Mike Featherstone

The body in consumer culture

In his paper ’The Discourse of Diet’, Bryan Turner (1982) drew attention to the role of dietary management in the production of docile, disciplined bodies. Concluding in a speculative vein, Turner (1982, p 14) remarked that the emerging problem of ageing populations within late capitalist society has pushed a new discourse, demography, to the fore ’centred on a regime of diet, jogging and cosmetics to control the alienated and disaffected citizens of retirement compounds.’ This statement, which we will take as our point of departure, curiously draws together diet, cosmetics and jogging under the rubric of demography yet these activities have already had their meaning pro-defined within the context of a consumer culture. The vast range of dietary, slimming, exercise and cosmetic body maintenance products which are currently produced, marketed and sold point to the significance of appearance and bodily presentation within late capitalist society. Consumer culture latches onto the prevalent self-preservatlonist conception of the body, which encourages the individual to adopt instrumental strategies to combat deterioration and decay (applauded too by state bureaucracies who seek to reduce health costs by educating the public against bodily neglect) and combines it with the notion that the body is a vehicle of pleasure and self-expression. Images of the body beautiful, openly sexual and associated with hedonism, leisure and display, emphasise the importance of appearance and the ’look’.

Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture

This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: that a person’s inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transformative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies.

Perspectives on consumer culture

Three accounts of consumer culture are discussed in this paper. The first one, the production of consumption perspective, presents the culture which develops around the accumulation of commodities as leading to greater manipulation and control. The second, the mode of consumption perspective, focuses upon the way in which goods are variably used to create distinctions and reinforce social relationships. The third perspective examines the emotional and aesthetic pleasures, the desires and dreams generated within particular sites of consumption and by consumer culture imagery. In addition the paper discusses the alleged tendencies towards cultural disorder and de-classification within consumer culture which some refer to as postmodernism.

Cosmopolis An Introduction

IN THE recent phase of globalization in the wake of expanding marketization and reactive nationalisms, there has been a revival of interest in cosmopolitanism.1 For some, the term holds out the prospect of global democratization along with the hope that cosmopolitan groups will be in the forefront of establishing values, institutions and lifestyles which are less directly embedded within nation-state societies. For others, the cosmopolitan is a figure to be reviled as it has become associated with ‘the revolt of the elites’, the inability of upper and middle class groups to sustain a sense of responsibility towards the growing numbers of the excluded around the world. These mobile elites, who enjoy the freedom of physical movement and communication, stand in stark contrast to those who are confined to place, whose fate is to remain located (Lasch, 1996; see also Bauman, 2000; Featherstone, 2000a, 2001; Urry, 2000). Equally harsh in its judgement of cosmopolitanism is the perspective which presents the cosmopolitan as dabbling rootlessly in a variety of cultures. This view of the cosmopolitan as voyeur, parasite, or some sort of cultural tourist again emphasizes this incapacity to form lasting attachments and commitments to place and others, the inability to participate in a community for which one feels obliged to make sacrifices. This restless pursuit of experience, aesthetic sensations and novelty, over duties, obligations and social bonds, is allegedly something which best fits anglophone societies such as the United States and Britain, in which the market values of the trader, who looks, deals and moves on, are often seen to be key formative features of the current world-view (See Featherstone, 1995, ch. 8). This raises two related questions. First, the extent to which cosmopolitan dispositions are closely associated with cities. Cities have long been the sites for markets and the mixing of people, commodities, ideas and

Problematizing Global Knowledge and the New Encyclopaedia Project: An Introduction

Theory, Culture & Society will commemorate its 25th anniversary in 2007. This provides us with the opportunity to reflect on the project of a journal committed to theorizing culture and society. Since its inception the journal has endeavoured to promote and debate innovative or challenging theory, for example, in special issues and sections devoted to postmodernism, globalization, reflexive modernization, digitalization, multiculturalism, performativity, vitalism, complexity and so on. As to be expected, the prime focus has been on theorizing culture and society in the context of profound changes in the contemporary world, and the emergence of new interdisciplinary fields of study in the social sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, even though ‘the new’ and ‘progress’ have been subjected to persistent critique in the pages of this journal, we need to reflect more on the relevance and impact of our theorizations in the circuits of global knowledge. This raises questions not only about the authority of our formulations, but also about the addressee. The analysis of the globalization of culture and knowledge has been a central concern of the journal, yet it is also important to give greater consideration to our participation in the globalization of a western-centric knowledge. This is especially the case if we remain confident that the theorizations we feature are necessarily legitimated because they are the latest, and by corollary the most advanced. In this special issue we seek to refocus attention on these questions and address the topic of the globalization of knowledge and its critique. As will become clearer in this introduction, the development of the New Encyclopaedia Project has enabled us to think through these issues about the production and circulation of knowledge in a way which opens up a more dialogical space of engagement with different globalizing knowledges and their modes of authorization. In considering these questions, we are trying to use, in what we hope proves to be a new way, an old form, namely, the encyclopaedia. A great deal of discussion and experimentation has gone into both the epistemological and the practical problems of how to reactivate this form as a forum for critique and for the production of new knowledge that would reflect the plurality of perspectives and interests that emerge in the flux of globalization and digitalization. Our overall goal is to open up the process of production and authorization of knowledge to greater questioning, along with the generation of new agendas for research that are sensitive to the broader questions of relevance, authority and public education.

