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Some early printed books are hard to OCR-process correctly and the text may contain errors, so one should always visually compare it with the images to determine what is correct. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 C M s,® Image Culture IMAGE CULTURE Media, Consumption and Everyday Efe in Reflexive Modernity André Jansson JMG PhD dissertation Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Göteborg University ISSN 1101-4692 ISBN 91-88212-43-2 © 2001 André Jansson Cover design and lay out: André Jansson Front cover photo (Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles): André Jansson Back cover photo: Johanna Stenersen Printed in Sweden by Grafikerna Givréna i Kungälv AB, 2001. Contents Introduction 1 Questions 4 Contexts 6 Part I Media Culture/ Consumer Culture: Assessing the Field 1 I The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity 13 Modernization: Rationalization and Differentiation 15 A Postmodern Prelude: The Commodity and the Metropolis 23 A Society of Signs 31 The Continuity of Contradictions 46 Notes 57 2 I The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture 60 Understanding Media Culture and Consumer Culture 61 Commercial Intertextuality 72 Image Culture and the Everyday Context 78 Notes 83 Part II Analysing the Social World 3 / Lifeworld and Social Space 87 The Lifeworld as Referential Structure 89 Physical, Social and Representational Realms 95 The World of Media Texts 102 Intersubjective Lifeworlds and Cultural Identity 108 Transition and Temporality 112 Lifestyle and Creative Ethos 122 Power Geometries 130 Notes 140 4 / Empirical Considerations 143 Sources and Methods 143 The Generalized Ethos 150 Interpretation 162 Notes 165 Part III The Cultural Arrangement of Lifeworlds 5 / Spatial Frameworks 169 Home 170 City 189 Nature 201 Tourism 210 Summing Up 233 Notes 233 6 I Temporal Frameworks 235 Alterations of the Lifeworld 1: Novelty versus Familiarity 236 Alterations of the Lifeworld 2: Fast versus Slow 252 Time Management: Routines and Life-Plans 259 Summing Up 271 Notes 272 Part IV The Authority of the Representational Realm 7 I The Mediazation of Lifeworlds 275 Representational Frameworks 277 Phantasms, Plans and Frustrations 297 Restraints and Intrusions 307 Summing Up 329 Notes 330 8 / Conclusion and Critique 331 Image Culture as Lived Experience 332 Image Culture as Social Force 338 Notes 346 Appendix 1: The CIT Qualitative Interviews 349 Interview Guide 349 Lists of Respondents 351 Appendix 2: The CIT Focus Group Interviews 355 Interview Guide 356 List of Focus Groups 357 Appendix 3: Additional Tables 358 Index of Tables, Figures and Illustrations 367 Bibliography 369 Introduction In spring 2000, the Swedish musician Olle Ljungström received his driver’s license. According to the tabloid Aftonbladet, he was very excited about it. The plastic badge not only implied the opening up of new physical spaces — places for driving and exploration — but also new imaginary spaces: I can see myself in different kinds of cars. And of course, I’m wearing different outfits with every car. One picture I have is of a Morris with wooden doors in the rear, and a cool, rather big white dog. In the trunk I would have a hunting rifle and some grouse-traps... Together with that I would wear green wellingtons and wool trousers. But no oil-coat, that’s a bit too much (Svensson, U., 2000: 43 - my translation). As members of a society we all have our minds filled with cultural code systems. Learning to live is very much about learning the conventions through which we are all classified — and learning to sense when these conventions are altered. Indeed, some individuals are more sensitive than others are. But nobody can escape the codes. This work is about how people construct their lifestyles and cultural frames of reference, and what positions various kinds of consumption practices hold within these cultural processes. What I want to discuss is how the increasingly intense flows of signs and images are handled by people in everyday life, and how various modes of appropriation correspond to various consumer worlds. My world is not entirely the same as yours. And while the quote of Olle Ljungström may seem appealing to some of us, others may find it very strange, or even silly. How we relate to the symbolic world is a matter of knowledge and taste. There are several reasons for why these questions are important to study. At the very core is the fact that we lead our lives to an increasing extent as consumers. There are today few areas of everyday life that do not involve moments of consumption — either as selection, purchase or use of commodities. And through all these activities we contribute to the circulation of cultural meanings and classifications. 2 / Introduction Accordingly, as many theorists have argued, consumption is not an innocent practice. It is not simply a matter of providing the necessary means for physical survival. Nor can it be reduced to fancy (and often supposedly ‘unimportant’) amusements of leisure time. As the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1899/1994) argued already in the late 19th century, consumption tends to have more or less macro-social implications, since the constitution of consumer worlds cannot be uncoupled from the prevalent power structures of society — a logic that has later been analyzed by for example Gans (1974), Hebdige (1981) and Bourdieu (1979/1984). Cultural skills, typically expressed through consumption practices, are important means of distinction — and are thus part of the reproduction of socio-cultural hierarchies. Furthermore, consumer worlds cannot be uncoupled from the systems of production and distribution. That is, what people consume, and what they know about commodities-as-signs, is to a great extent influenced by the capitalist logic of supply and demand. From the industry’s point of view, design, packaging and marketing, as well as the reinforcement of new fashions and trends are not merely a matter of making meanings. In the first instance, it is a matter of making money. The symbolic world that surrounds the consumer is not simply chosen by him or her; the consumer’s navigation in the symbolic world is simultaneously governed by the economic and cultural steering mechanisms of the industries. Today, we are all objectified as part of ‘consumer segments’ and ‘target groups’. In the same moment as we are born, we are also created as consumers — categorized in terms of needs, desires, skills and resources, and addressed in a corresponding manner. Individual tastes and styles are not only the expressions of people’s identities, but also the object of economic exploitation. Products are designed in order not only to make sense, but also to make profit. And in order to keep the wheel of demand turning, the industry continuously has to invent new styles, as well as absorb and diffuse existing ones to new groups. A key role in these processes is played by the culture industry, notably the mass media system. Although the culture industry often operates in symbiosis with other commodity producing branches — making it more and more difficult to keep different industrial sectors apart — there are occasions when the sheer media potential is exposed. For example, in the case of the Adidas trainer there is no doubt that much of the promotion actually took place beyond the company’s own reach: Introduction / 3 This was a moment of epiphany when the prose of flow charts, demographic targets and market research was supplanted by the spontaneous poetry of their product becoming a popular icon. For Adidas this happened in June 1986 in Philadelphia. In front of an audience of 20,000 rappers Run DMC told fans to brandish their trainers. [...] The black dollar saved Adidas in America. Hip-hop invented the style, created a look, then had to buy it back the following year. By 1995 Madonna was wearing Old School Adidas to the MTV Music Awards. But if the trainer bears some relation to the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, there are also as many trainer sects. Nike, Adidas, Converse, Puma, Reebok, Fila, Pro-Keds, Vans each gathered their own distinct congregations from basketball, football, hip-hop, grunge, skateboarding and dance culture. In the seventies and eighties the sneaker as a cultural sign featured prominently in films such as Grease, Back to the Future, and She’s Gotta Have It. But when Melaine Griffith’s secretary in Working Girl goes to work in her trainers before putting on her shoes, the trainer had also conquered middle America (O’Reilly, 1998: 2). The aim of my work is not to give a complete account of what the interaction between the culture industry and other commodity industries looks like. My study is primarily about consumers and audiences. However, an important point of departure for the investigation of consumer worlds is that the continuous expansion of the media sector during the last century has contributed to the increasing economic and social significance of such things as ‘image’ and ‘sign value’. The media system is the system that to a great extent circulates the code systems we think and express ourselves by. The media tell us things about what one commodity means in relation to another commodity. They are the prime educators of consumer culture. And this fact cannot be reduced to an exclusive matter of ‘youth culture’ or ‘popular culture’, as some commentators tend to argue. Although distinct lifestyles may be most reflexively developed among younger people, one cannot simply take for granted that the cultural significance of mass media is ‘lower’ among other groups. We are not dealing with a quantitative phenomenon. As Ang (1996: 80) puts it, ‘the media are increasingly everywhere, but not every where in the same way’. In other words, the media play different roles within different consumer worlds, being a major force behind the cultural transformations of society. 4 / Introduction Questions My overall aim in this book is to analyze how consumption practices in general, and media consumption in particular, are related to the composition of people’s cultural frames of reference, and how these relationships, in turn, correspond to and are expressed in different socio-cultural environments. However, in order to fulfil this empirical aim I also have to take on some theoretical challenges. I need to develop a theoretical framework and an analytical approach that enable me to study the phenomena I am interested in. The overall aim can thus be specified according to both theoretical and empirical questions, which together make up the field of inquiry. First, I need to illuminate the historical processes that are behind the current cultural situation — a situation which is customarily described in terms of media culture and consumer culture. This question will be answered through a kind of theoretical exposé, primarily dealing with the assumed shift from modernity to postmodernity (Chapter 1). My argument in this connection is that the key to an understanding of both media culture and consumer culture is the emergence of reflexive accumulation, which primarily has been discussed by Lash and Urry (1994). Following this line of thought, I also assert that the most reasonable labelling of the contemporary world is reflexive modernity (cf. also Giddens, 1991; Beck, 1992; Lash, 1994) — denoting a social arrangement that is still founded upon the modern capitalist logic, but involves a number of new and contradictory cultural tendencies. This argument will be further strengthened through my empirical analysis. Second, I have to provide working definitions of what the terms media culture and consumer culture actually mean, and how they are related to one another. My intention is not to present a complete literary overview of how the concepts have been used up to now, but rather to establish a theoretically grounded perspective of how they might be compared. My argument is that media culture and consumer culture are inseparable categories — in theoretical as well as empirical terms. In this connection (Chapter 2) I will introduce the concept of image culture, pointing to the kind of cultural condition that emerges through the successive fusion of media culture and consumer culture. Altogether, one may say that Chapters 1-2 give an ontological outline of the social and cultural contexts that my study is embedded in — a kind of background to why I ask the questions I do (see also Figure 1). Introduction / 5 Ch. 1 -2: Characteristics of contemporary culture and society - image culture FIGURE 1 Analytical outline Lifeworld Consumption Space Time Media cons. My third question is purely theoretical. What theories and concepts are suitable for the construction of an analytical model through which the overall aim can be studied? As noted above, my aim involves an intention to unite micro and macro perspectives. I am interested in the relationship between people’s everyday praxis and cultural frameworks, as well as in how these relationships are related to the reproduction and transformation of socio­ cultural structures and power-relations. In order to delineate how tips complex of relationships are composed I will try to bring about a fruitful combination of phenomenology and cultural sociology — primarily inspired by the works of Husserl, Schutz, Berger, Luckmann, Giddens and Bourdieu (Chapter 3). On the micro level such a model will primarily focus upon the interplay between lifeworld (the taken for granted knowledge) and lifestyle (the composition of practices). 1 will argue that both these concepts can be studied as the meaningful organization of time and space — the lifeworld being constituted by taken for granted space and time structures, and the lifestyle referring to the individual’s routinized patterns of action in time and space. In the final step, via the theories of Bourdieu and Giddens, I try to formulate the conceptual linkages between individual life situations and social structure. 6 / Introduction My fourth question is explicitly deduced from the overall empirical aim. Considered as an important component of the lifestyle, I want to analyze how consumption practices in general — including media consumption — are related to the composition of lifeworlds. In what ways does consumption influence and express people’s lifeworlds? And what does this relationship look like in different social groups? Through an empirical analysis of both quantitative and qualitative audience data I will try to come to terms with how various consumer worlds are formed - in terms of both spatial and temporal arrangements (Chapters 5-6). My final question concerns the particular position of media consumption in different social groups. Although in contemporary culture it is hard to actually separate media consumption from other kinds of consumption, it is worthwhile at least to try to discern what significance the media have in relation to the composition of consumer worlds (Chapter 7). Since the media continuously provide people with new alternatives and ideas as to what to consume, how to live and who to be, it is interesting to focus on media consumption specifically — both in terms of how media consumption corresponds to people’s cultural frames of reference, and how it is related to other kinds of consumption. What fantasies and plans of consumption do mass media create (if any)? And how are these fantasies and plans related to everyday life? Having addressed these basic questions, Chapter 8 contains a brief summary of my principal findings, and a critical account of the social nature of image culture. Additionally, in extension of these concluding discussions new questions can be discerned — like a preface to forthcoming theoretical and empirical work. Contexts Given the aims and questions I have just presented, it is important to discuss the contexts in which my work makes sense - and especially the theoretical discussions it is related to. Like all other social scientific research, my analysis is influenced by particular theoretical perspectives, involving both ontological and epistemological assumptions. That is, the paradigmatic position of me as a researcher is reflected through certain views concerning what the world is like and how it is to be studied. I do not pretend to conduct fully ‘objective’ research Introduction I 7 (which must be regarded as a utopian endeavour anyway); I have chosen a particular set of questions and pursue the analysis from a particular viewpoint. First of all, it must be stressed that my prime object of study is culture, or the cultural — such as in ‘media culture’ and ‘consumer culture’. In focusing upon media and consumption, then, my intention is to unveil the roles that these phenomena play within processes of meaning creation (see Chapter 2). My focus is not upon ‘behaviours’, ‘needs’ or ‘effects’, but upon ‘cultural practices’, ‘cultural frameworks’ and ‘cultural communities’. For example, I do not wish to establish any causal relationships stating how strong the connection is between a certain media preference and the knowledge of a particular brand. Instead, I am interested in the ongoing processes through which cultural meanings are formed, and how these meanings together constitute certain frameworks, which are in turn expressed through everyday praxis. My aim is not to isolate the influence of certain factors or variables, but rather to reach an understanding of the ‘webs of significance’ through which individuals and groups make sense of the world. Accordingly, in the final instance, all the results and conclusions generated from this analysis must be regarded as interpretations of interpretations (cf. Geertz, 1973/1993). This is a very important statement, since it explains why I do not discuss in any detail more functionalist or behaviouristic perspectives on consumption. For example, economic theories of consumer behaviour, as well as theories of media uses, gratifications and effects are left out of the analysis. This is not because such perspectives are meaningless. It is because they do not deal with the kinds of issues I focus upon. Similarly, studying the cultural implications of consumption does not mean that I question the fact that goods might be good for eating, building and clothing. It means that I am primarily interested in their ability to make sense, to generate cultural meaning (cf. Douglas and Isherwood, 1978). However, excluding functionalist approaches in favour of more culturalist ones, does not imply that the theoretical context is now restricted to one, single coherent ontological and epistemological perspective. Among the theories dealing with contemporary culture there are important controversies both as to what characterizes the cultural state and how it is to be approached as an object of study. Regarding the ontological dimension, there are at least two important disputes that I have to consider. The first one regards the transformation from modernity to postmodernity, and the corresponding shift from cultural modernism to postmodernism. Basically, what is at stake here is the question of whether the 8 / Introduction rationalistic ideals and differentiated structures of the modern project still dominates society and culture, or whether they have been replaced by a postmodern era of relativism, eclecticism and simulation. There is also a kind of middle position advocating a cultural scenario of late or reflexive modernity, which I will discuss in some detail. The second important dispute stems from the opposition between Marxist and pluralist versions of what characterizes contemporary culture and what mechanisms govern its transitions. On the one hand, there is the Marxist orthodox notion of economic-structural determinism, leading to dystopic theories of an all-mighty culture industry, creating false needs and a false consciousness among its consumers and audiences. On the other hand, there are pluralist notions of independent consumers, who are more or less free to create their own meanings out of cultural products. In other words, this split is related to the intricate dilemma of structure and agency. 1 will return to these two controversies in Chapter 1 — in both cases arguing for a kind of intermediary solution. My interest in cultural phenomena also has some epistemological consequences. As many researchers within anthropology and cultural studies have argued (cf. Carey, 1989; Marcus, 1992; Geertz, 1993; Keesing, 1994), the study of meaningful processes calls for perspectives and methods that can match the inherent dynamics of such processes. In other words, cultural studies are by definition based upon hermeneutical, interpretative perspectives. In the present work I will also pay some attention to political- economical perspectives, in order to outline the new structural conditions of production. However, my prime concern is the audiences/consumers and their activities, thoughts and dreams — phenomena that require a deeper kind of hermeneutics. In my view, the combination of phenomenology and cultural sociology holds the potential, not only to grasp the dynamics of cultural processes, but also to transcend the tensions between the particular and the general, between micro and macro processes. Methodologically, this implies that I will base most of my empirical analysis upon qualitative data, the interpretations of particular social actors. There are two qualitative sources: First, there are 41 individual, ethnographic interviews conducted within the research project Cultural Identities in Transition (CIT). These interviews primarily deal with the relationships between people’s media practices and identity work, but they also include substantive information about consumption and lifestyle in general. Second, there are 12 focus group interviews, likewise conducted within the CIT project. Designed as reception analyses of two different Swedish TV programmes, these interviews provide Introduction / 9 good insights into the cultural frameworks of different social communities. In addition to these qualitative sources, my study rests upon a quantitative component, the 1997 national market survey Orvesto Konsument — conducted by the Swedish research institute Sifo. From this survey I have primarily tried to generate a general picture of the cultural frameworks surrounding ten pre­ constructed market segments (RISC segments) — segments that actually can be treated as ten generalized consumer worlds. However, my study also shows that such generalizations leave many questions unanswered, especially regarding the question of how cultural frameworks are actually formed, and how these processes are embedded in everyday life. Such questions can only be investigated through longer personal interviews. Further information on methodology is found in Chapter 4 and in Appendices 1-3. Hence, neither ontologically nor epistemologically my work is to be considered as ‘pure’ media studies, or audience studies. Rather, the work is foremost to be associated with the broader field of cultural studies — a field which in its turn has become more and more heterogeneously composed since its advent in the 1960s. It is within cultural studies most of the analyses of consumer culture and media culture are to be find. It only takes a brief look in the book catalogues of major academic publishers to verify such a statement. The field of media studies is increasingly intertwined with cultural studies — which is, for obvious reasons, a reasonable development. Studying the media, simultaneously denying that one is studying culture, seems like a contradiction in terms. In a similar manner, those who are interested in the cultural processes of society make a big mistake if they overlook the significance of the media. In the late modern world it is impossible to isolate the media from culture and society. In my view, the fact that my work cannot clearly be positioned within the traditional discipline of media and communications research is not a problem. On the contrary, it is an expression of the fuzzy boundaries that have always marked out the discipline, and which are getting even more blurred due to cultural, social and technological change. As I will describe in the following chapters, both media production and consumption, as well as the media content itself, are increasingly bound up or fused with other institutions, processes, practices and products. Most of the previously taken for granted demarcation lines are eroding. I believe the development of media studies is facing a turning point, where the research must become even more integrated with other disciplines than before. Already today it is quite striking how much new energy is injected into media studies from research pursued outside the 10 / Introduction discipline itself — Baudrillard, Castells, Harvey and Jameson being just a few examples. These are all theorists that manage analytically to incorporate the implications of mediazation into a wider socio-cultural context. The present work has the same aim. And in this sense, it is not only to be seen as a theoretical and empirical investigation of image culture, but also as a paradigmatic statement. The future of media studies is nowhere and everywhere. PART I Media Culture/ Consumer Culture: Assessing the Cield 1 I The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity Modernization: Rationalization and Differentiation (a) The Modern Project (b) The Nationalisation of Cultural Production (c) The Differentiation of Cultural Communities A Postmodern Prelude: The Commodity and the Metropolis (a) The Commodity (b) The Metropolis A Society of Signs (a) Culturalisation (b) Mediasation (c) Simulation The Continuity of Contradictions (a) Reflexive Modernity (b) The Multi-Layered Character of Consumer Culture Notes 2 / The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture Understanding Media Culture and Consumer Culture Commercial Intertextuality Image Culture and the Everyday Context Notes The Cultural Ambivalence of Teflexive Modernity Basically, the term consumer culture involves the same semantic paradox as concepts like ‘culture industry’ and ‘cultural commodity’ — the conflict between economy and culture, or, in a broader sense, between rationality and meaning. Ever since the early modernist thinkers like Weber and Marx, this aspect of modern society has been of central concern for sociology. Industrial society brought with it a structural transition first of all regarding the sphere of production, imposing the orthodox capitalist logic of massification even onto culture. As argued by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s, the production of symbolic goods became an object of calculation, the means to economic ends, rather than a creative component of people’s everyday lives. According to the Marxist view, since the production and consumption of cultural commodities contribute to the same kind of alienation as do any other kind of commodity production, or consumption, modernity' has exhausted much of the essential social and political resources normally embedded in cultural practice. However, consumer culture does not only involve the modern tension between strategic profit making and everyday cultural practice; the phenomenon is at the same time marked by economic and cultural tendencies that may be regarded as postmodern in nature. As a matter of fact, consumer culture seems to emerge through the very fusion, or even confusion, of extended modern rationality and postmodern symbolic disorder. There are today many arguments for a successive breakdown of the capitalist logic in the modern sense, giving way for a reflexive and more symbolically loaded post- Fordist mode of production, or a state of reflexive accumulation.1 In contrast to Fordist mass production, post-Fordism involves characteristics that contribute to a blurring of the boundaries between the commodity industry 14 / Assessing the Field and the culture industry. If previously the production resources were mainly concentrated on labour and material, post-Fordism implies a greater accent on design, packaging and marketing. Thus, since an increasing share of the unit costs are comprised by these essentially aesthetic or imaginary elements, production becomes just as much about the mediation of signs as about the supply of goods. A similar breakdown of pre-established conventions and hierarchies can be noted on the consumption side. The individualization process of industrial society has extended into a post-industrial state of eclectic lifestyle creation, in which people’s sense of self-identity is formed as much through expressive consumption practices as through class experience (objectively identified as occupational position). Ultimately, as proposed by Baudrillard in the early 1970s, consumption might no longer be understood as a matter of instrumental need gratification, but as a process of signification — that is, a pure cultural activity, increasingly uncoupled from society’s socio­ economic structures. The characteristics and sources of consumer culture, as well as the conceptualization itself, may of course be formulated differently depending on one’s ideological and philosophical point of departure. However, as an overall conclusion it is reasonable to argue that consumer culture involves not only the well-known tension between economy and culture, but also the tension between modern and postmodern processes — found both in the cultural and economic spheres (cf. Ritzer, 1999). In extension, the ambiguous balance between modern and postmodern features even calls for a reformulation of the relationship between economy and culture. As Lash and Urry (1994: 64) put it, ‘economic and symbolic processes are more than ever interlaced and interarticulated; that is, the economy is increasingly culturally inflected and culture is more and more economically inflected.’ In consumer culture, notably via the process of media^ation, the modern opposition between economy and culture is no longer pregiven. In this chapter I will provide an outline of the historical parameters at the core of contemporary consumer culture. Put in another way, the following presentation is a historical and theoretical contextualization of consumer culture, starting at the turn-of-the-century theories of Weber and Durkheim, and ending at a kind of integrated perspective on reflexive modernity. It must not be seen as a full-fledged overview of the modern-postmodern controversy, or even of the roots of consumer culture, but rather as a brief recapitulation of some central lines of development, explaining how Western culture turned into what it is today.2 The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 15 Modernization: Rationalization and Differentiation Thinking of the term modernization is to think about an aggregate of interconnected processes. Grounded in the ideals of Enlightenment thought, modernity signifies the successive development from tribal, agricultural social formations, marked by strong collective communities and religious convictions, to secularized industrial societies. The growing belief in technical and scientific progress, which in Western societies can be identified from about the 17th century and onwards, is to be regarded as the primary driving force behind the range of structural transitions shaping the modern world. Although man’s desire to control nature, rather than being a dependable part of it, was embedded already in traditional communities, for the sake of physical survival, the breakthrough of Enlightenment principles resembled the 19th century industrialization process. Due to new mechanized ways of manufacturing goods and cultivating the land, paired with the existence of a monetary system, much of the production that had previously been conducted within the household or the local community could be relocated to specialized production units, like small factories and mills. Successively, as production was arranged in more efficient ways and the demand for raw materials increased, the domestic sphere lost its significance as a sphere of production, and was instead established as a sphere of reproduction — a place for child raising, nurturing, recovery and social interaction — and consumption. This shift indicates the advent of consumer society. (a) The Modern Project. As pointed out by Durkheim (1893/1964) in his work The Division of Labour in Society the overall transformation from traditional ways of living, pre-eminently signified by tightly integrated tribal communities, to more complexly intertwined social systems involved the central feature of functional specialization. Along with industrial society and the introduction of wage labour a wide range of new, more or less specific, occupations emerged. In its most archetypical form, the logic of capitalist industries even prescribed a production system in which the workers held the positions of replaceable units — the organizational principle that from the 1910s became known as Taylorism, often symbolized by the assembly line.3 Hence, the general turn towards functional specialization concerned both the overall organization of production and reproduction in society as a whole, and the more particular organization of labour within the sphere of production. 16 / Assessing the Field Durkheim also defined this process as a transformation from mechanical to organic solidarity. While the previous state of social integration was sustained through the existence of a shared set of basic values and beliefs, a so-called collective conscience, the latter form of solidarity was based upon the division of labour. Instead of being linked together as members of a homogenous, locally fixed collective community, often with kinship as the fundamental bonding, people of modern societies became connected to the social structure through their functional position, that is, their occupation. If the social system was to be maintained, individuals had to perform their tasks in an adequate way, not violating the formal regulations that governed the interactions within and between different functional spheres of the social organism. The primary social psychological consequence of industrialization may thus be termed individualisation. Compared to their ancestors, modem people became less tied up to collective communities. Identities were no longer pregiven as a natural consequence of kinship and other locally anchored peer groups. Actually, modern society was the first society in which it became important to speak about individuals in the true sense of the word; human beings who to a major extent were more unlike other people than they were alike (cf. Kluckhohn and Murray, 1948: 35). Instead of being a human component of the collective body — acting within the same social and geographical space, sharing a similar world-view and the same values and rituals as all other members of the community — the individual attained a greater autonomy to make his or her own life decisions, to become something else than a mere product of social heritage. The growing freedom of choice, or, rather, the necessity of choice, has been outlined in a number of important works on modernization (cf. Riesman, 1950; Berger et al., 1973; Giddens, 1991). Its consequences dominate society even today, and concern modern life in its totality: the course of day-to-day activities, as well as the longer perspective of life-planning. Along with the individualization process pre-written social manuscripts have been replaced by competing sets of lifestyle conceptualizations, providing temporary guidance as to what decisions to make and how to act within certain social circumstances. In general terms, individuals have successively become increasingly left to their own reflexive considerations regarding what might be appropriate and not. In this connection, Giddens (1991: 81) even states that modern people ‘have no choice but to choose’. Thus, the individualization process did not only mean greater freedom, but also greater psycho-social pressure. In contexts where life careers are relatively open to change, the risk The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity ! 17 of interest conflicts, ontological insecurity and frustrations due to failure of realizing one’s plans is destined to increase. Taking into account the multitude of social transitions that accompanied the modernization process, differentiation stands out as a principal common denominator. Processes like industrialization, functional specialization and individualization are all to be seen as concrete, and interconnected, manifestations of the more abstract concept of differentiation. In short, compared to traditional societies, the modern world — which still today marks great shares of the social landscape — was more segmented and complex. This regards everything from housing (where the domestic sphere was divided into particular functional areas), social manners (increasingly dependent upon the contextual setting) and ways of eating and interacting with others (separating the body from food and other people’s bodies by means of cutlery, clothes etc.) (cf. Goffman, 1959; Berger et al., 1973; Elias, 1978) to the systemic structuring of society as a whole. As described by Habermas (1987) in The Theory of Communicative Action, modernity did not only imply a differentiation of subjective lifeworlds, making people’s social knowledge and experiences more and more individual.4 Modernity also led to the uncoupling of system and lifeworld. This means that economic and political institutions with the original objective of supporting and mediating the interests of citizens via communicative rationality, that is, intersubjective agreements, successively took on a more independent role, intervening in lifeworld activities via the external steering media of money and power. As Habermas puts it, systemic interconnections were no longer interwoven with mechanisms of social integration, but ‘consolidated and objectified into norm-free structures’ (ibid.: 154). Then, seen from the point of view of individuals themselves, social institutions are under such circumstances experienced as an organizational reality external from their own scope of action (see also Berger et al., 1973; Luhmann, 1982). However, the modernization process cannot be understood solely as a function of social and systemic differentiation. Modernity did not only involve new principles of social organization and community formation, but also a movement towards increased rationalisation of social action. This process was investigated by Weber already during the early years of the 20th century, and has subsequently been picked up by social theorists such as Habermas. The main point of Weber’s original thesis was that social activities in post- traditional settings were increasingly governed according to particular individual goals, rather than according to (1) strictly traditional behaviour 18 I Assessing the Field based on die habituation of long time practice, (2) affective behaviour stemming from emotional impulses, or (3) rational behaviour governed according to absolute value orientations, such as religious conviction, duty or personal loyalty. In his own words, the instrumental rationality so typical for modernity ‘involves rational consideration of alternative means to the end, of the relations of the end to other prospective results of employment of any given means, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends’ (Weber, 1964: 117; 1994: 3-6). Although Weber empasized that actions rarely fit exclusively into either one of these four types, his overall conclusion was that rational, goal oriented calculation was taking over much of the significance previously held by traditions and values. In particular, the establishment of the monetary system, the monetarization of exchange relations — also discussed by Simmel (1907/1990) in The Philosophy of Money — played a key role within this process, promoting a growing objective interdependence between social actors. This analysis is compatible with Durkheim’s description of how the collective conscience of traditional communities successively lost its grip over individual actors. Both perspectives contribute to an understanding of the mechanisms sustaining the individualization process; pointing at, on the one hand, the transformation of social communities, and, on the other hand, the new principles of social action. Additionally, several other transitions affecting everyday life, such as detraditionalization and secularization — as outlined for example in Weber’s (1905/1992) celebrated essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism — must be seen as complementary, inseparable processes, whose core values are likewise to be defined in terms of rationalization and differentiation. In a similar manner, it is possible to put forward these two factors as the underlying logic of the organization and productive mode of modern state apparatuses and capitalist industries. The modern master­ narrative implied that both political and economic systems were typically marked by bureaucratic administration and goal oriented strategic patterns of action. The work force, as well as the clients/customers, were impersonalized and integrated in the machinery in the shape of functional elements and objects of calculation (cf. Weber, 1964: 246-66; Lucacs, 1971: 87-100). As Habermas (1987: 171-2) argues, this development, which is a distinct manifestation of the uncoupling of system and lifeworld, went along with the transformation of traditional societies into industrial, capitalist nation states. Naturally, one may also talk about rationalization and differentiation within the context of culture — pointing to the modern features of cultural production The Cultural Ambivalence oftteflexive Modernity / 19 and cultural communities. A society marked by industrial modes of production and dissolved collective communities implicates particular conditions under which the production of meaning and the formation and reformation of interpretive communities may take place. Within the extensive literature on modern culture, or cultural modernization, there are a few general key points worth mentioning as a background to the phenomena of media culture and consumer culture. Primarily, these features are to be related to the emergence of the culture industry — the capitalist machinery through which cultural production was partly detached from the social praxis of everyday life. As I will argue, these modern conditions still dominate significant shares of the cultural sphere. In spite of various postmodern tendencies, the culture industry is still a valid concept. (b) The Tationaliyation of Cultural Production. The fear of an over-rationalized society, in which instrumental reason imposes itself even on cultural activities, was clearly articulated already by Weber, who even spoke of a threatening ‘iron cage of rationality’. In his view, Western capitalism was even to be seen as the result of cultural rationalization — as demonstrated in his work on value changes in protestant societies (Weber, 1992) — rather than the other way around (see also Raulet, 1984: 160-4). However, the most permeating critique of modern culture so far was launched in the 1940s by the Frankfurt School, the first ones explicitly discussing the culture industry. According to thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1979), the culture industry of the mid- 1900s - notably the American entertainment industry - could not be regarded as an isolated phenomenon, but merely an aspect of an altogether rationalized society. In the same way as nature was analyzed and manipulated through scientific studies in order to result in all-explaining systems of knowledge, culture was turned into an object of instrumental planning. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, the true intention of a work of art is to mediate an experience of the whole in the particular, to extend itself beyond the limits of the already known. Just like the magic of traditional societies, true art finds its place where knowledge dissolves. However, the foundations of art and culture were undermined due to the very same Enlightenment project that had sought to eliminate witchcraft and superstition. In this Marxist view, the mutilation of culture was an integral part of industrial society, and the culture industry was a manifestation of how the Enlightenment project had expanded outside its domains of justification. 20 / Assessing the Field As far as I can see, there are two main features that mark out the logic of the culture industry, making the concept relevant also at the advent of the 21st century. Firstiy, alike other modern capitalist organizations, the ideology of the cultural industry predicts profit maximisation as its goal. Secondly, standardization and administration — that is, rationalisation — can be singled out as the prime means of reaching this goal. To quote Adorno (1991: 145): ‘To study television shows in terms of the psychology of the authors would almost be tantamount to studying Ford cars in terms of the psychoanalysis of the late Mr Ford.’ Originally, the culture industry was thus equated with Fordism — a concept pointing to the producer-driven economy of high modernity. Ford’s philosophy of the 1910-30s prescribed that profit goals were to be reached via the manufacturing of large series of standardized commodities, pertinent to a vaguely differentiated mass market. Through a low level of product variation and scientifically developed working sequences (Taylorism) the unit-costs were to be minimized, which in turn would lower the prices and magnify the range of potential customers. However, there were also limits as to how much labour costs could be cut down. Since a great share of the population was employed within industrial production, Fordist corporations had to strike a balance between keeping the wages low enough to maximize surplus value and keeping them high enough to produce new consumer demand. Accordingly, Fordism as a mode of social and economic regulation may be considered as an important precondition for the emergence of consumer society (Ewen and Ewen, 1982: 57-71; Schudson, 1984: 161-8; Harvey, 1990: 125-40; Bocock, 1993: 15-20; Slater, 1997a: 183-8). Although a producer driven economy, it actually produced consumers, making a range of new products available to ordinary people. This also regarded the commodities of the culture industry. Already in the article On Popular Music Adorno (1941/1990) described how mass produced culture, in this case popular music, was created according to standardized, prefabricated schemata, pre-accepted by the mass audience. Every component of the work was replaceable by similar components of the schemata, and could thus not take on any independent meaning. Developing these ideas in articles like The Schema of Mass Culture and Culture and Administration, Adorno (1991) insisted that every new cultural product referred to other, similar products, which had already gained success on the market. Speaking of a culture industry, then, is to speak about a structure that tends to recreate its products according to the formulas that have once proven to be The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity I 21 successful from an economic point of view. Altogether, this means that cultural artifacts are not produced according to the immediate conditions of lived experience, in direct accordance with the thoughts and interests of people’s everyday lives, but according to a capitalist logic that turns people into a population of potential consumers. In such a context cultural use-value must always be secondary to exchange-value; the latter actually becoming the operational measurement of the former (see also Miège, 1989; Ryan, 1992). My point of departure is that this logic still dominates, and is essential to the very definition of consumer culture. (?) The Differentiation of Cultural Communities. The main social consequence of the expansive development of the culture industry during the first half of the 20th century was that the production of meaning was no longer exclusively anchored in social life, but governed via the interference of distant capitalist production systems. Due to this uncoupling of cultural production and social practice, according to the Frankfurt School, ordinary people lost control of one important resource for political opposition. Since the instrumental logic that administration forced upon cultural production stood in direct opposition to the inner quality of authentic cultural objects, all mass produced culture was saturated by the capitalist ideology. Culture was deprived of its autonomy, its spontaneity and its critical potential, and the mass audience was incorporated as an integral part of the culture industrial system — although disconnected from any influence upon the production itself.5 In extension, it was argued, mass culture manipulated the consumers to enter a state of false consciousness, as well as developing false needs. Marcuse (1964/1991) advanced this argument forcefully in One-Dimensional Man: The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation — liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable - while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administred prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets (ibid.: 7). The uncoupling of cultural production and social praxis is to be seen as yet another example of how modernization detached institutional systems from 22 / Assessing the Field the world of everyday life, and how the cultural sphere got divided into communities of production and communities of consumption. This condition has also been pointed out by Habermas (1981), arguing that the great visions of the Enlightenment thinkers — stating that increased knowledge within the fields of science, morality and arts would benefit the lives of ordinary people — have still failed to come true within the modern project. Rather, these spheres have become separated from one another, each developing autonomous fields of expert knowledge. As a cure to this malaise of modernity, Habermas asserts that ‘the lifeworld has to become able to develop institutions of itself which set limits to the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of an almost autonomous economic system and its administration’. In other words, from Habermas’ pro-modern perspective modernity is not to be seen as a lost or finished project, but must be reworked in a direction so that the cultural status of the lifeworld can be reclaimed. Another type of differentiation that can be associated with the culture industry is the distinctively modern stratification of cultural expressions. Of course, cultural classifications were prominent also in traditional society. But due to the emergence of a popular (or mass) cultural sphere — involving various product categories, like music, films, pocket books, etc. — the distinctions between high and low, between legitimate and illegitimate culture, were put on display, even exploited, in a completely new manner. From a socio-cultural point of view, the mass production of culture tends to devalue the artistic value, as well as the distinctive sign-value of the product, according to an inverted ratio. The specific artistic originality of a cultural commodity erodes as a function of the same commodity’s success on the market — which in turn implies that cultural use-value and economic exchange-value stand in opposition to one another. The latter undermines the former (cf. Bourdieu, 1984; Garnham, 1990: 154-68; Miège, 1989; Ryan, 1992). Hence, in opposition to Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/1979), who stated that mass culture tended to fuse the standards of folk culture and artistry into a devastating sameness, one might just as well argue that the culture industry, in its modernist shape, works as an energizer of cultural classifications corresponding to the social stratification of society. Since modern distinctions, conceived of in terms of Bourdieuan sociology, are typically established in opposition to cultural objects associated with standardization and mass production/consumption, popularization devalues not only cultural expressions, but tastes as well. It typically defines the lower levels of the value scale between high and popular culture (cf. Gans, 1974, 1978). Although a The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity I 23 similar pattern existed in pre-modern societies, involving a polarization between fine arts and folk culture, the modern era and the rise of the culture industry partly relocated the circulation of classifications from the sphere of social interaction to the sphere of mediated representations. This is also to say that popular culture, compared to folk culture, lacks autonomy in relation to the market system. It does not obey the pure rules of art, or what might be called an ‘aesthetic rationality’, nor is it bound up with life-praxis, but is dependent upon the logic of the market-place (cf. Wolin, 1985: 12-4).6 However, if one admits that cultural tastes are hierarchically ordered, according to a class-related continuum, one is also compelled to admit that there is a limit to the massification thesis. Not even within a Fordist economic context are cultural commodities diffused in society totally without address, targeted for just anyone, or as many as possible. The market is typically divided into consumer segments, most often referring to demographic factors such as age, gender and social class (income level). On the one hand, this does actually mean that the executives of modern culture industries conceive of the market, and society in general, as a differentiated structure, and that the plurality of interests among consumers to some extent is obeyed. On the other hand, in a Fordist context product differentiation and marketing — design and advertising being the prime cultural vehicles for product positioning — are still symbiotically associated with a simplified view of social space. There is a prevailing notion of cultural communities being rigidly connected to basic demographic categories, and firmly anchored in one single class hierarchy. As we will see in subsequent sections, during the last few decades this view has been contested by a more pluralistic and culturally inflected socio-economic principle — that of post-Fordism, or reflexive accumulation. A Postmodern Prelude: The Commodity and the Metropolis Following Ritzer (1999), it seems reasonable to argue that both ‘consumer culture’ and ‘media culture’ emerge through the simultaneous, contradictory operation of modern and postmodern cultural mechanisms. Paradoxically, the modern project, as outlined above, bears the embryo of postmodernity within itself. Embedded in the overall processes of rationalization and differentiation lies a social and cultural antithesis marked by ambivalence, hedonism, phantasmagoria, and even chaos. As several theorists have argued (cf. Harvey, 24 / Assessing the Field 1990; Giddens, 1991; Jameson, 1991; Beck, 1992), during the last few decades these ambiguities have become increasingly evident in the Western world. In times of high individualization, involving the development of anonymous city environments, and a simultaneous growth of abstract systems, like scientific expertise and the monetary system (cf. Giddens, 1991: 133-9), many people come to experience a sense of insecurity and alienation. As life environments are getting more and more pluralized and uncontrollable, in order to develop a sense of ontological security individuals are forced to establish routines as to how decisions and practices are to be arranged in meaningful patterns. This is what lifestyle creation is about; a way of coping with the multitude of impressions and alternatives that people are continuously faced with (see further Chapter 3). Accordingly, as Giddens (ibid.: 81) stresses, ‘the more post-traditional the settings in which the individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking’. Undoubtedly, the most post-traditional, if not to say postmodern, setting one may think of is the metropolis — the area in which anonymity, socio- spatial pluralization and semiotic overload dominate much of people’s everyday experiences. This is also where we find the roots to the postmodern aspects of consumer culture. Hence, in the following two sections I will primarily focus upon the social and cultural consequences of the intensified circulation of commodities in the metropolis. (a) The Commodity. Although Karl Marx may not be advanced as an ancestor of postmodern thought, nor of the analysis of postmodern phenomena, when discussing the emergence of consumer culture there seems to be no way around his theory of the commodity and the accompanying notion of commodity fetishism. This body of work, which is an integral part of his overall view of the social consequences of the division of labour in capitalist societies, provides a very clear illumination of the ambivalent character of consumer culture — stemming from the balance between, on the one hand, instrumental rationality and functional differentiation, and, on the other hand, alienation, commodification and enchantment (cf. Ritzer, 1999). In short, people’s unhappy consciousness ‘arises when production and consumption become separate processes’ (Slater, 1997a: 106). As mentioned above, this separation of production and consumption is directly connected to the fact that people in capitalist societies do not produce goods primarily for their own needs, but rather in order to gain money to buy similar goods on the market. Therefore, capitalist society is by definition a consumer society — a society in The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 25 which people-as-workers are paid to produce goods that are sold to people-as- consumers. These conditions imply that the commodification process occurs on two different levels; first, the labour-power produced by the worker is sold