Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

Mike Featherstone

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412910149, 9781412910132
• eBook ISBN: 9781446225004
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Modern and Postmodern: Definitions and Interpretations

Any reference to the term ‘postmodernism’ immediately exposes one to the risk of being accused of jumping on a bandwagon, of perpetuating a rather shallow and meaningless intellectual fad. One of the problems is that the term is at once fashionable yet irritatingly elusive to define. As the ‘Modern-day Dictionary of Received Ideas’ confirms, ‘This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible’ (Independent, 24 December 1987). Over a decade earlier, in August 1975, another newspaper announced that ‘postmodernism is dead’, and that ‘post-post-modernism is now the thing’ (Palmer, 1977: 364). If postmodernism is an ephemeral fashion then some critics are clear as to who are responsible for its prominence:

today’s paid theorists surveying the field from their booklined studies in polytechnics and universities are obliged to invent movements because their careers – no less than those of miners and fishermen – depend on it. The more movements they can give names to, the more successful they will be. (Pawley, 1986)

For other critics these strategies are not just internal moves within the intellectual and academic fields; they are clear indicators and barometers of the ‘malaise at the heart of contemporary culture’. Hence ‘It is not difficult to comprehend this cultural and aesthetic trend now known as Postmodernism – in art and architecture, music and film, drama and fiction – as a reflection of … the present wave of political reaction sweeping the Western world’ (Gott, 1986). But it is all to easy to see postmodernism as a reactionary, mechanical reflection of social changes and to blame the academics and intellectuals for coining the term as part of their distinction games. Even though certain newspaper critics and para-intellectuals use the term in a cynical or dismissive manner, they confirm that postmodernism has sufficient appeal to interest a larger middle-class audience. Few other recent academic terms can claim to have enjoyed such popularity. Yet it is not merely an academic term, for it has gained impetus from artistic ‘movements’ and is also attracting wider public interest through its capacity to speak to some of the cultural changes we are currently going through.

Before we can look at the means of transmission and dissemination of the concept, we need a clearer notion of the range of phenomena which are generally included under the umbrella concept postmodernism. We therefore need to take account of the great interest and even excitement that it has generated, both inside and outside the academy, and to ask questions about the range of cultural objects, experiences and practices which theorists are adducing and labelling postmodern, before we can decide on its political pedigree or dismiss it as merely a short swing of the pendulum.

In the first place the broad range of artistic, intellectual and academic fields in which the term ‘postmodernism’ has been used, is striking. We have music (Cage, Stockhausen, Briers, Holloway, Tredici, Laurie Anderson); art (Rauschenberg, Baselitz, Mach, Schnabel, Kiefer; some would also include Warhol and 1960s pop art, and others Bacon); fiction (Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, and the novels of Barth, Barthelme. Pynchon, Burroughs, Ballard, Doctorow); film (Body Heat, The Wedding, Blue Velvet, Wetherby); drama (the theatre of Artaud); photography (Sherman, Levine, Prince); architecture (Jencks, Venturi, Bolin); literary theory and criticism (Spanos, Hassan, Sontag, Fiedler); philosophy (Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Rorty); anthropology (Clifford, Tyler, Marcus); sociology (Denzin); geography (Soja). The very names of those included and excluded in the list will doubtless strike some as controversial. To take the example of fiction, as Linda Hutcheon (1984: 2) argues, some would wish to include the novels of García Márquez and even Cervantes under the heading of postmodernism and others would want to refer to them as neobaroque and baroque. Scott Lash would want to regard Dada as postmodernism avant la lettre (Lash, 1988). There are those who work and write unaware of the term’s existence and others who seek to thematize and actively promote it. Yet it can be argued that one of the functions of the interest in postmodernism on the part of critics, para-intellectuals, cultural intermediaries and academics has been to diffuse the term to wider audiences in different national and international contexts (this is one of the senses in which one can talk about the globalization of culture); and to increase the speed of interchange and circulation of the term between the various fields in the academy and the arts, which now want to, and have to, pay more attention to developments among their neighbours. In this sense it is possible that some greater agreement on the meaning of the term might eventually emerge as commentators in each particular field find it necessary to recapitulate and explain the multiplex history and usages of the term in order to educate new, academic audiences.

