"Architecture et sciences sociales", EDAR, EPFL Prof. Jacques Lvy and Prof.

Luca Ortelli

Consumer Culture and Modernity by Don Slater

Book review

Marija Cvetinovic PhD student, CODEV

The 7th of December 2011.

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1.General framework 3 2.The scope of the book 4

Consumer Culture and Modernity 4 The Freedom of Market 7 Consumption versus Culture 8 The Culture of Commodities 9 The Meaning of Things 9 The Use of Things 10 New Times? 10

3.Contextual analysis and influences 11 4.Critical approach 13 5.Afterword 14 6.References 14

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1.

General framework

The book Consumer culture and Modernity was published in 1997 and it introduced the author Don Slater to the wide audience not only academic and scholar but also the popular one. Immediately afterwards, the book was praised as a valid and vivid critique of consumer culture that encompasses sociology, theory of communications, cultural studies, anthropology and history. As soon as the first review were published, it was evident that educational trait of the book casts a shadow on all other qualities - it becomes widely accepted and recognized as an ideal textbook about the nuanced spectrum of theoretical approaches to consumer culture, a key issues of our time. Don Slater is a Cambridge PhD in Social and Political Sciences, who, apart from teaching, spent several years in publishing, photography and community arts. His work focuses on the relations between culture and economy, and falls into three broad areas: the sociology of economic life (in particular, consumer culture and market society); the sociology of the Internet and new media; and visual sociology (particularly photography and advertising). His work has been traced by a commitment to empirical (particularly ethnographic) research, to historical research, to critical traditions within modern social theory, and to interdisciplinary study and collaboration. His first book Consumer culture and Modernity is widely accepted as an introduction to the field of consumer culture, which focuses on how to place theories of consumer culture in the broader context of the development of social thought throughout the modern period. Therefore, the framework of the book is Modernity. The authors approach introduces consumer culture as a subject, elaborating its evolution and broad field of causes and influences, binding it gradually with central issues of modern times and modern social thoughts. However, what is even more striking is authors shift in the approach by his concentration on how certain modern experiences and dilemmas concerning consumer culture have been formulated and how they refer back to society and the social in the modern discourse; he elaborated and structured this book to fully fall into the category of sociology in the manner that he study things in the context of social relations, structures, institutions, systems. The author provides us with a synthesis of social theories which gives rise to consumer culture in todays sense elaborating that consumer culture is not solely a product of the postmodern period, but has its beginnings in modernity. Thematically organized, the book debates how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choices, identities, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been placed and related within modern theories, from the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Knowing that this book does not claim to define consumer culture, but states that Consumer culture is probably less a field (which evokes the steady tilling of a well-marked patch of productive land) and more a spaghetti junction of intersecting disciplines, methodologies, politics (Slater 2003), it is consumer culture through which material basis, cultural forms and ethical status of everyday life have been structured and arisen from the 18th century up to post-traditional society. In other words, Slater encapsulates consumer culture as a leitmotif in layers of modernity, which replicates core concepts and styles of modern western thought. The book is organized in chapters which slowly and gradually build the bond between consumerism, culture and modernity. Slater thoroughly examines multiple and diverse theories constantly asking questions about consumption (why, when, and how). He captures many of the paradoxes of "consumption" and "culture" without any judgment. In the introductory chapter the methodology and terminology of the book is explained. Formed from the standpoint of the scientific field of sociology, the main issues of the book are here underlined and subsumed in relation to the core definition of society in terms of social actors, social practices (policies and processes) and social order. Slater introduces the registry (such as needs, choices, identities, Page 3

