going once, going twice...

Auctions are odd affairs. I'm not thinking of expensive (Sotheby's) or specialty (art) auctions, or ebay. I speak of the consignment auction. Growing up in Youngstown, auctions were popular, albeit subcultural, attractions. When I taught at Miami U., I learned that auctions were also common in southwest Ohio, and Nicole and I regularly attended them. Here in Detroit, I don't know of any auctions, aside from car auctions and the now ubiquitous real-estate auctions that follow foreclosure.

Visiting Youngstown this past weekend, we went to two auctions and I realized that one of the things I miss about Ohio (either of the two opposite sides of the state where I've spent time living) is the auction.

Auctions and the people who attend them for fun and profit exist in a parallel universe. There's a class dynamic, as attendees lean toward working class. Both sub/urban working class and rural working class. There's also a broader cultural dynamic that relates to class but transcends class. Auction-goers resist many of the whims and fads of mass culture. They seem to fetishize objects and artifacts just as intensely, or moreso, but the objects and artifacts of attention vear further from the mainstream. Milk bottles. Pottery from occupied Japan. Sheet music from 1970s singer-songwriters.

I don't mean to draw some kind of broad and inaccurate dichotomy. Certainly many (most?) auction-goers collect antiquities by day and then go home and watch Lost or listen to music on an i-pod. (And certainly Yuppies attend auctions, although there are fewer and fewer middle-class folks in Youngstown or Hamilton.)

But I get the sense that many auction afficionados resist at least some elements of the mainstream. Dick Hebdidge writes that "subordinate groups...express obliquely, in style" a challenge to hegemony. Folks at auctions, to use Hebdidge's language, have style. They are subculture. Rooted in kitsch and retro, their cultural practices threaten the mainstream. For example, buying a crate of records for five bucks doesn't feed the economy the way dropping $50 at Best Buy does.

But is there political praxis? Certainly, and sadly, reactionary politics has a presence. Confederate flag bumper stickers (and this is Youngstown, hundreds of miles north of the Mason-Dixon), for example. I get the sense that auction-goers may be dissatisfied with the current trajectory of free-market capitalism ("Buy American" bumper stickers, too). Buying goods at an auction may or may not be a legitimate resistance to that trajectory. There's a sense at the auction that stuff from the mall is tainted by free trade, sullied by globalism. Maybe old stuff at an auction expresses a nostalgia, not only for a previous lifestyle (listening to music on vinyl, eating off a set of china from the '20s) but also for earlier, happier moments on capitalism's timeline (roaring 20s, baby boom, etc.).