Mike Featherstone - Consumer Culture and Postmodernism - The Aestheticization of Everyday Life

If we examine definitions of postmodernism we find an emphasis upon the effacement of the boundary between art and everyday life, the collapse of the distinction between high art and mass/popular culture, a general stylistic promiscuity and playful mixing of codes. These general features of postmodern theories which stress the equalization and levelling out of symbolic hierarchies, antifoundationalism and a general impulse towards cultural declassification, can also be related to what are held to be the characteristic postmodern experiences. Here one can build upon the use of the term modernité by Baudelaire to point to the new experience of modernity, the shocks, jolts, and vivid presentness captured by the break with traditional forms of sociation which the modern cities such as Paris seemed to bring forth from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In a similar way one might also be able to speak of the experience of postmodernité and draw upon perceived shifts in cultural experiences and modes of signification. Here we find an emphasis upon the aestheticization of everyday life and the transformation of reality into images in the work of Baudrillard (1983a). Jameson (1984a) too emphasizes the loss of a sense of history and the fragmentation of time into a series of perpetual presents in which there is the experience of multiphrenic intensities. A similar aestheticization of experience and breaking down of the ordered chain of signifiers can be detected in the writings of their followers where one finds an emphasis upon ‘the liquefaction of signs and commodities’, ‘the effacement of the boundary between the real and the image’, ‘floating signifiers’, ‘hyperreality’, ‘depthless culture’, ‘bewildering immersion’, ‘sensory overload’ and ‘affect-charge intensities’ (Kroker and Cook, 1987; Crary, 1984).

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