Consumption, Body, and the Sacred

A couple of further notes from Featherstone’s very stimulating book. First, citing Pierre Bourdieu, he notes the limits of seeing consumption as an isolated marker of status. The signs “that betray a person’s origins and trajectory through life are manifest in body shape, size, weight, stance, walk, demeanour, tone of voice, style of speaking, sense of bodily ease or discomfort, and so on. Hence culture is incorporated [we might say ‘incarnated’], and it is not just a question of what clothes are worn but of how they are worn.”

Second, several times Featherstone refers to cultural products as “sacred.” Hence, “artistic and intellectual goods are enclaved commodities whose capacity to move around in the social space is limited by their ascribed sacred qualities.” Elites thus attempt to form “an enclosure of high culture” to preserve the sacred cultural products and to make sure they are not sullied and defiled by contact with unwashed masses. A moustache on the Mona Lisa seems a transgression, a sacrilege; as does an uncredentialed Amazon.com reviewer’s criticisms of, say, Philip Roth’s latest; as does any effort to market art.