What do you think?
Rate this book
ثقافة الاستهلاك وما بعد الحداثة
If a society is postmodern, it must prioritize the consumption of resources in everyday life. In this view, mass media advertising and market dynamics lead us to a constant search for new fashions, new styles, new sensations, and new experiences. In this volume, Featherstone examines the idea of a postmodern society. He explores the roots of consumer culture, how it is defined and differentiated and the extent to which it represents the arrival of a "postmodern" world. He examines the theories of consumption and postmodernism among contemporary social theorists and relates these to the actual nature of contemporary consumer culture. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism will interest academics and professionals in the areas of sociology, social theory, cultural studies, economics and anthropology. "Several of Mike Featherstone's chapters address topics that are immediately recognizable to marketing researchers. . . . In exploring these issues the author reveals a strong grounding in sociological theory and research, leading to some penetrating interpretive insights about contemporary consumer life. Uncovering the sociocultural significance of these particular consumption developments is Featherstone's chief concern. . . . He does an admirable job." --Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science "Featherstone neatly integrates recent ideas, models and writings concerning consumer capitalism, postindustrialism and postmodernity. . . . The author has taken great pains to develop (his) ideas clearly and to make the esoteric accessible to the literate." --Cooperative Economics News Service ". . . [Featherstone's book] can be recommended. . . . A worthwhile effort to open up a relatively undeveloped field." --Peter R. Grahame, Bentley College in Massachusetts ". . . precisely the sort of text which is necessary to read to escape from our productivist preconceptions. . . . The text must be recommended wholeheartedly to all those in industrial relations who wish to have their noninstitutional lives illuminated for them." --British Journal of Industrial Relations "Of great value to social scientists seeking a guide to the growing literature on the intersection of these two processes, which can no longer be considered peripheral concerns of contemporary sociology." --Humanity and Society
287 pages, Paperback
First published December 7, 1990
14 people are currently reading
549 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 2, 2020
If you wanted to pick two of the hardest words to define, you could hardly do worse than to pick Post-modernism and Culture. Culture isn’t made any easier to define by sticking ‘consumer’ in front of it. In fact, Raymond Williams, in his wonderful book Keywords (a book I read and thought I’d reviewed, but now must get around to) famously refers to Culture as “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” Featherstone also quotes the Modern-day Dictionary of Received Ideas for a definition of Postmodernism, which says, “This word has no meaning. Use it as often as possible.” Despite every word in the title being a nightmare, this book is easier to read than you might expect.
A lot of nonsense is said about post-modernism. Some of that nonsense is even said by people who call themselves postmodernists. I think the main thing to notice with post-modernism is that the term isn’t a particularly self-confident one. Any term that defines itself by what it is not is generally anything but self-confident – no matter how much its followers strut. ‘Atheist’ is another term based on a negative. Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself an atheist, but I also acknowledge it’s essential negativity. I think this is part of the reason why so many atheists seem to want to set up their own churches. Marx’s famous quote that religion is the opium of the people is born of this idea of the essential negativity of atheism. That is, Marx saw that religion offers pain relief to the masses. To take religion away from people without offering something else to remove their pain (Marx’s plan for a paradise on earth) seems cruel to the point of viciousness.
Post-modernism is the something that comes after modernism that as yet isn’t confident enough to speak its own name. Or rather, perhaps it is something that is yet to know what it truly is. All that is certain is that what now ‘is’ simply isn’t modernism.
Modernism has a solidity to it that post-modernism can no longer claim. We can use Marx again as an example. Marx presented a theory that is criticised by many post-modernists because it is a ‘grand narrative’. That is, it looks quite true if you accept its premises, if you do that then you will end up with its solutions. But there are other premises, and these can lead to other solutions. Which one is ultimately true? Well, it depends. Rather than the class struggle being the motive force of history, others have proposed that racial conflict is more central. Others that gender forms a truer basis for understanding the fundamental questions of human inequality. Others again have said that there is no single basis for making these determinations, but that we need to look at how they all intersect. For Foucault, for example, all is power and power struggles. Power is inevitable and eternal. The perspective of everyone within these relations of power is as valid as that of all of the others. This is often presented as a crazy form of relativism – and it is clearly ‘relative’, but I’m not sure it is quite so crazy. It seems hard for me to imagine anyone really arguing that a rich old white man and a young disabled black woman walking through ‘the same’ railway station are really experiencing the same thing. And if they are not experiencing the same thing, in what sense are their truths not relative? Relative and contingent upon their social location and the truths they experience in that? This isn’t saying there is ‘no truth’ – just that there is no master truth, no ultimate truth, outside of the embodied and contingent truths as these people experience them.
