Consumer Culture and PostmodernismSAGE, 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:
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. |
From inside the book
Results 6-10 of 31
Page 17
... entails a seemingly 'natural' mastery not only of information (the autodidact 'memory man') but also of how to use and consume appropriately and with natural ease in every situation. In this sense the consumption of high cultural goods ...
... entails a seemingly 'natural' mastery not only of information (the autodidact 'memory man') but also of how to use and consume appropriately and with natural ease in every situation. In this sense the consumption of high cultural goods ...
Page 18
... entails a lifelong investment in cultural and symbolic capital and in time invested in maintaining consumption activities. Douglas and Isherwood (1980: 180) also remind us that ethnographic evidence suggests that the competition to ...
... entails a lifelong investment in cultural and symbolic capital and in time invested in maintaining consumption activities. Douglas and Isherwood (1980: 180) also remind us that ethnographic evidence suggests that the competition to ...
Page 19
... entail performing services and the production, marketing and dissemination of symbolic goods. Given conditions of an increasing supply of symbolic goods (Touraine, 1985), demand grows for cultural specialists and intermediaries who have ...
... entail performing services and the production, marketing and dissemination of symbolic goods. Given conditions of an increasing supply of symbolic goods (Touraine, 1985), demand grows for cultural specialists and intermediaries who have ...
Page 20
... entails the capacity to spot imposters. In this sense the newly arrived, the autodidact, will unavoidably give away signs of the burden of attainment and incompleteness of his/her cultural competence. Hence the new rich who may adopt ...
... entails the capacity to spot imposters. In this sense the newly arrived, the autodidact, will unavoidably give away signs of the burden of attainment and incompleteness of his/her cultural competence. Hence the new rich who may adopt ...
Contents
1 | |
13 | |
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 |
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Common terms and phrases
academic aesthetic aestheticization of everyday argued artistic and intellectual audiences avant-garde Baudelaire Baudrillard become Bourdieu carnivalesque central centres century changes China cities common culture concept consumer culture consumption contemporary counterculture critical cultural capital cultural intermediaries cultural sphere Culture & Society discussion economic Elias emergence emotional emphasis enclaved entails ernism example expansion experience fashion Featherstone flâneur forms gentrification global groups Habermas Hence high culture Ikegami images interest Jameson Japan knowledge lifestyle Lyotard mass culture means metanarratives middle class Ming Dynasty modernity modes Norbert Elias notion particular petite bourgeoisie popular culture postmod postmodern architecture postmodern art postmodern culture practices public sphere question R.H. Williams range refer role Scott Lash sense shift signs simulations social sociology specialists in symbolic structure style sumer symbol specialists symbolic hierarchies symbolic production taste tendencies theory tion Tokugawa tradition tural ture urban Weber Western
Popular passages
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