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the possession of some significant object and even the plain desire tohave it will have disastrous effects not only on the soul of a single humanbeing, but also on the existing social order. This view is not only a matterof fairytales, but can be seen in the way that the same kind of fear thatthese tales incorporate has been repeatedly reproduced when some significantnew good (car, radio, telephone, TV, mobile phone) has been introducedinto the markets (see Pantzar, 1996).
Although it is generally believed that goods have a marked impact on
our lives, they have not obtained a reasonable place in social theory, especiallyin the analysis of our sociality (see Knorr Cetina, 1997; Preda, 1999). Ofcourse, one of the forebears of sociology, Marx, considered commodities asalienated end products of collective workers that connected them in themarkets to people that were unfamiliar to them. His emphasis, however,was more on the exchange value and the related social relations than onthe use value of commodities (Marx, 1972; see also Haug, 1979). Simmel(and Veblen), in turn, paid his attention to the uses of goods, for instance,in his analysis of fashion, and pinpointed their distinctive nature. However,
since such classic analyses, in most social theory, whether talking about
different strands of structural theories inspired by Parsons or ethnomethodologicaltheories based on Schutz and Garfinkel, our relations to
products are missing. It is not so much that these social theories do not
accept the existence of goods, but that they do not admit that goods play
an important role in a social world. This is the case in spite of the
commonly shared fact that ‘homo faber’ works and rebuilds the physical
world by utilizing tools and ‘homo consumens’ transforms it according to
his or her tastes and preferences.
The situation did, however, change in the late 1970s when sociology
became interested anew in consumption matters. It considered goods not
only to be one of the most important means to make and maintain social
distinctions, but also to be an important element in our identities
(Campbell, 1996; Ilmonen, 2001a; Warde, 1994). Until now, the way in
which consumption has been dealt with in the sociology of consumption,
which is my main frame of reference, has been relatively narrow. It still
leaves open the general question of the use of consumption objects. In thisarticle, I will proceed further and try to show that goods play a moreJournal of Consumer Culture 4(1)
Downloaded from https://joc.sagepub.com at University of Leicester Library on May 5, 2010important role than is usually thought, that goods are not only a passivemeans that can be utilized for whatever aim, but, on the contrary, that they
actively influence our lives and have, therefore, an important role in our
social networks. In this role, they may even counteract the trend of
desocialization related to the individualization process.
Knorr Cetina, for example, maintains that understanding the issue of the
‘disembedding of modern selves’ in terms of human relations ignores ‘the
ways in which major classes of individuals have tied themselves to object
worlds’ (1997: 1). She is certainly right here, but she never mentions thatour object relations are necessarily different from human relations. Objectsdo not speak back (at least, for the time being), unlike we humans. Still, theymay attract our attention and even be