And this contingency is becoming increasingly the case. One of the ironies of capitalism is that for a system based on mass production, it increasingly encourages people to atomise, particularly in asserting their own individuality. A lot of this book is devoted to this theme – the theme of autopoiesis (self-creation), even if that isn’t a term he actually uses here. Rather he talks of the aetheticization of everyday life or of our self-created lifestyles. The point is much the same. Capitalism encourages us, through consumer culture, to turn ourselves into works of art, where our bodies and our houses become canvases to symbolically represent the people we truly are. And if decide we do not like who we have become, well, there is always someone else, someone who is also us, who is only a purchase or two away from becoming yet another version of our true selves.
This means that culture becomes increasingly important in being able to distinguish ourselves both as we exist as individuals and to the extent that we choose to belong to groups of people. And here the author turns to Bourdieu. We do not only choose our choices, but we are chosen by our choices too. As Bourdieu says, we are classifiers, but how we classify the world also classifies us. You see this most clearly, perhaps, on TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy – this is something I feel completely competent to speak about, because I did see an episode of this show once years ago. The premise of the show is that straight guys have zero taste, and so they need the superior taste of homosexual males to teach them how to not spill beer on their clothes, to learn how to tuck their shirt in and to take a shower. What is more likely to be going on in this show isn’t necessarily a gay verses straight view of the world, but rather class shaming dressed up as gendered stereotypes.
Each group in society is playing a game of position and those with the most resources (financial, educational, social, physical) get to trade those resources to sustain various positions. There was a time when the upper class did this by knowing more about high-art – they were the ones who could tell a Rothko from a Ravel – but today even low art is dominated by the upper classes. This is also noted somewhere by Bourdieu who says that whether it is jazz, cinema, pop music – the higher up the social gradient you go, the more likely it is that the people there will have a broader and fuller knowledge of just about any topic. As social tastes become those of cultural omnivores, only those with the time to be able to sample across the full range of dishes on offer can ever really become such omnivores.
A lot of this book nods directly at Baudrillard. Again, this is because much of culture is symbolic representations and capitalism has ratchetted this to the point where we are inundated with symbols and simulations so that ultimately everything is valued for its symbolic value. This symbolic overload is not limited to the endless world of advertising, or even to film and TV, but even toothpaste is branded – and what does branding mean? It means we buy our toothpaste as much for the symbolic representation linked to it as for its ability to whiten our teeth and freshen our breath and make our dentists proud of us…
This book didn’t end quite as I had expected. We pivot to globalisation and to a test of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Weber’s idea being that the Protestant states of Europe did not only out-do the Catholic ones due to their Calvinist notions of work, but that they clearly also out-did the rest of the world as well, Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu, which are all alike essentially defined as being incapable of developing the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to acquire the true nature of capitalism. Before you smile, there are books still being written on this topic today, long after Said has died. Orientalism lives on. Featherstone deconstructs this idea – central to notions of Western exceptionalism (WEIRD anyone?) – by discussing at length movements within China and Japan, tracing these back to interactions between China and the Arab world going back to when ‘the West’ was still deep in the dark ages.
The post-modernism referenced here is one that recognises shades of grey, rather than the black-and-white of much of Modernist thought. This book provides a scan across a lot of post-modern thought in language that is relatively easy to read, but not so simple that you will assume you are learning nothing at all.
I’ve taken a few things from this book in particular. One is the idea not actually discussed as such, but that collage and montage need to be attended to – while these are art forms often associated with the left, they are perhaps best understood as hinting towards our common experience of life in late-stage capitalism. This is again Baudrillard’s point of the avalanche of symbols we are swept along by. Turn the sound off on the television for five minutes and try to count the separate images that flash across the screen. This ought to be particularly effective if you are watching commercial television. All is montage now. If patterns exist at all, they are mere moments within what otherwise seems an endless, chaotic flow. But this book makes it clear that montage has been (and always has been) part of what late-stage capitalism ‘means’. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins’ is the high art enactment of this all-too-central mode of capitalist expression. Our self-creation, as entrepreneurs of the self, enacting our autopoiesis, is only possible on the basis of an over-abundance of images and symbols from which we can draw, choose, and in turn be chosen from.
