Article: "Subculture Theory and the Fetishism of Style"

November 25, 2009 – 1:29 pm

The latest issue of the graduate communication studies journal that I helped found, Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology, has been posted. It has the proceedings of this year’s Nelson Conference, where I presented a paper called “Subculture Theory and the Fetishism of Style.”

The article contains a rough and ready introduction to the “post-subcultures” critique of the Birmingham School subcultures model as well as some thoughts to how this paradigm’s own shortcomings might be superseded by a de-fetishizing critique of style from the point of view of subcultural participants “consummative labour.”

My thanks to Danielle Deveau, Dylan Mulvin, and Laurynas Navidauskas at Stream and to conference organizers Marcos Moldes and Kelly Bergstrom.

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Whoops!

August 24, 2009 – 12:01 pm

I broke the web page a little bit trying to fix something else. Bear with me as I try to re-prettify it.

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August VCJ

August 24, 2009 – 10:46 am

I’ve posted my pages from this weekend’s Vancouver Comic Jam to the VCJ livejournal. It was the busiest Jam I can remember in a long while, so I hope  a lot more pages will trickle in soon.

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I Forgive You

July 23, 2009 – 7:44 am
"Stop saying awesome."

"Stop saying awesome."

I spent yesterday afternoon at a public dialogue on debt and forgiveness (in an age of excess) hosted by the students of a 400-level Communications course on dialogue and public issues. I initially was interested in attending based on some of the questions related to responsibility for the negative consequences of consumerism. However, it was the moral/theological dimension of the issue that became most interesting to me.

After a panel discussion and somewhat lacklustre Q&A session (which was difficult more for the broad range of topics subsumed under the day’s theme than any shortcoming of the participants, really), I participated in two “table sessions” on the topic of moral debt and forgiveness. Essentially, myself, my supervisor (Dr. Gary McCarron), and a handful of others spent a couple hours talking soteriology. A couple of points that came out of this discussion and my reflection upon it:

  • Despite the centrality of “forgiving yourself” to popular therapeutic discourse, is this, strictly speaking, even possible? My own intuition is that it is a contradiction and, logically, meaningless. I have no right or capacity to forgive myself for a wrong I have done to you. By contrast, I wonder if the emotional force of this experience may be related to absence of a strong vocabulary of repentance in the secularized discourse around injury and pardon.
  • All of our standards and expectations for forgiveness derive from the interpersonal level. That is, we know what a satisfactory or authentic apology and pardon look like based on our experience of giving and receiving them from individuals. And yet the most “important” apologies seem to involve states and societies. Can these interpersonal experiences scale up to that level, or is it impossible for a state to provide a(n emotionally) satisfactory apology?
  • Some of the group discussion later on turned on the example of seeking forgiveness for the genocide and oppression of First Nations people in Canada. The question was, how far does responsibility for events in the past extend? (The examples included new generations as well as immigrants to Canada.) However, I think this issue is more interesting from the alternative hamartiological perspective—that is, sins of omission rather than sins of commission. If one accepts the moral relevance of sins of omission (that is, that one can be held culpable for thigns one ought to have done but did not do), then it seems to me culpability is potentially infinite, since at every moment one could be doing something more moral than what one has done.
  • Finally, and in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek mode, I was struck by the opening instructions as to the nature of dialogue (i.e., that it is open-ended, intended to come to understanding of people’s perspectives, not a debate, &c.). Is this normative anomie? What if my genuine perspective is that dialogue is a debate?

All in all, an interesting and surprisingly lunatic-free (for a public talk/event hosted by a university) way to while away an afternoon. Congratulations to all involved in planning it.

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Multitude

July 19, 2009 – 6:25 am

Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities for global democracy.

