Ornamental Excess

Definition

Ornamental excess names the economic face of ornament: the expense of adorning understood not as waste to be minimized but as the very substance through which order is produced, registered and reproduced. Soulillou's account has three components. The economy of order: "Cosmetics are an economy of order, administering the ornamental costs to produce a symbolic yield. Kosméō in ancient Greek means 'I adorn,' 'I decorate,' and in doing so I produce order, I reproduce an order in initiating the appropriate expenses to honour a certain situation or figure" (p. 316) — adorning and ordering are one act ("not just decorate, then order, or order then decorate, but decoder if I may so put it," p. 316). This economy is not the "economy of restraint in which the expense is incurred in function of an economic rationality"; it is "a general economy in which the level of expense is set according to a symbolic rationality, in keeping with the status of the person" (pp. 316–317) — the warrant supplied by Norbert Elias's court society: "A high social circle obliges a member to own a house and ensure it is beautiful… it is in reality an expression of the ethos of lords" (quoted p. 317). The excess paradox: within this economy "nothing appears to be excessive" (p. 321) — "the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure," which is why "the ornamental expense is exclusively thought of in terms of legitimate or illegitimate, in keeping with a certain status" (p. 321); in the religious register, "there were never enough ornaments, neither in quality nor quantity, to pay homage to the divinity (the original meaning of 'magnificent' does not refer to beauty, but to the largesse of the expense)" (p. 321). The denunciation paradox: "the denouncement of the excessive use of ornament" is the classic call to order — yet each such denunciation "involves positions of power," and it sanctions not excess as such but a change in the hierarchies of legitimacy: expense is excess only from an order other than the one that sustains it. The concept connects ornament directly to the wiki's symbolic capital and taste analyses: ornamental expense is Bourdieu's distinction-economy avant la lettre, and the nineteenth-century "reformers of taste" are its stigmatizers — consigning to the decorative "whatever opposes it in… hegemonic strategy" (p. 322).

Key Thinkers

• Jacques Soulillou — the concept's theorist: kosméō as producing order in adorning; the general economy of symbolic rationality; the excess paradox and its status-legitimacy rule (2002/2006).
• Norbert Elias — the court-society warrant (quoted in the source): the beautiful house as "the ethos of lords," ornamental expense misread as waste by bourgeois morality (not yet paged — see log).
• Pierre Bourdieu — the sociological framework the status-legitimacy thesis parallels: expense as distinction, taste as classificatory judgement (see symbolic-capital).
• Thorstein Veblen — the conspicuous-consumption lineage the wiki's domestic-consumption sources carry (Lawrence): the ornamental expense whose "latent function" is status (not yet paged — see log).
• Immanuel Kant — the limit case the concept names from the other side: the desert islander for whom ornament, without a social order to honour, has no pleasure at all.

Related Concepts

• Ornamental Ground Plan — the encoding matrix the expense registers: ornamental cost assigns the body's place on the plan's vertical (status) axis.
• Symbolic Capital — the sociological reading of the same expense: ornament as capital conversion, its "symbolic yield" (p. 316).
• Taste — the tribunal that polices legitimacy: "bad taste" as the label for expense deemed illegitimate (atticism vs orientalism).
• Manifest and Latent Functions — the Veblen-lineage reading of possessions the ornamental expense instantiates: the latent status function of the beautiful house.
• Consumerism — the system the "economy of restraint" names: the bourgeois-morality view ("If he's going to fall into debt, why doesn't he lower his standard of living?") that the ethos of lords exceeds.
• The Decorative — the stigmatized side of the legitimacy divide: what the new order consigns to "the decorative" is the expense it cannot authorize.
• Call to Order — the denunciation of excess as the power-saturated mechanism that polices the ornamental economy's legitimacy hierarchies.
• Domestic Economy — the restrained economy the ornamental general economy contrasts with: household thrift vs status expense as two rationalities.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — the concept's source: cosmetics as "an economy of order, administering the ornamental costs to produce a symbolic yield" and kosméō's doubling of adorning and ordering (p. 316); the general economy vs the economy of restraint, expense set "according to a symbolic rationality, in keeping with the status of the person" (pp. 316–317); Elias's ethos of lords (p. 317); the excess paradox — excess as "a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure," "nothing appears to be excessive," the religious limit-case and "magnificent" as largesse (p. 321); and the Encyclopédie as "one of the last great Western texts to recall this – at the very moment it had run its course" (p. 321).
• source-notes/taylor-2006-a-roam-of-ones-own
• source-notes/wharton-codman-2006-the-historical-tradition

Open Questions

• "General economy" and "economy of restraint" are Georges Bataille's terms, but Bataille is nowhere named in the text. Is Soulillou's ornamental economy Bataille's general economy at the scale of the room — and what follows for the wiki's capitalism and consumerism registers if ornament is an economy that cannot be restrained without abolishing the order it expresses?
• If "nothing appears to be excessive" within the general economy (p. 321), then "excess" is never a property of objects but a verdict of legitimacy — does this dissolve the wiki's kitsch and "too decorative" registers into status-verdicts rather than aesthetic properties? Cf. Batchelor's chromophobia analysis of "the distracting din of colours and ornaments."
• The religious limit-case ("never enough ornaments… to pay homage to the divinity") names a legitimacy hierarchy in which expense is always justified. Are there secular interiors with the same structure — the museum, the monument, the national-symbolic interior — where the general economy still governs, or did the Encyclopédie's moment ("it had run its course") end the structure everywhere?
• The Elias warrant ties ornamental expense to the lords' ethos, and Soulillou notes bourgeois morality can only see "waste." The wiki's modest-income households (Madigan & Munro) buy by use-value and are judged by respectability — is respectability the economy-of-restraint's judgment-form, the ornamental general economy's class-other? See respectability, use-value.