ABSTRACT

The passion that Raymond Williams employs in his rationale for a new discipline is the element that Judith Williamson is pursuing in her study of consumer culture. In a sense she takes up Williams’s baton for she is concerned about what we buy and see and do and only too aware of the ever new social problems that ensue. In her introduction to Consuming Passions the problematic is contained in the first lines: ‘We are consuming passions all the time – at the shops, at the movies, in the streets, in the classroom: in the old familiar ways that no longer seem passionate because they are the shared paths of the social world, the known shapes of our waking dreams’. Like Williams, Williamson is concerned with and for the way we live now and, like Williams, is all for constructing a radical response. She turns first on the academics who she accuses of pursuing desire in a way that ‘is not unrelated to the obsession with “revealing” sex on every hoarding’. She pinpoints a vital feature of any study of mass culture, or anything else for that matter, when she points out: ‘People who study things aren’t fuelled by different drives from anyone else’.