Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

However, practices of object modification are not confined to do-
mains of impoverishment or lack. As Arkhipov states in the foreword
to his book, ‘The folk phenomenon of the home-made production
of functional everyday items is wide scale, spontaneous, and largely
unknown. Such things have always been with us, and can be found in
any country in the world.’ (2006, p.5)
1.2 Consumer production
This research focuses on practices of object modification within a
contemporary consumer environment – a domain that is not defined by
scarcity of material resources, but rather by excess. It has been argued
however, that within the excesses of consumer culture, the individual
suffers from an entirely different form of lack (Jencks & Silver, 1972;
Slater, 1997). Confronted by the showy products of mass-production
the consumer has little opportunity to participate in the production of
their own life and may become alienated from their material environment
(Slater, 1997, p. 106). In forging divergent paths through the
consumer environment, practices of object modification may be seen
to provide a degree of resistance to this alienating effect.
By taking up the term ‘consumer’ to describe the focus of this study, I
am locating practices of object modification on one side of a traditional
producer-consumer binary relation. This approach provides a useful
boundary to the study, but it also makes a claim as to the nature of this
amateur production, i.e. that the practice is largely structured through a
producer-consumer relationship. Establishing the nature of this binary
relation is not straightforward. As Michel de Certeau makes clear in
The Practices of Everyday Life, the division between production and
consumption can not be drawn along lines of geographic distribution,
of places of work or leisure, or via the activities undertaken, but must
instead be established through ‘modalities of action’ (1984, p. 29). What
distinguishes producers from consumers is the producers’ ability to
claim a space as their own and to dictate the ‘proper’ use of that space.
By contrast, consumers can only ‘use, manipulate, and divert these
spaces’ (1984, p. 30). Despite the consumer’s marginalised status, de
Certeau argues that ‘users make (bricolent) innumerable and infinitesimal
transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in
order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules’ (1984, p. 31).
Introduction
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