ABSTRACT

We come, then, to the crux of the issue. We have studied and analyzed the history of consumption as it evolved in modernity, and we have explored the ongoing transformations in consumption, both in the construction of the meanings of consumption in (post)modern1 times and in the practices of consumption. At this juncture, then, where do we stand-we the people, consuming people? Is consumption consuming us, the people? Or can we turn things around so that we consume for ourselves, so that consumption is for us? Is it possible to have consumption of the people, by the people, for the people rather than consumption of people, qua consuming people? These are some of the central political, cultural, and philosophical questions of our time. Unlike modernity’s quest for the democratic rights of the individual subject-a quest that postmodernity transcends by taking these rights as given-the challenge for the postmodern era is to create or find (consumption?) processes that are liberating rather than repressing, diversifying rather than totalizing, connecting rather than alienating. While modernity waged its struggles at the barricades and ballot boxes, postmodernity carries on its discourse in an electronic sea of symbols, a sea of symbols that is technologically dynamic and culturally volatile. In modernity, production-its relations, its value, its controlwas the contested terrain. In postmodernity, consumption-its relations, its significations, its liberation-is the issue to grapple with.