as a commodity to the capitalist, and second, the object produced is sold as a commodity to the consumer. Taken together, this means that the worker gets alienated both from the things he or she creates, and from the work he or she puts into the creative process. According to Marx (1975), then, the capitalist arrangement stands in sharp opposition to people’s inherent nature as human beings, that is, their striving to manifest themselves through creative work. In social life, as individuals alternate between their two complementary roles as workers and consumers, they can never fulfill their true needs, but only the false ones imposed on them by consumer society — primarily the need for money. Since the relationship between production and consumption is mediated through market mechanisms and the monetary system, the value of commodities is peculiarly dualistic; comprised by the two before-mentioned components of use-value and exchange-value. This dualism defines the particularity of the commodity form, extensively discussed within Marxist theories in general, and political economical analyses of the culture industries in particular (cf. Smythe, 1981; Garnham, 1990; Murdoch, 1992; Golding and Murdoch, 1996). The point to be made here is that in a capitalist economy use-value must always be secondary to exchange-value. The industrialist does not primarily buy labour-power in order to satisfy people’s needs for goods and thirst for creative work, but in order to make profit, which in turn secures the continuity of mass production. Hence, although consumers obviously use commodities for certain ends within their everyday lives (and this must also be the case if the economy will be functioning) the production of use-value is never an end in itself, as is the case within self-maintained communities, but merely the means for making more profit. This logic demarcates one essential feature of consumer culture in general, namely the process through which consumption takes over significant parts of the social psychological functions originally held by productive work. While production turns culturally meaningless, since the use-value of the commodities is created for an anonymous mass, and thus is of no concern for the worker, consumption becomes the main practice through which self-identity can be sustained and expressed. As Smythe (1981: 39-47) argues, in a market economy people’s consumption practices, predominantly conducted as leisure activities during their ‘free time’, can even be regarded as just another kind of work. Actually, 26 / Assessing the Field leisure time itself is increasingly commodified, expropriated by various branches of the culture industry, through the circulation of holiday trips, movie tickets, sports events, and so on.7 Symptomatically, keeping in mind the double nature of consumer culture, this theme also appears in the postmodern works of Baudrillard (1998: 151-8)8, who makes the following statement: But, increasingly, free time itself has to be directly or indirectly purchased before it can be ‘consumed’. Norman Mailer has analyzed the production calculation carried out on orange juice, delivered frozen or liquid (in a carton). The latter is dearer because the price includes the two minutes gained over preparing the frozen product: in this way, the consumer's own free time is being sold to him (ibid.: 153). The commodity form then appears as an essential link between individuals and the capitalist system, not only reproducing people’s needs, but also mediating the production of cultural meaning. However, from the viewpoint of social subjects themselves these relationships are invisible. In their eyes, commodities appear as something entirely objective, circulating on the market independently of the labour-power actually behind their existence. The object­ world is thus conceived of as a kind of phantasmagoria — as a world consisting of alien entities, whose values (that is, exchange-values) are measured in relation to one another and in relation to the monetary system, rather than in relation to the productive work. Additionally, since commodities seem to be magically generated they are also endowed with other, social and cultural values, which appear as natural properties of the thing itself. In this way commodities become fetishes in the same manner as religious artifacts (Marx, 1976). A central aspect of the process of commodity fetishism is the expansion of new representational systems, that is, meaning generating systems which attach a particular set of values to the commodity. Through the semiotic work of such creative instruments as design, packaging and advertising, commodities are turned into something entirely different from mere functional items. Their communicative capacity is reinforced, implicating that consumers/users do not only consume or use material goods for practical- instrumental reasons, but also for social and cultural purposes, in order to express something about who they are, or want to be. This is not to say that material goods were totally without meaning in pre-capitalist societies, but rather to say that the meaning generating processes took on an entirely new form through the separation of production and consumption, and through the The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 27 advent of various commercially governed media. As examined in the anthropological work of Douglas and Isherwood (1978), material possessions can always be treated as an information system, as ‘a nonverbal medium for the human creative faculty’ (ibid.: 62). However, while material culture denotes a system in which the meanings of things are established through social interaction and intersubjective understanding within particular cultural communities, consumer culture is a socio-cultural arrangement in which cultural meanings are attached to commodities under the influence of media channels controlled by the market system itself (cf. Lury, 1996: 10-51). (b) The Metropolis. The increasing significance of commodities and their representations, as well as commodities-as-representations, was considered at an early stage by Walter Benjamin, who perhaps could be singled out as the first major investigator of consumer culture. For Benjamin, the metropolis was regarded as the principle site of the emerging consumer culture; the modern space par excellence, hosting rationality and myth side by side — with Paris as the capital of capitals. One of his crucial discoveries was that ‘underneath the surface of increasing systemic rationalization (Weber), on an unconscious “dream” level, the new urban-industrial world had become fully reenchanted. In the city myth was alive’ (Buck-Morss, 1989: 254; see also Ritzer, 1999). In Paris the latest technological innovations and the latest fashions in design and architecture were circulated and put on display. As he noted, ‘the phantasmagoria of capitalist culture attained its most radiant unfurling in the World Exhibition of 1867’. The exhibitions in Paris ‘erected the universe of commodities’ (Benjamin, 1983: 166). Hence, Benjamin’s focus on the prevalence of myths and phantasmagoria in metropolitan areas shows obvious connections to Marx’ theories of commodity fetishism. Some commentators have even stated that the concept of phantasmagoria is merely another term for commodity fetishism (Tiedemann, 1982/1988: 277). According to Gilloch (1996: 118), though, Benjamin appears to have understood commodity fetishism as a triadic structure. First, it could be seen as a myth of modernity. Second, it regarded the idolization of the object, the projection of human dreams on to products alienated from their creators. Commodities are the idols of modernity, and ‘the arcades, the boutiques and the department stores are the shrines to the commodity; they are its temples where one goes to pay homage’ (ibid.: 119). Third, fetishization means that the commodity is transformed into an object of sexual desire. Since it is treated as a divine creation, independent of the industrial production process, 28 / Assessing the Field the commodity becomes sexualized although it stands in direct opposition to the organic. By the same token, this process involves a commodification of the sexual. What is central to Benjamin’s analyses, then, is the human experience of the environments created by modern capitalism. One may even say that Benjamin, in the Passagenarbeit, as well as in his re-examinations of Baudelaire’s writings on the 19th century Paris flâneur and in autobiographical essays such as the Perlin Chronicle (1986), takes on a phenomenological approach, trying to grasp the truth about modernity from the viewpoint of the subjects themselves. In this connection, Benjamin tends to return to two interconnected topics: First, modernity is regarded as a state of dream-sleep. All technological and aesthetic innovations and fashions of the era must be considered as realizations of the dreams of earlier generations; in other words, people live the dreams of their parents and grandparents. They constitute a dreaming collective, at once surrounded by the traces of historical utopias and the new utopian imaginations produced by photographers, designers, graphic artists, and others. In this context, the city itself can be seen as both the achievement of and the setting for collective dreaming. Thus, Benjamin argues (as did Adorno and Horkheimer a few years later) that modernity, behind the mask of progress and the end of myth, actually involves a mode of mythical intensification (Benjamin, 1983: 60). And nowhere is myth as present as in the metropolis, in the arcades and department stores, and at the exhibitions - where, paradoxically, rational progress is also told to be exposed. Accordingly, and secondly, in spite of the rapid technological progress and the intensified alterations in fashions (for example, the arcades of the 1830s, were rather soon outdated, replaced by department stores as the new locus of commodity culture)9 the key to modernity is an ongoing sameness. What on the surface seems like novelty and improvement is nothing else than an ongoing motion of repetition; the old appear as new, because the past is forgotten. In his essay Pan's, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Benjamin writes (1986: 158): Novelty is a quality independent of the intrinsic value of the commodity. It is the origin of the illusion inseverable from the images produced by the collective unconscious. It is the quintessence of false consciousness, whose indefatigable agent is fashion. The illusion of novelty is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the illusion perpetual sameness. Likewise, as Buck-Morss (1989: 260) notes, since the dreaming collective is ‘composed of atomized consumers imagining their own commodity dream- The Cultural Ambivalence of Teflexive Modernity / 29 world to be uniquely personal’, they are not aware of their own uniformity - that, in the era of individualization, they are all dreaming the same dream. Taken together, these two points imply that the critical task of cultural analysis, and, in extension, mankind in general, is to bring about an historical awakening from the dream-sleep, to explode the illusion of modernity as progressive and endless. From this outset, the arcades project of the 1930s must be treated not only as a matter of historical documentation, but also, in the shape of an ‘archeology of dreaming’ (Gilloch, 1996: 111), as a revolutionary proclamation. Many of the themes appearing in Benjamin’s work — notably the lonely individual in the midst of metropolitan activity, surrounded by crowds, commodities and signs — are clearly influenced by one of his intellectual predecessors, Georg Simmel. What primarily unites Simmel and Benjamin is that both tried to disembed the ambivalent psychological character of modern city life; describing the interplay between economic calculation and phantasmagoria, fascination and estrangement, sexual desire and boredom, and so on (cf. Jameson, 1999). For Benjamin, the representative of modern individuality is the metropolitan flâneur, who unhurriedly strolls through the cityscape for no other reason than pleasure. The city, and in particular the arcades, are the very places in which the flâneur is truly at home, just like ‘a citizen in his four walls’ (Benjamin, 1983: 37). The flâneur is a spectator and an exhibitionist, wanting to see and to be seen, always at the heart of the urban crowd, but never an integrated part of it. He refuses to be a man of the crowd, and can therefore maintain a sense of identity, while all around are losing theirs. In his most spectacular form, dressed up as a dandy in the latest fashions, the flâneur even takes on a narcissistic character as he moves through the mirror-filled city landscapes glancing at the look of himself and enjoying the glances of others. Paradoxically, though, in his hunt for novelty the flâneur (or the dandy), the self-appointed connoiseur of consumer society, also becomes the most devoted slave to the repetitions of the ‘ever-the-same’. His desire to avoid boredom leads him even deeper into false consciousness. A quite similar analysis appears in Simmel’s (1997) famous essay The Metropolis and Mental Life, first published in 1903. Already in the opening paragraph, stating that ‘the deepest problems of modern life derives from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life’ (ibid.: 174-5), Simmel touches upon the core dilemma of the personality type which the flâneur later came to 30 / Assessing the Field represent. His prime point is that on the psychological level the increasingly diverse and unpredictable environments of the metropolis generate an ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’, which the individual somehow has to cope with. Instead of lasting impressions, rythm and continuity, the psychological conditions of the city are characterized by short visual impulses, irregularly occurring events, and the fragmentarization of lived experience. Additionally, this new life environment is a place of anonymity, where individuals interact with more people than ever before, but all the same remain strangers to one another. In accommodating to this situation, Simmel stresses, the monetarization process has had a significant generalizing influence, since it provides the means for impersonal social interaction — money. While personal relations are founded upon the existence of emotions and individuality, rational relationships make all individualities indifferent, reduced to the level of the exchange value. Both people and things are dealt with in a ‘matter-of-fact attitude’, presupposing a rational reciprocity between actors. However, this ‘intellectualization of everyday life’ is only one socio- psychological aspect of metropolitan life. Another, not as rational, feature is the prevalence of the blasé attitude-, a non-reflexive mode of consciousness resulting from continuous over-stimulation of impressions. Simmel writes that ‘a life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all’ (ibid.: 178). Hence, the initial fascination and engagement in the city environments tend to transform into its opposite; boredom and indignation. Thus, one of the underlying themes of both Simmel’s and Benjamin’s analyses is the crisis of modern identity; the risk of identity loss in an environment marked by anonymity and the overload of capitalist phantasmagoria. We can in this context discern several lines of thought that later have come to appear frequently in the literature on socialization and personality development — questions that I will return to in Chapter 3. Additionally, as asserted at the beginning of this section, the transitions described by Simmel and Benjamin may to a certain extent also be seen as a prelude to many of the contemporary phenomena discussed by postmodernist thinkers like Jameson and Baudrillard. What is primarily at stake here is the overproduction of symbolic representations, leading to an increasingly floating and imaginary everyday experience. The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 31 A Society of Signs An important point of departure for the present work is that in capitalist societies consumption has not only expanded in quantitative terms — mass consumption being a prime force behind the economic development of the Western world. It has also arisen as an essential cultural issue, an integrated aspect of people’s hermeneutic praxis. Due to the interplay between social individualization and the evolution of an increasingly reflexive mode of production, commodities have become increasingly image loaded — produced and consumed as communicators. The consumption of goods has for a very long time created differences between individuals, groups and social classes. Ever since the ground breaking work of Thorstein Veblen (1899/1994), The Theory of the Teisure Class— identifying the phenomenon of conspicuous consumption as a principal means of class distinction among the new, affluent American upper and middle classes — the meaning of modern consumption has been a matter of sociological and cultural interest. Another early exploration of the theme can be found in Weber’s theorization of the growing significance of the stylisation of life (cf. Weber, 1994: 113-20), which has been picked up by, among others, Bourdieu (1984: 55, 174) and Giddens (1991: 81). More recently it has also been argued that in capitalist economies consumption has come to play a more significant role in people’s identity work than production. For example, in the 1960s Luckmann and Berger stated that in times of high social and geographical mobility ‘conspicuous patterns of consumption take the place of continuous interpersonal contacts within an individual’s biography’ (1964: 339).10 On a structural level these social tendencies can be directly coupled to the rise of Fordism. The ideology of mass production and mass consumption, which I discussed above, made a wide range of goods available to groups that previously could not afford them. As Ewen (1999: 57-77) describes, that was the time when consumption became a matter of style — and style became an essential social task, a way of elaborating the expression of one’s social position. Since mass production enabled more and more people to afford the commodified symbols of the good life, the entire cultural value system was set in faster motion. The alterations in fashions and trends were speeded up, and the self became a project of continuous aesthetic accommodation and stylization — especially in the growing cities. In 1933 (that is, about the same 32 I Assessing the Field time as Benjamin worked on his Arcades Project) the American sociologist Robert Lynd commented dryly upon the rise of the ‘commodity self : The process of growing up and of effective adult living consists in adjusting one’s individual tensions by weighting them with values sufficiently congruous with the accepted values of society and at the same time with the urgent personal needs of the individual to enable him to present some socially tolerable semblance of an integrated front in the business of living. Within each of us this exciting drama is played out in our every waking and sleeping hour until the end of the picture (Lynd, quoted in Ewen, 1999: 71). For a great share of the population, then, consumption and style had taken on an important function within the general modern strategy of social and psychological survival. Benjamin’s flâneur was successively turned into a more general phenomenon. In Riesman’s (1950) The Lonely Crowd this line of development is given the name other-directedness, pointing to the modern individual’s continuous striving to adapt to the standards of appearance and behaviour set by significant others. This new form of sociability — distinguished from tradition-direction and inner-direction — demands greater reflexivity from the individual, not at least regarding the evaluation of aesthetic expression. To fit in and to ‘be right’ is essential for the other-directed person. Within the social formations that he or she moves ‘the proper mode of expression requires feeling out with skill and sensitivity the probable tastes of the others and then swapping mutual likes and dislikes to maneuver intimacy’ (ibid.: 72). According to Riesman, the training in consumer taste, partly governed via the supervision of mass media and advertising, has to a great extent replaced training in etiquette and morality. Already in early childhood the individual, or the ‘consumer trainee’, learns to make choices according to what products mean, rather than what they actually are (ibid.: 81). Hence, in the era of other-directedness taste patterns get more group specific. By contrast, according to Riesman, the kind of conspicuous consumption outlined by Veblen half a century earlier had been quite typical for the inner-directed period, since it was intrinsically bound up with the social prestige of the social actor. Conspicuous consumption is to be regarded an unashamed expression of the wealth one has managed to achieve, rather than a means to adapt to the perceived tastes of one’s peers (ibid.: 122). Although a rather harsh generalization of social development, Riesman’s ideas were in many respects ahead of his time. Discussing questions like the blurred distinctions between the sphere of production and the sphere of The Cultural Ambivalence of Teflexive Modernity / 33 pleasure; the new sensitivity among individuals, and the impact of mass media on personality development, Riesman outlines a world pretty much like the post-Fordist, or postmodern world. Clearly, he is preoccupied with issues like reflexivity, narcissism and the consumption of media created hyperrealities, although these concepts are not yet explicitly addressed. Following these lines of thought, in the succeeding discussion, guided by theorists such as Harvey, Jameson and Baudrillard, I will tty’ to give an account of how the world of consumption in many respects has undergone a successive, but nonetheless significant, shift during the last fifty years or so. Under the three headlines of culturalisation, mediasation and simulation I will identify the main processes through which the production and consumption of goods has merged together with the production of meaning. (a) Culturalisation. If it is, on the one hand, possible to argue that the production of culture has been removed from the sphere of everyday life into profit making institutions, that is, the culture industry, it is at the same time important to note that the production of ‘functional’ commodities has become culturalized. Today, the production of such things takes place within settings that have adopted many of the characteristics associated with the culture industry — essentially the preoccupation with meaning, or image, creation. Hence, the borderlines between culture industry and ‘other’ industrial branches (including all those branches normally not considered as cultural producers, like the car industry, the tool industry, or the soap industry) have been blurred. Of course, there has for a long time existed corporate branches whose connections to the culture industry have been ambivalent, such as most kinds of fashion producers, in which the work of designers and artists has been an indispensable ingredient. But today these branches seem to be customary rather than exceptions from the rule. In order to make profit, most producers of consumer goods have to put great resources into the development of an image that hopefully will make the product distinguishable from other, basically similar, products on the market. This is also the simple logic explaining why companies producing the substantially most identical kinds of goods — such as detergents, soaps, shampoos, etc. — must constantly entertain their customers with advertising messages and subtle novelties in flavours, packaging, and so on. The products are simply too similar in composition and performance for creating any meaningful distinctions by themselves. 34 / Assessing the Field Thus, in vast areas of the market-place, regarding a vast range of product categories, the modern ideal of rational progress has become increasingly obsolete as a sales argument. This is obvious when analyzing the development of advertising formats, which during the 20th century successively have abandoned the standard of product information, and turned into a vehicle for image creation (Leiss et al., 1997: 236-62). When thinking of the term consumer culture, this double movement has to be taken into account: Culture is not only commercialized; commerce is likewise getting culturalized. And the principal reason to this, springing from the general social developments outlined above, is that style has become business. However, as for example Harvey (1990) argues, there is no reason to believe that the culturalized economy represents a significant break from the basic organizing principles of capitalist economic life. Although the means of accumulation have partly taken on a new form, the ultimate goal of profit making is still predominant. What brought about the transformation of the production system can actually be explained according to the same capitalist logic as motivated the rise of Fordism. Due to the influence of a number of interconnected political and economic factors during the late 1960s and early 1970s — including the weakened role of the US dollar; the hardening competition between American, West European, Japanese, as well as other newly industrialized economies; the growing establishment of offshore manufacturing in low-wage, developing countries; and the Arab oil embargo in 1973 — the Fordist mode of production proved to be too rigid for generating the surplus value needed to sustain economic growth in the Western, and notably the US, economies. In the years of strong deflation 1973-75, implying decreased demand and vanishing profit margins, the excess capacity of many big corporations became obvious. The prime means of solving this problem was to put higher stake on rationalization and organizational restructuring - trying to eliminate ‘the rigidity of long-term and large-scale fixed capital investments in mass production systems that precluded much flexibility of design and presumed stable growth in invariant consumer markets’ (ibid.: 142). The mode of production that started to emerge was one of flexible accumulation, or, in more general terms, post-Fordism, outlined by for example Lash and Urry (1987) and Harvey (1990). According to this perspective, the rise of flexible accumulation, typically represented by ‘just-in-time management’, involves a range of different transitions as to how production is organized. Of course, this is not to say that Fordism in its entirety, globally, or in any clear-cut manner has been replaced by a pure post- The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 35 Fordist economy. However, the following points may serve as a summary of tendencies, which together have marked the last 25 years:11 ~ Mass production of homogeneous, standardized goods is replaced by flexible small batch production of a variety of product types. ~ Resource driven production is replaced by demand driven production. ~ Single, specialized work tasks are replaced by multiple tasks with eliminated demarcations. ~ Vertical labour organization is replaced by horizontal labour organization with more responsibility given to the workers. Speaking of culturalization, then, on the production side of the economy this phenomenon is closely connected to a wider process of dematerialisation. The prominence of design, packaging and advertising - what Wernick (1991) refers to as promotion — is intrinsically bound up with the implementation of rationalizing technologies, like computers and robots, which empower the alterations and variations of product characteristics (customization) demanded by an increasingly heterogeneous and other-directed consumer market. In a post-Fordist production context the costs for mere labour-power and raw material are secondary to the resources put into essentially imaginary components — notably various kinds of commodity aesthetics. Naturally, this condition is as most obvious within the growing service, information and cultural sectors of the economy. Moreover, following Lash and Urry (1994), the phenomenon of dematerialization extends well beyond the sphere of production (see also Slater, 1997a: 193-4). The fact that non-material goods play a more important role in the economy, and that material commodities have a greater non­ material component, is also reflected at the level of everyday experience. Due to the development of the mass media, people are today to a great extent encountering semiotic representations of commodities, rather than the commodities themselves. In the course of everyday life, various kinds of media texts provide the consumer with images of goods and services that might be acquired and incorporated as meaningful components of his or her expressive style. This also implies that consumers often have a quite extensive knowledge about the meanings of things before they actually acquire, or even encounter, them — especially individuals for whom the ‘aestheticization of everyday life’ is an essential issue (Featherstone, 1991: 65-82). 