status, alienation, objects, and culture) which he finds essential for understanding consumer culture in the modern context. In brief, the book Consumer culture and Modernity deals with western modernity and its achievements, the rise of commercial society, the relation between needs and social structures, the relation between freedom of choice and the power of commercial systems, the nature of selves and identities in a post-traditional world, the reproduction of social order, prosperity and progress, and of social status and division, the modern fate of individuals and of the intimate, private and everyday world(Slater 2003) leading undoubtedly to the rise of consumer culture. Chapter 1, Consumer Culture and Modernity, gives a very general characterization of consumer culture deeply grounded in the course of modernity with its assigned attributes. Further on, the chapter The Freedoms of the Market is about the consumer and consumer sovereignty and how it is placed in the system of modern values and developed as such. Coming up from the historical background through the elaboration on the consumer as a valid social actor to Consumption versus Culture, Slater then discusses the term culture and its relation not only to consumerism, but also to modernity trying to justify the very phrase consumer culture in the modern context. Having elaborated this term, Chapter 4, named The Culture of Commodities, takes up the issue of alienation: moreover, how consumer culture from an explosive output of things, of a wealth and prosperity which promises satisfaction [..] seems only to deliver poverty, boredom and a sense of estrangement. (Slater 2003) In the following two chapters (The Meaning of Things and The Use of Things) Slater subsequently places things and their meanings within social practice and later on questions relations between needs and objects, nature and culture, meanings and social practices and how it all influences the cultural reproduction of social identities, membership, status and ideology. Finally, Chapter 7, which was entitled New Times? and ended with the question mark, is about the change of the role of culture and consumption in social life which have shifted us out of the modern period into new times: an era of postmodernity, post-Fordism or disorganized capitalism.(Slater 2003) Bearing in mind all that has been elaborated on the rise of consumer culture in the course of history, its justification in the framework of modernity and the concluding interlinkage with post-Fordism, postmodernity and post-structuralism, the author did not leave the subject to end in this linear manner, but added Afterword chapter, which eventually put the scope of Consumer culture into some manageable order and context by offering different perspectives and possible hypothesis, in order to see what and how much it is at stake. (Slater 2003)

2. The scope of the book Consumer Culture and Modernity

The title of the book itself denotes its main topic intrinsic and long-term relationship between consumer culture and the course of modernity and how this dominant mode of cultural reproduction has developed within it. The author begins with recognizing consumption as the cultural process on one hand, and the western modernity with its central values, practices and institutions, on the other. This fruitful, long-lasting inter-dependence, according to what has been claimed in this book, is responsible for the very making of the modern world, as we know it today, with its idea of modernity, of modern experience and modern social subjects sustaining it with practical scope and ideological depth. In this sense, the practice of everyday life within western modernity keynotes choice, individualism and market relations as constitutional issues which ultimately affect social actors and installs the concept of needs as the central theme which explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Therefore, consumption comes to be the response to the particular pattern of needs and

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objects relations within the current cultural model being a consumer is about knowing the relationship between ones needs and getting them satisfied(Slater 2003). Early in the Introduction chapter, Slater refers to needs as both social and political, which question the division of material and symbolic resources, labour and power within a macro social context in a way as to guarantee people the kinds of lives that they want to live and is, therefore, justified as a social value. What is even more intriguing may be the great issue about consumer culture as the way in which central questions about how we should or want to live are connected with questions about how society is organized.(Slater 2003) This stated, it becomes conspicuous that consumer culture is ultimately judged by its ability to meet needs. Knowing that different ideologies derive these needs in different value-systems, the author initiates his analysis telling the story of the historical rise of consumer culture, but in reverse. He explains this approach with the incisive comment that consumer culture is constantly heralded as 1 new , that allows us to have each new age traced back to a previous one and then bound back up again with the whole of modernity. In this manner, the storytelling grows from Reaganomics and Thacherism in the 80s, when consumer culture had been already established as the scope for consumer choice. In these times, the choice 2 actually became the obligatory pattern for all social relations. Furthermore, it goes back to Fordist mass consumption, Keynesian economics, and Galbraiths affluent society as the milestones of postwar consumerism, organized capitalism and neo-liberal renaissance, seen in terms of the market freedom, which once guaranteed both economic progress and individual freedom. Important previous times, Slater summarizes in four crucial periods: 1. 1920s: which gave rise to a generalized ideology of affluence and promoted the link between everyday consumption and modernization 2. 1880-1930: the emergence of mass manufacture, the geographical and social spreading of the market and rationalization of the production and its organization 3. 1850-1870: known as mid-Victorian period when the forces of industrial and urban modernisation came into play and initialized the nascence of the production of space as a public spectacle and the consumption of time in the form of leisure activities th 4. 1750-mid19 century: Romanticism, which raised and passed on many of the themes considered as modern (or even postmodern), such as personal authenticity, aestheticism and creativity Following this historical narrative, consumer culture is derived in relation between modernity and capitalism through the Industrial revolution with mass production as the essence of modernization and economic prosperity. In terms of relationship between needs and objects of needs, these are the circumstances which have induced and spread the propensity to consume among people and brought into question the authenticity and autonomy of individual needs, namely whether social systems (influential social agents market forces, private corporations, media and cultural institutions, scientific knowledge and expertise) have the power to define their needs instead. If we explore deeper the social relation between private life and public institutions, there are three central issues which group its