I hope this review isn’t too much harder to read than the book itself, that really is a possibility. But I’m trying to work my way through a lot of these ideas and am not sure how far I am getting.
A lot of nonsense is said about post-modernism. Some of that nonsense is even said by people who call themselves postmodernists. I think the main thing to notice with post-modernism is that the term isn’t a particularly self-confident one. Any term that defines itself by what it is not is generally anything but self-confident – no matter how much its followers strut. ‘Atheist’ is another term based on a negative. Don’t get me wrong, I consider myself an atheist, but I also acknowledge it’s essential negativity. I think this is part of the reason why so many atheists seem to want to set up their own churches. Marx’s famous quote that religion is the opium of the people is born of this idea of the essential negativity of atheism. That is, Marx saw that religion offers pain relief to the masses. To take religion away from people without offering something else to remove their pain (Marx’s plan for a paradise on earth) seems cruel to the point of viciousness.
Post-modernism is the something that comes after modernism that as yet isn’t confident enough to speak its own name. Or rather, perhaps it is something that is yet to know what it truly is. All that is certain is that what now ‘is’ simply isn’t modernism.
Modernism has a solidity to it that post-modernism can no longer claim. We can use Marx again as an example. Marx presented a theory that is criticised by many post-modernists because it is a ‘grand narrative’. That is, it looks quite true if you accept its premises, if you do that then you will end up with its solutions. But there are other premises, and these can lead to other solutions. Which one is ultimately true? Well, it depends. Rather than the class struggle being the motive force of history, others have proposed that racial conflict is more central. Others that gender forms a truer basis for understanding the fundamental questions of human inequality. Others again have said that there is no single basis for making these determinations, but that we need to look at how they all intersect. For Foucault, for example, all is power and power struggles. Power is inevitable and eternal. The perspective of everyone within these relations of power is as valid as that of all of the others. This is often presented as a crazy form of relativism – and it is clearly ‘relative’, but I’m not sure it is quite so crazy. It seems hard for me to imagine anyone really arguing that a rich old white man and a young disabled black woman walking through ‘the same’ railway station are really experiencing the same thing. And if they are not experiencing the same thing, in what sense are their truths not relative? Relative and contingent upon their social location and the truths they experience in that? This isn’t saying there is ‘no truth’ – just that there is no master truth, no ultimate truth, outside of the embodied and contingent truths as these people experience them.
And this contingency is becoming increasingly the case. One of the ironies of capitalism is that for a system based on mass production, it increasingly encourages people to atomise, particularly in asserting their own individuality. A lot of this book is devoted to this theme – the theme of autopoiesis (self-creation), even if that isn’t a term he actually uses here. Rather he talks of the aetheticization of everyday life or of our self-created lifestyles. The point is much the same. Capitalism encourages us, through consumer culture, to turn ourselves into works of art, where our bodies and our houses become canvases to symbolically represent the people we truly are. And if decide we do not like who we have become, well, there is always someone else, someone who is also us, who is only a purchase or two away from becoming yet another version of our true selves.
This means that culture becomes increasingly important in being able to distinguish ourselves both as we exist as individuals and to the extent that we choose to belong to groups of people. And here the author turns to Bourdieu. We do not only choose our choices, but we are chosen by our choices too. As Bourdieu says, we are classifiers, but how we classify the world also classifies us. You see this most clearly, perhaps, on TV shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy – this is something I feel completely competent to speak about, because I did see an episode of this show once years ago. The premise of the show is that straight guys have zero taste, and so they need the superior taste of homosexual males to teach them how to not spill beer on their clothes, to learn how to tuck their shirt in and to take a shower. What is more likely to be going on in this show isn’t necessarily a gay verses straight view of the world, but rather class shaming dressed up as gendered stereotypes.
Each group in society is playing a game of position and those with the most resources (financial, educational, social, physical) get to trade those resources to sustain various positions. There was a time when the upper class did this by knowing more about high-art – they were the ones who could tell a Rothko from a Ravel – but today even low art is dominated by the upper classes. This is also noted somewhere by Bourdieu who says that whether it is jazz, cinema, pop music – the higher up the social gradient you go, the more likely it is that the people there will have a broader and fuller knowledge of just about any topic. As social tastes become those of cultural omnivores, only those with the time to be able to sample across the full range of dishes on offer can ever really become such omnivores.
