Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

Front Cover
SAGE, 2007 M07 11 - 232 pages
The first edition of this contemporary classic can claim to have put ′consumer culture′ on the map, certainly in relation to postmodernism. This expanded new edition includes:
  • a fully revised preface that explores the developments in consumer culture since the first edition
  • a major new chapter on ′Modernity and the Cultural Question′
  • an update on postmodernism and the development of contemporary theory after postmodernism
  • an account of multiple and alternative modernities
  • the challenges of consumer culture in Japan and China.

The result is a book that shakes the boundaries of debate, from one of the foremost writers on culture and postmodernism of the present day.

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Contents

Definitions and Interpretations
1
2 Theories of Consumer Culture
13
3 Towards a Sociology of Postmodern Culture
28
4 Cultural Change and Social Practice
50
5 The Aestheticization of Everyday Life
64
6 Lifestyle and Consumer Culture
81
7 City Cultures and Postmodern Lifestyles
93
8 Consumer Culture and Global Disorder
110
9 Common Culture or Uncommon Cultures?
127
10 The Globalization of Diversity
142
11 Modernity and the Cultural Question
147
Bibliography
182
Index
198
Copyright

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Page 83 - Rather than unreflexively adopting a lifestyle, through tradition or habit, the new heroes of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle.
Page 67 - And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality . And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image.
Page 7 - ... a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life - from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself - can be said to have become 'cultural' in some original and as yet untheorized sense.
Page 18 - culture industry' is a targeted rather than an undifferentiated field, and lifestyle practices reflect the divisions of class and culture: . . . knowledge becomes important: knowledge of new goods, their social and cultural value, and how to use them appropriately. This is particularly the case with aspiring groups who adopt a learning mode towards consumption and the cultivation of a lifestyle. It is for groups such as the new middle class, the new working class and the new rich or upper class,...
Page 54 - This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and...
Page 80 - ... we are moving towards a society without fixed status groups in which the adoption of styles of life (manifest in choice of clothes, leisure activities, consumer goods, bodily disposition) which are fixed to specific groups have been surpassed.
Page 63 - ... the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life; the collapse of the hierarchical distinction between high and mass/popular culture; a stylistic promiscuity favouring eclecticism and the mixing of codes; parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness and the celebration of the surface "depthlessness...
Page 58 - ... the play of the real' and capacity to open up to surface sensations, spectacular imagery, liminoid experiences and intensities without the nostalgia for the real.
Page 67 - Today it is quotidian reality in its entirety - political, social, historical and economic - that from now on incorporates the simulatory dimension of hyperrealism. We live everywhere already in an "esthetic

References to this book

About the author (2007)

Mike Featherstone is Professor of Communications and Sociology at Nottingham Trent University.CONTRIBUTORS OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA :Zygmunt Bauman University of LeedsHenning Bech University of CopenhagenElizabeth Beck-Gernsheim Universtiy of ErlangenMary Evans University of Kent at CanterburyDavid Frisby University of GlasgowMike Hepworth University of AberdeenEva Illouz Tel-Aviv UniversityMaria Esther Maciel Universidade Federal de Minas GeraisMichael Richardson SOAS, University of LondonLaura Rival University of Kent at CanterburyAndrew Travers SomersetJeffrey Weeks South Bank UniversitySasha Weitman Tel-Aviv UniversitySam Whimster London Guildhall UniversityElizabeth Wilson University of North LondonCas Wouters University of Utrecht

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