"Consumer culture is about continuous self-creatino through the accessibility of things which are themselves presented as new, modish, faddish or fashionable, always omproved and improving"Slater, D. (2003). Consumer culture and modernity, Polity Press.

as Thatcher put it, There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families ibid.

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possible socially significant repercussions: commercialisation and the economy, cultural reproduction, and ethics and identity. Generally speaking, in modern discourse, consumers do not produce the goods they consume, but buy it on the market: the venue for the distribution of material and cultural resources, determined by market relations. Ergo, the concept of continuous modernization and economic prosperity against constant consumption call into question the satiability of needs, precisely whether people would stop working and enjoy free time independent of commodity consumption once their needs are satisfied, but rather want more so that they will continue working in order to buy more commodities (Slater 2003) and, hence, the process of commercialisation is what brings up trade and commerce rather than production or consumption as the propulsive force of social reproduction to the consumer, an example of the private and enterprising individual, who stands at the central position of modernity. In other words, the consumption of goods and services requires the mobilisation of social resources and this is always carried out under specific social arrangements of productive organisation, technological abilities, and relations of labour, property and distribution. (Slater 2003) Furthermore, a commercial society, systematically dependent on the insatiability of needs, entitles consumption values as the dominant value in society. Contradictory, culture, by its core definition, is the cultural reproduction of authentic values, independent from money or market exchange. Henceforth, this mlange designate cultural reproduction within a social context as done by objects of consumption, which are always culturally meaningful and generate culturally reproducible social identities through this process. Likewise, perpetually engaged in consuming they do not simply reproduce their physical existence but also reproduce culturally specific, meaningful ways of life (lifestyles). The consumer is, as a matter of fact, at the end of this process - anonymous, constructed as an object, the target driven by impersonal and generalizable relations of exchange that form the basis for the consumption principle. They are, without willing it themselves, endowed with the human right to consume freely, in addition, all social relations, activities and objects are offered to them to be consumed as commodities; and this particular freedom is, paradoxically, compulsory. The author define it as consumer sovereignty, their private act of private choice and private life, which, conversely, has tied the intimate world inextricably to the public, the social, the macro and allowed these to invade the private to an considerable degree.(Slater 2003) They also practice private choice with no public significance, without any notion of social order, solidarity and authority, which are the basic forces for holding society together. In brief, this is a social struggle of ethics and human nature over the production of everyday life which challenges the modern social discourse. To sum up, Slater finishes the case of consumer culture and modernity by stating the signposts which outline this relationship and frame the story, as following: Consumer culture is a culture of consumption Consumer culture is a culture of a market society Consumer culture is universal and impersonal Consumer culture is a free practice of private choice and private life Consumer culture is based on unlimited and insatiable needs Consumer culture is constituted on the balance between identity and status Consumer culture is an exercise of power