To briefly summarize, Hardt & Negri’s book is an attempt to locate a political subject that can resist the logic of Empire—i.e., the exercise of power by nation-states, international institutions, and capital to maintain the global, neoliberal order. This new political subject is the titular multitude, the global masses transformed by their engagement in the newly hegemonic paradigm of immaterial labour. Immaterial labour refers to those types of labour that produce or process ideas, symbols, relationships, and affects. (Hardt & Negri do concede that the distinction between material and immaterial labour is an analytical one; in practice, they are “almost always” mixed together [p. 109].) Because immaterial labour is biopolitical—i.e., it creates forms of life as its product or byproduct—and because the expropriation of the common that it thus produces is the source of a common antagonism, the multitude has within it the means of self-rule.

However, the book’s project fails in at least three ways.

First, the multitude does not fulfull the quest for a post-liberal and post-socialist political subject. Hardt & Negri define the multitude as “an open network of singularities that links together on the basis of the common they share and the common they produce” (p. 129). The multitude is not a collectivity in the old sense (either of the body politic or of the socialist party/state) because participating in the common life of the multitude does not require the subsumption of the singularity:

The contradictory conceptual couple, identity and difference, is not the adequate framework for understanding the organization of the multitude. Instead we are a multiplicity of singular forms of life and at the same time share a common global existence. The anthropology of the multitude is an anthropology of singularity and commonality. (P. 127)

For all its fashionable network-society vocabulary, this strikes me as little more than a recreation of the liberal individual in the state of nature entering into a social contract for the mutual benefit of all. Furthermore, because the multitude is based on one’s dependence on and contribution to the common, it is potentially inclusive of all of humanity; Hardt & Negri do not address the problem that the multitude also includes those people who, as individuals, benefit the most from the expropriation of the collective, biopolitical production that is embodied in the common.

Second, their inscription of democracy (defined as “the rule of all by all”) as the telos of all movements for social change is problematic. I am not sure it is good historiography to read the achievement of this vision of democracy into previous (and therefore “incomplete”) movements. It strikes me that what has been desired is not so much the rule of all by all as the end of (illegitimate) rule by another. Moreover, the emphasis on democracy seems to confuse means with ends. Democracy may well be necessary for a just global social order but it is by no means sufficient for one, as there are no guarantees on what that the multitude will democratically choose to do. (This second problem is, of course, exacerbated by the aforementioned conflict within the multitude that is elided from Hardt & Negri’s account.)

Third, for all of the emphasis on the importance of communication to the creation of the multitude, Hardt & Negri do not articulate a theory of communication. At times, communication seems to be nothing more than the regular interchange of messages as part of the circuits of production. At others, the authors seem to have a “sacramental” conception of communication, for lack of a better term, in mind: “The common does not refer to traditional notions of either the community or the public; it is based on the communication among singularities and emerges through the collaborative social processes of production” (p. 204). Without more clarity on this point, the description of the multitude’s “becoming” through processes of collaboration and communication is unconvincing.

These three problems are mutually re-enforcing and reproductive of one another. My suspicion is that they require a similarly mutual solution: a triune theory that unites a philosophical anthropology to address the nature of the human being, an ethics to evaluate values to correct for the focus on democracy, and a theory of communication. To say that this theory must be “triune” is to seek, for each term, a theory that contains the other two—for example, a conception of the human subject (anthropology) that implies how subjects ought to treat to one another (ethics) and how they can relate to one another (communication).

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Requiescat in pace

June 27, 2009 – 3:24 pm

I recently found this old jam comic drawn at an APE a few years ago. Pages by Dalton Sharp, myself, Dean Trippe, Jason Turner, Jamie Dee Galey, and Phil McAndrew. Not precisely sure how inappropriate this is right now.
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Subculture Theory

June 2, 2009 – 11:10 am

If, as Raymond Williams suggested, a culture is a “whole way of life,” then it follows that a subculture is a partial way of life. That is, subcultural participation implies a set of value orientations and practices that are neither coterminous with the entirety of a given population nor exhaustive of any one individual’s activities and identity positions. When considered in isolation, such participation may seem a trivial thing, but subcultures—or niche audiences, taste cultures, consumer lifestyles, and “neo-tribes”—and the kind of sociality that they embody make increasingly powerful claims on people’s allegiance at the same time as traditional categories of ascribed identity and status (class, ethnicity, gender, religion, &c.) appear to be loosening their grip on them. The concept of subculture is needed to theorize adequately the uneven circulation of meaning in contemporary societies. Furthermore, it is particularly well suited to the analysis of culture at the meso-social level, below macro-social structures but above and beyond the individual actor in micro-social contexts.

