Theory & Event

Feeling Luxury

Luxury is everywhere, and yet it has become inconceivable. We say: "Luxury is whatever goes beyond what's needed," and then go on to admit that luxury neatly meets a need, "in the display of status." So doing, we define luxury one way with respect to the body, and another way with respect to the mind. Some may be deterred by the split from going further, others, dissatisfied, will aver that recognition is everything. In rushes a utilitarian common sense that eviscerates luxury as a conception of political, social, or cultural analysis. Recognition-as-utility becomes the vanishing point for luxury as a system of discourse whose power prior to the modern age can scarcely be overstated.¹

This conviction that no distinction between needs and luxury can hold is a hallmark of modernity. Its coordinates are fast and familiar. Citing Bernard Mandeville, we aver that such a distinction must be both culturally and historically contingent. Every attempt to draw the line can only be, we insist, a disciplinary move. Adding incantations from the more rigorous Adam Smith, we are assured that luxury consumption, like normal consumption, contributes to the circulation of goods. Luxury stimulates commodity production precisely because it gratifies the putatively transhistorical and transcultural human need for social esteem. With its excesses neutralized, any modern conception of luxury is whittled to the point that it is scarcely distinguishable from the rhetoric of marketing.

The collapse of luxury's distance from needs is a conspicuous register of its apparent weakness as a conceptual hook for political theory today. Rarely noted is that the weak modern conception of luxury has taken the means by which Classical and Christian moral discourses condemned luxury—by pointing to its lux, perceptible light or shine, its glitter, sparkle—as the very essence of luxury's appeal. Framed within these vitiated remainders of Classical and Christian critiques, luxury becomes a mere species of fashion, another bit of segmented consumer culture, a niche marked by its pretense of hierarchical stratification. If such a picture of luxury still has anything to offer to modern social theory, its contribution lies in how it appears as the apotheosis of consumption-for-others. For theorists like Thorstein Veblen, luxury becomes the paradigm for modern consumption as a whole.² Social and political theories of luxury are thus assimilated wholesale to the modern fashion pattern that abetted the explosion of consumer culture, and that undergirds the entrenchment of that culture today.³

It is doubtful, however, that luxury's conceptual weakness, as compared to its power as a premodern discourse, reflects the attenuation of luxury's power in the life of late modern polities. Indeed, in the face of the incongruity between luxury's conceptual weakness and its symbolic and material powers in late capitalism, the weakness of this conception for grappling with the life of the present-day commercial polity is even more striking. The problem with the weak conception, I argue, is that it renders us insensitive to aspects of luxury that exceed, and even contradict, the patterns of visibility by which luxury appears to be little more than expensive fashion. We should instead understand luxury's appeal in terms of irreducible surplus, an excess that the visual, with its emphasis on display and other-directedness, cannot apprehend. With this in mind, if one sense should serve as a synecdoche for luxury consumption, it may well be touch rather than sight. The touch-related, or "haptic" dimension of luxury, I contend, speaks less to how persons' identities are encoded or inscribed in a consumer society, than to how capacities for pleasure are exercised, refined, and partitioned in a late modern context—and how hierarchy and subordination are sources of pleasure, felt upon the body.

With this in mind, restoring luxury's haptic dimension to political economy gestures to political questions. These questions may be most broadly framed in terms of what Jacques Rancière has called the "distribution of the sensible;" Davide Panagia's discussion of this distribution, offered by way of reading Kantian aesthetics, provides an especially apt point of reference. The haptic...