Page 174 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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became influential as an educational approach from the late 1950s, through the
work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner was particularly known for his theory of ‘reinforce-
ment’ – events or factors which increased the rate or intensity of response to a
stimulus. His experiments with rats pressing levers suggested that an interactive
feedback system that rewarded certain responses could be used to condition or train
people.
Commodity aesthetics: Term coined by the German Marxist philosopher Wolfgang
Haug. Commodity aesthetics is about false appearances: even if we desire an object
for its usefulness, all that counts from the seller’s point of view is the appearance of
usefulness. Thus the appearance and sensual aspects of the commodity become
dedicated to inspiring desire on the part of the buyer. Part of this process is that
ordinary mass-produced goods are made to appear more luxurious (and better-
quality) than they actually are.
Commodity fetishism: According to Karl Marx, in a society where different kinds of
producers only meet at the point of exchanging their products, and where money
mediates that exchange, the social relationships between producers appear as rela-
tions between material objects. Exchanges of goods make equivalences between the
very different (and in reality, unequal) kinds of work that go into producing them.
Their value in the marketplace is unrelated to their use, and determined by the
human labour ‘congealed’ in them, but concealed in the exchange process. This
makes the goods exchanged in the market start to seem ‘mystical’, like fetishes (see
fetishism) and appear to take on human character. Exchange value appears as a
natural quality of an object, and so the continual rise and fall in value also appears
as a natural or chance process, as a movement of things rather than something
controlled by people (Marx 1976: 164–6).
Conspicuous consumption: The economist Thorstein Veblen used this term in his
influential book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) to describe the way in
which the American ruling class regarded ostentatious possessions as necessities,
and used them as a means to display social status. Conspicuous consumption has
been adopted as a term to describe the use of excessive or wasteful consumption as
a means of socially distinguishing oneself.
Contact zone: This term comes from Mary Louise Pratt’s work on travel writing and
was introduced to museum studies by James Clifford. Pratt uses the term to refer to
the space of colonial encounters in which previously separated people come
together. This is not an easy mingling but involves ‘conditions of coercion, radical
inequality and intractable conflict’. The concept of a contact zone places the
emphasis on the mutual, improvised interrelations of colonizers and colonized
(Pratt 1992: 6–7).
Culture industry: This is what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer call industrial-
ized mass culture, the culture of monopoly capitalism which is entirely geared to
the production of profit. The culture industry ‘impresses the same stamp on every-
thing’, and the apparent variety of cultural products conceals an underlying same-
ness and serves only to give an appearance of choice. Distinctions between films,
magazines and so on, are not simply distinctions in form or content, but the result
of a system of classifying people as types of consumer.