"When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping."
Consumerism is an acceptance of consumption as a way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. It makes a clear separation between producers and consumers. In a consumer society an individual's identity is tied to what s/he consumes. People living in consumer cultures have a tendency to satisfy social, emotional, and spiritual needs with material things.
For critics of consumerism, such as Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life), “the consumerist society has to rely on excess and waste” (p.38) The advent of consumerism augurs the era of ‘inbuilt obsolescence” and the insatiability of needs. New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires, and this dynamic makes individuals wish to do what is needed for the to enable the system to reproduce itself. Thus consumption is a “hedonic treadmill” (p.45). Its promises of satisfaction remain seductive only as long as the desire stays ungratified.
Read MoreIn " Avant-Garde and Kitsch", Clement Greenberg describes a second new cultural phenomenon that appeared in the industrial West: Kitsch. For Greenberg, the new urban masses lost their taste for the folk culture of the countryside, discovered a new capacity for boredom, and set up a pressure on society to provide them with a culture fit for their own consumption. For Greenberg, Kitsch is produced by a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry and erases the values that permit distinctions between good and bad art.
Read More"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. IX. "We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to its extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial." (Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 196) "The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration..." (Jameson, p. 62)
Any account of postmodernism must address the tangled relationship between its writing and its object. As Frederic Jameson admits, "I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters (of his book Postmodernism) are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodernism theory" or mere examples of it." Some disaffected critics claim that "A key to understanding the postmodern temper is that, for it, the distinction between truth and illusion has lost its purchase. " (Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, p.87)
Frederic Jameson is not quite so sure. He goes on to ask whether we can identify some "moment of truth" within the more evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern culture.
Read MoreAs Elizabeth Eisenstein points out in her study of Printing as an Agent of Social Change , the effect of printing on culture is generally ignored or considered to be so broad and self-evident that it is rarely studied, except by authors such as Marshall Macluhan, who she considers irresponsible. (see electronic media)
Read MoreThe tradition of Platonic and idealistic philosophy separates theory from practice in much the same way as it does mind from body, privileging in both cases the "conceptual" (or moral) over the "material".
Praxis philosophies give primacy to a theory of action. The original expression is Aristotle's and refers to a symbolically meaningful activity, whose very doing, not its result, is the fulfillment of a cultural commitment. It can be defined as meaning rather than function.
For the Frankfurt school in its earlier period, prior to 1937, truth was defined as "a moment of correct praxis." Subsequently, in the face of Fascism and Stalinism, the relation between theoretical truth and the political praxis of specific social groups began to appear increasingly remote.
Read MoreIn the progressivist accounts of European civilization, primitive attitudes come to be replaced by rational ones, just as primitive technologies are replaced by modern ones. But recourse to descriptions of the primitive are often motivated by the desire to criticize the civilized or the present. If civilization is thought to rely on "the renunciation of instinct" (Freud) then one is tempted to project a rejection of the modern on to the archaic.
Freud examines the contention that "what we call civilization is largely responsible for our misery, and we should be so much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions." (p.33) Freud adhered to the notion that individual development followed the lines of social development -- beginning with an animistic phase and then followed first by a religious and then by a scientific phase -- the biological notion that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." Thus the child is thought to be more primitive than the adult, just as the "primitive" individual is thought of as a child.
"The European belief in primitive magic has lead to a false distinction between primitive and modern cultures, and sadly inhibited comparative religion."
Read More"Surrounded by a world full of wonder and vigour, whose laws man will never understand (though he may sense their existence and long to know them), a world which reaches him in a few interrupted chords that leave his soul unsatisfied, man conjures into being the perfection that he lacks, and, creating a miniature world where the cosmic laws, though restricted, may appear complete in themselves, he gratifies the cosmogonic instinct within him." (Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonishen K nsten.)
"During the Middle Ages, spatial relations tended to be organized as symbols and values. The highest object in the city was the church spire, which pointed toward heaven and dominated all the lesser buildings, as the church dominated their hopes and fears." (Mumford, "the Monastery and the Clock"
Mircea Eliade locates the primary spatializing impulse of architecture the demarcation of sacred from profane. He studies sacred space and the ritual building of human habitation as parts of the modality of sacred experience. For Eliade, the sacred and the profane are two modalities of experience, each with its own world. The former experience takes place in a sacralized cosmos, while the latter desacralizes the world in order to assume a profane existence. An echo of this distinction is to be found in the relationship between philosophy and poetry. (see truth )
In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga, linking play to ritual, also emphasizes spatial separation from everyday life. (In a structuralist perspective, play and ritual are inverses of each other. eg. see time)
Read MoreOn ne nait pas femme; on le devient -- Simone de Beavoir
At its simplest, the distinction between sex and gender is between a physical difference and a cultural difference. Gender is the mapping of socially and ideologically important distinctions onto biological differences between the sexes. (see also sexuality.)
The distinction between sex and gender becomes important in arguments that lean towards social constructionism, in which gender is given more attention, and is presumably more open to change, than sex. Feminism asserts that gender is a fundamental category within which meaning and value are assigned to everything in the world, a way of organizing human social relations. In a further twist on the relation between culture and nature, Brian Massumi calls gendering the process by which a body is socially determined to be determined by biology.
Read MoreIn Totem and Taboo, Freud introduces the term taboo as a Polynesian word that means both sacred, consecrated and uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, unclean. The taboo seems to have a strength all its own. "Taboo restrictions have no grounds and are of unknown origins." (Standard Edtion, vol 13, p.18) nor are they subject to question.
Freud describes taboo as a magical power which is inherent in persons and spirits and can be conveyed by them through the medium of inanimate objects. He compares their dangerous charge to electricity and infection.
For Mary Douglas, taboos are reactions to events that seriously defy established lines of classification.
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