Page 35 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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defended ‘property and liberty’ by evoking the most defensible kind of property:
that which is knowledge-producing (Burke 1999: 268–9). Burke was writing in
the wake of the great debates about luxury that had raged throughout the
eighteenth century. It had now become possible to separate certain kinds of
luxury consumption from others: and especially to value luxuries while deriding
ostentation. The attachment of the landed aristocracy to certain kinds of things
was defensible while their flamboyance was not.
The luxury debates had begun in the late seventeenth century and the first
half of the eighteenth century. These were not philosophical debates conducted
in high isolation but struggles at the foundation of the emergent economic
system of capitalism, and related both to class, and to forms of governance. In
Britain, excessive dress and conspicuous consumption became associated with
monarchs who wanted to concentrate too much power in their own hands. After
1688 there were great anxieties about luxury producing ‘moral and political
decline’. Luxury was associated with France – the ‘source of absolutism and
luxury fabrics’, and connected to speculative investments, which became par-
ticularly controversial after the 1720 stock market crash (the ‘South Sea Bubble’;
Kutcha 1996: 62). In France itself, the emergence of consumerism in the eight-
eenth century provoked fierce argument about luxury, and its effect on the
social, economic and moral well-being of the nation (Kwass 2003; Saisselin
1992: 28). On both sides of the Channel, arguments about luxury were linked to
the advocacy of different political and economic systems, and economic inter-
ests. They were also used to justify the exclusion of women from political
power. British and French writers issued stern warnings about effeminacy and
the dangerous influence of women: in 1787 Sénac de Meilhan specifically
blamed women, especially the royal mistresses with their taste for novelty and
fashion, for the bankruptcy of the state and the aristocracy (Saisselin 1992: 41).
Opulence also became associated with economic ruin, and seen as a national
failing of the French in particular. In her mid-eighteenth century novel, Madame
de Graffigny wrote, ‘The dominant vanity of the French is to appear opulent.
Genius, the arts, perhaps even the sciences, are all related to this magnificence;
everything works to the ruination of fortunes’ (cited in Saisselin 1992: 29).
Meanwhile the bourgeois class, with their high-interest loans, quietly benefited
from this aristocratic predilection (Haug 1986).
The question of where to draw the line between necessity and luxury, and
what counted as overconsumption, was crucial to the luxury debates. Advocates
of luxury could argue that either luxury was everything that was not necessary
for survival, in which case everyone except the almost destitute participated in
luxury consumption, or there was no such thing as luxury at all (Saisselin 1992:
38). In the end, a defence of luxury was developed which allowed the luxury
market to continue whilst dissociating it from excess, and specifically, from the