36 I Assessing the Field When Lash and Urry (1994) introduce the concept of reflexive accumulation (as an extension of ‘flexible accumulation’) it is precisely this broader socio­ cultural picture they are addressing. According to them, what is not captured in the notion of flexibility is ‘the extent to which production has become increasingly grounded in discursive knowledge’, and ‘the extent to which symbolic processes, including an important aesthetic component, have permeated both consumption and production’ (ibid.: 60-1). This means that the culturalization process (considered as a component of the broader dematerialization process) is based on the continuous hermeneutic interplay between consumption and production practices. As lifestyle engineering has become a critical project, demanding great reflexivity from individual subjects, a similar self-reflexivity has developed among producers, trying to maximize their adaptability to cultural changes in the environment. Not only must the fluctuations in tastes and expressions on the consumer market be interpreted and re-interpreted, but also the norms, rules and resources of the production processes trying to meet these changes. Hence, both consumption and production are turned into increasingly cultural practices (see also Wernick, 1991). A similar view is taken by Jameson (1991), who argues that the lost distinctions between economy and culture are not primarily to be explained by commercialization processes, or the expansion of the culture industry: Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life — from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself — can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original and yet un theorized sense (ibid.: 48). According to Jameson, this cultural explosion signifies a postmodern turn, involving not only a fusion of culture and economy, but also an expansion of mediated experience, phantasmagoria and the hyperreal; that is, the preoccupation with surfaces, images and simulacra. However, in line with the arguments of Harvey (1990) and Lash and Urry (1987, 1994), Jameson argues that postmodernism must not be understood as an independent, ideologically innocent occurrence, but rather as ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’. People of today are caught as cultural subjects within the growing multinational communication network, whose development is in turn coupled to the internationalization of capital. Although the major changes that have occurred The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity ! hl within the field of consumption and production during the last decades tend to problematize the view of modernity as a one-dimensional line of development, marked by the ever- expanding logic of instrumental rationality and functional differentiation, the postmodern condition is not to be considered as fundamental break with the capitalist system, but rather as a movement within that very system. The rationality of economic calculation is not abandoned, but rather reshaped, culturalized, in order to fit the new, individualized conditions of social life - which are likewise to be considered as part of the extension of capitalism.1 (b) Mediazation. The development of the mass media and new information technologies is to be seen as one of the most significant forces behind the pluralization of contemporary society. As the significance of traditions, religious beliefs, kinship systems, and local communities has eroded, the expansion and diversification of media production have created new opportunities for identity development. Today, substantial parts of people’s cultural frameworks are derived from media consumption. One may say that the mass media provide a means for individuals to map out and elaborate their position in the world. In the realm of culture, then, the term mediazation refers to the process through which mediated cultural products have gained importance as cultural referents, and hence contribute to the development and maintenance of cultural communities — which are in turn the source for people’s sense of cultural identity. In other words, the mediazation of culture is the process that creates and reinforces media culture. What is particularly interesting to note regarding the mediazation process, is that the diversified constitution of the contemporary media system (whose evolution has followed a typically modern trajectory of rationalization and differentiation) caters simultaneously for the extension and culmination of modern socio-cultural processes and for their over-extension and lapsing into postmodernism. In the modern context, the mass media’s potential to create and nourish cultural communities has often been discussed in relation to already demarcated social groups, for example ‘the British people’ (cf. Scannell, 1992), or ‘the European people’ (cf. Morley and Robins, 1995). Through mass media use, these kinds of groups have been given the adequate cultural material to reinforce a sense of shared cultural identity. The typical example in this context is the former function of national broadcasting. As the range of programming for a long time was very limited in most European countries, both television and radio could gather vast national audiences to 38 / Assessing the Field watch or listen to the same content. To use Benedict Anderson’s (1983) term; people became part of an ‘imagined community’. Although they did not interact socially, they could share a common, national frame of reference. However, since the mass media system has become more international and market-driven, the patterns have started to change. For example, in Sweden most people in the late 1980s could still watch only two public service television channels, and only listen to three public service radio channels. Today the situation is considerably different: Commercial television stations have been introduced, and most households can watch several internationally distributed channels via cable or a satellite dish. Moreover, many local and regional radio stations have been launched, most of them commercial. This situation is not a specifically Swedish phenomenon, but an indication of a general process of internationalization and commercialization. All over the world people’s cultural environments are changing quite rapidly. But the intensified differentiation process can not in itself be regarded as postmodern; not even the preoccupation with niche marketing, lifestyle segmentation, and so on, within particular media channels is basically to be considered postmodern to its nature. The general aim is still profit making, and the means of reaching this goal is further specialization and adaptation — although in a post-Fordist manner. At first glance, this is just an extension of modern ideals. However, taking a closer look at the social consequences of the current media landscape, it is obvious that the mass media do not only nourish the cultural patterns of pre-existing communities; to an increasing extent they also contribute to the establishment of new, detemtonaliqed ones (cf. Meyrowitz, 1985: 131-49; Thompson, 1995: 207-34; Featherstone, 1995: 114-22; Appadurai, 1996). While it has become more difficult to maintain national, or other locally fixed cultural communities — since the differentiated media output rather sustains a polarization between specialized audience segments (Reimer, 1998a) — people can experience a new sense of community through the sharing of lifestyles and certain cultural tastes. Such communities are typically transnational and established in relation to popular culture, including advertising and consumer goods. In this regard the media function as an ‘image bank’ from which individuals may adopt specific cultural attributes according to lifestyle (cf. Kellner, 1995: 257): My analyses thus suggest that in a postmodern image culture, the images, scenes, stories, and cultural texts of media culture offer a wealth of subject positions which in turn help structure individual identity. These images project role and gender models, appropriate and inappropriate The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity I 39 forms of behavior, style and fashion, and subtle enticements to emulate and identify with certain identities while avoiding others. Implicitly, Kellner’s analysis suggests that while media in general support the development of deterritorialized cultural communities, visual media in particular, like magazines and television, play a crucial role for the development of expressive communities (cf. Featherstone, 1991: 66-72; Kratz and Reimer, 1998; Gibbins and Reimer, 1999; Jansson, 2000a). These are communities which are not merely based on invisible denominators like values, interests, demographic characteristics, etc., but also, and sometimes exclusively, on semiotic expressions of a shared interpretative framework. In these instances cultural belonging is founded upon the mutual recognition of a shared ‘stylistic ensemble’, that is, a particular combination of aesthetic attributes (Marchand, 1985).13 Whether in a Fordist context of mass produced goods, or in a post- Fordist context of customized lifestyle accessories, the mass media, especially advertising, are the prime vehicles for transmitting images of how these commodity-signs are to be composed in relation to one another (cf. Hebdige, 1981). The development of stylistic ensembles thus becomes the means for the expression of belonging, as well as individuality. In this context one must even argue that postmodern media culture, intrinsically associated with consumer culture, involves the development of a range of peripheral interpretative communities, which are hermeneutically accessible only to limited groups of people. As mediated experiences of stylistic images and lifestyle concepts multiply (as do the range of available consumer goods) there also emerges a larger symbolic battery for cultural distinction. Quite logically, the number of expressive communities, all trying to create specific cultural codes and thereby distinguish themselves from other communities, increases — a situation at once implying that more and more cultural products are produced and distributed only to make sense within specialized groups. Hence, the paradoxical consequence of this development is that the more mediated images people potentially can appropriate for the sake of identity creation, and the wider their intersubjectively shared cultural framework gets, the more cultural symbols will remain beyond their subjective horizon of interpretation. Post-Fordist advertising strategies serve as a particularly good example: The advertiser presumes that the target audience has the adequate cultural competence, the adequate hermeneutic skills, to make the ‘right’ interpretation of the message, that is, a ‘preferred reading’ (cf. Hall, 1980a). This balance 40 / Assessing the Field between encoding and decoding is especially intricate in those advertising formats in which informative arguments have been replaced by an image based game of connotations and intertextual relations (cf. Fowles, 1996: 90-3; Leiss et al., 1997: 225-84). If such an advertisement reaches the wrong audience, or if the characteristics of the target group diverge from the advertiser’s presumption, the message will fail in its objective as communicator. This is a rather idiosyncratic manifestation of the condition of reflexive accumulation, referred to above, as well as the dilemma of symbolic over-production discussed by Baudrillard and others (see paragraph c). As Harvey (1990: 284-9) notes in his discussion of the term time-space compression, the development of electronic communication technologies has been essential for the speeding up of information flows, both within corporations and between corporations and customers. Reflexive utilization of media resources contributes to accentuating the volatility and ephemerality of fashions and styles. In social life this means that cultural and expressive communities are not only spatially displaced and increasingly pluralized, but also increasingly changeable (cf. Appadurai, 1996). New cultural components enter and vanish from people’s cultural horizons more and more frequently. Of course, this does not mean that cultural producers are simply handing out new trends to passive consumers, or, conversely, merely respond to new trends; rather, reflexive accumulation implies that producers are both sensitive to cultural impulses and able to adjust and display these trends to potential consumers (cf. Klein, 2000). Accordingly, as pointed out already in Veblen’s analyses of the late 19th century leisure class and Benjamin’s analyses of the metropolitan flâneur, (postmodern people’s desire for new, unfamiliar experiences must be seen as a complementary clue to the dynamic of consumer culture. To some extent the search for noveltv is even unrelated to the characteristics of the products themselves, but rather a function of the individual’s previous experiences and cultural frames of reference. As Campbell (1992: 55) puts it, novelty is ‘virtually exhausted in the act of consumption itself, disappearing rapidly with the consumer’s own familiarization with the purchase’, leading to an endless circle of new product demand. It is no doubt that the expansion of new communications media, which makes it possible to distribute new cultural concepts on a global scale at one single moment, has had a great influence on this process. The electronic media landscape implicates a quicker diffusion of trends and consumption styles, since it more or less eliminates the resistance of social structures. It creates a short cut between ‘producers’ and The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 41 ‘consumers’, penetrating the lifeworld as a kind of cultural, or aesthetic, expert system (Lash and Urry, 1994: 54). According to a number of cultural analyses, the desire for novelty is particularly prevalent among the cultural intermediaries within the new middle class,14 occupied as symbolic producers themselves (like directors, executives and creators in design, advertising and the media). Since these groups do not have the affluent habitus of the traditional bourgeoisie, they must continuously generate new distinctive cultural code systems and circulate alternative images of consumption; ‘consumption as excess, waste and disorder’ (Featherstone, 1991: 21; see also Bourdieu, 1984: 310-5; Wynne and O’Connor, 1998). Driven by the typically middle class ‘mobility ethos’ (Luckmann and Berger, 1964), and controlling the mechanisms of the media system, the cultural intermediaries function as a force of cultural acceleration. Additionally, their ambivalent socio-cultural position implies that their tastes and stylistic innovations promote the diffusion of postmodern aesthetics — that is, aesthetics marked by bricolage and collage. Popular culture is blended with high culture; new expressions are blended with older, recycled ones; ‘exotic’ artifacts are blended with Western modernism, and so on. Old distinctions are dissolving. Since cultural representations are lifted out of their ‘natural’ contexts and combined in new ways, the relationship between signifier and signified is destabilized. According to Jameson (1991: 26-7), in a postmodern context signification is generated and projected rather by the relationship of signifiers among themselves, through the ways in which they are combined, rather than through a more straightforward predetermined connotation — an argument also put forward by Baudrillard (1998: 69-86). However, since the postmodern mode of representation is an outcome of late capitalism — or even ‘the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism’ Jameson (1991: 45) — there is also a certain socio-economic logic to this cultural transformation. First of all, a driving force behind the ‘popularization’ of postmodernism — the process through which postmodernism is turned into something distinctively different from the artistic postmodernism of various avant-garde movements (Huyssen, 1980) — is the cultural and economic interests of the culture industries, notably the cultural intermediaries. Secondly, the absorption of different kinds of alternative styles by the cultural industries tends to promote a state of middle class hegemony. Although traditional value hierarchies are problematized, blurring the lines between legitimate and illegitimate cultural forms and tastes, the same process also involves the symbolic disarming of countercultural movements. Hence, the 42 / Assessing the Field new media driven ephemerality of images and styles involves, on the one hand, an increased stylistic freeedom on the part of consumers, and, on the other hand, a continuous rush among producers to convert new ideas to commercial advantage - including those of oppressed and oppositional groups (Harvey, 1990: 289; Jameson, 1991: 49; Klein, 2000). (c) Simulation. The ultimate argument following from the identification of the culturalization and mediazation processes is that today we live in a world of spectacles and simulations. According to the postmodernist perspective, most notably represented by Baudrillard, media images and the appearances of commodities have outweighed the significance of direct experiences and functional use-values. When images become more important than their referents, when the copy foregoes the original, the simulacrum rules the world. Reality is no longer a dependable category. However, Baudrillard’s argument is not entirely new. Rather, it is to be seen as an extreme philosophical extension of Marx’ theory of commodity fetishism and Benjamin’s descriptions of metropolitan consumerist phantasmagoria. In between these endpoints, the Marxist and the postmodernist, it is also possible to identify the theories of the spectacle, introduced by the French neo-Marxist and Situationist movements of the 1960s, headed by figures like Henri Lefebvre and Guy Debord. As Best and Kellner (1997: 80) note, theoretically there is a clear trajectory ‘from the society of the commodity to the society of the spectacle to the society of the simulacrum, paralleled by increasing commodification and massification to the point of implosion of the key phenomena described by modern theory’. The shift from early Marxism to the neo-Marxist/Situationist standpoint is essentially a reorientation from production to consumption, or from the factory to everyday life. While still making a Marxist interpretation of society, Debord (1967/1995) in The Society of the Spectacle, argues that the dominant force of alienation is no longer the mere commodity, produced in factories by workers, but the spectacle, primarily generated by symbolic producers in the culture industry. Parallel to the Frankfurt School’s ideas of the capitalist expropriation of people’s ‘free time’, Debord asserts that ‘alienated consumption is added to alienated production as an inescapable duty of the masses’ (ibid.: 29). Yet, the emerging forms of consumption, predominandy governed by the mechanisms of commercialized media culture, are not concerned with use-value in its original sense, but with the illusion of use­ value; what things seem to be, and what solutions they seem to provide. This is The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 43 also what Lefebvre (1971: 85-98) refers to as the creation of make-believe. If industrial society created false needs in the form of a widespread urge to have certain things, the society of the spectacle is a social arrangement marked by an extreme preoccupation with how tilings appear. This tendency is not only reflected in the fact that the use-value of commodities to an increasing extent is judged according to their style and surface, and that the mass media dominate considerable parts of people’s everyday experience. According to Debord, the spectacle penetrates all areas of human life. Even the educational and political systems are part of the spectacle, since they reproduce those values and practices that more directly generate the culture of appearances. The creativity of students is choked, and politicians are more and more indulged in stylization, campaigning and dramatized pseudo-events (cf. Boorstin, 1961/1992). Thus, the concept of spectacle does not refer to single occasions of spectacular events, like a carnival or a circus, but to the general structuring principle arising along with the metamorphosis of media and consumer society. Debord contends there is nothing soothing or liberating about this new regime, since it grows stronger the more the true essence of life and reality is denied: ‘Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear* (ibid.: 16). The society of the spectacle is thus a society in which people get alienated from their own existence, as well as from reality itself. A very specific feature of the spectacle is that it tends to make power and dominance invisible. The spectacle arises as a masking of the class divisions on which the system is based, nourishing consumerist dreams that can never be fulfilled, and, thus, in the long run reinforces an increased alienation among the working classes. While seemingly delighted and at ease with their lives, the dominated classes are actually pacified and detached from all substantial forms of social power. This implies that the spectacle shows certain similarities to the hegemonic principle, as described in the theories of Gramsci (1971).15 Its domination is based on false consensus, rather than force. Following the implications of such a condition, the initial goal of the Situationist movement was not a socio-political revolution, but rather a cultural one. In political manifestations, as well as aesthetic praxis, they sought to promote a revitalization of creativity and imagination — a revitalization that had to start in the world of everyday life. As argued by earlier avant-garde movements of the 20th century, art (together with technology) was to be reunited with the social practices of ordinary people. The aestheticization of everyday life was then to 44 / Assessing the Field be reclaimed as a source of subjective, human creativity (Debord, 1995: 136-7; see also Marcus, 1989; Best and Kellner, 1997: 92-4). Being the student of Lefebvre, Baudrillard was clearly inspired by the Situationists. In one of his earlier works, The Consumer Society (1970/1998), he tries to combine a semiotic approach with the cultural critique carried out within Marxism. While consumption is fundamentally seen as a matter of signification, whereby objects attain their meanings through their relationships to other objects within the system, this analysis is subordinated to a historicizing critical theory. In other words, Baudrillard tries to reform the original Marxist approach, which over-empasized material needs compared to communicative needs, and did not account for the development of the increasingly powerful semiotic apparatus within the capitalist system. Especially the mass media system (whose extraordinary expansion Marx himself of course could not foresee) reinforces the conditions within which social exchange is primarily a matter of the consumption of commodity-signs, or sign values. However, when the notion of the spectacle is explicitly brought up in Baudrillard’s subsequent writings on simulation and simulacra, it is in a negative sense. Now, from his postmodern point of view, the cultural transition has gone even further: We are no longer in the society of the spectacle which the Situationists talked about, nor in the specific types of alienation and repression which this implied. The medium itself is no longer identifiable as such, and the merging of the medium and the message is the first great formula of this new age (Baudrillard, 1983a: 54). Such a super-extension of the mediazation process denotes that the products of the media system no longer provide people with information of reality. Rather, media images constitute a hyperreality more significant than reality itself. Day after day people are bombarded with ‘information’ and images, which cannot be judged according to established norms regarding truth and falsehood; the media flow forces itself upon people’s lived experience and becomes reality itself. The machinery behind all this is the commercial logic stating that information must be produced in order to create audiences that can be sold to advertisers — a logic that by definition contradicts the idea of the mediation of meaning. Consequently, it no longer exists any media in the original sense of the word, but merely commercial apparatuses producing simulacra for an imaginary mass audience. The over-amplification of appearance and dramaturgy correlates with the implosion of meaning; The Cultural Ambivalence ofKeflexive Modernity / 45 communication is exhausted in the moment of its own performance (Baudrillard, 1983b: 97-100). Compared to the Situationists, then, Baudrillard no longer discusses Marxist phenomena like alienation, since, ultimately there are no real points of reference to get alienated from. Likewise, Debord’s distinction between appearance and reality vanishes, since reality is no longer identifiable (cf. Best and Kellner, 1997: 95-103). When uncoupled from any modern anchorage in objective reality or pre­ existing needs or use-values, signifiers take on meanings by themselves according to new associative schemes. There is no longer any stable signified which can lead subjects to relevant, clear-cut interpretations; the images saturating everyday life refer to other mediated images, which are in themselves uncoupled from referents in the real world. The self-referentiality among fragmentary images generates floating interpretations according to a non-narrative logic. Such postmodern aesthetic, or anti-aestheic, is regularly manifested in advertising, fashion and music videos (cf. Foster, 1983; Kaplan, 1987: 33-48; Jameson, 1991: 67-96; Kellner, 1995; Fiske, 1996, 1998). As for the transformation of social experience Baudrillard’s theories imply that the narratives and images of for example television, video and computer games take the place of real life experiences. People are not interested in ‘reality’, since the constructed ‘representations’ of the mass media are far more enticing and accessible. For example, ‘it is the football match or cartoon which serve as models for their perception of the political sphere. The people even enjoy day to day, like a home movie, the fluctuations of their own opinions in the daily opinion polls’ (Baudrillard, 1983b: 37-8). Thus media products themselves become the reference points, the hyperreality, against which direct experiences and other kinds of knowledge are measured. Perhaps the most concrete illustration of this condition is provided in Baudrillard’s (1995) writings on the 1991 Gulf War, logically entitled The Gulf War Did not Take Placed6 The utter consequence of Baudrillard’s theories, then, is that even social inquiry becomes obsolete and pointless; there is in fact nothing left to study. Indeed, as Best and Kellner (1997: 95) put it, ‘Baudrillard takes us into a whole new era of social development: beyond Marx, beyond neo-Marxism, beyond the Situationists, beyond modernity, and beyond theory itself. For clear reasons, the present study is not to be regarded as an extension of radical postmodern thought. Foremost, as I will argue in Chapter 2, I oppose the notion of a vanishing sociality due to symbolic over-production, since it neglects the significance of pre-existing cultural networks. Nonetheless — 46 / Assessing the Field paradoxically as it may seem - in several of my subsequent analyses of commodity and image consumption, theories of spectacle and simulation will play a central role for the understanding of people’s lived experience. The Continuity of Contradictions The cultural sociological oudine I have presented so far is by no means a full account of the processes underlying the development of consumer culture. Yet, what the discussion hopefully has revealed, is the various contradictions and ambiguities characterizing not only consumer culture, but also contemporary culture and society in general. As asserted in Bell’s (1976) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, as well as in a recent article by Lichtblau (1999), the modern project is an unstable phenomenon in itself — and has been so from the very beginning. While functional differentiation is normally regarded as a manifestation of progress, according to the modern master narrative, the very same process is also the key to an understanding of modern contradictions — which have often been referred to as ‘pathologies’. For example, the typical split between various socio-structural value systems, such as the often discussed division of art, science and