Consumer Culture and Fragmentation

Culture, Mike Featherstone suggests in Undoing Culture , becomes problematic in consumer societies. How?

As developed in cultural anthropology, culture is “somehow homologous to the distinctions, differences, and divisions between social groups who unconsciously use culture as relatively fixed markers in status games.” But in consumer societies, there is little control over the “flow of new goods, images, and information,” and this makes reading the status signs difficult: “The problems we encounter in everyday practice because culture fails to provide us with a single taken-for-granted recipe for action introduces difficulties, mistakes and complexity . . . .

“Culture which once seemed invisible, as it was habitually inculcated into people over time and became sedimented into well-worn social routines, now surfaces as a problem. Taken-for-granted tacit knowledge about what to do, how to respond to particular groups of people and what judgement of taste to make, now becomes more problematic. Within consumer culture newspapers, magazines, television and radio all offer advice on how to cope with a range of new situations, risks and opportunities – yet this only adds to rather than reduces complexity.”

As Featherstone notes, though this version of Berger’s heretical imperative is seen as a feature of postmodernity, “Simmel, writing around the turn of the century, identified this as a characteristic feature of modernity, or perhaps we should say ‘the modern condition’: the difficulties of coping with, and meaningfully assimilating, the overproduction of objective culture.”