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to achieve aesthetic synchronicity with the present and with their peers, each
in their own rhythm, through the appropriation of objects (Blumer 1969a;
Vejlgaard 2008). Some writers have also suggested that the domestic appropriation
of objects reflects a more general trend of aesthetisation, that is, the
increasing importance of aesthetics in everyday living (Noro 1995; Levanto et
al. 2005; Featherstone 2007).
There has been much less discussion about what the appropriation involves
and what needs to be in place for the appropriation to succeed. Turo-Kimmo
Lehtonen, in his research on shopping, notes that,
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It remains an open question what in the end makes the [purchasing] decision
and where it gets its power. All in all the deciding instance cannot completely
define the field where the decisions are made. When it is said that “individual
chooses”, we cannot refer to any stabile entirety but instead we talk
about a dam with which we have shackled an overflow of questions: how
the choosing individual is constructed, to what problems it is in relationship,
why and when? (Lehtonen 1999b 228)
Daniel Miller, too, points out that in most economic and political discussions,
the consumer is portrayed as a “mere choice”:
The fictive consumer of economic models, the aggregate of desocialised, individual,
rational choice-makers, the source of whose demands or desires is
understood as entirely irrelevant to politics as it was already to economics
[…] a consumer homogenised as choice, but also as mere choice. (Miller 1995a
15)
The domestication model, too, has its roots in the problematization of a choicemaking
individual, since the framework for the moral economy of the household
represents an attempt to bring the household, an informal and inherently
social agent, into the discussion concerning formal economy and policy making
(Silverstone 2005 1).
Miller continues his discussion by saying that consumption research needs
to “delve deeply into the nature of consumption as a social, cultural and moral
project” (Miller 1995a 17). This can be seen as a call to study consumption in
private domains. And, while studying the public domains of consumption has
in general been more popular than studying what takes place in private (Miller
1987 7), there is a strong, albeit scattered, body of literature focusing on private
settings, especially the home. The domestication framework itself is most