This examination area is intended to review three major strands of subculture theory — the Marxian model of the Birmingham School, subsequent post-subcultures frameworks, and American interactionist approaches — and also to explore other analytical traditions in a variety of fields that may provide fruitful avenues for comparison and synthesis.

The study of subcultures was one of the foundational strands of British Cultural Studies as formulated at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart Hall’s directorship. Through its research on working-class youth lifestyles, the CCCS subcultures working group produced a Marxian sociology of culture that has not only achieved canonical status but also continues to set the agenda for contemporary scholars working in this area. Representative readings are drawn from both programmatic CCCS subcultural studies (J. Clarke 2006a, 2006b; Clarke et al. 2006; Hall et al. 1981; Hebdige 1979, 2006; Willis 1977, 1978) and their interlocutors (G. Clarke 2005; P. Cohen 2005; Frith 1983; McRobbie and Garber, 2006; Murdock and McCron 2006). The Birmingham School’s innovation was its attempt to analyse (sub)cultural expressions in terms of power and class-based experience through semiotic ‘readings’ of particular youth lifestyles. At the same time, the Birmingham model is an incomplete work, and even its most substantial and provocative statements point toward further research more than they resolve the questions that they have raised.

The 1990s and early 2000s saw another fruitful period of research and theorization on subcultures—again, largely in Britain. This set of approaches (Chaney 2004; Hetherington 1998; Hodkinson, 2002; Maffesoli 1996; Marchart 2003; Muggleton 2000; Straw 2005; Thornton 1995) has subsequently been termed ‘post-subculture’ theory. The prefix both signals an attempt to overcome perceived inadequacies in the CCCS model and alludes to an increasing engagement with postmodernism. The idea of the postmodern not only challenged the theoretical and epistemological foundations of earlier research but also seemed to signify an important change in the object of study, as fluid, consumerist lifestyles were seen increasingly to displace the relatively stable, class-based cultures of the immediate post-war period. These shifts in identity and social solidarity (and the study of the same) may be further contextualized by Nestor García Canclini’s (2001) analyses of cultural life in Latin American cities under conditions of multiculturalism and globalization. While postmodernism led to a useful reconsideration of received wisdom, it has also had a tendency to move the study of subcultures more and more into specialist sub-disciplines such as youth, leisure, and popular music studies. In this way, subculture theory’s broader implications for the analysis of society and culture have been largely obscured.

This obscuring may be partially compensated for by a re-evaluation of an older tradition in subcultural research within American interactionist sociology, particularly the urban sociology of the Chicago School. These scholars (Becker 1963; A.K. Cohen 2005; Cressey 2005; Fine and Kleinman 1979; Gordon 2005; Park 2005) were primarily concerned with immigrant and deviant subcultures in American cities, only later (Irwin 1977, 2005) coming to be associated with the kinds of leisure lifestyles that have so preoccupied British researchers. Their focus on action and communication in relatively localized subcultural contexts is a necessary corrective for the tendency towards abstraction present in British (post)subcultural research. Furthermore, the frequently less spectacular and more quotidian nature of the subcultures studied by these American researchers help to de-essentialize some of the definitions of subculture (and participation therein) advanced by British theorists.

Finally, I want to indicate other fields and bodies of research that may enrich our understanding of contemporary subcultures. In ‘culturalist’ strands of New Social Movement theory (McAdam 1997; Melucci 1997), fandom studies (Jenkins 1992), the field theory of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology (1983, 1985), and Michael Warner’s (2002) discussion of the “publics” and “counterpublics” constituted by discourse, we encounter phenomena that are reminiscent of subcultures and structured in similar ways but have, for various reasons, rarely been analysed in subcultural terms. These analyses call into question many of the assumptions of traditional thought in subculture theory and provide ways of theorizing some of its blind spots.