A lot of this book nods directly at Baudrillard. Again, this is because much of culture is symbolic representations and capitalism has ratchetted this to the point where we are inundated with symbols and simulations so that ultimately everything is valued for its symbolic value. This symbolic overload is not limited to the endless world of advertising, or even to film and TV, but even toothpaste is branded – and what does branding mean? It means we buy our toothpaste as much for the symbolic representation linked to it as for its ability to whiten our teeth and freshen our breath and make our dentists proud of us…
This book didn’t end quite as I had expected. We pivot to globalisation and to a test of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Weber’s idea being that the Protestant states of Europe did not only out-do the Catholic ones due to their Calvinist notions of work, but that they clearly also out-did the rest of the world as well, Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu, which are all alike essentially defined as being incapable of developing the entrepreneurial spirit necessary to acquire the true nature of capitalism. Before you smile, there are books still being written on this topic today, long after Said has died. Orientalism lives on. Featherstone deconstructs this idea – central to notions of Western exceptionalism (WEIRD anyone?) – by discussing at length movements within China and Japan, tracing these back to interactions between China and the Arab world going back to when ‘the West’ was still deep in the dark ages.
The post-modernism referenced here is one that recognises shades of grey, rather than the black-and-white of much of Modernist thought. This book provides a scan across a lot of post-modern thought in language that is relatively easy to read, but not so simple that you will assume you are learning nothing at all.
I’ve taken a few things from this book in particular. One is the idea not actually discussed as such, but that collage and montage need to be attended to – while these are art forms often associated with the left, they are perhaps best understood as hinting towards our common experience of life in late-stage capitalism. This is again Baudrillard’s point of the avalanche of symbols we are swept along by. Turn the sound off on the television for five minutes and try to count the separate images that flash across the screen. This ought to be particularly effective if you are watching commercial television. All is montage now. If patterns exist at all, they are mere moments within what otherwise seems an endless, chaotic flow. But this book makes it clear that montage has been (and always has been) part of what late-stage capitalism ‘means’. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ‘These fragments have I shored against my ruins’ is the high art enactment of this all-too-central mode of capitalist expression. Our self-creation, as entrepreneurs of the self, enacting our autopoiesis, is only possible on the basis of an over-abundance of images and symbols from which we can draw, choose, and in turn be chosen from.
I hope this review isn’t too much harder to read than the book itself, that really is a possibility. But I’m trying to work my way through a lot of these ideas and am not sure how far I am getting.
March 27, 2013
I liked this but I fear that because it isn't overly user-friendly, few people will pick this up and read it on a casual whim. The manner in which postmodernism and postmodernity are explained and distinguished, leave much to be desired and unless you are well-versed in these and the overall subject, the reader may too easily get lost, frustrated, and set it aside for something else. This is a good book and more people should be exposed to it. I often feel frustrated when others take a complex issue and in the process of trying to provide clarification, they merely muddy the water.
4 out of 5 for content.
2 out of five for presentation.
This is why I give it a 3 out of 5.
4 out of 5 for content.
2 out of five for presentation.
This is why I give it a 3 out of 5.
July 4, 2025
5/5 Stars - The Definitive Guide to Our Hyper-Real World
Mike Featherstone's "Consumer Culture and Postmodernism" is an absolutely essential text for anyone seeking to understand the intricate relationship between consumption, identity, and the shifting landscape of contemporary society. Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society, this book is a masterclass in synthesizing complex theoretical ideas into an accessible and profoundly insightful analysis. It is, without a doubt, a five-star academic achievement.
Featherstone meticulously navigates the vast and often bewildering terrain of consumer culture and postmodern thought. He doesn't just present theories; he critically engages with them, drawing connections between the works of Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Veblen, Simmel, and many others. The book systematically explores how consumption has moved beyond mere utility to become a central arena for the construction of identity, lifestyle, and social distinction in a fragmented, media-saturated world.
What makes this book so utterly brilliant and deserving of a perfect score is its remarkable clarity and comprehensive scope. Featherstone manages to distill highly abstract concepts like simulation, hyperreality, aestheticization, and the body as a project into understandable terms, making them relevant to our everyday experiences of shopping, advertising, and self-presentation. He provides a robust framework for understanding how the boundaries between culture, economics, and social life have blurred, giving rise to the consumer-driven societies we inhabit.
