Symbolic Exploitation and the Social Dialectic of Desire

Abstract

Utilizing the work of Thorstein Veblen, I argue that the interrogation of 'symbolic exploitation' should be of pressing concern to sociologists who hope to end economic exploitation. Contesting economic exploitation must begin with the destruction of traditional sovereign action patterns of desire that ensnare agents. Such a work of destruction must simultaneously be a work of construction, the construction of counter-hegemonic cultures of solidarity that reject the normative systems of status distribution associated with pecuniary capitalism. With this self-recognition on the part of the laboring classes, the end of economic exploitation becomes both palpable and possible.

Working Class Self-Fashioning inSwing Time(1936)

“…for building a new culture of resistance against what he called 'the American tradition' (Veblen 1964: 158-83; see also Cassano 2006Cassano , 2009a. 9.…”

Desperately seeking social approval: Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen and the moral limits of capitalist culture

“…Activating the self results from the successful capture of another's unrealizable desires, which means that the relationship between the individual and the world of material possessions is governed by the search for recognition from observant onlookers (Cassano : 382). That recognition comes from the association of ownership with status and from understanding one's own standing within society through the imagined opinion of someone other than oneself: ‘the world comes to looks as it does’, writes Cassano (: 384, emphases in original), ‘through the eyes of the other ’ (see Veblen : 112; : 278–80, 349–50; : 161; : 11–12). The underlying Veblenian ontology therefore looks by no means dissimilar to the Smithian equivalent, albeit with some subtle differences in the activation of the relationship between self and other.…”

“…In Veblen's day, the general population remained incompletely acculturated to the natural dispositions which the machine process might have served to restore, and this was due to the controlling effects of economic language which fixed the social meaning of aspiration in distinctly predatory form. The leisure class was thus provided through essentially arbitrary linguistic conventions with ‘a veritable “generalized other” that infects the common pattern of desire’ (Cassano : 384). No such parallel was available for the industrial working class (see Veblen : 177–8; : 115–18; : 218), because the semiotic code of a society organized hierarchically by wealth stripped its objectives of social recognition (Cassano : 750).…”

“…According to Cassano (: 380), Veblen's theory suggests that ‘social actors receive a status wage for their identification with normative value systems’. The whole realm of conspicuous consumption should therefore be understood as a fundamentally de‐moralized sphere in which feelings of self‐worth are available to the highest bidders.…”

“…The whole realm of conspicuous consumption should therefore be understood as a fundamentally de‐moralized sphere in which feelings of self‐worth are available to the highest bidders. The act of engaging in conspicuous consumption will ‘“pay” the actor a portion of symbolic capital, in the form of social “prestige” ’ (Cassano : 380). Yet this in itself has to be paid for when symbolic advance is tied to economic advance and both, in turn, are regulated socially by distributional hierarchies which are established on wealth holdings.…”