Consumer culture: an introduction

The first special issue of TCS brings together a collection of papers which illustrate our intention of publishing theoretically informed analyses of both substantive cultural processes and everyday popular culture. Under the rubric of consumer culture we have Included studies of some of the major institutions, representational forms and experience of consumerism (the department store,advertising, spectator sport, women’s magazines, the comic strip and popular music) as well as papers which attempt to chart the place of consumerism within broader historical and cultural processes. The term consumer culture points to the impact of mass consumption on everyday life which has led to the gearing of social activities around the accumulation and consumption of an ever-increasing range of goods and experiences. New modes of cultural representation ensure the proliferation of images which saturate the fabric of social life with a mbl6e of signs and messages which summon up new expressive and hedonistic definitions of the good life. Consumer culture cannot however be equated with contemporary culture per se, its transformative efforts encounter stubborn resistance from both the residue of tradition and the new set of oppositional practices and counter-tendencies it generates. Indeed, the project may

Genealogies of the Global

The term global suggests all-inclusiveness and brings to mind connectivity, a notion that gained a boost from Marshall McLuhans reference to the mass-mediated ‘global village’. In the past decade it has rapidly become part of the everyday vocabulary not only of academics and business people, but also has circulated widely in the media in various parts of the world. There have also been the beginnings of political movements against globalization and proposals for ‘de-globalization’ and ‘alternative globalizations’, projects to re-define the global. In effect, the terminology has globalized and globalization is varyingly lauded, reviled and debated around the world. The rationale of much previous thinking on humanity in the social sciences has been to assume a linear process of social integration, as more and more people are drawn into a widening circle of interdependencies in the movement to larger units, but the new forms of binding together of social life necessitate the development of new forms of global knowledge which go beyond the old classifications. It is also in this sense that the tightening of the interdependency chains between human beings, and also between human beings and other life forms, suggests we need to think about the relevance of academic knowledge to the emergent global public sphere.

Body Image/Body without Image

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble. New York and London: Routledge. Dean, T. (2000) ‘Transcending Gender’, in Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Ekins, R. and D. King (1999) ‘Towards a Sociology of Transgendered Bodies’, Sociological Review “http://www.ingenta connect.com/content/bpl/sore” 47(3): 580–602. Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Feinberg, L. (1992) Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come. New York: World View Forum. Garfinkel, H. (1967) ‘Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an Intersexed Person’, in Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Ubiquitous Media An Introduction

THE PAPERS in this special issue have been drawn from the Ubiquitous Media: Asian Transformations Conference held at the University of Tokyo in July 2007 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Theory, Culture & Society.1 The idea of the conference originated from previous cooperation between Mike Featherstone, Shunya Yoshimi, Scott Lash, Couze Venn and others, going back to the development work on the Theory, Culture & Society New Encyclopaedia Project (which led to the ‘Problematizing Global Knowledge’ special issue – Featherstone et al., 2006).2 In seeking to grapple with the nature of contemporary knowledge formation, the processes of globalization and digitalization became seen as important axes for making sense of the changes taking place in the production, circulation and practical use of academic and intellectual knowledge today. One of our aims was to think through the problems of concept formation and knowledge classification, in the light of the critiques of Western-centred accounts of the rise of modernity (Featherstone, 2007). Not only in the sense of attempts to explore alternative genealogies and redress the ‘theft of history’, and theoretical-logical accounts driven by dubious notions of superior Western cultural resources (see forthcoming TCS special section on ‘Jack Goody on Occidentalism and Comparative History’ [esp. Goody, 2006; Friedman, forthcoming]). But also in the concern to take into account the shifting global balance of power away from the West towards Asia and China in particular, which has the potential for the de-stabilization and even the de-classification of Western knowledge along with its universalistic assumptions of providing generic categories (Featherstone, 1995: ch. 8, 2000, 2006). This suggests not only the potential for introducing new content, but shifts in disciplinary structures and sets of theoretical categories. But additionally, and more fundamentally, it points to the reconstruction of the archive, as new sets of relevances come into prominence, which can lead

The midlifestyle of George and Lynne: notes on a popular strip

’George and Lynne’ is a comic strip which appears each day in one of Britain’s most popular newspapers, The Sun. The central characters are an affluent married couple living in a spacious house on the banks of a river. George has an executive (though unspecified) position with a commercial organisation and Lynne, who has no children to look after, stays at home. They have a large number of friends, plenty of clothes and other material possessions, and enjoy a happy marriage and active social life. As portrayed in the strip their lifestyle, as we shall see below, is an expression of contemporary consumer culture and in particular a celebration of the naked (or almost naked) human body (Featherstone 1982).