Consumer Culture Reborn

——The cultural politics of consumption

This book is written from the same premise. It is a book which takes as its central theme the commodity as the primary index of the social relations of modern capitalist societies. Using some of the insights into the workings of capitalism that were left to us by Marx, I take as my starting-point the fact that any significant change to the nature of modern society can ultimately be seen reflected in the commodity-form. Moreover, any changes to the commodity-form itself, that is, any changes to the ways in which we
produce, distribute and exchange commodities, will have important implications for the composition of our social needs and of society generally. To explain the nature of changes to the commodity-form is therefore the primary goal of this book. Consequently, I do not work from a premise which attempts to draw together, in any piecemeal fashion,the whole array of discrete changes that have occurred throughout the 1980s, but

rather,by considering the ways in which changes to the nature of commodities may have possibly impacted upon social life, often in quite diverse and sometimes unexpected ways. Such an approach necessarily draws together economy and culture, two areas of social life so often treated as autonomous and distinct from one other. That is why this book is about consumption, for consumption is the social activity which, above all others,
unites economy and culture. It is therefore partly a book about the nature of human needs and about some of the ways in which human needs have changed over recent years. It is a book about a certain logic of capital which requires that human needs change over time and is, therefore, a book about the transformational nature of capital and its effects on everyday life. Finally, it is a book about the ways in which capital and the practices of
everyday life, drawn together in the sphere of consumption, articulate a relationship to each other within this sphere, a relationship which is ultimately condensed into the form of the commodity.