ABSTRACT
When Featherstone (1990) reviewed developments in the sociology of consumer culture at the end of the 1980s, he identified three analytic perspectives. The first he called the ‘production of consumption’ approach, which focused on the disproportionate power of capitalist producers and the nature of the commodity. A view associated initially with the Frankfurt School, it has been more recently developed in the early work of Baudrillard (1998[1970]) and by Jameson (1984) who depicted post-modern culture as an effect of the logic of the commodity in late capitalism. The second perspective he referred to as the ‘modes of consumption’ approach. This concentrated on the role of consumption in social classification, because ‘the symbolic associations of goods may be utilized and renegotiated to emphasize differences in lifestyles which demarcate social relationships’ (Featherstone 1990: 8). The work of Pierre Bourdieu was singled out for particular attention because of his analysis of the way in which cultural capital generated a knowledge of and conflict over legitimate taste, around which social classification was accomplished. Featherstone suggested that the proliferation of commodities in consumer culture made this process of classification less straightforward because it became more difficult to read displays of goods as signs of social status. The third perspective, not yet fully formed, was more heterogeneous, being concerned with the ‘dreams, images and pleasure’ associated with consumer culture. Featherstone pulled out some aspects of post-modern culture for scrutiny. He suggested that attention be paid to: issues of excess and waste (after the fashion of Bataille); carnivalesque events; the ‘dream worlds’ of department stores and arcades (following Walter Benjamin); the creative potential of mass culture and the apparent collapse of the boundary between high and popular culture instigated by post-modernism; the aestheticisation of everyday life; and the collapse of the boundary between the artistic avant garde and the new petite-bourgeoisie represented in the plural lifestyles of the new cultural intermediaries.