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The Freedom of Market

The consumer is the subject and object simultaneously as seen from the standpoint of consumer culture and modernity. Having acknowledged the authors scope of consumer culture (market venue, practice of choice, needs, identities, status and power), he wants to identify social agents responsible for and susceptible to the construction of social identities and relations out of social resources; so, the consumer is the social actor for him. What is more, he starts the story from the question as to whether the consumer, in their sovereign freedom over needs and their satisfaction, is a fool (satirically called a cultural dupe or a dope) or a hero. Placing the consumer at the central position of modernity, Slater assigns all features of consumer culture to them. They are, on the one hand, entirely immersed into dichotomies of modernity: rational/irrational, sovereign/manipulated, autonomous/other-determined, active/passive, creative/conformist, individual/mass, and subject/object; on the other, they express their needs, transform them deliberately into demands and exercise freedom of choice. What he, however, wants to emphasize is the historical venue of market society where all these activities and relations happen, in order to further bond the rise of consumerism and consumer culture with the development of modern society, and to prove, in such a manner, that it is not at all a sole product of post-traditional and post-modern period, although it gained its full realisation therein. The consumer exerts their sovereignty in the scope of the market. They connect their individual desires and social institutions through the rational calculation of self-interest and the market responds through its demand and offer. The Market is a social institution. It derives its policies, laws and practices from the individual, self-defined demands and catalyses them into the mechanism of how to coordinate social order. Price is there to reflect, not the value of goods, but a social compromise between the identified individual needs and a common denominator in relation to which individuals calculate its utility. Understood in the constant loop of definition and practice of pricing, it is actually the information, the efficient mechanism for allocation of social resources in accordance with the preferences of individuals. In Don Slaters terms, the role of the consumer, torn between a hero and a fool, is built on the disparity among their freedom of choice, ability to calculate the utility and reasonably act, on one side, and irrationality and whims of their needs on the other. They are able to measure the maximization of the satisfaction of desires by replacing the multiplicity of human desires with a single desire for utility maximized utility. On the contrary, they formulate their demands on the variety of needs. Nonetheless they are basic, real and authentic or socially constructed, mediated and influenced; they are legitimate individual preferences which consumers choose to pursue. The individual is, though, sovereign the consumer is sovereign. Everything has its price if individuals express a demand for it. In terms of the market: goods, according to this way of thinking, do not have utility in themselves, but only in the eyes of a beholder(Slater 2003) There is, then, no moral authority for these preferences to be judged, the consumer has an ethical basis (personal liberty) and a cognitive basis (the limits of reason). Finally, the authors replaces his distinction of heroism and idiocy of the consumer, according to the register of modernity, with the difference of male and female in the character of the modern consumer. Regardless of their personal capacities, liberalism endowed them with freedom and autonomy of actions, it imposed on them self-government and self-management as the governing principle. They are free to choose their self for themselves. They are not only social actors free to exercise the choice among alternatives, but also both objects and resources for the management of population, by defining and confining the possible alternatives, from which the choice is made.

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Consumption versus Culture

This chapter deals with the essential definition of terms in this book and their range of meanings and representation. It has been obvious, so far, how consumption has been established among the core agents of modern society, which finally triumphed in post-modernity. On the other hand, the author assumes, according to classical principles of sociology and pre-modern times, that culture is a driving social force and it provides the society with substantive values which govern everyday life. This analysis immediately starts from post-traditional society, because it is generally viewed as the adequate framework for positioning consumerism as the principle social value over all other kinds and sources of social worth. Culture is, on the other hand, a mere social thought, an ideal which must fulfil a social function, the pursuit of community preservation, self-hood and the good, in order to fulfil its social function. In social circumstances where everything has its price and where social preferences are mediated solely by market economy and liberalism, the linguistic coin consumer culture seems ironically as an oxymoron of two incompatible terms locked together in the course of the evolution of modernity. Having brought up the idea of the oxymoron, the author illustrates its post-traditional context in terms of (Giddens 1991): No fixed identities Pluralisation of life-words No traditional authority Mediated experience

Taken from the rise of modern social thought (from Enlightenment onward) needs are the basic social drive of progress and the pursuit of their satisfaction led to a post-traditional plural society with its variety and fluidity of values, roles, authorities, symbolic resources and social encounters Choice is a requirement and compulsion we are forced into by the absence of a stable social order we have no choice but to choose(Slater 2003) This practice of choice in everyday life made economic value to triumph over the social one. Consequently, everything comes to be the object of commerce and consumption. Cultural values, which by default cannot be bought or exchanged, evolve as objects of social distinction the status, as the good to be consumed and individual self comes to be the means of social domination over individuals. The self is the chosen identity from what is on offer in the pluralized social world, further moulded inside a certain social circumstances in order to construct a pure cultural pattern a lifestyle, not unique but rather formal representation of social membership. We not only choose the self, but constitute ourselves as a self who chooses, a consumer(Slater 2003) This omnipresent consumption, enslaved by the necessity of constant economic growth and stability, craves to be standardized even in the sphere of cultural reproduction, the free choice of the self. Individuals unavoidably tend to conform to the expectations of their immediate social surroundings; in their pursuit of identity, self-realization and self-fulfilment, they are torn between the cult of the self and the other-directed self, in such manner that it blurs any limits or boundaries for needs and the possibilities to satisfy them and enables the whole system to function in the vicious, never-ending loop.

