ABSTRACT
In his preface to Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, Mike Featherstone remarks that ‘despite the populist turn in analyses of consumer culture some of the questions raised by the critical theorists such as “how to discriminate between cultural values”, “how to make aesthetic judgements”, and their relation to the practical questions of “how we should live”, it can be argued have not actually been superseded but have merely been put aside’ (Featherstone 1991: viii). I think this argument is true and in this article I want to think through both why this might be a problem and how we might be able to get such questions back on the agenda. These questions are the kind that arise in carrying out a critique: they are questions about how, on what principled basis, one can judge consumer culture, how one can come to conclusions about its wrongness or rightness, about its potential for developing or thwarting the kind of life one might want to live.
