A review of Lifestyle Shopping:
the Subject of Consumption
by Rob Sheilds and A Primer
for Daily Life by Susan Willis.
In Design Issues: Volume 12
[1] (48-62), 1996 M.I.T.

The Place and Space of Consumption in a Material World
Abstract
Laura R. Oswald, Ph.D.

The twentieth century can be characterized by the intense movement of art, science and literature toward abstraction, toward the reductionof the meaning of lived experience to sign, subject or system. One need only refer to the development of linguistics, poetics and semioticsfrom Saussure to Greimas to underscore the overarching priority given to formal system over content in the study of language and cultural production in our time. By the 1960's this trend had reached its zenith:Roland Barthes announced the death of the author and reference of literature, structuralism reigned and it appeared that all of Western culture would soon be minimalized to a set of abstract relations on a chess board. It then comes somewhat as a surprise that the l990's should witness a proliferation of humanistic research devoted to the empirical study of daily life, replete with demographic and statistical grids, historical documentation and even field interviews. Whether symptomatic of a kind of fin de siècle decadence, of a breakdown of the intense theoretical work
driving critical theory in the twentieth century, or a radical challenge to the intellectual elitism of the past twenty years, books such as Lifestyle Shopping: The Subject of Consumption and A Primer for Daily Life take theory “on the road” as they apply semiotics, psychoanalysis and the Marxist critique to the study of culture and consumption. Their preoccupation with the meaning and function of consumer goods and services for the constitution of personal and social identity testifies to the growing awareness that contemporary life is being played out in the marketplace, not the theater, the political forum, or even the family.

The market thus conceived is neither a place for the exchange of goods between producers and consumers nor a symbol for the economic infrastructure shaping material life, but an imaginary/symbolic site for staging the post-modern self in consumer culture.


Contact Dr. Oswald at:
loswald@marketingsemiotics.com