Bibliography

Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1983. “The Field of Cultural Production, Or: The Economic World Reversed.” Poetics 12(4-5): 311-356.

——. 1985. “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory and Society 14(6): 723-44.

Chaney, David. 2004. “Fragmented Culture and Subcultures.” Pp. 36-48 in After Subculture: Critical Studies in Contemporary Youth Culture, edited by A. Bennett and K. Kahn-Harris. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Clarke, Gary. 2005. “Defending Ski-jumpers: A Critique of Theories of Youth Subcultures [1981].” Pp. 169-174 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Clarke, John. 2006a. “The Skinheads and the Magical Recovery of Community.” Pp. 80-83 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

—–. 2006b. “Style.” Pp. 147-161 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Clarke, John, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts. 2006. “Subcultures, Cultures and Class.” Pp. 3-59 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Albert K. 2005. “A General Theory of Subcultures [1955].” Pp. 50-59 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Cohen, Phil. 2005. “Subcultural Conflict and Working-class Community [1972].” Pp. 86-93 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Cressey, Paul G. 2005. “The Life-cycle of the Taxi-dancer [1932].” Pp. 35-45 in in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Fine, Gary Alan and Sherryl Kleinman. 1979. “Rethinking Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis.” American Journal of Sociology 85(1): 1-20.

Frith, Simon. 1983. Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock. London: Constable. Introduction & Chapters 8-11.

García Canclini, Nestor. 2001. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. G. Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, Milton M. 2005. “The Concept of the Sub-culture and its Application [1947].” Pp. 46-49 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. 1981. “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular.” Pp. 227-240 in People’s History and Socialist Theory, edited by R. Samuel. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Crichter, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes & Meier.

Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.

—–. 2006. “The Meaning of Mod.” Pp. 71-79 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1998. Expressions of Identity: Space, Performance, Politics. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Introduction & Chapters 1-4.

Hodkinson, Paul. 2002. Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture. New York: Berg.

Irwin, John. 1977. Scenes. Beverly Hills: Sage.

—–. 2005. “Notes on the Status of the Concept Subculture [1970].” Pp. 73-77 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York, Routledge.

Maffesoli, Michel. 1996. The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. Trans. D. Smith. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Marchart, Oliver. 2003. “Bridging the Micro-Macro Gap: Is There Such a Thing as a Post-subcultural Politics?” Pp. 83-97 in The Post-subcultures Reader, edited by D. Muggleton and R. Weinzierl. New York: Berg.

McAdam, Doug. 1997. “Culture and Social Movements.” Pp. 473-487 in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, edited by S.M. Buechler and F.K. Cylke, Jr. Toronto: Mayfield.

McRobbie, Angela and Jennie Garber. 2006. “Girls and Subcultures.” Pp. 177-188 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Melucci, Alberto. 1997. “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements.” Pp. 259-274 in Social Movements: Perspectives and Issues, edited by S.M. Buechler and F.K. Cylke, Jr. Toronto: Mayfield.

Muggleton, David. 2000. Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style. New York: Berg.

Murdock, Graham and Robin McCron. 2006. “Consciousness of Class and Consciousness of Generation.” Pp. 162-176 in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 2nd ed., edited by S. Hall and T. Jefferson. New York: Routledge.

Park, Robert E. 2005. “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment [1925].” Pp. 25-34 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Straw, Will. 2005. “Communities and Scenes in Popular Music [1991].” Pp. 469-478 in The Subcultures Reader, 2nd ed., edited by K. Gelder. New York: Routledge.

Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Warner, Michael. 2002. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14(1): 49-90.

Willis, Paul E. 1977. Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. Aldershot, UK: Gower.

