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There are, it would seem, two kinds of novelty: the one that breaks from tradition, ushering in a new order, and the one that perpetuates the same under the guise of change. The latter, associated with fads and trends, marks the logic of consumption, whereas the former, querying the new and indeterminate, suggests a revolutionary [...]
In a remarkable scene in the first season of The Wire, Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) follows “Stringer” (Idris Elba) the consigliere to what turns out to be an NYU macroeconomics course. It’s an astonishing discovery — for the viewer, of course, but also for McNulty. When he checks the placard on the door, he [...]
Zsuzsanna Vargha, a sociology PhD student at Columbia (–currently guest-blogging over at Socializing Finance), has made available a draft chapter from her forthcoming dissertation on client-customer interaction at a Hungarian bank. Her choice of field site couldn’t be more timely. For all the scholarship on consumption and the commodity, much less seems to have [...]
Setting-off a deliciously entertaining exchange between the infinitely pompous Alain de Botton and Nina of Infinite ThØught, in February 18 post, she wrote, with inspiration, before being forced to remove (and eventually re-publish) her post:
Occasionally I have to get people to review books like this. Now I don’t know about you, but I find the [...]
In a thought-provoking post on I cite, Jodi Dean describes the proliferation and popularity of ‘tag clouds’ as capturing “the shift from message to contribution characteristic of communicative capitalism”. That is, in place of meaning and context, which in actuality govern discourse, tag clouds display information in terms of repetition, frequency, and intensity.
“The meaning of [...]
In the chapter “Mobilizing the Consumer: Assembling the Subject of Consumption”, from their recent book Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life, Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose give a fine summary of the state of consumer/consumption theory.
It begins, appropriately, with a sketch of the profound ambivalence that has marked consumer studies since the [...]
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