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The Culture of Commodities

The system requires all of our needs to be insatiable and to look for their satisfaction. The system produces things and thing-like social life, social subjects relate to social objects which could satisfy their needs. Social relations are based on the dialectic of consumption. In Hegelian terms, subjects and objects are mutually constituted through labour / practice; it is not the case that subjects are using objects, but they are interdependent and integrally linked. Therefore, our reality is constantly constituting and restituting, in transforming the world we transform ourselves.(Slater 2003) Unfortunately, in modern society labour becomes abstract and formal, not qualitatively rich and substantive. People do not produce directly for their own needs, but for wages; and their wide variety of needs has been replaced for the only real need the one for money. Even values are dependent on the market, and not on their true source, human labour, which is indirectly projected in the form of the sign-object. This is what the author defines as commoditization alienated labour which functions to satisfy alienated needs by object-signs whose values are estimated in the fetishist object-world. In modern society, when we consume, we most probably consume commodities(Appadurai 2003), which actually carry on everyday life and bring the satisfaction within it. Moreover, the consumption of commodities exposes the everyday to large-scale and rationalised intervention by economic forces and agencies enabling the reproduction of the system itself.

The Meaning of Things

Consumption is a meaningful activity. After the gradual building of the contextual and historical support for the rise of consumer culture, the author buttresses this concluding statement in the final discourse of postmodernity. Herein it has already been stated that consumption is a cultural activity, the agent of cultural and social reproduction. Culture represents the fact that all social life is meaningful and constitutes needs, objects and practices within a particular way of life. These social agents bear the meaning which is constituted through social relation to social actions, processes and institutions. It obvious that there is no social agent without meaning and the derivation and constitution process of generating meaning is what comes into question. According to postmodern social thought, meanings depend on the system of signs rather than on the objects in themselves or their place in social practice. Systems of meanings are internally organized and depend on the related social theory. In this respect, semiotics and its language basis are deeply grounded and applied in the post-modern discourse, where meanings are inseparably affiliated with objects or practices. In its ultimate representation, every single thing inside one society is converted into a sign of itself. Inside such a social context, everything we consume is actually a sign. This statement is, as a matter of fact, what the author adopts from modern social thinkers, such as Baudrillard and Barthes, justifying that things, needs and uses are culturally defined, but questioning finally whether they are, by being endowed with meanings inside the system, actually deprived of their everyday practical purposes and connotations.

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The Use of Things

The meaning of things is one of the crucial forces for the making of social relations and social order and it is deeply related to the underlying social division. Consumption of goods and production of cultural patterns through freedom of choice both mark the fact that post-modern times also include social stratification. This social stratification is directly mapped onto a division between goods and consumers, where this two-way relation represent a certain social context. In this sense, we consume the social through this system of signs, so that by being deprived of the material we are being excluded from society. The author here clarifies a new model of social differentiation, where status is being obtained by consumption and social climbing occurs through the chase of sign-values represented in different lifestyles. In times of freedom of choice and abundance of the material and the meanings, culture also decomposes and dilutes and so there is a multiplicity of cultures: high culture, consumer culture, subculture, lifestyle culture, the pure products of lived experience. This ever expanding and differentiating field is actually the venue for the endless production of concepts. As a result, we now have consumption norms, prices and wages, needs and demands, markets, cultural patterns and associated lifestyles as, in fact, components within an endless cycle of reproduction.

New Times?
The book finishes, in a certain sense contradictory, with a sort of introductory summary of the new times we now live in. It exemplifies the flow of concept and succession of periods that eventually finish in our times post-traditional society and post-modernity. Here, it is finally conspicuous how our society through consumption and consumer culture as valid patterns slowly turned from the period of the evolution of modernity into post periods. Although, as it is stated at the very beginning of this book that consumer culture assumes itself as constantly new, Slater use this term to encompass the current trends concerning the issue. First of all, the author clarifies the terminology giving us the definition of relevant fields of study, and in this manner he differentiates: Sociology of postmodernity aims to explain what society looks like now Sociology of postmodernism states the shifts in cultural scope (everyday practices, aesthetic practices and social theory) Postmodern sociology as a new concept to understand the society of today in general and consumer culture in particular