To work towards some preliminary sense of the meaning of postmodernism it is useful to identify the family of terms derived from ‘the postmodern’ and these can best be understood by contrasting them to those which derive from ‘the modern’.

modern	postmodern
modernity	postmodernity
modernité	postmodernité
modernization	postmodernization
modernism	postmodernism

If ‘the modern’ and ‘the postmodern’ are the generic terms it is immediately apparent that the prefix ‘post’ signifies that which comes after, a break or rupture with the modern which is defined in counterdistinction to it. Yet the term ‘postmodernism’ is more strongly based on a negation of the modern, a perceived abandonment, break with or shift away from the definitive features of the modern, with the emphasis firmly on the sense of the relational move away. This would make the postmodern a relatively ill-defined term as we are only on the threshold of the alleged shift, and not in a position to regard the postmodern as a fully fledged positivity which can be defined comprehensively in its own right. Bearing this in mind we can take a closer look at the pairings.

Modernity–postmodernity

This suggests the epochal meaning of the terms. Modernity is generally held to have come into being with the Renaissance and was defined in relation to Antiquity, as in the debate between the Ancients and the Moderns. From the point of view of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sociological theory, from which we derive much of our current sense of the term, modernity is contrasted to the traditional order and implies the progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social world (Weber, Tönnies, Simmel): processes which brought into being the modern capitalist-industrial state and which were often viewed from a distinctly antimodern perspective.

Consequently, to speak of postmodernity is to suggest an epochal shift or break from modernity involving the emergence of a new social totality with its own distinct organizing principles. It is this order of change that has been detected in the writing of Baudrillard, Lyotard and, to some extent, Jameson (Kellner, 1988). Both Baudrillard and Lyotard assume a movement towards a post-industrial age. Baudrillard (1983a) stresses that new forms of technology and information become central to the shift from a productive to a reproductive social order in which simulations and models increasingly constitute the world so that the distinction between the real and appearance becomes erased. Lyotard (1984) talks about the postmodern society, or postmodern age, which is premised on the move to a post-industrial order. His specific interest is in the effects of the ‘computerization of society’ on knowledge and he argues that the loss of meaning in postmodernity should not be mourned, as it points to a replacement of narrative knowledge by a plurality of language games, and universalism by localism. Yet Lyotard, like many users of the family of terms, sometimes changes register from one term to the next and switches usages. preferring more recently to emphasize that the postmodern is to be regarded as part of the modern. for example, in ‘Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix’ he writes ‘“postmodern” is probably a very bad term because it conveys the idea of a historical “periodization”. “Periodizing”, however, is still a “classic” or “modern” ideal. “Postmodern” simply indicates a mood, or better a state of mind’ (Lyotard, 1986–7: 209). The other interesting point to note about Lyotard’s use of postmodernity in The Postmodern Condition is that where he talks about the changes in knowledge accompanying the move to the post-industrial society he still conceives this as occurring within capitalism, adding weight to the argument of critics that the move to the postmodern society is undertheorized in Lyotard’s work (see Kellner, 1988). Although the move is assumed at some points, it is easier to avoid the accusations of providing a grand narrative account of the move to post-modernity and the eclipse of grand narratives, by insisting on a more diffuse notion of ‘mood’ or ‘state of mind’. Fredric Jameson (1984a) has a more definite periodizing concept of the postmodern. Yet he is reluctant to conceive of it as an epochal shift; rather postmodernism is the cultural dominant, or cultural logic, of the third great stage of capitalism, late capitalism which originates in the post-World War II era.

