"Architecture et sciences sociales", EDAR, EPFL

Prof. Jacques Lévy and Prof. Luca Ortelli

Consumer Culture and Modernity by Don Slater

Book review

Marija Cvetinovic

PhD student, CODEV

The 7th of December 2011.

 Page 1
 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 author’s 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 author’s 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
today’s 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

 Page 4
objects relations within the current cultural model – “being a consumer is about knowing the
relationship between one’s 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 Galbraith’s “affluent society” as the milestones of post-
war 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

1
"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.

2
“ as Thatcher put it, « There is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families”” ibid.

 Page 5
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 mélange 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 author’s 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 Slater’s 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.

 Page 7
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.

 Page 8
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.

 Page 9
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, sub-
culture, 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

 Page 10
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

 Page 11
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 today’s 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
Marxism’s 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. Marx’s consumers “rich in needs” are Slater’s” 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 Slater’s 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 Baudrillard’s

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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
today’s 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 Slater’s 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 exposé 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

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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 Slater’s 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 Slater’s 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 author’s 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>> société 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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