WAYS OF SEEING, a critique of advertising, with John Berger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmgGT3th_oI

intros to sociology of consumption

Having read a few introductions to the sociology of consumption lately I can recommend the following: Peter Corrigan, The Sociology of Consumption, Celia Lury, Consumer Culture, Mark Paterson, Consumption and Everyday Life, and Roberta Sassatelli, Consumer Culture: history, theory and politics. The latter is probably the best overall and the most recent (07). Corrigan’s is the simplest (but still valuable). Here’s a quote from Sassatelli

‘As a normative cultural identity, the ‘consumer’ appears in striking continuity with hegemonic modern views of subjectivity. The dominant modern ideal of subjectivity depicts a unique and autonomous subject, independent of social contexts and material possessions which are in fact fundamental to the construction of identity.’

You don’t have to be middle class to be a postmodern philosopher but it helps

Mike Featherstone in Consumer culture and postmodernism, says that Habermas’ ‘dissatisfaction with Foucault and Derrida (and by association with Deleuze and Lyotard) was for endorsing a decentred boundless subjectivity, content to experience expressive intensities that were effectively derived from the postmodernist avant-garde which had sought to break down the boundaries between art and everyday life and hence gave primacy to aesthetic experiences and gestures over morality and communicative modes of truth’ (31). So some forms of postmodern philosophy actually advocate forms of subjectivity that are found in the middle classes of consumer culture. These postmodern philosophers thereby reveal their class situation. (This is somewhat ironic given many of them have Marxist positions). Admittedly most consumers may have learned to make ‘style’ the most important part of their ‘lifestyle’ but this suggests that their theories may be much less useful for understanding other subcultures in society.