ABSTRACT
The economic specialists who market postmodern consumer capitalism comprise a New Class of "cultural intermediaries" who "cater for and expand the range of styles and lifestyles available to audiences and consumers". The "colonization of the lifeworld" that Habermas detected is facilitated and extended by postmodernity. Baudrillard's "postmodern social theory obscures the extent to which 'radical semiurgy,' the proliferation of signs and images, is itself a function of the stage of capitalist development". In Baudrillard early work on the "Political Economy of the Sign," for instance, he acknowledged that the Marxist "code of political economy" is "the fundamental code of people society". Marxists are often accused of treating ordinary individuals as "cultural dopes" who are riddled through and through with "false consciousness". Postmodern culture develops and encourages a further elaboration and development of the bricolage of personal style. Yet because postmodern culture erases the distinction between such style and "inner" identity, it does nothing for individualization.