Lyotard’s invocation of a postmodern mood or state of mind points us towards a second meaning of modernity–postmodernity. The French use of modernité points to the experience of modernity in which modernity is viewed as a quality of modern life inducing a sense of the discontinuity of time, the break with tradition, the feeling of novelty and sensitivity to the ephemeral, fleeting and contingent nature of the present (see Frisby, 1985a). This is the sense of being modern associated with Baudelaire which, as Foucault (1986: 40) argues, entails an ironical heroicization of the present: the modern man is the man who constantly tries to invent himself. It is this attempt to make sense of the experience of life in the new urban spaces and nascent consumer culture, which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, which provided the impetus for the theories of modern everyday life in the work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin discussed by David Frisby (l985b) in his Fragments of Modernity. The experience of modernity also forms the subject matter of Marshall Berman’s (1982) book All That Is Solid Melts into Air in which he looks at the visions and idioms accompanying the modernization process which he pulls together under the term ‘modernism’. Berman discusses the modern sensibility that is manifest in a wide range of literary and intellectual figures from Rousseau and Goethe in the eighteenth century to Marx, Baudelaire, Pushkin and Dostoevsky in the nineteenth.

Apart from the confusing use of modernism to take in the whole of the experience and the culture that accompanied the modernization process, Berman and many of those who are currently trying to delineate the equivalent experience of postmodernity focus upon a particularly restrictive notion of experience: that which appears in literary sources and is so designated by intellectuals. But we have to raise the sociological objection against the literary intellectual’s licence in interpretating the everyday, or in providing evidence about the everyday lives of ordinary people. Of course, some intellectuals may have articulated well the experience of the shocks and jolts of modernity. Yet we need to make the jump from modernity or postmodernity as a (relatively restricted) subjective experience to outlining the actual practices and activities which take place in the everyday lives of various groups. Certainly the descriptions of subjective experience may make sense within intellectual practices, and within aspects of the practices of particular audiences educated to interpret these sensibilities, but the assumption that one can make wider claims needs careful substantiation.

To take an example of the alleged experience of postmodernity (or post-modernité), we can refer to Jameson’s (1984a) account of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. Jameson gives a fascinating interpretation of the experience of the new hyperspace of postmodern architecture, which, he argues, forces us to expand our sensorium and body. Yet we get little idea how individuals from different backgrounds actually experience the hotel, or better still, how they incorporate the experience into their day-to-day practices. Perhaps for them to interpret the experience as postmodern they need guidelines to make sense of things they may not fully notice, or view through inappropriate codes. Hence, if we want to understand the social generation and interpretation of the experience of postmodernity we need to have a place for the role of cultural entrepreneurs and intermediaries who have an interest in creating postmodern pedagogies to educate publics. The same can be said for two other features of postmodern culture identified by Jameson: the transformation of reality into images and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents. Here we can take an example which encompasses both features: the media, which tends to be central to many discussions of the postmodern sensibility (one thinks for example of Baudrillard’s simulational world, where ‘TV is the world’). Yet for all the alleged pluralism and sensitivity to the Other talked about by some theorists one finds little discussion of the actual experience and practice of watching television by different groups in different settings. On the contrary, theorists of the postmodern often talk of an ideal-type channel-hopping MTV (music television) viewer who flips through different images at such speed that she/he is unable to chain the signifiers together into a meaningful narrative, he/she merely enjoys the multiphrenic intensities and sensations of the surface of the images. Evidence of the extent of such practices, and how they are integrated into, or influence, the day-to-day encounters between embodied persons is markedly lacking. Thus while learned references to the characteristic experiences of postmodernity are important we need to work from more systematic data and should not rely on the readings of intellectuals. In effect we should focus upon the actual cultural practices and changing power balances of those groups engaged in the production, classification, circulation and consumption of postmodern cultural goods, something which will be central to our discussion of postmodernism below.

Modemization–postmodemization

On the face of it, both terms seem to sit unhappily amid discussion of modernity-postmodernity, modernism–postmodernism. Modernization has been regularly used in the sociology of development to point to the effects of economic development on traditional social structures and values. Modernization theory is also used to refer to the stages of social development which are based upon industrialization, she growth of science and technology, the modern nation state, the capitalist world market, urbanization and other infrastructural elements. (In this usage it has strong affinities with the first sense of modernity we discussed above.) It is generally assumed, via a loose base-superstructure model, that certain cultural changes (secularization and the emergence of a modern identity which centres around self-development) will result from the modernization process. If we turn to postmodernization it is clear that a concomitant detailed outline of specific social processes and institutional changes has yet to be theorized. All we have is the possibility of deriving the term from those usages of postmodernity which refer to a new social order and epochal shift mentioned above. For example, Baudrillard’s (1983a) depiction of a postmodern simulational world is based upon the assumption that the development of commodity production coupled with information technology have led to the ‘triumph of signifying culture’ which then reverses the direction of determinism, so that social relations become saturated with shifting cultural signs to the extent that we can no longer speak of class or normativity and are faced by ‘the end of the social’. Baudrillard, however, does not use the term ‘postmodernization’.

