ABSTRACT
The cultures of advanced capitalist or postmodern societies are often characterized by their saturation with visual media. For many critics, the visualization of daily life has affected an epochal shift in the realm of identity, politics and representation, subjecting the most intimate realms of identity and selfhood to subtle and pervasive commodification processes. Scholars of contemporary culture have produced a surfeit of theories describing postmodern culture as an expression of visual, spectacular and imagistic media, whose ultimate end result is the decentring of a once unified subjectivity. The lifestyles of the new middle classes and the new cultural intermediaries express the desire to relinquish the mechanisms of self-control which secure aesthetic distances and maintain outmoded classificatory schemes. A discourse of lifestyle tied to the counterculture emerged in the US in a print culture that had many specific points of origin, from struggling rural communes to small urban cooperative groups.
