Abstract
There is a moment in the archaeological record, sometime within the 1920s, when the household waste we uncover resembles our own trash more than that of previous eras. The Machine Age or the Interwar Period (1917–1940) yielded transformations in materiality and political economy producing new relationships between individuals, objects, and collective bodies. Their introduction at this time reinforced the development of particular forms of infrastructure and materiality, economic and political policy, and subjectifying practices that endure in their structuring effects to this day. Two major crises confronted the nation at the turn of the century. The first stemmed from anxieties held by the middle class over social fragmentation connected to immigration and labor strife. The second came in the form of unmet demand for excess production. An effort to confront these crises would find rationale and methods from an unlikely intellectual source, in the psychology of masses, crowds, and publics adapted out of psychoanalysis. The engineering of mass consumerism starting in the Interwar Period provided the nation’s business and political leaders with a parsimonious and diabolical solution to these crises. To understand the ironies and contradictions of the late twentieth century, we can build theory directly out of objects as Walter Benjamin intended through the materialist pedagogy of his work in the 1920s and 1930s. Observations from research conducted in the anthracite coal region of Northeast Pennsylvania by the Lattimer Archaeology Project furnish examples of object types materializing these changes in capitalism.
There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described
Garry Winogrand
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- 1.
Schroeder and Carlson (2000, pp. 656–657), draw from Žižek’s interpretations of Kantian definitions for evil in his texts, The Ticklish Subject:The Absent Centre Of Political Ontology (1999), Sic 2: Cogito and The Unconscious (1998), and The Plague Of Fantasies (1997), in defining the diabolical as:…evil that comports exactly with the procedural requirements of Kantian morality. Diabolical evil is what the perfect coincidence of law and morality portends. When law and morality coincide, the ordinary, quotidian traces of evil rooted in the acts of mankind threaten to metamorphosize into a monstrous, sublime diabolical evil.They continue, “The moral act is that which is done for the sake of universality alone, out of a duty freely adopted on purely rational grounds. What is done for reasons of particularity—inclination, feeling, or, in general, pathology—is evil. Diabolical evil, however, is done for nonpathological reasons—out of a duty freely adopted on purely rational grounds. Hence, it is indistinguishable from the moral. In Kantian philosophy, there is no difference between the highest morality and the direst evil” (656–657).From a historical standpoint, they conclude that, “diabolical evil is nothing but the negative freedom of the human subject, and as such, is the very foundation of liberal philosophy and psychoanalysis.” (656–657)
- 2.
Similar events were conducted in small towns throughout the region, accounts of which were reported in the industry circular Coal Age throughout 1917. We do not know how well attended or received the Lattimer event might have been, though in and around the nearby metropolis of Hazleton a string of unsolved arson attacks throughout 1917 and 1918 point to local attempts to sabotage the war effort and rouse worker’s pacifism. At least one act of arson, in which an individual attempted to set fire to a coal bank, was reported in Lattimer in mid-April of 1917 (Tarone 2004; Coal Age 1917, p. 876).
- 3.
Recognizing, of course, that this ideological change in no way marked an end to violent suppression of class struggle well into the twentieth century (Ludlow Collective 2001; Nida 2013) and even today within a globalized economy that still turns to repressive violence to maintain strict control over labor and production (for instance see Little and Shackel 2014, p. 111).
- 4.
Theodore Roosevelt was said to have kept a copy of the text “always near at hand” throughout his presidency (Ewen 1996, p. 65).
- 5.
A sample of these texts include: Edward Bernay’s Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923), Propaganda (1928); Edward Filene’s The New Capitalism (1930), The Consumer’s Dollar (1934); Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion (1922), The Phantom Public (1930); and Roy Sheldon and Egmont Aren’s Consumer Engineering: A New Technique for Prosperity (1932).
- 6.
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw a flurry of federal intervention aimed at stabilizing American markets, neutralizing dissent, and engineering social demographics. The work of the CPI went beyond homogenizing messages but also included the coercive suppression of dissenting voices. The legal frameworks for this came in the form of two federal laws passed in 1917 and 1918, respectively, known as the Espionage and Sedition Acts (Ewen 1996, pp. 119–121). Comprehensive immigration reform beginning with the Dillingham commission in 1907 brought an end to unlimited migration from sectors of the world deemed “unsuitable” or “unassimilable” by the commission with the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 (Ngai 2004; Zeidel 2004). Progressive reformers focused on the material aspects of everyday life to Americanize its immigrants within, at least superficially, middle-class norms of taste and aesthetics (Cohen 1985). The Wagner Act of 1933 gave unions bargaining power for the first time, preempting violence (Harvey 1982, p. 133).
- 7.
A very similar approach is promulgated in a recent special issue of International Journal of Historical Archaeology, co-edited by LuAnn Wurst and Stephen Morozowski (Wurst and Mrozowski 2014).
- 8.
On the subject of material realities, the perspectives and insights of object-oriented ontological approaches (OOO) in recent archaeological scholarship should be considered. Among their insights, they suggest that even the broadest definitions of consumption far from exhaust the manifold entanglements between humans, memories, objects, landscapes, and other material and ecological properties (Olsen 2010; Olsen et al. 2012; Hodder 2012; Pétursdóttir 2012). Even within the confines of household waste, objects from the Lattimer and Pardeesville assemblages account for manifold material engagements and localized or patchwork incorporation of mass consumerism owing to resistance, poverty, isolation, racism, and other factors. Objects suggesting curation, inheritance, salvage, recycling, cultivation, pilfering, and barter are all represented in the collection. However, the insights OOO do not necessarily limit critical perspectives. In fact, ontological approaches challenge traditional notions of causality and entanglement, potentially expanding our understanding of the causal relationships between objects and different forms of material and social production.
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Roller, M. (2015). Diabolical Consumerism: Mass Psychology and Social Production between the Gilded and the Golden Ages. In: Leone, M., Knauf, J. (eds) Historical Archaeologies of Capitalism. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12760-6_2
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