Furthermore, the book is not merely descriptive; it is deeply analytical and thought-provoking. Featherstone encourages readers to critically examine their own participation in consumer culture, prompting reflection on the promises and pitfalls of a world increasingly defined by images, brands, and the pursuit of novelty. It's a text that doesn't just inform; it equips you with the intellectual tools to decode the subtle mechanisms at play in the postmodern condition.
For students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, marketing, or anyone grappling with the complexities of modern life, "Consumer Culture and Postmodernism" is an indispensable resource. It's a book that synthesizes a vast body of knowledge, offers original insights, and remains incredibly pertinent in its exploration of how we live, consume, and define ourselves in the 21st century. A truly outstanding contribution to critical thought.
Mike Featherstone's "Consumer Culture and Postmodernism" is an absolutely essential text for anyone seeking to understand the intricate relationship between consumption, identity, and the shifting landscape of contemporary society. Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society, this book is a masterclass in synthesizing complex theoretical ideas into an accessible and profoundly insightful analysis. It is, without a doubt, a five-star academic achievement.
Featherstone meticulously navigates the vast and often bewildering terrain of consumer culture and postmodern thought. He doesn't just present theories; he critically engages with them, drawing connections between the works of Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Veblen, Simmel, and many others. The book systematically explores how consumption has moved beyond mere utility to become a central arena for the construction of identity, lifestyle, and social distinction in a fragmented, media-saturated world.
What makes this book so utterly brilliant and deserving of a perfect score is its remarkable clarity and comprehensive scope. Featherstone manages to distill highly abstract concepts like simulation, hyperreality, aestheticization, and the body as a project into understandable terms, making them relevant to our everyday experiences of shopping, advertising, and self-presentation. He provides a robust framework for understanding how the boundaries between culture, economics, and social life have blurred, giving rise to the consumer-driven societies we inhabit.
Furthermore, the book is not merely descriptive; it is deeply analytical and thought-provoking. Featherstone encourages readers to critically examine their own participation in consumer culture, prompting reflection on the promises and pitfalls of a world increasingly defined by images, brands, and the pursuit of novelty. It's a text that doesn't just inform; it equips you with the intellectual tools to decode the subtle mechanisms at play in the postmodern condition.
For students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, marketing, or anyone grappling with the complexities of modern life, "Consumer Culture and Postmodernism" is an indispensable resource. It's a book that synthesizes a vast body of knowledge, offers original insights, and remains incredibly pertinent in its exploration of how we live, consume, and define ourselves in the 21st century. A truly outstanding contribution to critical thought.
July 4, 2021
A nice overview of some very Fisher-esque themes coupled with a concise, well-informed overview of postmodernism. It's a bit heavy but I think this is the nature of the topic, and certainly it could be a lot lot worse. Pretty good introduction to postmodernism and its social, political, artistic, literary, and economic applications for anyone interested in what the hell the term means.
May 24, 2021
bueno està bé però esq estic 0 motivada i me'l he llegit amb mala llet
Read
October 11, 2022passionnant purée en plus en anglais là miam c’était super génial quoi 🤩
July 1, 2013
Featherstone presents an engaging analysis of the relationship between postmodernism and consumer culture presenting them as manifestations of each other within the politics of the contemporary experience. His outlook on consumer culture as a source of personal fulfilment, while refreshingly positive, comes at the risk of masking the questionable origins and terrifying consequences of that culture. There are also traces of elitist, even classist language in parts of the book.
January 22, 2012
La vida misma llega a redefinirse como una obra de arte. Los bienes materiales se consumen más como "comunicadores" que como meras utiliddes; se los valora como significantes del gusto y estilo de vida.
September 21, 2013
Impeccably clear covering a whole range of issues that postmodernism has infiltrated. It is repetitive however and overlap is thus to be expected. His writing style is enjoyable and isn't written in a purely formulaic way.
December 7, 2007
I heart Mike Featherstone, and almost all books on anthropology published by SAGE
February 13, 2011
I read an arabic translation of this book ... and it was really bad, totally non-coherent made me miss a lot of things.
Hope the English version isn't that bad
Hope the English version isn't that bad
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews