by the seigneur and the Burger. 'The Burger is distin
guished from the seigneur in that, instead of using his expenses as
the standard to which his income must be adjusted, he uses his
income as the standard to which his expenses must be adjusted'
(Mitzman, 1973:246).
2. 'The most striking distinction between the erotic life of antiquity
and our own no doubt lies in the fact that the ancients laid the
stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasise its object.
The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its ac
count to honor even an inferior object; while we despise the in
stinctual activity itself, and find excuses for it only in the merit of
the object' (Freud, cited in Padgug, 1979:4).
51 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
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