morality, is on the one hand reassuring each sphere a certain degree of autonomy and hence a potential for internal rationalization (progress) according to a pure, internal logic. On the other hand, the rationalization of particular subsystems - be they cultural, social or scientific — does not make modern society increasingly rational and comprehensible in its entirety, but, on the contrary, more unpredictable and uncontrollable. Phenomena like ‘black Fridays’ on the stock markets, and environmental backlashes due to technological progress, are examples of major incidents that make society as a whole system look quite ‘irrational’ (cf. Beck, 1992,1999). Hence, rationality is never a fully generalizable concept; what according to a certain subjective, or intersubjectively shared, outset may seem rational, runs a great risk of being understood in a completely different manner within another context of evaluation. And a continuous repetition of ‘rational’ behaviour may actually turn into its own anti-thesis — producing change, even chaos, rather than reproduction, or linear ‘progress’ (cf. Urry, 1999). In fact, in a self-differentiating society contradiction and uncertainty must always be the normal state. In the following, summing up the processes discussed so far, I will show that issues of contradiction are also at the very core of the present study. The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 47 (a) Reflexive Modernity. Many modern sociologists have come to consider contradictions as problematic. The identification of antithetic processes has generated extensive debates in terms of the crisis of the modern project, or the breakthrough of postmodernity. Recapitulating some of the themes I have discussed above, it is possible to discern a number of modern contradictions, or ‘pathologies’ — located both on systemic and individual levels. Typical examples of systemic pathologies are the over-expansion of economic and technical rationality, invading the cultural domains via the establishment of the culture industry (the Frankfurt School), and the system’s colonization of the lifeworld (Habermas). In both cases the core dilemma springs out of a notion of differentiation and rationalization processes running amok, creating conditions in which certain forms of logic inappropriately intervene in other domains. In extension, such pathologies are always thought to influence people’s everyday lives in a negative way. Examples of explicitly social psychological side-effects of the modern project are the creation of false needs, alienation and commodity fetishism (commonly discussed within the Marxist tradition), as well as the emergence of existential anxiety, frustration and narcissism (discussed by for example Simmel, Benjamin, Riesman, Lasch and Giddens). Additionally, there is also an epistemological side to the modern ambiguity. The optimistic sociological ideal of creating grand theories of modern society has obviously failed to come true; even the contradictions of modernity have been differently interpreted depending on paradigmatic and ideological point of departures. There are no doubts that many a theory has exaggerated either side of an actually contradictory and complex structure. This regards parts of Marx’s material determinism, as well as Baudrillard’s postmodern account of consumption as sign play — just to point at one theoretical opposition which cannot be explained as a mere reflection of the historical development from industrial to post-industrial capitalism. Theories have often tended to over­ emphasize their main argument, which by definition implies an underestimation of alternative interpretations. In other words, sociology itself serves as an idiosyncratic representation of modern differentiation and contradiction. Sociology has not primarily functioned according to the kind of ultimately modern communicative rationality discussed by Habermas (1987), but rather as the gigantic postmodern language game proposed by Lyotard (1984). Obviously, postmodernist art and philosophy have played a crucial role in revealing the modern ambiguities — both ontological and epistemological ones. Modern society, as well as modern sociology, has for a long time managed to uphold a false illusion of intellectual superiority and universality — an illusion that practically, and seemingly paradoxically, has 48 / Assessing the Field expressed itself as ethnocentrism and reductionism. These are the true pathologies of the modern project. From this discussion also follows that it is impossible to define postmodernity merely in terms of contradictions. One cannot argue that postmodernity is a historical stage of social development in which contradictions become normality, since contradictions are normality also in modernity. Not even the deepening awareness of contradictions and disorder, most clearly manifested in postmodernism — that is, the intellectual and aesthetic movements — signifies a shift to postmodernity. When theorists such as Baudrillard, Jameson and Lyotard argue that postmodernity is a social condition in which previously taken for granted norms are cast aside, and the demarcations of concepts like rationality and irrationality are eroding, this does not de facto signify the rise of a new social regime, but rather an increasing awareness and critique of how the pre-existing regime is already arranged. Postmodern thinkers are thus examples of a new auto-awareness and auto-critique. Following sociologists like Beck (1992, 1994), Giddens (1991, 1994) and Lash (1990, 1994), it seems reasonable to conceive of this new self-reflexivity as a gradual turn from basic modernity to reflexive modernity. Such a society may still be considered as modern; it still involves the extension of processes of rationalization and differentiation, as well as the upcoming conflicts related to these. But it is a modern society increasingly aware not only of its own socio- intellectual regime in relation to previous ones, but also the internal contradictions of that very regime, and the potentially problematic consequences of those contradictions. Progress in terms of extending rationalization and functional differentiation is no longer considered as a one­ way track; it is not even clear what these words mean anymore. Instead the various contradictions and ‘pathologies’ of modernity are to be accepted and reflexively dealt with — among institutional systems, as well as among people in their everyday lives. Reflexive organizations and minds are continually assessing a range of various alternatives, weighing and problematizing significant parameters like possibilities versus risks, self versus others, and right versus wrong. Such a thing as postmodernism — a new cultural relativism operating among artists and intellectuals, within post-Fordist industries, and within people’s cultural praxis — is therefore a perfectly logical outcome of the reflexive turn, and does not contradict the ongoing predominance of the so called ‘modern project’. The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 49 (b) The Multi-Layered Character of Consumer Culture. In the same manner as the modern project has undergone significant changes over the last century, so has consumer culture. While still being an integral part of the capitalist system, and still involving the basic opposition between economy and culture, the appearance of consumer culture is today more reflexive than before. Regarding both the production and the consumption of goods, the cultural reflexivity has increased — a process very well captured in the theories of reflexive accumulation (Lash and Urry, 1994). This does not mean, however, that the practice of consumption historically has developed from a matter of mere material need gratification to a state of postmodern sign play. As hinted at above, my view is that Baudrillard’s thesis of the abolishment of all material use-value is primarily to be considered as a radical philosophical experiment (or provocation), rather than a social truth. Although his perspective is highly important inasmuch as it identifies the ultimate consequences of a continuing semioticization of the material world, it is still a simplification of what consumption generally is all about (cf. Fiske, 1996: 59-64).1 The primarj’ transition that has taken place in modern societies, particularly in metropolitan areas, is not that materialism has vanished altogether, but that the meanings of consumption are more frequently reflected upon than before. People tend to use consumption practices as a means of symbolic expression - a development connected, on the one hand, to the culturalization and mediazation processes, and, on the other hand, to the new preoccupation with lifestyle creation. Being a component of the lifestyle, reflexive consumption is a critical task, elaborated and routinized for the sake of ontological security in the same manner as all other social practices. This means that consumption is not only a cultural practice, but an expressive praxis as well — a practice deliberately conducted in order to communicate meanings (cf. Douglas and Isherwood, 1978). However, there are a number of limitations to this argument. First of all, increased reflexivity among consumers does not imply that other causes for consumption are superceded. As Lunt and Livingstone (1992) concluded from a major analysis of everyday consumption, expressive purposes are not normally the primary ones for the appropriation of new goods. Most kinds of shopping are still basically done for the sake of physical survival — explained as the gratification of practical needs (see also Campbell, 1997). People go to the super market to buy the standard food they need during the week; to the drug store to buy some pills for their allergy; to the post to buy stamps, and so on. These kinds of practices are hardly pursued with a deliberate intent to 50 / Assessing the Field communicate.18 Obviously, the kind of instrumental consumption connected to an essentially Protestant work ethic, as outlined by Weber, has not vanished from the lifeworlds of ordinary people. The practical, material use of things is not entirely replaced by a reflexive, symbolic use, although the latter has become more common — and presumably more so in relation to certain objects, within certain contexts and among certain groups of people. In addition to the opposition between self-reflexivity and instrumentality, or, between the symbolic and the material, it is worthwhile to make a similar distinction between expressive and impressionistic consumption practices. Both at a material and a symbolical level consumption may be aimed for generating new experiences of pleasure and excitement. In this connection, the phenomenon of hedonism has for a very long time, in different guises, existed as an antipode to the more ascetic modes of living prescribed for example by puritan Christianity and early capitalism. Bodily and spiritual pleasure was the prime goal of ancient bacchanals, the carnivals of medieval European culture, as well as other kinds of festivities in history (cf. Featherstone, 1991: 21-3). In these contexts the pleasure principle has (at least temporarily) been the guideline for social action, rather than the kind of instrumental means rationality described by Weber. This is not to say that hedonism is something completely irrational, though. On the contrary, while hedonistic consumption most often has been considered as a typical malaise of capitalist society — associated with passivity, sin and escapism — it seems reasonable to conceive of the pleasure principle even as a kind of ‘means rationality’. Just like instrumental action aims at solving practical problems in the most efficient way, hedonistic action tries to maximize bodily and/or spiritual pleasure by means of a goal oriented calculation, taking into account the various alternatives at hand. As explored by Campbell (1987) in The Rom antic Ttbic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, consumer society involves precisely this kind of mentality, alongside the more ascetic capitalist mentality focused on capital saving and accumulation. In fact, it seems quite improbable that a society of mass production and consumption could have arisen without the active participation of a competing hedonistic, or Romatic, ethic. The kind of novelty seeking and consumer phantasmagoria noted by Benjamin are good examples of consumption practices, be they material or merely imaginative, crucial for the sustaining of a capitalist economy. These practices do not necessarily take on an expressive character (though this is typically the case for Benjamin’s flâneur and Veblen’s leisure class), but are foremost impressionistic. The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 51 FIGURE 2 Seven ideal types of consumption Consumption mode Intention Logic Creative ethos Instrumental consumption Reach material need gratification Instrumentality Work ethos Realistic hedonistic consumption Achieve bodily pleasure Experiential pleasure principle Pleasure ethos Imaginative hedonistic consumption Achieve spiritual pleasure Imaginative pleasure principle Romantic ethos Reproductive consumption Reproduce identity 1st order aesthetic reflexivity Reproductive ethos Pretentious consumption Appropriate desirable identity 2nd order aesthetic reflexivity Mobility ethos Postmodern consumption Avoid fixation of identity 3rd order aesthetic reflexivity Postmodern ethos Progressive consumption Reach ideological goals Anti-consumerism (e-g- environmentalism) Progressive ethos In sum, just like modernity as such, consumer culture has from the very outset been a highly contradictory structure, and continues to be so. Therefore, in order to structure the various themes I have elaborated upon in this chapter, I will introduce a typology of consumption, distinguishing between seven ideal types (Figure 2). As we will see further on, these types are also grounded in my empirical findings (see Chapters 5-7) — and may thus be seen as one of the more important conclusions of this work. The typology identifies two important analytical aspects. First, it unveils seven different consumption modes, related to the intentions that consumption practices may have. While forming a loose chronology, my thesis is that all seven modes, marked by their certain logics, co-exist in society today — holding different positions in different contexts, among different individuals, and in relation to different objects of consumption. Second, the typology points out the different kinds of creative ethos that such consumption modes 52 / Assessing the Field ideally emanate from. The ethos can be regarded as an overarching value principle governing not only consumption practices, but also the lifestyle formation in general. Hence, the creative ethos also governs how the individual applies different modes of consumption in different contexts. The more specific conceptual properties of the ethos will be outlined in Chapter 3. — Instrumental consumption. This is actually the kind of consumption correlative to the Protestant work ethic, and is thus ultimately anti-consumerist. The goal is to gratify certain physical and material needs in the most efficient way, through functional solutions. The appropriateness of a particular commodity is measured according to the relationship between its perceived functional use-value and its exchange value. As prescribed by the work ethos, consumption is not a desired practice in the first place, but always second to production. Accordingly, in its most extreme form instrumental consumption is characteristic of an ascetic lifestyle. — Idealistic hedonistic consumption. This is the kind of consumption that Campbell (1987: 58-76) refers to as ‘traditional hedonism’ — the kind of pleasure seeking typical for societies in which production and consumption are yet not culturalized and mediatized. According to the pleasure principle, the individual tries to maximize the bodily pleasure that may be achieved through consumption. The calculus involved in this type of consumption takes into account previous experiences of similar goods, comparing the potential joy and the perceived efforts needed to appropriate the product once again. This kind of hedonism is traditional in the sense that it does not lead to any ambition to tty’ out new, unfamiliar goods, but rather stays to safe bets in order to minimize the risk of failure. Since the experiential pleasure principle implies that the same kind of pleasure is sought out over and over again its typical pathology is addiction. — Imaginative hedonistic consumption. In relation to realistic hedonism, the imaginative type — which Campbell (1987: 77-96) calls ‘modern autonomous imaginative hedonism’ - concerns the symbolic dimension of a commodity. Pleasure is sought via emotional and spiritual rather than sensory stimulation. The typical imaginative hedonist is a day-dreamer, hoping to experience the kind of higher spiritual joy promised by the image of certain goods — rather than by its material properties. Past The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity ! 53 experiences are of little concern; what becomes enticing to the imaginative hedonist is the fantasy of gaining really new sensations. This is what is at stake among the flâneurs of the metropolis, indulged in the phantasmagoria of shop windows, advertising and exhibitions, looking for novel objects on which to project their dreams of future pleasure. The culturalization and medization processes have for clear reasons had a great influence upon the emergence of imaginative hedonism, since these developments have intensified the symbolic aspect of commodities - advertising being the principal forum of romantic image creation. Since it is concerned with the magical values ascribed to objects, imaginative hedonism may also involve the kind of alienation discussed in Marxist theories of commodity fetishism. — Reproductive consumption. In contrast to mere hedonistic consumption, reproductive consumption involves an expressive component — the aim to manifest who one is. The individual reflects as to how he or she is to be experienced by others, and tries to mark out his or her socio-cultural status. Creating such distinctions, however, can be done in many ways. According to Veblen’s (1994) original thesis about ‘conspicuous consumption’, for example, the wealthy American leisure class wanted to express and reproduce their privileged social position by showing off their ability to consume. The more wasteful their consumption could be, the better it could distinguish the subject’s status. Hence, the efficiency of consumption was a direct outcome of economic wealth. On the other hand, as Bourdieu (1984) has demonstrated, socio-cultural distinctions may just as well be generated through very refined and minimalistic consumption — notably among people rich in cultural capital — what Riesman (1964: 129) refers to as ‘conspicuous underconsumption’ (see also Baudrillard, 1970/1998). What all forms of reproductive consumption have in common, then, is that they are typically inner-directed. As Riesman (1950) has pointed out, such reflexivity is not aimed for elaborating the image of one’s identity, but for reproduction. — Pretentious consumption. Historically, pretentious consumption can be connected to the emergence of Fordist mass production, which enabled more people to buy commodities as markers of social success. Unlike reproductive consumption, it involves a second order reflexivity. Governed by the mobility ethos typical for middle class fractions (cf. 54 / Assessing the Field Luckmann and Berger, 1964), pretentious consumption is not primarily about expressing who one is, but who one wants to be. The act of pretentious consumption — which may indeed also seem conspicuous — involves not only a reflexive assessment of how others see oneself, but also of how others might see oneself as someone else than one actually experience oneself to be. Pretentious consumption might thus be seen as a cultural strategy in certain individuals’ ambitions to alter their habitus; their continuous endeavours to appropriate the lifestyle attributes of the groups they consider as desirable to belong to (see also Toffler, 1964). It may be a certain social class fraction, or any other kind of socio-cultural community. Especially since social space is getting more complex and volatile, pretentiousness tends to relate to other communities than traditional class positions. However, the strong ambition to adapt culturally to certain groups - what Riesman (1950) puts into the term other-direction — also involves the risk of frustration due to social failure,19 as well as the development of narcissism. — Postmodern consumption. This kind of consumption typically emerges in post- Fordist settings, where commodities are tailored for rapid, specialized consumption, and established cultural value hierarchies are neglected and reworked. The cultural meanings of commodities are increasingly ambiguous. As signifiers they are very unstable and self-referential, which is also manifested in postmodern advertising. In contrast to reproductive and pretentious consumers, then, postmodern consumers try to reject the entire socio-cultural structure. Consumption practices are carried out in the ambition of not getting stuck in any culturally identifiable position — keeping the narrative of identity open-ended (cf. Kellner, 1992; Bauman, 1996). This implies that the individual wants to uncouple his or her practices from any pre-defined mode of interpretation. This leads to a third order reflexivity: the subject reflects as to how others might see him or herself as someone who is not socially definable. Therefore, aesthetically, postmodern consumption implies a radical eclecticism, and continuous alterations. The consumer must always avoid clear-cut stylistic ensembles, but create new, previously unexplored ones, and then rapidly abandon these for new ones. — Progressive Consumption. Compared to the other six types, progressive consumption is actually based on an anti-consumerist (or even post- The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity / 55 consumerist) orientation. Being guided by a progressive ethos implies that instrumental, hedonistic and expressive purposes are typically second to ideological considerations. As several commentators have noted (cf. Crook et al., 1992; Gibbins and Reimer, 1999; Klein, 2000), in times when affluence does not merely generate comfort, joy and communion, but also narcissism, social inequalities and environmental pollution, it is quite reasonable that consumerism is contested by more anti-materialist values (see also Ingelhart, 1990). To a great extent these ideals are articulated within social movements — anchored in for example environmentalism, feminism, veganism, or global solidarity. Due to the continuous expansion of consumer society, these oppositional forces have rendered increased cultural and social significance. It goes without saying that these seven types, and the kind of ethos linked to each of them, are unlikely to be found frequently in their pure forms — for example in the type of statistically generated categorizations frequently adopted in marketing research (cf. Miller et al., 1998: 22-3).211 Empirically, it is likely that their existences are dependent upon at least four important parameters. First, quite logically, some consumer objects are more symbolically loaded than others, and hence more suitable for imaginative and expressive purposes. In a similar manner, some objects are automatically more pleasurable to use than others; among most people a new house might for example arouse more excitement than a new pair of socks. Therefore, it is even reasonable to think of commodities in terms of genres. Second, the presence of various creative ethoses may vary between different individuals or groups of people, that is, according to subject. For example, younger people living in urban areas are often considered to be the archetypal expressive consumers, while older people in the countryside are typically non-expressive. Third, the consumption of a particular object may be conducted differently according to the properties of space (see the analyses of Chapter 5). The physical and social setting is highly important as to how practices are carried out. One may in this connection recall Goffman’s (1974) discussion of front stage and backstage behaviour. What is appropriate in one context, might be socially sanctioned in another. Eating out is for example likely to be a more reflexive act than eating alone at home by the TV set. The final parameter is time (see the analyses of Chapter 6). As already mentioned, historically, the postmodern ethos is to be considered the most 56 I Assessing the Field recent one. Nevertheless, that does not necessarily mean that postmodernism is the dominant form today, or that it has nothing to do with historical socio­ cultural formations (cf. Featherstone, 1991). As pointed out by Raymond Williams (1965: 57-70; 1980: 40), cultural transitions tend to take place gradually, as new values and meaning systems blend with (or oppose) the structures of selective tradition. Successively, cultural patterns are not only replaced, but also reinterpreted, given new meanings within the practices of daily life. Moreover, the temporal dimension also regards such things as age, generation and life-stage, as well as variations related to daily routines, work schedules, holidays, and so on. The logic of consumption is in constant motion. Within the total arrangement of lifestyles and lifeworlds, temporal and spatial properties continually interact with the individual’s ethos. What is not explicitly reckoned in the typology is the extent to which each consumption mode is reflexively considered by the subject; whether the individual reflects as to what the intention of a particular act of consumption actually is. Indeed, people often consume things without any consideration of the desired end and possible consequences of their actions, but rather according to conviction, emotional impulse, or taken for granted routines. My point here, however, is that even traditions and routines are based on an initial reflexivity as to what the outcomes of the actions are thought to be, that is, before they are routinized or traditionalized. The actual presence of reflection and calculation must thus be an empirical matter. Pursuing hermeneutically dynamic analyses of the characteristics of consumption practices implies that also taken for granted, non-reflexive practices can be described in terms of the seven categorized ethos — being the sediments of an earlier reflexivity (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 85-9). It is for example possible to distinguish between traditions emanating from a Protestant work ethos, and traditions corresponding to various forms of hedonism. Identifying such socio-cultural sediments and their reflexive correlates in the domain of consumption is a significant aim of this work. The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity I 57 Notes 1 As Lash and Urry (1994) argue, the concepts of post-Fordism and reflexive accumulation are not fully equivalent. I will return to some of the divergences in the section A Society of Signs. 2 There is already a great body of literature covering these matters. Good overviews of the postmodern debate are provided by for example Wolin (1985), Lash (1990), Best and Kellner (1991), Collins (1992), Crook et al. (1992); Smart (1992), Lyon (1994), Kellner (1995) and Best and Kellner (1997). The roots and features of consumer culture have been explored by for example Schudson (1984), Bocock (1993), Lury (1996), Leiss et al. (1997) and Slater (1997a). 3 The term Taylorism originates from F. W. Taylor, who in 1911 published the influential book The Principles of Scientific Management. However, the ideas of Henry Ford (who established his first assembly line in 1913) went further than that; he also recognized that mass production meant mass consumption, that is, a new kind of society. This distinction is also what essentially marks the difference between Fordism and Taylorism (cf. Harvey, 1990: 125-6). 4 See also the discussion of the plurali^ation of lifeworlds in Chapter 3, originally appearing in Berger et al. (1973). 5 Similar arguments have been made by Gouldner (1976), who discusses the impoverishing social and political consequences of the ‘consciousness industry’. A less deterministic version of the Marxist argument was developed by Walter Benjamin (1969) in his classical essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. He concluded, on the one hand, that the duplication of artistic works withers the aura of authenticity, since the creation is no longer bound to a particular place or time, or to the context of ritual and tradition. On the other hand, new techniques of direct representation, like photography and film, held a liberating, or healing potential in a time of massification and imitation. Especially film - in which disparate fragments could be forged together in new ways and real-life events could be slowed down — was able to unveil and magnify the truth about modern life. Benjamin was particularly praising the contemporary cinematic works of Chaplin (see also Buck-Morss, 1989: 268-9). 