—–. 1978. Profane Culture. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Mass and Individual in Consumer Society

June 2, 2009 – 10:28 am

The productivist bias inherent in both classical economics and orthodox Marxism has delayed the recognition of the ‘consumer revolution’ that accompanied the industrial one and has come, over the course of the last century, increasingly to drive the transformation of capital. Today, however, the consumption of commodities has entangled itself with almost every facet of social life. Indeed, the critique of consumption is now arguably fundamental to any critique of contemporary capitalism. I have entitled this examination area, ‘Mass and Individual in Consumer Society,’ hoping to capture in this phrase a specific set of issues related to the analysis of consumer capitalism. To elucidate them, I will here address each of the title’s key terms in reverse order.

To speak of ‘consumer society’ rather than other, closely related terms (e.g., ‘advertising’ or ‘consumerism’) is to address the social and cultural transformations engendered by the metastasisation of the commodity form and its “promotional logic” (Wernick 1991) rather than the problems posed by particular kinds of ‘bad consumption.’ Zygmunt Bauman (2007) provides a clear formulation of this distinction:

If consumerist culture is the peculiar fashion in which the members of a society of consumers think of behaving or in which they behave ‘unreflexively’ […] then the society of consumers stands for the peculiar set of existential conditions under which the probability is high that most men and women will embrace the consumerist rather than any other culture, and that most of the time they will obey its precepts to the best of their ability. (P. 52)

A first group of references attempt to account for the emergence of such a society of consumers (Campbell 1987; Cross 2000; Ewen 2001; Frank 1997; Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill 2005; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb 1982; Williams 1982). They are primarily historical in orientation; however, in describing the development of modern consumerism and explicating its differences from other social formations, these authors also provide an initial theoretical description of consumer society. As Grant McCracken (1988) suggests, the rhetoric of the consumer revolution is somewhat deceptive: though the aggregate transformations described by these historians have indeed changed capitalism in profound ways, it has been a ‘long revolution.’ Thus, rather than seeking a radical rupture, we must look to a number of historical periods in different societies to trace the genealogy of consumer society. Key moments include England in the 18th century (the industrial commodity, distribution and marketing apparatuses), France in the 19th century (the Arcades, department stores, and the consumerist gaze), and the United States in the 20th century (increasing mass-mediation of marketing communication, post-war affluence, and ‘hip consumerism’).

The keyword ‘individual’ refers to a second group of texts that is concerned with explaining consumer behaviour (Baudrillard 1981, 1996; Campbell 1987; Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Fiske 1989; McCracken 1988; Miller 1997, 1998). These authors are largely from anthropological and cultural studies backgrounds, and much of their work is based on ethnographic accounts of everyday consumption (Jean Baudrillard is the notable exception). Their attempts to make consumption decisions rational and explicable serve to reveal the complexity of the consumer subjectivities that prevail under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. They tend to privilege the experiences of individual consumers over and against the totality of the society in which they live and often stress the pleasure and the possibilities for the exercise of agency that can be derived from the acquisition and consumption of commodities. The key questions, then, relate to how consumers appropriate the commodities furnished by capitalism and use them to produce meaning in their everyday lives.

A third group of sources deals with the organization of consuming subjects into different kinds of groups and audiences by the rationalizing apparatuses of capital and the culture industry—a process that I have described using the keyword ‘mass.’ This group largely comprises scholars from radical or Marxist traditions (Adorno 1991; Bauman 2007; Bourdieu 1984; Horkheimer and Adorno 2001; Marcuse 1991; Wernick 1991) but is also inclusive of liberal critiques of mass culture (Galbraith 1958; Holt 2000, 2002; Simmel 1957; Veblen 1953). Speaking in very general terms, these writers are concerned with the effects that the commodification of culture—embodied, for example, in the structures of modern marketing—has on the human subjects who are produced as consuming masses. Here, consumerism is a tool of class privilege that distorts people’s true needs and desires and serves to reinforce capitalist relations of domination. Also included within this group are a smaller set of sources describing recent developments in niche marketing (Turow 1997) and the development of the lifestyle concept (Veal 1993), which represents the increasing rationalization of the process of demand-creation.