Having these terms clearly distinguished, we have a distinct outline of how all focal topics of postmodernity could be related to the theory. When applied, it explains the concept of our modern times; the author refers to the post-traditional, post-Fordism, post-modernity, and post-structuralism, and relates it to capitalism, liberalism, critical and cultural theories. Nevertheless, this book in its wholeness maintains the idea of consumption in the central position viewed from the perspective of the reproduction of labour and of system. In addition, in terms of society, it must be set to balance between needs and effective demands, labour costs and wages, which have to be functionally adjusted to keep society afloat. In this constant production, we came to an end when more value is produced than there is effective demand available to absorb it, and in order to produce more the market happens to be dominated by information, media and signs the modern means of surplus-value production. This is what the author refers to as Fordism. What is

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more, the author insists on the concept of the transformation of Fordism into post-Fordism through the constant rising of expectations. Additionally, this general priority of consumption over production in everyday life, constitution of identities and interests and dematerialization of objects and commodities is, in fact, postmodern culture. In postmodernism society and social development are gravitated by: non-material goods, commodity aesthetics, mediation of goods, and non-material functions of production. This apparent domination of the non-material transforms our encounter with the world into pure image-perceiving and image-representing: the circulation of signs. And these signs are to be chosen through various social practices, but in post-modern realm without any stable and standard hierarchical relationships, these social practices and relations come to be relativistic, a never-ending flow of significations: the image of the consumer inhabiting a perpetual present, confronts all of social life as a field of simultaneous and depthless images from which to choose, but to choose without reference to any externalities or anchors (finalities like need or value or truth).(Slater 2003) This relativism exemplifies the dissolution and mobility of social boundaries and hierarchies and the inability to bond any social category to the real with no finality of needs, social structures or natures. The social is represented as an abundance of mere images and raw materials to be chosen and applied for the construction of possible new realities. This is how our new age becomes post-structural - there are no longer stable foundations, values, truth, authenticity, real needs and even real objects, but the system of signs which encompasses everything. To conclude, Slater identifies post-modernity as the top, all-inclusive category of our new times; it is made up by unifying post-Fordism (which defines the relation of economy and culture, how signs have been dominating consumption as well as production) and post-structuralism (it is applied in relating culture to society, when there is no single purpose and meaning, needs and values, but relationships). This unity, being elaborated here, is deeply immersed in the agenda of consumer culture; moreover, it is not just a constitutive part of post-modern period, but represents a definite continuity with modernity.

3. Contextual analysis and influences

As the author states in the introduction chapter that he has no pretensions to build a theory or to define consumer culture in relation to modernity, but to circumscribe the flow of social thought, social practices and processes which constituted consumer culture in the modern sense and how these process arose, formed and evolved. In order to achieve it, he argues the development of consumer culture from the present day to the early modern period and refers to it as the evolution of modernity (from the classical social thought which he identifies with the Enlightenment onward and backward several times inside the book) in a lucid and concise overview of the literature of historians and social thinkers. Having his goal determined and associated with the framework of the historical period of modernity, Slater keeps referring back and forth to different social theories in the whole course of his book, connecting them first to the topic and then to each other so as to embody their continuity. The author places all of his statements in a certain historical context, validating them in such manner. Firstly, he starts with explaining the evolution of consumer culture; he refers backwards to the main social and economic theories (from Thatcherism back to Romanticism). Further on, he debates the freedom of market through two opposing philosophies liberalist and utilitarian. Then he extends his argumentation of the relation between consumer culture and modernity to contemporary critiques by the elaboration of the social order transformation that led to dysfunctional culture, evident in theories of Durkheim, Rousseau, Hobbes, Tocqueville and Marx. Moreover, Slater continues to approach the