Yet the term does have the merit of suggesting a process with degrees of implementation, rather than a fully fledged new social order or totality. One significant context for the utilization of the term ‘postmodernization’ is the field of urban studies and here we can point to the writings of Philip Cooke (1988) and Sharon Zukin (1988a). For Cooke, postmodernization is an ideology and set of practices with spatial effects which have been notable in the British economy since 1976. Zukin also wants to use post-modernization to focus on the restructuring of socio-spatial relations by new patterns of investment and production in industry, services, labour markets and telecommunications. Yet, while Zukin sees postmodernization as a dynamic process comparable to modernization, both she and Cooke are reluctant to regard it as pointing to a new stage of society, for both see it as taking place within capitalism. This has the merit of focusing on processes of production as well as consumption and the spatial dimension of particular cultural practices (the redevelopment of downtowns and waterfronts, development of urban artistic and cultural centres. and the growth of the service class and gentrification) which accompany them.

Modemism–postmodemism

As with the pairing modernity–postmodernity, we are again faced with a range of meanings. Common to them all is the centrality of culture. In the most restricted sense, modernism points to the styles we associate with the artistic movements which originated around the turn of the century and which have dominated the various arts until recently. Figures frequently cited are: Joyce, Yeats, Gide, Proust, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Musil, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner in literature; Rilke, Pound, Eliot, Lorca, Valery in poetry; Strindberg and Pirandello in drama; Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Cézanne and the Futurist, Expressionist, Dada and Surrealist movements in painting; Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Berg in music (see Bradbury and McFarlane, 1976). There is a good deal of debate about how far back into the nineteenth century modernism should be taken (some would want to go back to the bohemian avant-garde of the 1830s). The basic features of modernism can be summarized as: an aesthetic self-consciousness and reflexiveness; a rejection of narrative structure in favour of simultaneity and montage; an exploration of the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain open-ended nature of reality; and a rejection of the notion of an integrated personality in favour of an emphasis upon the de-structured, de-humanized subject (see Lunn, 1985: 34 ff.). One of the problems with trying to understand postmodernism in the arts is that many of these features are appropriated into various definitions of postmodernism. The problem with the term, as with the other related terms we have discussed, revolves around the question of when does a term defined oppositionally to, and feeding off, an established term start to signify something substantially different?

According to Kohler (1977) and Hassan (1985) the term ‘postmodernism’ was first used by Federico de Onis in the 1930s to indicate a minor reaction to modernism. The term became popular in the 1960s in New York when it was used by young artists, writers and critics such as Rauschenberg, Cage, Burroughs, Barthelme, Fielder, Hassan and Sontag to refer to a movement beyond the ‘exhausted’ high modernism which was rejected because of its institutionalization in the museum and the academy. It gained wider usage in architecture, the visual and performing arts, and music in the 1970s and 1980s and then was rapidly transmitted back and forth between Europe and the United States as the search for theoretical explanations and justifications of artistic postmodernism shifted to include wider discussions of postmodernity and drew in, and generated an interest in, theorists such as Bell, Kriste...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Modern and Postmodern: Definitions and Interpretations
• 2 Theories of Consumer Culture
• 3 Towards a Sociology of Postmodern Culture
• 4 Cultural Change and Social Practice
• 5 The Aestheticization of Everyday Life
• 6 Lifestyle and Consumer Culture
• 7 City Cultures and Postmodern Lifestyles
• 8 Consumer Culture and Global Disorder
• 9 Common Culture or Uncommon Cultures?
• 10 The Globalization of Diversity
• 11 Modernity and the Cultural Question
• Bibliography
• Index