Perhaps the major theoretical challenge in approaching this subject is the large gulf that stands between the ‘consumer studies’ literature, with its focus on the emancipatory potential of individual consumption, and the ‘mass society’ literature, with its critique of the repressive functions of consumerism. The former tends to dismiss the latter as elitist and pessimistic for its normative judgements on consumption and its recourse to spectres of false consciousness and ideological manipulation. For its part, the mass culture critique might suggest that more celebratory studies have mistaken the subjective experiences of pleasure derived from individual acts of consumption for the objective conditions of constraint or oppression that are imposed by consumer society—a fact which is self-evident once the entire system of consumerism is considered as a whole. Yet some form of rapprochement between the two camps is necessary to make sense of the deeply contradictory phenomenon that is modern consumerism.

Bibliography

Adorno, Teodor W. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge. Chapters 2-4, 8.

Baudrillard, Jean. 1981. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.

—–. 1996. The System of Objects. London: Verso.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2007. Consuming Life. Malden, MA: Polity.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press

Campbell, Colin. 1987. The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Cross, G. 2000. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press. Chapters 1, 4, 7.

Douglas, Mary and Baron Isherwood. 1979. The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption. London: Allen Lane.

Ewen, Stuart. 2001. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books.

Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the Popular. Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman. Chapters 1-2.

Frank, Thomas. 1997. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Galbraith, John K. 1958. The Affluent Society. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press.

Holt, Douglas B. 2000. “Does Cultural Capital Structure American Consumption?” Pp. 212-252 in The Consumer Society Reader, edited by J.B. Schor and D.B. Holt. New York: New Press.

—–. 2002. “Why Do Brands Cause Trouble? A Dialectical Theory of Consumer Culture and Branding.” Journal of Consumer Research 29(1): 70-90.

Horkheimer, Max and Teodor W. Adorno. 2001. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Pp. 71-101 in Media and Cultural Studies: KeyWorks, edited by M.G. Durham and D.M. Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. Introduction and Chapters 1, 2, 7.

McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

McKendrick, Neil, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb. 1982. The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England. London: Europa Publications.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1991. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press.

Miller, Daniel. 1997. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg.

—-. 1998. A Theory of Shopping. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Simmel, Georg. 1957. “Fashion.” American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541-558.

Turow, Joseph. 1997. Breaking up America: Advertisers and the New Media World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Veal, A.J. 1993. “The Concept of Lifestyle: A Review.” Leisure Studies 12(4): 233-252.

Veblen, Thorstein. 1953. Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: The New American Library.

Wernick, Andrew. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology, and Symbolic Expression. London: Sage. Chapters 1-2, 5, 8.

Williams, Rosalind. 1982. Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Berkely: University of California Press.

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Shiny, New, and Very Yellow

May 27, 2009 – 10:09 am

I decided it was time I got myself a new web site, so here it is. I have yet to decide how bloggy/personal versus c.v./professional it will be, but, in all likelihood, infrequent posting will make that decision for me. In any case, this site replaces the defunct borealism.com and nom de plume, so update your bookmarks, I guess?

Over the next few days, I will be transferring some items from my archives onto here in order to make it look more lived-in: The definitional essays from my comprehensive exams and my undergraduate thesis will be near the top of the list; maybe some old comics, too. I imagine that I will continue to be working the kinks out of the design for some time, so excuse the mess, &c., &c.

To complete introductory matters, I should note that the site is running on Wordpress and its inaugural design is based on the Takimata theme designed by Robert Ellis, late of Upstart Blogger, for the Sandbox design competition. I have modified it loosely to resemble the original No Name packaging designed by Don Watt, which seemed an appropriate aesthetic for a Canadian interested in consumer society critique. Also, note that the asterisks in the header and footer are links that can skip between the top and bottom of the page, for your convenience.

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