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critique of consumer culture from the historical point of view with the exposition of prominent theories regarding the meanings and uses of consumption (Durkheim, Mauss, Douglas, Bourdieu, and Veblen). Finally, the book is finished with key-thinkers of post-modernity: Bartes, Baudrillard and Foucault. We may encounter a methodological problem, when we want to place such historical volume in a certain context. What is even more challenging may be that the book explores a wide range of concepts and defines actually no theory but only a framework for its main topic. However, the author in his historical analysis keeps visible track of his main concept the post-modern vision of consumer culture, even though he blames post-modernity for its tendency to break its connection to the dialectics of modernity. This gradually developed thought may be identified as influenced mostly by the theories of Marx, Baudrillard and Barthes. Starting with Marx and his critique of capitalism, Slater finds in his theory the essential roots for explaining consumer culture in todays sense and key-causes for its rise in capitalistic societies. He develops his idea of consumer culture from marxistic ethical commitment to human creative powers and its vision of alienated labour when workers are separated from the means of production and when labour is reduced to a commodity. It is how the process of production is being separated from the process of consumption and how capitalism necessarily produces its consumers. Taking Marxisms standpoint, it becomes clear how human development inside capitalism has become alienated, governed by abstraction and formal rationality, and this is indeed what constitutes consumer culture. Marxs consumers rich in needs are Slaters dopes or dupes; profit is alienated sign-value which became the aim in itself; and freedom of needs and choices and constant growth in number of means for fulfilling them (as stated essential for Slaters viewpoint) eventually leads to their multiplication that paradoxically gives rise to a lack of the same (as indicated by Marx). A second important milestone of consumer culture is its ground in object- meaning -value relation and its organization inside either social or cultural system. Slater states that objects are understood in their context, so that their meaning depends on the system of signs. This system of signs is represented through the model of language. Here in the terminology and discourse of Barthes and Baudrillard, the author feels at home while explaining the alienation of objects and needs, their meanings and their further assimilation with signs and classification in reproducible cultural patterns (lifestyles). In linguistic terms, the sign (the basic linguistic unit) is divided into three components: the signifier (material form), the signified (the meaning), the referent (the object to which the sign refers). Taking Barthes into account, sign systems are considered cultural in the sense that they constitute methods for organization and division inside particular societies, and they are arbitrary in respect to the real world. Nevertheless, in modern consumer culture consumer goods, services and experiences have a place in systems of meaning and in structures of practice or practical action, so as soon as there is a society, every usage is converted into a sign of itself.(Barthes and Lavers 2000) When Slater, in his book, discusses the meaning of things, and the usage of these meanings/signs inside consumer culture to constitute status and generate lifestyles, he comes up with the idea that function of an object, in this sense, is not only dependent on signification, but can be also completely reduced to its meaning (ideology, sign-value). Elaborating consumer culture, he resorts to Baudrillards, who goes even further then Barthes by stating that we now consume only signs rather than things.(Baudrillard 2003) Admitting that this standpoint is partly extreme and reduces the fullness of social life to codes and codification, the author yet accepts that these determinant meanings take an active part in the constitution of individual identities and their positioning within discourses. Social structures are derived entirely from their relational position in social codes (function, prestige, aesthetics); as Baudrillard says that all these are reduced to images, and Slater approves when he explains the formation and distribution of lifestyles inside consumer culture. What is more, the whole horizontal stratification of society in new times (equity and plenty of needs, demands, choices and values), as Slater affirms, invokes Baudrillards

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philosophical approach to objects, which have been released from their traditional contexts and no longer relate to the real world but only to each other. So, in modern society with consumer culture as one of its driving forces, we consume signs, and by consuming them we actually buy a social place, which positions us back to the same commodity-sign system. Repeating what they both state, and what lies in the foundation of consumer culture - the value of goods is no longer derived from their use or production, but from their abstract economic exchange in short, everything in this system is now defined by its sign value.

4.

