ABSTRACT
This is the project of turning one’s life into a work of art’ (1994: 75). The key notion here seems to be that consumerism is now inextricably linked to an expanding culture of aesthetics wherein to look good is to be good – or, as the mass media insist on telling us, ‘image is everything’. For slightly different reasons, other commentators also point to consumerism as a potentially liberating phenomenon (see Miller 1995). De Certeau (1984), for example, has suggested that resistance and oppositional practices have a vital role to play in the consumption process. Consider the influence that consumer lobby groups (or indeed the public more generally) had in bringing about recent changes in manufacturers’ production and purchasing processes. One thinks immediately of the recent volte-face by major British supermarkets in response to widespread public opposition to genetically modified foods, the rise of organic and ecologically sustainable products and, most recently, the new ‘ethical eating movement’. (Of course, from a Foucauldian perspective, this resistance itself might simply be seen as just another part of the very mechanisms of power: see Zizek on Butler’s account of Foucault in Butler et al 2000.)
Sharply contradicting this position is the more established classical view that casts consumerism in a more negative role. Here it is suggested that the prevailing ethos of consumerism will result only in the continued rise of individualism and the ‘death of the social’. There is no room here for the idea that the so-called ‘postmodern consumer’ might somehow represent the ‘hero of the age’ (compare with even the supposed ‘consumer led’ economic recovery post 9/11), capable of ‘transcending structural and class hierarchies’ and ‘renegotiating urban relations’. In fact, such thinking is dismissed as little more than theoretical abstraction. Instead, the point is stressed that many of the practices and processes associated with late modern consumer culture, by their very nature, must exclude as many individuals as they include (possibly even more), thus creating an environment in which the distinction between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ becomes ever-sharper (see Bauman 1987: 149-69, 1998; Clarke and Bradford 1998). Furthermore, it is argued that theories of consumption that overplay the self-valorising potential of consumer culture are deeply troubling in the sense that they focus myopically on the consumption practices of the so-called ‘new middle-classes’ or ‘new petit bourgeoisie’ (middle income earners who perpetuate shared values based around standard of living, expressive ‘lifestyles’ and, importantly, consumption patterns),9 and thus tend to ignore other major demographic groups such as senior citizens and the unwaged (compare Taylor et al 1996; and Miller 1995: 34-39).
