The ethics of second-hand consumption

Over the past forty years the shame and stigma associated with second-hand consumption has given way to a more confident and exuberant championing of second-hand shopping as an ethical alternative to unregulated and uncontrolled 'consumerism'. This chapter will begin by setting out what is known of the scale and growth of the second-hand market. It will then consider the extent to which this growth is a response to environmentalism and the ethical consumer movement. It will be argued that although these have had an impact they do not explain the complex origins of this market growth, particularly the social, aesthetic, political and moral contexts out of which second-hand consumption has emerged. A more complex theoretical and historical account will be constructed using the works of Walter Benjamin (1955), Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Wolfgang Welsch (1997), David Ley (1996) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998) as well as some recent ethnographic studies of collecting, particularly the works of Russell Belk et al. (1991), Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe (2003), Alison Clark (2000) and others. This account will be structured around four distinct if overlapping cultural shifts: first, the 'anti-modem' countercultural movements of the 1970s that addressed the liquefaction of tradition and culture and the arrival of what can be called a disposable modernity; second, an 'aestheticization process' that relates to powerful trends in art, design, manufacturing and consumption that aroused a curiosity for the archaeology of modernity; third, the routinization of collecting in modernity and its association with memory, conservation and preservation; and, lastly the use of second-hand objects in the generation of 'cool' and its material performance through 'stylistic arrhythmia'.