6 The modern division of the three autonomous value-spheres of science, morality and arts was precisely the arrangement contested by the 20th century avant-garde movement (involving several ‘isms’ of the 1910s and 1920s; most significandy futurism, constructivism, dadaism and surrealism), which came to be an important force in the development towards a postmodern cultural condition. The avant-garde sought to bring together art and life-praxis, not primarily as a critique of mass culture, but rather as a critique of the principle of aesthetic autonomy itself. In other words, as Wolin (1985: 14) notes, ‘the bourgeois affirmative ideal of culture as a sphere of beautiful illusion in which the values denied in the realm of (workaday) material life can be safely enjoyed’ was insupportable to the avant-garde (see also Huyssen, 1980, 1984). 7 Some other classic essays on the commodification of leisure time are Simmel’s (1997) The Alpine journey and Adorno’s (1991) Free Time. In the latter text Adorno states that “‘free time” is tending towards its own opposite, and is becoming a parody of itself. Thus unfreedom is gradually annexing “free time”, and the majority of unfree people are as aunaware of this process as they are of the unfreedom itself (ibid.: 163). 8 In this connection it is important to note that Baudrillard as a social theorist has moved from a rather progressive Marxist perspective, marking his works of the 1960s and early 1970s, to the postmodern position he is now primarily known for. Clearly, as noted by Ritzer (1998) in the introduction to The Consumer Society, the French structuralists soon came to be far more influential to his work (see also Poster, 1995: 104-16; Best and Kellner, 1997: 95-110). 58 / Assessing the Field 9 According to Gilloch (1996: 124-7), there are three principal reasons for why Benjamin was so preoccupied with the Parisian arcades. First, the building of arcades signified a new direction in architecture, where the street became interiorized. Thus, the spatial distinction of inside and outside was problematized. Second, the arcades were the home of the commodity, the site of fetishism and urban desire. Third, Benjamin was fascinated by the very fact that the arcades themselves got out of fashion. The very first Parisian arcades were built in the late 18th century at the time of the revolution, like the Galerie du Palais Royal (1786) and Passage Feydeau (1791). The last arcade to be built in Paris was the Passage de Princes in 1860, but at that time the arcades were already about to become obsolete. 10 For similar arguments (though posed from different perspectives), see for example Riesman (1950) and his distinctions between tradition-direction, inner-direction and other-direction, and Lasch (1979), who argues that economic man, obeying the ideals of a protestant work ethic, is being replaced by a narcissistic personality, obeying hedonistic values. 11 For a more complete overview of this development, which involves a transformation not only of production, but also of legal and social policies, and so on, see Harvey (1990: 172-9). 12 One must also keep in mind that none of the theorists referred to in this section adhere to postmodernism in its epistemological appearance; that is, as the rejection of grand narratives. They all share the position that although an increasingly ambivalent structure, the postmodern world may still be the object of sociological inquiry, as well as cultural and ideological critique. A good overview of the relationship between postmodernism and Marxism is given by Smart (1992: 183-221), discussing for example the relationship between the analyses of Jameson and Harvey. 13 The stylistic ensemble is to be distinguished from the functional ensemble. While the former concerns the aesthetic combination of goods with non-related functions (like clothes together with furniture, or a car together with a wine bottie) the latter refers to a set of devices that are functionally meaningful together (like a CD player together with a receiver and pair of speakers, or a pair of jogging shoes together with a T-shirt and a pair of Adidas shorts) (Marchand, 1985; see also Leiss et al., 1997: 86-8). 14 The transition of the modern class structure — involving the emergence of new spheres of production, leading to new occupations and new positions in social space — has been studied in a number of important works. Especially the emergence of new middle class positions has been widely discussed, and several concepts have been introduced — for example ‘the New Class’ (Gouldner, 1979; Kellner and Berger, 1992; Heuberger, 1992), ‘the knowledge class’ (Berger, 1979), ‘the service class’ (Lash and Urry, 1987), ‘the new petit bourgeoisie’ (Bourdieu, 1984) and ‘the new cultural intermediaries’ (Featherstone, 1991). What all these analyses have in common is the identification of new occupations and lifestyles coupled to the expanding service, knowledge and cultural/informational sectors of the economy, and these groups’ preoccupation with legitimating and demarcating their status in the social hierarchies. 15 A good introduction to Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and ideology is provided by Mouffe (1979). 16 Already before the outbreak of war Baudrillard questioned whether it was really a war that was about to occur in front of the waiting TV cameras. The situation, in which the mass media simultaneously depicted the American forces as invincible and the anticipated war as an unavoidable brutal reality, looked more like a dramatized TV show than a realistic scenario. The war was not unavoidable because the possibilities of diplomacy were exhausted, but because the TV audience demanded the narrative climax they had somehow been promised — according to the logic of TV dramaturgy. Thus, the Gulf War would become the greatest pseudo-event in The Cultural Ambivalence of Reflexive Modernity I 59 history, arranged solely for the sake of reporting (cf. Boorstin, 1992). Additionally, when the war was actually (perhaps) on, Baudrillard went on disputing whether the images presented in the news were really referring to some ongoing events in the Persian Gulf. The apparently extreme authenticity of the TV pictures, involving direct shots from the area and detailed video demonstrations of the bomb raids, created an illusion that was more illusory than the image of any previous war. Hence, this ‘authenticity’, being the foundation of trust among distant TV viewers, was also the potential means for a gigantic process of mass deception, in which the media representation was so realistic that it transcended reality itself — if there ever was one. 17 It must be noted that my belief is not that Baudrillard is unaware of what he is doing. On the contrary, his own view of his theoretical mission is quite obvious (Baudrillard, 1987: 98-9): ‘The status of theory could not be anything but a challenge to the real. Or rather, their relation is one of respective challenge. For the real itself is without doubt only a challenge to theory. It is not an objective state of things, but a radical limit of analysis beyond which nothing any longer obeys the real, or about which nothing more can be said. But theory is also made to disobey the real, of which it is the inaccessible limit. The impossibility of reconciling theory with the real is a consequence of the impossibility of reconciling the subject with its own ends. All attempts at reconciliation are illusory and doomed to failure.’ 18 Still, the kinds of food people keep in their fridge and put on the dinner table may actually communicate in a social context. As demonstrated by for example Bourdieu (1979/1984), as soon as goods and practices are appropriated within the lifestyle, they also become part of the classificatory system defining the social status of both object and subject. 19 Pretentious groupings are typically those who run the risk of doing ‘the right things in the wrong ways’, especially in terms of symbolic exaggerations. As May (2000: 165) argues, ‘a misalignment or alignment between point of view, attributes, actions and context may exist. One may wish to belong, but attributes and/or points of view are in disjuncture to symbolic acceptance. Having a point of view of “who” one is relates to what one “does”, how it is performed and how others value one’s contribution and opinions.’ A good empirical example of how the mobility ethos is articulated in consumption practices can be found in Conroy’s (1998) analysis of the cultural significance of factory outlet malls. According to Conroy, these malls highlight the fracturing of middle-class identity: ‘factory outlets reveal the historical and social pressures that have destabilized middle-class identity itself in the post-Fordist age’ (ibid.: 64). 20 This condition is also stressed by the fact that many theorists of modernization and postmodernization tend to equate hedonistic and expressivistic modes of consumption. For example, in Consumer Culture and Postmodernism Featherstone (1991: 86) states the following: ‘The instrumental and expressive dimensions should not be regarded as either/or polarities, rather they can be conceived as a balance which consumer culture brings together. It is therefore possible to speak of a calculating hedonism, a calculus of the stylistic effect and an emotional economy on the one hand, and an aestheticization of the instrumental or functional rational dimension via the promotion of an aestheticizing distance on the other.’ Although Featherstone’s view counts for the significant blending of instrumentality and expressivism, it is a simplification to believe that this mode of consumption can be taken for granted as hedonistic too. Rather, instrumental, expressivist and hedonistic calculation must be regarded as three different types. 2The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture The world of everyday consumption is to be considered the prime arena on which cultural meanings and categories are established and negotiated. It is also the arena on which media culture and consumer culture can be experienced as one. Due to the culturalization and mediazation processes discussed in Chapter 1, the environments of everyday life have become increasingly saturated with signs. Beside the continuous flow of media texts, most other kinds of consumer goods have also become increasingly image- loaded — taking on meanings in relation to media texts, other commodity­ signs, lifestyles, and so on. Through this kind of interplay the everyday world becomes image-loaded; meaningful stylistic ensembles emerge wherever there is social praxis. And not to forget, part and parcel of this development is the culture industry, whose products today account for a great share of people’s experiential frameworks. As Jameson (1991: 275) notes in a discussion of the symbiosis between the market and the media, the ‘products sold on the market become the very content of the media image’. The intertextuality generated between products and advertisements, as well as the media texts these are embedded in, contribute to the images of consumer goods, while these goods and advertisements simultaneously become important for the classification of co-existing media texts. In such a context, then, consuming goods and media texts becomes pretty much the same thing. Earlier distinctions between thing and concept, or between economics and culture, are eroding, and ultimately the real world gives way for a realm of postmodern simulation. As previously stressed, my view is not that contemporary individuals are faced with this kind of gigantic manipulation of reality. However, it is obvious The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 61 that culturalization and mediazation have contributed to the fusion of categories whose separations were previously taken for granted. In this connection, ‘media culture’ and ‘consumer culture’ denote two contexts within which such ambiguities tend to emerge; blurring the demarcations of time and space, high and low, culture and economy, and so forth. Furthermore, these two phenomena have arisen as two mutually reinforcing structures within the overall modernization process. If there ever were any clear distinctions between them, these are vanishing. As I will argue in this chapter, in the capitalist settings of reflexive modernity media culture and consumer culture are to be conceived of as inseparable categories, creating a cultural sphere in which the kind of confusions expressed in postmodern theory are more or less self-generating. From a sociological perspective this sphere can be defined as a capitalist image culture. Without being the same thing as postmodernity, it is a cultural condition in which postmodern tendencies are easily identifiable. In an attempt to identify both the conceptual and empirical features of image culture, the following discussion will focus upon three main areas. First of all, I will present an account of what the concepts of media culture and consumer culture might stand for in the first place. This may seem like an impossible task, since none of the concepts have been uniformly defined within the existing body of literature. However, via an analysis of ‘the cultural’ component in these two concepts it seems reasonable to arrive at theoretically comparable descriptions, and in extension to expose their interconnectedness. Second, I will try to specify the cultural mechanism according to which image culture maintains itself. Due to transformations in tire mode of production a cultural realm of commercial intertextuality has emerged. Finally, these developments will be connected to the contexts of everyday life — in order to advance a framework for analyzing the social significance of image culture. Neither image culture, nor its textual logic of reproduction, can exist in a social vacuum. Their meanings and social implications are negotiated in relation to a number of contextual parameters. Consequently, this over­ determination of the real-life context constitutes a critique of postmodernist theory. Understanding Media Culture and Consumer Culture In cultural studies, as well as in public debate, the terms media culture and consumer culture often figure as buzz-words. They both seem to signify 62 / Assessing the Field intriguing, yet taken for granted aspects of contemporary society. However, since they have very rarely been explicitly compared, there is no clear understanding of the extent to which they actually refer to one and the same thing — in theoretical terms. And, consequently, there is just as little understanding of the extent to which social and cultural processes might have fused them together. I argue that such a development is taking place right now, due to the processes outlined in Chapter 1, making it more or less pointless to look for distinctions. In order to strengthen this argument, I will begin this analysis by providing broad definitions of media culture and consumer culture. My purpose is not to present a literary survey of the multiple meanings that have been ascribed to these concepts over the years — since such a survey would itself result in a major text. Nor do I intend to develop theoretical definitions that are absolute, since such an operation would contradict my underlying belief that media culture and consumer culture are dynamic, inseparable structures. Rather, in spite of the divergences as to how these two concepts previously have been defined, my aim is to demonstrate their compatibility within cultural studies. And the means to bring about this compatibility is to carefully assess the meaning of their common denominator: culture. Defining culture is not an easy task. As many theorists have illuminated (cf. Williams, 1981: 10-4; Thompson, 1990: 122-62; Bocock, 1992: 234), the concept of culture points to different dimensions of society and is therefore relevant within different areas of research. Without being too reductionistic, however, as for the definition of consumer culture and media culture I think it is reasonable to focus upon three major aspects: cultural products, cultural communities and culturalpractices. Together they constitute three levels of culture, or three interrelated components of ‘a whole way of life’, following Williams (1961:46-7): I would then define the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life. The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships. [...] A key-word, in such analysis, is pattern: it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that any useful cultural analysis begins, and it is with the relationships between these patterns, which sometimes reveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities, sometimes again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysis is concerned. The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 63 As Williams (ibid.: 41-2) notes, to conceive of culture in this broad manner implies that many societal aspects that have been left out in ‘traditional’ analyses of culture (primarily limited to literary criticism, musical analyses, etc.) are now to be included — notably aspects regarding the practices and relationships of everyday life. These ideas have been widely influential for the development of the cultural studies tradition. The turn to everyday life and the corresponding recognition of popular cultural expressions have been integral parts of the theoretical perspective emanating from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), or the Birmingham School, of the 1960s and 1970s. This theoretical heritage has the advantage of recognizing that ‘the cultural’, or what is meaningful to people, can be found wherever there is communication and social interaction, and hence not only in artistic expressions, or in recorded form. As Hall (1971:6) states, following Williams’ perspective, culture is clearly about ‘the way social life is experienced and handled, the meanings and values which inform human action, which are embodied in and mediate social relations, political life, etc.’ — that is, the interplay between signification and interpretation. This is what I consider to be the foundation of everything cultural; the hermeneutic dynamic through which products, communities and practices become cultural) To state that culture fundamentally is about meaning production through hermeneutic activities could be seen as an identification of the smallest common denominator among the three cultural levels identified above. Hence, culture is not a pregiven or independent category, but arises through what Gadamer (1976a) refers to as people’s hermeneutic praxis — ongoing meaning producing processes which never reach any ultimate conclusion or completion. In Gadamer’s words, there can never be a final interpretation, since the interpretation is always ‘on its way’ {unterwegs) (ibid.: 100-2). This is true both regarding the hermeneutic praxis of everyday life — in people’s striving to make sense of the world — and for hermeneutics as scientific task. If one equates every cultural phenomenon with a verbal sentence, which could be seen as the archetype of meaning production, the insights of hermeneutics tell us that every such sentence must be seen as an answer to a question. And the only way to understand this sentence is to search for the question which it is an answer to. This is how people’s everyday practices become cultural; through the continuous and never completed interplay between signification and interpretation. This is also why all cultural research in itself must be interpretative. Since the aim is to understand the meanings of social practices, the researcher has to ground his analytical work 64 / Assessing the Field in people’s lived experience. Both in ethnography and hermeneutics the difficult, or, rather, impossible, task becomes to transpose oneself into the situation of the other — making one’s own interpretative horizon converge with the horizon of the other (Gadamer, 1989: 300-7). In a similar manner Clifford Geertz in his classical essay Thick Description (1973/1993: 5) gives an essentially semiotic oriented description of culture, considering culture as the ‘webs of significance’ spun between people through their own social actions. From Geertz’s anthropological perspective, studying cultural phenomena is to search for the complexities of meaning underlying these social actions and the various artefacts that accompany them. To illustrate the task of ethnography, he applies an example about the many possible meanings of a wink. What in one situation could be nothing but a quick, involuntary twitch with the eye, could in another situation be a very deliberate signal to a special person, meaning something more than the mere physical movement. Depending on whether the two persons are aware of the same cultural code system or not, and whether their perceptions of the situation are in correspondence, the intended gesture will be understood or misunderstood. And, the other way around, a simple twitch may be ascribed a meaning that was not at all intended. In the lives of ordinary people, the webs of significance are continuously worked upon, or negotiated, giving rise to sophisticated expressions like irony, parody and understatements. Ethnography, through interpretation and thick description, has the aim of understanding these webs and sorting them out. What is behind the wink? And behind that? What is also pointed out here, is that neither cultural praxis (referring to both signification and interpretation), nor cultural research can be described as being without structure. Since ‘the cultural’ emanates from people’s wishes to understand each other, it cannot arise in a social vacuum, but only through the symbolic exchange between people. This implies that culture is never an individual matter (however it may seem so). Instead, continuous cultural praxis both presupposes and creates more or less structured webs of significance — that is, interpretative communities (Fish, 1980). The existence of such communities is the very foundation of people’s ability to attain a certain degree of intersubjective understanding. Even if it would be too much to say that a person is never alone in making a certain interpretation of a certain expression, since every individual has a unique biography and thereby unique cultural experiences, it is evident that the social interaction within The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture I 65 various contexts always leads to the development of shared schemes of basic cultural interpretation.2 In other words, there is a mutual relationship between cultural practices and cultural (interpretative) communities; none of these two categories can exist without the other one. What must be made very clear, however, is that talking about cultural communities is not the same thing as talking about homogeneous, clearly demarcated cultures. This way of reasoning emanates often from a reductionist, as well as traditional, view of what constitutes culture — most clearly manifested in ethnocentric world-views. We may then speak of ‘our culture’ as opposed to ‘their culture’, falsely implicating a sharp borderline and an internal cultural homogeneity that rarely exists. Such an operation is always an act of simplification, even though groups may seem to be very distinct concerning their cultural frames of references. As Keesing (1994: 302-3) argues, notions of symbolic meaning cannot simply be assumed to be shared within a certain group of people, since there will always be cultural encounters, leading to internal and external tensions and thereby to a successive transformation of cultural patterns. It is plainly impossible to conceive of culture as a rigid structure, manifested through public ceremonies and rituals, as was the case in the early, essentialist anthropological investigations of foreign tribes and communities. In these instances the concept of culture tends to converge with the concept of community. Such an equation is a way of reifying culture, turning it into a stable entity instead of a contested process of meaning creation. Accordingly, in recent anthropological literature (as well as in anthropologically inspired cultural studies) the focus has, for good reasons, been re-directed towards the creation and negotiation of meaning within people’s day-to-day activities (cf. Marcus, 1992: 315-6; Keesing, 1994; Featherstone, 1995: 102-8; Baumann, 1996: 191; Gillespie, 1996). When thinking and speaking of cultural communities, then, Geertz’s web metaphor is very fruitful. We may now assess the meanings of media culture and consumer culture. In the same manner as social practices become meaningful as they enter into webs of significance, so do various kinds of objects. Cultural products are those material and immaterial human creations that in subjective experience, and in relation to a context, function as signs — that is, as representations of something more than just their mere physical, sensory properties. Throughout social life objects appear as components and outcomes of cultural practice and cultural communities; they become important for the creation of webs of significance, and through the very same processes they themselves become 66 / Assessing the Field culturally meaningful. As argued in The World of Goods by Douglas and Isherwood (1978), as soon as an object is produced and used within a cultural context the mere functional dimension is supplemented by a symbolic dimension: If it is said that the essential function ot language is its capacity for poetry, we shall assume that the essential function of consumption is its capacity to make sense. Forget the idea of consumer irrationality. Forget that commodities are good for eating, clothing, and shelter; forget their usefulness and tty- instead the idea that commodities are good for thinking; treat them as a nonverbal medium for the creative faculty (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978: 62). This quote indicates that it is possible to treat the material environment as an information system. A pair of sunglasses turns into something more than a protection device for one’s eyes, and a bicycle turns into something more than a vehicle for transportation. In every society objects enter into complex systems of cultural categories, which are established and negotiated through the social interaction between people (see also Bourdieu, 1979/1984: 483). Accordingly, this view underlines my previous statement that all cultural phenomena spring from the interplay between signification and interpretation — an interplay which is both based on and contributing to the negotiation of shared cultural meanings (see also Sahlins, 1976). Every choice between material and immaterial products is the result of, and contributes to, culture. Symbolic meaning is not carried naturally within the object itself; it is not totally fixed or pregiven, but rather developed within the processes of production, exchange and use. Depending on the aim of the producer, the features of the product, the social characteristics of those who use the product, and so on, the specific object is ascribed a cultural significance. It becomes culturally categorized, or ‘named’ (Douglas and Isherwood, 1978: 75 6), in relation to other objects. This naming process is taking place both on a structural level, referring to its generalized position in social space, and on a more situational level, referring to the stylistic ensembles which the object enters into in social life. The object achieves its meaning in relation to the objects which are actually there, in the concrete physical environment, and those which are not there (but perhaps could have been there). In the postmodernist cultural theory of Baudrillard (1998: 88-90) such meaning structures are considered as systems of difference, since one particular object does not mean anything if it is isolated from the meanings of other things; what the particular object is not. In consumer culture this kind of code systems enable people to construct and The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 67 reconstruct cultural expression through the combination and recombination of commodities (ibid.: 79-80): ‘The circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by which the entire society communicates and converses.’ What unites media culture and consumer culture, then, is that both concepts deal with the hermeneutic processes through which objects become cultural, and conversely, how consumer products (that is, commodities) and media products enter into and become influential for the formation of webs of significance. The concepts refer to a socio-cultural condition in which consumer products and media products are important for the establishment and expression of cultural communities (webs of significance), and hence also for the creation and expression of cultural identity (cf. Jansson, 2001). In other words, the concepts refer to a condition in which these products-as- texts saturate and give shape to culture as a whole way of life. Neither media culture nor consumer culture can be reduced to only products, practices or communities, but regard the very interrelationship between these three levels. Yet, the potential distinction between consumer culture (or commodity culture) and media culture may be traced to the product level, the circulated objects-texts, since this is where the concepts theoretically diverge. Clear definitions of the properties of ‘consumer products’ and ‘media products’ might thus generate an understanding of the difference between consumer culture and media culture as well. But this is where things get really problematic. How do we actually separate media products from consumer products? Most media products are also commodities. And, given the culturalist perspective outlined above, most kinds of commodities are in some way functioning as mediators of meaning. Notably, the emergence of reflexive accumulation (see Chapter 1) actualizes all these ambiguities, making it increasingly pointless to separate between such categories, as well as between media culture and consumer culture. While there indeed has existed, and still exists, consumer goods with hardly no other cultural meaning than their functional purposes, as well as non-commodified media products, they are not representative for the culture of reflexive modernity. Rather, they are all embedded in complex patterns of commercial intertextuality, which in turn interact with the practices and webs of significance of everyday life. They are part of a breeding image culture. 68 / Assessing the Field r»M0RR9W‘k TftUTMl T0ÖÄV DIESEL■ ED $M HER MUI SFW *-•*«■* *» f*€«3ÜWn»*--«KM» ÎW .S-CÄS«* kJ.. kz«n>-«»*4 •» Jx«h® » «efc SwMdfr «Iwl* <»06» fc+» *«*»■ &r C—-J*r# &»*■ :**£ MH*« ’*» *»*â* MS * rwMW»««ä* 4«MH»e Ill-r «WA ! ! î L jiu*, .{ 1 "• J i.js. ••..«.• j> • W tteVWl*'' Uta ASrtSta’* MM ••♦te'tabif f^Wts4*=«i» «s#® ÿ» *> sfctanwif i»c=w ur^Ä^s^äm'. gioK ~F* < **M «hj» h-«k«O‘f «•> “’M« « ♦«».- ‘1«3âss.ï ifeg »rar’JM» -fei:-vi«>s-ÆS m.1 4?«w JW.3 COUNTRY-ROCK STAR JOANNi^ ATTACKS PREGNANT WOMAN! LUSIVE MK w.i.iiHi.iii.j.w^teii.ni.na.i.»......»....Uai ;».llli»ija ;ri,ij..i<»aM«it>7r»t ■T-Mat», The dirty country girt plays dirty when denied entry to club wr uww»rw«s(«r ffmwf rue tunu^rt^oif»r ttn/raft ruf ümjum-ormm re^ftw Advertisement! Diesel Jeans The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture I 69 The Story of a Fallen Star The American historian Daniel Boors tin (1992: 61) once noted: ‘The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.’ Celebrities, then, are persons who are famous for being famous. Their main achievement is their appearances, or, the image of their personalities. In image culture the production of such celebrities — via the symbiotic operations of reality shows, talk­ shows, tabloids, lifestyle magazines, etc. — is an essential ingredient. The celebrity is a sign of his or her own visibility, an icon of image culture itself. In a recent advertising campaign for the Italian jeans manufacturer Diesel, an entirely new media celebrity is created: country singer Joanna Zychowicz. Throughout the campaign — which includes commercial films, print ads, a CD, and a 32 page tabloid — the audience can follow the made-up rock star’s scandalous life. The movie commercial is conforming in exaggeration to the real-life TV documentary, showing a reporter with a microphone chasing the truth about Joanna and her chaotic background. In brief clips he is interviewing old colleagues, friends and relatives, who are all revealing the dirty secrets of the celebrity. Wherever the reporter goes people are wearing Diesel Jeans, and there are Diesel banners hanging in the background. However, they are not pushed to the fore, but merely there., almost authentically — creating a meta-ironic atmosphere of an all too obvious product placement campaign. At the end of the film the well established Diesel slogan appears: For successful living. As always in Diesel ads, the interpretation of this phrase is problematized through the narrative. How is this device to be understood? On the one hand, it says that wearing Diesel Jeans is not simply a matter of appropriating the signs of success, but something more; a way of staying successful, in style, when the world is falling apart. It does not matter what happens to us; wearing Diesel we are successful anyway. On the other hand, the phrase encourages us to think for ourselves. A pair of trousers can hardly help us to become successful in life. Success stems from an ability to think beyond such simple advertising slogans. And Diesel customers are individuals smart enough to understand this. Hence, Diesel adverts can also be seen as comments upon the general naivety of the advertising industry. The fake tabloid (see opposite page), at the same time a Diesel catalogue, is headed by the ironic logo It's Real-, hinting at the tabloid press’ obsessive hunt for shocking truths and extreme ‘reality’. The front page proclamation ‘It's true because It's Real!' can surely be read as the advertiser’s own problematization of the relationship between mediated realities and the reality that the mass media are supposed to report about. Thus, by using the generic structure of the tabloid press, in terms of themes, foci, language and lay-out, the campaign functions as a critique of the textual context in which it is itself embedded. Additionally, the tabloid-catalogue may be read as a comment upon the creation of media celebrities. It is in itself (as an advertisement for Diesel) an example of how easily a new face can be created and diffused to the minds of the audience. The anti-hero Joanna Zychowicz is incorporated as a component of our cultural framework — no less real than any other celebrity of whom we have only read or heard. She is the perfect rock myth, whose fantasy life we all want to live. Thus, in this particular campaign, the system that is challenged is the culture industry itself. However, without the very same system there would not have been any ground for irony. There would not have been any ground for distinction. 70 / Assessing the Field Renault Mégane. Säkraste biten i sin klass. Advertisement 2 Renault Mégane The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture I 71 We Got to Be Good to Each Other A hitchhiker dressed in jeans and T-shirt is standing along an empty highway. The sky is blue and the landscape is flat and open. There are not many cars passing by, but eventually he manages to halt one. However, it is an American 1960’s cabriolet without sufficient safety belts, and the hitchhiker rejects it. Same thing goes for the following two cars: The hitchhiker examines their safety arrangements and rejects them. He is not satisfied until a silver-coloured Renault Mégane, driven by a sensuous woman stops by. Then the hitchhiker gives a sign to his comrades hidden behind a bush. The driver at first seems terrified, but then bursts into laughter; the hitchhiker’s partners are actually his family. Enthusiastically they all jump into the car. In the background we can hear the indie pop tune We Got to Be Good to Fach Other. This TV commercial was launched in early spring 2000, accompanied by a print ad figuring the ‘lonely’ hitchhiker holding a hand-written Renault Mégane sign (see opposite page). At the bottom of the page is the textual slogan: The safest car in its class. ’ Except for the fact that several different discourses and text attributes are at play here — such as the ironic glimpse at the film myth of the lonely hitchhiker; the safety discourse well-known from public service motor programmes, and the incorporation of leisure fashion (jeans, T-shirt and boots) associated with brands such as Levi’s and Camel — what is particularly interesting about the Mégane commercial is the music. The song We Got to Be Good to Fach Other is written and performed by the rather unknown Swedish guitar band Ray Wonder, whose record company recommended the song upon a request from the advertising agency (Malm, 2000). The reason for choosing an original — obscure, though catchy — pop song for a TV commercial like this, is twofold. First, the songs of upcoming bands can provide TV ads with an atmosphere of independence and originality. Using music that is previously unheard to the popular audience means that a fresh sound is associated with the product; there are no disturbing prejudices as to what the song signifies (cf. Blake, 1997). Second, using the music of non-established bands is definitely cheaper than contracting well- known pop stars. Seen from the band’s point of view, lending a song to advertising might be a way to gain popularity. Record companies of today actually derive 70 per cent of their revenues from the exchange of music rights, that is, through fees from radio, television and advertising. Per Sundin, manager of Sony Music Sweden, predicts that the amount of original music in commercials will double each year. Many new artists will be promoted via the profitable advertisements for hip, fashionable lifestyle products (Malm, 2000). A peculiar question then emerges: Is the song promoting the advertisement, which is promoting the car? Or is the advertisement (and ultimately, the car) promoting the song? Obviously, it is not easy to figure out which of these alternatives is the most appropriate. The interesting point here is that the intertextual relationship operates in both directions. While the positive atmosphere and phrase of the song is inscribed in the car, the narrative and image of the advert, as well as the name of the car, is inscribed in the song. The TV commercial thus functions in a way quite similar to the music video, defined both as a cultural product in itself and a promotion message for the record. The important difference is that the car commercial gives no clues as to what the name of the song or the group is. Consequently, when heard on the radio the song We Got to Be Good to Fach Other might not connote Ray Wonder in the first place, but rather Renault Mégane. Just like the print ad does not have to show the complete TV narrative, or even the car, in order to signify Renault Mégane, the car company achieves free advertising every time the now well-known pop tune is played on the radio. Then, a new flavour has been added to the term ‘commercial music’; music from commercials, or, better, music-as-commercials. Apparently, bands like Ray Wonder run the risk of becoming a one hit wonder, best known as the image of a car. 72 / Assessing the Field Hence, my point is that for the present purpose every attempt to make further distinctions would lead entirely wrong. It is impossible to find any functional limits of ‘consumption’ and ‘mediation’.3 What is important to make clear, rather, is that media culture and consumer culture are theoretically overlapping and empirically inseparable categories. On the one hand, due to the media-nation process outlined in Chapter 1, the scope of media culture is expanding, simultaneously changing the face of consumer culture. Mediated texts mean a great deal as for how people experience the relationship between the self and the surrounding world — including the world of goods. The cultural naming of consumer goods is normally impossible to discuss and analyze without taking into account how such a process is related to the circulation and appropriation of significant media images. Surprisingly, both Bourdieu (1984) and Douglas and Isherwood (1978), pay very limited, if any, attention to how the media environment influences cultural classifications. But as demonstrated in media ethnographic research, the everyday media context actually constitutes an integral part of socio-cultural processes, rather than something external to them.4 On the other hand, the ongoing refinement and implementation of the capitalist logic involves a commodification process within the media sector, turning media products into media commodities. This tendency can for example be found in studies of how contemporary public service media actually function; how the intensified competition regarding the circulation of the ‘audience commodity’ has affected their practices.5 Then, what emerges out of this fusion is a capitalist image culture, in which mediazation and commodification processes are mutually reinforcing each other. Commercial Intertextuality As pointed out in Chapter 1, there are good reasons to assert that the lifeworlds of reflexive modernity are marked by a prevailing presence of signs. Except for texts, pictures, verbal utterances, etc., the world of everyday life contains an increasing amount of image-loaded artefacts: objects that are more or less deliberately applied as communicators within social life. Speaking of objects-as-signs, then, is to speak about objects as representations of something other than their mere physical appearance. Following Saussure’s original conceptualization, such objects are turned into signifiées, referring to a signified.6 A Chanel dress is not simply a garment, but may also generate associations such as ‘wealth’, ‘bourgeoisie’, ‘Paris fashion’, and so forth. The The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 73 connotations of a commodity-sign, just as any other sign, is of course relative to the person making the interpretation and to the context in which the interpretation is made, but is nevertheless often quite congruent within interpretative communities. The sharing of cultural frameworks enables people to use goods as agreed-upon communicators, incorporating them in various cultural image structures, or mythologies of contemporary life. As Barthes (1993) showed in the 1950s, most things (objects and practices) can be analyzed according to structuralist semiotics; everything from wrestling and strip-tease to soap-powder, toys and a new Citroen model. The capitalist image culture, however, implies that the semiotic relationship inherent in a commodity-sign is predominantly generated by the media. When a particular product is consumed in a social context, the object, as well as the practice, is interpreted according to standards that are greatly influenced by media images — not just advertising, but also the images created in other media texts. If, for example, a particular commodity is regularly positioned in fashionable, urban contexts when depicted in magazines, movies and TV series, this view is likely to be cultivated among the audience. The meaning of a particular act of consumption emerges to a great extent (though not solely) via the connotative link between the consumed object and the media generated image — like one text related to another. The media image, often based upon several various texts, is inscribed in the commodity in the same way as many different discourses may be at play within one and the same media text. This is what intertextuality is all about; the internal co-existence and referentiality of various externally derived texts, genres and discourses. As demonstrated by Fairclough (1995), most media texts can be revealed as embedding aspects and traces of several other textual phenomena (see also Fiske, 1989; Collins, 1992; Agger, 1999; Bjurström et al., 2000: 109-12). Reasonably, as Hebdige (1981) points out in the case of the streamlining trend that in the 1930s spread from cars, trains, etc., to the surfaces of a whole range of unrelated products, an intertextual analysis of consumer goods would find the same thing, although in a more subtle manner. A good illustration of how commercial intertextuality works is the product placement, which is essentially a strategy of positioning a branded product within a desirable media context, trying to strengthen the image of the product. As Russell (1998) notes, a product placement always contains a dual movement: First, there is an intertextual linkage directed from a media text to a branded consumer product, which implies that the styles and values of the media text are transferred to the product. Second, there is a linkage directed 74 / Assessing the Field from the product to the media text. The image, or the ‘aura’, of the commodity contributes to the perceived characteristics of people and places in the film or the TV programme: For instance, highly symbolic brands, such as clothing brands or car manufacturers, can help construct the lifestyle of a character on a show. The use of status symbols such as an Armani suit in the show Northern Exposure, contributes to the depiction of affluent lifestyles in the show, thus enhancing the veracity of the characters and their lives. Similarly, the use of familiar food and beverage brands, such as candy bar Twix in Seinfeld or Diet Coke in Friends, do more than bring the characters to life: they bring the characters to real life, by portraying products that the audience knows and uses (ibid.: 9). However, broadening the scope of Russell’s analysis, I would assert that the two-way transfer of cultural meaning is also to be found in relation to other categories than particular media texts and particular branded products. For example, a great deal of contemporary popular culture illustrates entire lifestyles, including consumption styles, without necessarily mentioning certain brands. This kind of lifestyle representations, which are characteristic for postmodern texts, are likewise based on a play with textual conventions and the images of various consumer products (cf. Foster, 1983; Kaplan, 1987; Wernick, 1991; Collins, 1992; Kellner, 1995; Fowles, 1996: 90-93; Nixon, 1997). In this way, commercial intertextuality largely functions unnoticed. In Gerbner’s (1969) terms, image formation is a matter of cultivation, emanating from a composite message system composed of a variety of inter-related texts, genres and discourses. It is pointless to try to crystallize exactly what messages are strengthening what image, and ‘how much’. In addition, this also means that even non-commercial media (such as organizational and public service broadcasting) are part of these intertextual processes. On the one hand, non-commercial corporations have successively adapted many of the features of the commercial sphere; such as new program formats (purchased from commercial format companies), new genres, and the inclusion of sponsor messages. On the other hand, as pointed out in Chapter 1, while trying to keep their distance towards the commercial sector, the distributors of alternative media (typically non-commercial organizations) are often imitated by the culture industry, which continually searches for new concepts and styles for commercial exploitation. It is now evident that commercial intertextuality is a manifestation of all three processes listed in Chapter 1: The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 75 (1) It can be understood as the semiotic mode of a culturalized economy. (2) It is enabled by the presence of a media system. (3) It presents itself to social actors as a realm of simulation. However, commercial intertextuality is not simply related to the kind of reflexive small-batch production normally referred to in discussions of reflexive accumulation. It is also nurtured by the commodity concepts of huge media conglomerates. I will provide one example from each context: In the first instance, specialized media are applied as a tool for keeping up quick alterations in styles and tastes, quenching the audiences’ desire not to get stuck in clear-cut, that is, obsolete social positions. A good example is the small Canadian Urban Juice & Soda Company, manufacturing the Jones Soda, which in 1999 was the fastest growing company in the North American beverage industry. In contrast to most other (bigger) firms, this producer does not put hundreds of millions of dollars into the endeavour of creating one coherent image, appealing to anyone, around a beverage that is virtually similar to the competitors’, but encourage their customers to take part in the development and marketing of the product — which they themselves eventually consume. Except for using weird customer-submitted sayings in their print ads (such as 1Ue took the best things In life and kept them. You can have this.'), Urban Juice & Soda also owns the concept of using submitted photographs on soft-drink botdes. This means that lucky contributors have the chance of seeing their own photograph (portraying almost anything) on 100,000 botdes; in 1998 the company used 635 out of 22,000 submitted photos on their labels. Hence, the labels are replaced continuously, as are the tastes. So far they have included everything from cherry, lemon-lime and root beer to blue bubble gum and hot-dog-and-mustard. The manager, Peter van Stolk, would also like to do cheeseburger, because ‘then we could use that old Saturday Night Live bit: “No Coke, no Pepsi, just cheeseburger. ” Additionally, in their ambition of turning the consumer into the producer, the company is also applying the new communicative potentials of the Internet. The user has the opportunity? to upload a photo, work out a label, and a few days later receive a personally branded batch of pop (Watson, 1999). Urban Juice & Soda is thus a manifestation of many of the key elements of post-Fordism: the consumer as producer, product specialization and volatility, and intertextuality. As to the latter, as a sign one single soda bottle may contain a whole network of intertextual relations. There is the indexical relationship between the label photo and the motive; the symbolic connection 76 / Assessing the Field between the branded flavour and the idea of a maybe existing blue bubble gum; the connotative association between the bottle and its advertisement; the relationship between the marketing slogan and a particular TV show, and so on. All these foreign discourses, as well as other ones, enter into the intertextual pattern inscribed in the bottle, providing it with a particular, yet temporary and socially negotiated meaning. Accordingly, it goes without saying that such a culturally complex product demands more of its consumers in terms of cultural skills than a widely accepted, less specialized sign, such as the Coca Cola bottle, and that the target group therefore is narrower. The case of Jones Soda, is a good example of how marketers regularly try to turn basically anonymous goods, ‘for anyone structures’, into commodity signs that in shape of ‘for anyone-as-someone structures’ communicate to people as individual subjects (cf. Scannell, 2000). However, this scenario must be supplemented by an account of the parallel conglomeration among the culture industries (cf. Morley and Robins, 1995: 27-31). As has been argued by political economists during the last 35 years or so, substantial parts of the culturalized economy — or the commercialized culture — are characterized by mergers, take-overs and joint ventures. Such transformations are to be found both within and between the different sectors of the culture industry, leading to increased concentration of control and economic resources. One recent example of a deal spanning the borders between the media industry and the information technology industry is American Online’s purchase of Time Warner — the latter being the world’s largest media conglomerate already before the take-over, owning for example Warner Music, Warner Brothers film studio, 24 magazines (including Time and Sports Illustrated), several cable television channels in the US and elsewhere (including CNN and TNT), theme parks, over 150 retail stores, and more than 1000 movie theatres (Herman and McChesney, 1997: 77-81). This deal provides both actors with an increasing control over the production and distribution apparatuses (Murdock and Golding, 1973). The combination of AOL’s software technologies and Time Warner’s wide range of cultural products may have many profitable synergetic effects (see also Klein, 2000). What is even more interesting here, though, since it has a direct influence upon the expansion of commercial intertextuality, is the new opportunities for product diversification and cross-over marketing that emerge through many mergers and take-overs. As Garnham (1990: 161-2) notes, there is a quite obvious logic to this tendency, based on the fact that all kinds of product development and implementation involve great risks of economic failure. Experiences also The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 77 show that the risk can hardly be decreased through an extended concentration of skills and economic resources upon product development and marketing; market success cannot be estimated with any certainty (see also Mattelart, 1984; Mattelart, 1988). Especially in contexts where the drive to audience maximation is high, as are the developmental costs, the total risk at one moment in time has to be spread out over a range of products and product categories. A major record company cannot put all their efforts into the promotion of just one or two artists, or only one particular genre. On the cultural market, as well as on most other markets, particular products, brands, genres and entire product categories run the risk of temporary or lasting failure. New concepts may be rejected by the audience, and established ones may get obsolete. The diversification strategy is a way to cope with this inescapable moment of uncertainty. The consequences in terms of commercial intertextuality stem from the implementation of multi-product concepts, within which each cultural product contributes to the marketing of the others within the concept. The most obvious illustration of this phenomenon is the operations of the Walt Disney Company, the second largest media firm after Time Warner. Ever since the 1950s Disney has undertaken the meshing of mass media texts, merchandising and promotion, gathering a line of self-referential products under one coherent concept — which is always a media narrative. Even though filmed entertainment stands for a major share of the revenues, more than 50 per cent actually come from consumer products and theme parks (Wasko, 1996; Herman and McChesney, 1997). As Garnham (1990: 202) puts it, ‘a film may only need hardly to break even in cinemas if its mere exhibition and associated publicity can generate sufficient book, record and merchandising sales, while at the same time the distribution of books, records, T-shirts and toys can create an atmosphere of “want-to-see” for the film.’ Thus, what is at stake here, paradoxically, is the materialisation of media texts — a promotion strategy where themed goods and experiences contribute to the overall strengthening of the movie concept (cf. Ritzer, 1999: 124-6). The foremost location of this phenomenon is the great theme parks (Disneyland in Anaheim, California, being the first one in the 1950s), where audiences- customers can walk around in ‘real’ three-dimensional spaces, looking at well- known figures, reviving well-known narratives, and buy various kinds of themed merchandises. Such media governed spaces are the utter manifestations of commercial intertextuality at work; commercial intertextuality being their very principle of functioning. Theme parks can be 78 / Assessing the Field seen as an extreme extension of the philosophy of consumer phantasmagoria that was embedded already in the 19th century arcades and department stores (see also Zukin, 1991; Gottdiener, 1995). In this connection it is also interesting to note that conglomerates like Disney, Sony, MCA and Time Warner are today taking the idea of media materialization far beyond the theme parks, retail stores and resorts. They are actually taking the theme park idea back to the ‘real’ metropolis — like the recent Disneyfication of Times Square in New York — once again contesting the line between fantasy and reality. For example, Disney is launching ESPN Zone sports cafes (ESPN and ESPN2 being world-wide Disney owned sports television channels), a chain of DisneyQuest high-tech arcades and a group of pay-to-enter children’s centres called Club Disney, ‘each of which has direct and overlapping network, film and cyber media content and connections’ (Davies, 1999: 447-8; see also Ritzer, 1999).8 Considering these two tendencies together — recognizing the emergence of small, flexible firms on the one hand, and the increased conglomeration and diversification on the other — what they have in common is the growing importance of the media in order to support the marketing and distribution of novelties, that is, to keep up the ever continuing recreation of consumer demand. Today we may thus speak of image industries. We may also speak of an intensified cultural flow, which no longer can be restricted to the arena of television distribution, as was the main objective when Raymond Williams (1974: 86-96) once coined the term. People are in their day-to-day lives experiencing a continuous flow of images, composed of media texts, advertising and commodities — categories that, furthermore, collapse into one another. It is no longer obvious what is image and what is product; what is promotion and what is the object of promotion, and so on. Through die operation of commercial intertextuality media generated images are constantly leaking into the lifeworld — in one shape or another. Image Culture and the Everyday Context What is missing in the postmodernist notion of image culture — as expressed for example in Jameson’s (1991) work on ‘depthless culture’ and Baudrillard’s (1983b) theory of the implosion of meaning in the media - is an account of how the realm of self-referential images are experienced and negotiated in everyday life (cf. Fiske, 1996; Silverstone, 1999: 9). Quite frankly, Jameson’s consideration of the reception processes stops at the discussion of how the The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 79 world of media texts, through the blurring of the lines between the real and the imaginary, has altered people’s ability for cognitive mapping, that is, their ability to think of themselves as located in spatial and social spaces (Jameson, 1991: 51-4). In a similar manner, Baudrillard’s view contends that audiences are turned into masses through the overproduction of spectacular, meaningless signs; a process through which all sociality on behalf of the audience evaporates. Hence, in this shape postmodernism is turned into something distinctly different from the subject-relativist position developed within post-structuralism. Overlooking the authority of interpretative subjects, as well as the contexts in which interpretations are made, the theories of both Jameson and Baudrillard are somewhat media deterministic, sharing one of the core problems of the Marxist media imperialism thesis; the paradoxical neglect of the cultural patterns that industrially produced (American) media images are supposed to wipe out (cf. Jansson, 1998, 2001). The point of departure for my study — which will also be stressed through the empirical analysis — is that commercial intertextuality does not operate in isolation; the image industry cannot in any straightforward manner prescribe how meanings are to be composed. Nor do products/texts take on meanings by themselves; the fixation (however temporary) of cultural meaning is made through interpretations and expressions made by consumers in contexts. All intertextual inscriptions depend upon the interpretation of the subject; they must be ‘discovered’ and confronted with the subject’s cultural frame of reference in order to (perhaps) function in the way intended by the encoders. In extension, this means that image culture is not an arrangement in which consumers/audiences are passive, manipulated dupes unable to think beyond the apparent logic of images, or to reflect upon the productive sources behind the image structure. On the contrary, image culture presupposes precisely the cultural creativity of interpreting subjects. Following the argument of Hall’s (1980a) famous encoding-decoding model, their ability to associate one text with another is just as important for the circuit of cultural production and reproduction as is the practices and competencies of the image industry. This does not mean that the audience can escape, or exclude, the code systems in which particular texts operate, or that human hermeneutic creativity by definition neutralizes the inscriptions of dominant ideologies; it means that the operation of commercial intertextuality is a negotiated business, just as any other form of meaning production. Accordingly, the social significance of commercial intertextuality can not be deduced from mere examinations of particular image structures, no matter 80 / Assessing the Field how ‘close’ these readings may be. Analyzing image culture does not equate studying the transitory characteristics of media texts and commodities (cultural products), but rather studying how these transformations are intertwined with people’s everyday practices and the structure of cultural communities. For this purpose I would like to distinguish between three different contexts that are important as for how a particular commodity-as- text is ascribed cultural meaning. First, the meaning is dependent upon the intertextuality described above, that is, the object’s particular relationship to a intertextual context. While some external textual phenomena may be embedded in the text (in positive or negative terms), others may be absent. In order to understand how such relationships can actually make sense, it is important to study not only the pattern of intertextuality, but also how the interpretative subject is related to that pattern, as well as to other texts. That is, one has to grasp the overall composition of the subject’s cultural framework, in terms of knowledge and preferences. The latter means that one particular text, and its intertextual structure, may be ascribed different meanings within different sociocultural contexts, according to the variations between interpretative communities. To state a harsh example; a bikini does not mean the same thing to a liberal Swede who likes going on charter trips to the French Riviera, as it means to a strongly religious Muslim. What in one cultural context is regarded as convenient clothing, is in another context sanctioned according to religious conventions. This is a basic distinction regarding the connotation of one single object. Fundamentally, however, such divergences regard the interpretation of all kinds of texts, more or less apparently. In a cross-cultural reception analysis of the reading of Dallas, Liebes and Katz (1990) could discern several explanations as to why the series did not become successful in Japan. Primarily, the failure stemmed from the fact that the Japanese audience strongly rejected the materialistic values and dynastic family order that was depicted. According to the respondents, the social conditions in Dallas corresponded to a pattern typical for pre-modern Japan — a social order that was no longer attractive. Additionally, the viewers’ genre expectations diverged from what the programme actually turned out to be. Most of them wanted to read Dallas as a ‘home drama’, that is, according to how a home drama is generally composed in Japan. Dallas was considered to be too violent, involving too many parallel stories, and without any real solutions. Since the intertextual composition of the programme was ‘misinterpreted’, the narrative became hard to follow and make sense of in a positive way. The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture I 81 However, one need not travel across the globe in order to reveal interpretative variations. Corresponding results are reported from other reception analyses, focusing for example on the cultural significance of social class (cf. Morley, 1980; Press, 1989). Ultimately, one may even argue that every individual interpretation is unique (cf. Fiske, 1987, 1989, 1991; Hobson, 1982), and that there even can appear internal conflicts as to what interpretative scheme to apply. All individuals are part of a whole range of different communities at the same time, experiencing a sense of multiple cultural identity (Keesing, 1994: 302-3; Morley and Robins, 1995: Ch. 3; Jansson, 2001). FIGURE 3 The everyday contexts of commercial intertextuality Commodity-as-text Intertextual context Situational context Sociocultural context Finally, the meanings of texts vary between different situational contexts. To develop the example of the bikini a bit further; it is not the same thing to wear this clothing during a lecture at the university as it is to wear it at a night-club, or on a sunny beach. Due to culturally established conventions — which in particular have been studied within ethnomethodology (cf. Goffman, 1959; Garfinkel, 1984) — one and the same behaviour and hence one and the same object is interpreted differently as the immediate social and material contexts change (see also Kaufmann, 1995). When it comes to media products, ethnographic studies have clearly demonstrated that the social networks in which media products are actually consumed mean a great deal to what cultural and social meanings are ascribed to the products (cf. Lull, 1990). Even though a particular intertextual pattern could be unveiled in one and the same way no matter the context, the entire process of interpretation may be influenced by situational factors; interpersonal discussions, channel zapping, 82 / Assessing the Field distractions, and so on. Moreover, as mentioned above, the particular material constellation — the functional and stylistic ensemble — which a text enters into tends to shape its final interpretation. The meaning of the single object is dependent on its relation to other objects, although no intertextual links are actually binding them together in the first place. Hence, images are not fixed, or independent from the authority of interpretative communities and social and material reality; they are relative. When trying to understand the logic of image culture it is necessary to take all these contexts, and the interplay between them, into account. Moreover, it is necessary to stress the importance of time. Since all contexts, down to their smallest components, are in fluctuation themselves, a pattern of intertextuality is not a stable construction either. The potential meanings of the external texts that one text may contain or refer to are themselves changeable, since these texts are embedded in changeable contexts too. In other words, it is impossible to find any absolute stability. The cultural significance of an object can change from one period of time to another — a transitory process including both particular commodities-as-texts and entire product categories, or genres. Concerning single objects, their connotations alter as they enter different stages of a ‘social life’, as they are used by and exchanged between people (Appadurai, 1986). The gradual cultural alteration of genres may typically stem from their diffusion in social space; to what extent the products are accessible to and consumed by different social groups. This phenomenon is especially obvious in relation to new communication technologies such as television and mobile telephones. The latter product genre, for example, was initially primarily used by businessmen wearing suits and driving exclusive cars. It then symbolized prestige and success. When the product became more affordable to common people it lost its prestige. To speak with Bourdieu (1984), the mobile telephone could no longer function as a means for cultural distinction. Summing up, image culture can be defined as a social arrangement in which media images and media influenced commodity-signs to an increasing extent are used as sources for and expressions of identity. Through the operation of commercial intertextuality, these expressions, in turn, contribute to the reproduction of cultural categorizations, which in a specific period of time are shared within a certain (although often vaguely demarcated) cultural community, and relevant within a certain situational context of consumption. Speaking of image culture, then, is not to speak about hyperreality. While the boundaries between image and reality, between imagination and direct The Fusion of Media Culture and Consumer Culture / 83 experience, might be increasingly blurred, and material use-value is eroding, this is not the whole picture. The hyperreal and the superiority of the sign, are just extreme aspects of the current cultural state. Image culture is intrinsically bound up with social reality, and that reality is still to a great extent shaped by material and economic forces. Then, as Morley and Robins (1995: 40) puts it, "postmodern culture [...] must be about positions and positioning in local and global space: about contexts of bodily existence and about existence in mediated space.’ In Chapter 3 I will work out an analytical framework that corresponds to this multi-contextual proposal. Notes 1 As Kellner (1995: 35) notes, the interplay between interpretation and signification also points to the centrality of communication in all instances of culture: ‘All culture, to become a social artefact, and thus properly “culture”, is both a mediator of and mediated by communication, and is thus communicational by nature.’ This also explains why cultural studies always must be about communication, or, why communication studies must always be about culture (ibid.): ‘There is no communication without culture and no culture without communication, so drawing a rigid distinction between them, and claiming that one side is a legitimate object of a disciplinary study, while the other term is relegated to a different discipline is an excellent example of the myopia and futility of arbitrary academic divisions of labor.’ 2 See also Habermas’ (1987: 119-52) discussion of the ideal conditions for rational communication. He applies the concept of lifeworld as a description of the shared stock of background knowledge that enables people to attain a consensus view of the topics of discussion, and eventually reach common solutions to problems. 1 will return to the lifeworld concept in Chapter 3. 3 Fruitful discussions of the media concept are provided by Silverstone et al. (1992) and Bjurström et al. (2000). For example, following Silverstone et al. (1992), one may regard ‘media products’ as the products of all kinds of media institutions, thus including both media content (texts) and technologies. Since it is often hard to distinguish between text and technology, content and mediator, it is reasonable to treat both aspects as media products: both the text in the magazine and the magazine itself; both the music of the CD and the disc itself; both the TV programme and the TV set, and so on (cf. also Bjurström et al., 2000: 75-81). The concept of consumption is discussed for example in Slater (1997a) and Bjurström et al. (2000). 4 Good empirical examples of contextualizing media ethnography can be found in Morley (1986, 1992), Lull (1990), Silverstone and Hirsch (1992), Moores (1993, 1996), Ang (1996), Gillespie (1996), Andersson and Jansson (1997, 1998), Larsen (1997, 1999), Tufte (1997, 1998, 1999), Gauntlett and Hill (1999) and Jansson (2000b). 5 The influences of the commercial media sphere upon public service corporations have been discussed by for example Garnham (1990: 115-35), Syvertsen (1991), Murdock (1992), Scannell (1992), Sparks (1995) and Sondergaard (1999). 84 I Assessing the Field 6 Good introductions to semiotics are provided by Williamson (1978) and Seiter (1992). Saussure’s original linguistic theory of the sign (first published in 1915) is to be found in Course in General linguistics (1966). 7 Critical analyses of the growing media conglomerates, often linked to a critique of Americanization and cultural imperialism, have been conducted by for example Murdock and Golding (1973), Schüler (1969, 1974, 1984, 1996), Mattelart (1979, 1980), Bagdikian (1983), Mattelart et al. (1984), Garnham (1990), Bogart (1995), Golding and Murdock (1996). 8 Zukin regards the second order influence that dreamscapes like Disney World have on contemporary cities as a typically postmodern process. In newer, decentered cities like Los Angeles and Miami the images and values of Disney World phantasmagoria are inscribed — ‘an inscription of capital in spatial forms’ (ibid.: 223). In these areas landscape itself takes a primary role in cultural mediation, creating a form of ‘Disney realism’. As a peculiar parallel, one may also note that the marketing strategy of making toys and games from movies, is now also inverted. Currently, the themes and characters of a number of computer games are turned into movie films — such as Pokémon, Tomb Raider, Soul Calibur and Final Fantasy (cf. Wiklund, 2001). PART II Analysing the Social World 3 I Lifeworld and Social Space The Lifeworld as Referential Structure Physical, Social and Representational Realms The World of Media Texts Intersubjective Lifeworlds and Cultural Identity Transition and Temporality Lifestyle and Creative Ethos Power Geometries Notes 4 / Empirical Considerations Sources and Methods (a) The Sumy (b) The Ethnographic Interviews (c) The Focus Group Interviews The Generalized Ethos (a) The Collectivism-Individualism Axis (b) The Globalism-Eocalism Axis (c) The Stability-Alteration Axis Interpretation Notes 3Ufeworld and Social Space Theoretically, this study rests upon two principal foundations, corresponding to two interrelated sets of questions. The first one regards the construction of everyday reality: What is it like to live in image culture? How do people create their worldviews and notions of the self in an era of intensified symbolic circulation? Questions like these call for a phenomenologically grounded approach to knowledge production, as well as for an ethnographically oriented method of inquiry. The second fundament is cultural sociological in nature and regards questions of cultural power and legitimization. How do people’s cultural practices and frames of reference correspond to the socio-cultural structuration of society? Who are in control of the desirable skills in image culture? In order to grasp these relationships of cultural power, the constructivist approach must be linked to what might be called a realist notion of the mechanisms of socio-cultural reproduction and change. That is, a sufficient understanding of individual processes of meaning production can be reached only through a simultaneous account of the influence of structural forces. Or, as Giddens (1984) argues in his theory of structuration, these analytical levels must be understood as one. The critical task of this chapter, then, is to outline how these two foundations are to be joined; how they can be theoretically inter-related. This chapter is to be considered both as a theoretical framework, demarcating the social domains and relationships of direct interest to my study, and as a conceptual toolbox, containing the necessary means for making sense of empirical data. The dilemma about to be addressed is thus an old one; the somehow unsolvable dilemma of structure and agency. To what extent and under what conditions are individuals affecting society, and vice versa? Clearly, depending on research topic, what questions are addressed, and from what perspective analyses are made, the micro-macro relationship may be accounted for in 88 / Analyzing the Social World different ways. Within the general field of social analysis, a range of solutions have been proposed (cf. Giddens, 1984; Huber, 1991). In audience studies the need for contextualising approaches has often been stressed, but more rarely realized in actual empirical fieldwork. Although the cultural turn during the 1980s and 1990s involved a sobering critique of the dominant uses and gratifications paradigm, notably for its all too individualistic and instrumentalistic view of the audience (cf. Carey, 1989; Morley, 1992; Ang, 1996), the developing culturalistic fraction has thus far not managed to generate very much original research. Nor has the ideal of contextualization and rigorous ethnographic fieldwork been carried out in a sufficient manner (cf. Murphy, 1999). As Reimer (1998) argues, the term ‘context’ has been applied in a rather loose and vague manner; sometimes associated with the domestic setting of actual media practices; sometimes with everyday life in its entirety, including for example ideological and class-related structures as well. The ways in which various contexts are bound together, and how these relationships are to be grasped, have typically been left open for discussion. Furthermore, qualitative fieldwork has normally focused upon the significance of one particular structure — predominantly social class (cf. Morley, 1980) or gender (cf. Hobson, 1982; Modleski, 1984; Ang, 1985; Radway, 1987), or both (cf. Morley, 1986; Press, 1989) — rather than on how media practices are governed through the interplay of a multitude of contextual parameters, each having various significance from one case to another. Hence, there is still a need for a multi-contextual, empirically applicable perspective — systematic, yet non-reductionist (see also Reimer, 1994a, 1997a, 1997b; Gibson, 2000). Then, bringing together the phenomenological theories of the lifeworld — primarily represented by the works of Schutz, Berger and Luckmann, who are in turn successors of the Husserlian tradition — and the cultural sociology of Bourdieu and others, my aim is to develop a framework which can account both for a deeper understanding of people’s everyday knowledge and practices, and how such orientations are distributed in social space. Although my empirical analyses are more akin to the cultural sociological tradition, I am convinced that the injection of phenomenological terminology will make it easier to discuss people’s cultural experiences and the formation of cultural communities in a systematic way. Furthermore, by means of phenomenology the very concept of social space can be elaborated, since the new face of modernity’ asks for a greater consideration of representational properties — notably the media and their images. I will not discuss ‘social position’ or ‘class’ in a materialist, or Marxist, sense, but point to the interplay between various LSfeworld and Social Space / 89 significant factors that together condition the composite spatial positions of individuals and groups — including their relationship to representational realms of experience — and, in extension, the composition of lifeworlds and lifestyles. Altogether, the following presentation is an attempt to develop what may be called a phenomenologically invigorated sociology of image culture (cf. Smart, 1976: 73-80). The Lifeworld as Referential Structure Time has showed that one of the most pertinent concepts emanating from the phenomenological works of Edmund Husserl is the lifeimrld ÇEebenswelt), which became the leading theme of the first part of Husserl’s second major work The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970). First appearing in 1936 in the journal Philosopbia, this concept stands out as a key word in his philosophy of everyday life.1 The task of Husserl’s theoretical project was to alter the focus of social philosophy from the world of scientific knowledge (which at that time was the model for all kinds of knowledge) to the world people experience through their immediate consciousness, the world constantly surrounding their day-to-day activities.2 Hence, instead of trying to define social and cultural facts in terms of their theoretical, ‘realistic’ properties, Husserl was interested in the same facts as phenomena, that is, the way they are perceived within everyday life and contribute to individuals’ construction of reality. In a broad sense, the lifeworld can be defined as the taken for granted world of everyday life; the world people do not have to make the object of hermeneutic reflection.3 This world is simply there, pregiven, because its existence has been accepted through long time lived experience. The lifeworld is a sphere of taken-for-grantedness, a more or less coherently arranged set of phenomena which the individual can approach in a natural attitude — another basic concept within the Husserlian school of thought, originally appearing in Husserl’s (1982) work Ideas from 1913. The existence of such material and immaterial phenomena — like the physical structure of the domestic sphere, the codes of behaviour in a classroom, the cyclic shifts of seasons, etc. — are not put into question, because they are always appearing in an order that the individual has gotten used to. Being in the natural attitude, then, is to be in a state of non-reflexivity, co-ordinating one’s actions on the basis of routines which in their turn are the outcomes of initial reflexive adjustments to the 90 / Analyzing the Social World circumstances of the surrounding world. The qualities and the very existence of new, unfamiliar objects must be evaluated and incorporated as aspects of one’s routinized schemes of interpretation before they can be approached in the natural attitude, that is, before they can become part of the taken for granted reality, the lifeworld (see also Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 8-14). Basically these interpretative processes stem from people’s striving to make sense of the world, turning problematic objects into unproblematic, controllable phenomena. As Berger and Luckmann (1966: 38) put it: As long as the routines of everyday life continue without interruption they are apprehended as unproblematic. But even the unproblematic sector of everyday reality is so only until further notice, that is, until its continuity is interrupted by the appearance of a problem. When this happens, the reality of everyday life seeks to integrate the problematic sector into what is already unproblematic. Consequently, the lifeworld cannot be restricted to the immediate, surrounding world of touchable physical things, the Here and Now of the ‘natural world’ — what Schutz (1962: 306-11) refers to as ‘the world within my reach’. This domain had not been taken for granted if it had unveiled itself to the subject in isolation, disconnected from his or her previous experiences (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 5). Accompanying all social and physical activities are actualities not directly in the field of perception, but existing merely as phenomena inside the heads of social actors. These phenomena constitute what Husserl (1982: 52) describes as an ‘infinite, misty and never fully determinable horizon’ - an accumulated stock of knowledge, in itself taken for granted, composed according to the individual’s own particular view of the world. Without this experientially derived horizon of interpretation it would not be possible to make sense of the world ‘on hand’, nor face it as something pregiven. When altering between different situations, defined according to their particular constellations of spatial, temporal and social characteristics, different parts of the taken for granted stock of knowledge is activated — while still remaining in the background of direct experience (as experience experiences itself). The new situation is unreflectively assessed according to what is already known in terms of space, time and social relations, and if there are no unfamiliar aspects to it, it is considered as unproblematic. In this way, in order to make sense of the world, every new situation is interpreted within the frame of what has already been interpreted; in relation to the already familiar (see also Schutz and Luckmann, 1973: 8-15; Lifeworld and Social Space I 91 Habermas, 1987: 119-35). The lifeworld can therefore be seen as a referential structure, containing all kinds of phenomena that together order individual experience when acting in the world (Figure 4). Every new experience (crystallized from the continuous stream of experiences) contributes to this taken for granted higher structure — a structure which the actor also can reflect upon as an amalgamation of meaningful polythetic acts (Schutz, 1967: 74-8; see also Luhmann, 1990: 22-6). FIGURE 4 The reproduction of the lifeworld The subjective lifeworld Comparison Inclusion Realms of experience Referential structures This implicates that the lifeworld is not a stable entity. As new phenomena are encountered and eventually appropriated as parts of the taken for granted stock of knowledge its composition is gradually altered, although it still remains one and the same. This transitory process goes on ceaselessly through life; sometimes almost without notice, sometimes involving great psychosocial turbulence, as in occasions of major shifts or crises in life. New components are brought in all the time, while others are eroding or put into question, forming a double movement of inclusion and exclusion, through which the scope and composition of the referential structure is reworked. Discussing the first matter - what may be called ‘the problem of inclusion’ — Husserl (1982) stresses that even entire new worlds, fields totally separated from the world of ‘real actuality’, can be appropriated. Taking the knowledge of arithmetic as an illuminating example, he points out that if the skills necessary to master the rules of this world are obtained, it can be approached in a mode of consciousness congruent to the natural attitude. The subject can then fully engage his or her thoughts in the ‘arithmetical world’, surrounded by a ‘partly indeterminate arithmetical horizon’, being in the ‘arithmetical attitude’. In this 92 / Analyzing the Social World way the individual can shift his or her focus of attention, altering between different attitudes — always returning to the natural attitude: If my cogito is moving only in the worlds pertaining to these new attitudes, the natural world remains outside consideration; it is a background for my act-consciousness, but it is not a h