keeping a good fire

It is surprising how many people who call themselves materialists (cultural or otherwise) rarely comment on the most basic element of a society… energy. Reading Hoggart’s account of the housewife who can “keep a good fire,” he reminds us that “seventy years of cheap coal have ensured that most people have learned to use it lavishly, by most foreign standards” (35). Here we have an instance where part of the material base of the economy is brought out in a particular cultural practice: having, sharing, and seeing a large, warm, coal-fueled fire.

This fire not only mediates relations within the family by providing a common source of warmth and utility, by its very lavishness and the cheapness of the coal itself, it conceals other social relationships which make this family’s togetherness possible, namely, the relationship between the coal miners and the owners of the mine. Reading this brief account sixty years after it was written we might see this family fire inside the home as mediating and constituting a particular relationship to the outside.

This could be why there is today such a virulent reaction to calls for conservation of energy or curtailing of consumption. When things as crass and “external” as geological deposits of petroleum or bauxite (and the people who live on those deposits) all of the sudden appear or are implicated in our most intimate of encounters, it IS unsettling. This is why I believe that in the 21st century the materialism of culture, the very matter (and material possibilities) which comprise the objects, relationships, and people in question, will be laid bare in environmental discourses on habitation itself.

Raymond Williams is apt to disagree with R.E. Warner’s statement that “capitalism has no further use for culture” (270). Every commercial we see now is about creativity. Energy companies market themselves by highlighting the ingenuity of their human (mental) laborers and never mention the US soldiers who protect the supply lines from the insurgent locals. The US military now hires cultural anthropologists to put a more human face on occupations, literally going into people’s homes. It seems as if the only way capitalist modernization can continue, to keep economies expanding on increasingly difficult-to-obtain supplies of material resources, culture itself needs to be mobilized as a supplement.

If we wish to go on keeping good fires and good tables we will have to reconstitute the base. Both Williams and Hoggart highlight the role of culture in making this possible.