Critical approach

This book goes beyond a simple synopsis to provide a critical review of consumption studies in a light, readable manner, but at the same time being strongly supported by scientific facts. It turns to consumer culture and posits very challenging questions regarding its position in modern times. Generally speaking, the main strength of the book is Slater's nuanced assessment of an eclectic but vital range of thinking about the social and consumption since the late 18th century. His story grows through well-structured, thoughtful and vivid factuality of production and consumption in market-society and their reference to consumer culture. What is more, at the end Slater does not leave his readers with a widely-spread notion of consumers as being manipulated in the world of consumption, but emphasizes consumers capacity to negotiate, reinterpret, and "recuperate the material and experiential commodities that are offered to us."(Slater 2003) So, he begins his Afterword chapter with the clear announcement of the ultimate goal of his book to frame and structuralize the question of consumer culture and then to examine its validity. In this volume through the idea of consumer culture, he also aims to bond modernity and post-modernity back together, as it actually was in history. In general, the book develops through the elaboration of the existence of contemporary features of consumer culture in the early modern minds. The author recognizes its various forms, its basic terminology and summarizes its evolution. He lucidly interweaves main social topics into the discourse of modernity, gradually building his story from the notion of needs and their transformation into demands; socially organized labour which progressed through industrialization and modernization in todays form governed by knowledge and immaterial; value of goods being defined by wages and prices; and classical social stratification turned into the social fully dependent on consumption, coming ultimately to the idea of free choice of needs, identities and lifestyles from the horizontal layer of equal possibilities, where all social hierarchies are derived from sign-values. Following Slaters flow of facts, we are able to realize how consumption participates in the making of social relations and social order and how it reproduces our everyday lives through this system of signs. When he explains the continuity from modernity into postmodernity, the author repeats the well-known fact that modernity has reduced everyone to consumers, and, as a response, in postmodernity the only oppositional activity is to consume yet more intensely.(Slater 2003) Having elaborated both viewpoints in detail, Slater in the gives his own viewpoint on the topic; namely, he refuses to accept the common picture of the modern consumer as completely relying on external impulses, object-signs and system of consumption, but claims that this stage still is the part of the evolution of the western social thought, and though it may sound confusing and unnatural, it is just one more a step in social development, now identified in terms of market society and consumer culture. Keeping the neutral and narrative tone to the very end, but not leaving the readers without the final cut by offer them a positive ending, is one of the great qualities of this book. The author concludes his expos with the opinion on the position of the consumer in our new times and, in such a manner, he gives the final purpose to the historical analysis he has built inside the book. Furthermore, another important quality of the book is, however, the well-argued relation of consumer culture and modernity, which, unfortunately, is not the case when he finally turns to the critique of Page 13

postmodernism. In this discourse, he most likely provides readers with strong theoretical background of the relation, but any flaws of the period are blurred and unclear. It may seem that he immersed his methodological approach so deep in the scope of modernity that this huge evolutional period (the transition from traditional to modern society since the Enlightenment) has been evolving so slowly so that any progress has been diluted and not any significant change could be marked in social life ever since. To conclude, the author dealt easily and successfully with giving a detailed critique of the various theoretical approaches, he treats every subject in its complexity, but, as a whole, the reader may stay with the impression that he, in a certain sense, failed to assemble the facts back together again and form the big and overall picture.

5. Afterword
Don Slaters book Consumer culture and Modernity with its quality of a textbook, its rather neutral approach and analytic methods provides not only scholars but common people as well with critical understanding of consumer culture. The author himself created more issues on this topic and broaden the field of research to new media, technology and communication, as the core modern tendencies in terms of consumer culture. After this book, he continued with publishing The Internet: An Ethnographic in 2000, Approach Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Thought in 2001 and The Technological Economy in 2005, in collaboration with other authors. His writing career undoubtedly shows the way in which his ideas on consumer culture in modern society grew and were transferred in ethnographic, economic and technological terms. On the other hand, Don Slaters views on consumer culture certainly influenced the wide and general public and his words have been quoted in different settings from economic to cultural and artistic ones. As an example we can use the authors visions of the city and consumer culture, and there we find that he also places cities to be products of consumption and consumerism; they are, from his point of view, venues for the production of public spectacle, and citizens/ individuals are not only human capacity which has built it once, but they are also consumers of cities. This relation identifies the city as a place of consumption, entertainment and services (building of shopping malls and precincts, the 24hour city). Furthermore, from urban point of view in particular, this volume has inspired new visions of urbanism in relation to consumer culture, and it has supported and brought up new scientific approaches concerning an urban consumer an individual between citizen and consumer. Finally, this may serve as a representation of the importance of consumer culture in any field of modern life and modern times and of how important it is to trace the roots of consumer culture in order to solve the problems it has caused in the course of modern life and modern times.

6. References
Appadurai, A. (2003). <<The>> social life of things, Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. and A. Lavers (2000). Mythologies, Vintage. Baudrillard, J. (2003). <<La>> socit de consommation, [Gallimard]. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity, Stanford University Press. Slater, D. (2003). Consumer culture and modernity, Polity Press.

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