Postmodernism and Consumer Culture

Everything, everything we know, everything we believe in, everything we trust, is falling apart. Capitalism doesn't seem to be the capitalism we know. It seems to lean on consumption rather than production, image rather than benefit, and the "service" class rather than "productive labor". While an ascetic ethic prevails during work hours; On weekends and at night, we are required to adopt a hedonistic orientation towards the world. While transnational capital crosses the planet from one end to the other without knowing any borders, it sweeps away huge bureaucratic apparatuses, especially the nation state. It seems like political positions are no longer positions as we know them. Yesterday's most radically progressive positions suddenly appear before us with a conservatism that is even lower than the positions they previously attributed to the lowest rung on the ladder of historical progress. Ideologies that, according to dialectical logic, should have been surpassed and even thrown into the dustbin of history, are beginning to interfere with daily life, as if mocking the fairy tale called History. "Like"! That's the key word.

In this book, Featherstone explores the totalizing postmodern implications that state that an era is ending, revealing the continuities that lie deep within the superficial breaks assumed in the tradition-modernity-postmodernity trilogy. It examines the close connections between the conservative Bell and the Marxist Jameson, who seem to exclude each other at first glance, and between Adorno, who we know is a lover of dialectics, and Baudrillard, a strict follower of the "logic of possibility". In short, postmodernism neither accepts itself as it presents itself nor surrenders to the ease of the prescriptions we are familiar with. Featherstone, who exhibits the attitude of a genuine, endangered sociologist that we long for in an environment where we cannot see the future of intellectuals who feel that they cannot comprehend the "new states of the world" and react to this with a frightening conservatism, acts from the following proposition: "From the theoretical problems related to society and culture that he raises." Therefore we cannot avoid welcoming the emergence of the postmodern." To those who see that concepts are used for thinking, not for belief, and that the creature we call intellectual is a researcher, not a soldier of a cause; We recommend this book to those who have not forgotten that they cannot have the luxury of not understanding the dimensions and concepts presented by an increasingly complex world.
(From the Promotional Bulletin)



Number of Pages: 288

Year of Printing: 2013


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Details Publications

First Print Year: 1999

Number of Pages: 288

Language Turkish