Lifestyle Shopping - The Subject of Consumption

Shields, R. (1994). Lifestyle Shopping. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.

Spaces for the subject of consumption
Rob shields

page 15-16
In the context of these 'tribes', a re-valorized sense of self is a specific, reflexive configuration of the body and psyche. While it is a form of 'individualism', its emphasis on exression, body centredness, and connection to a social and spatial milieu distinguishes it from the autonomous rational individuum which is the ideal type of classic froms of individulaism.

Neon cages
shopping for subjectivity 
lauren langman

page 44
With the growth of capitalism and its provate realms outside public scrutiny, public displays of self became increasingly subject to manipulation and control and hence scrutiny by others to judge inner security and moral worth.

page 45
Every day life in the lived world can now be seen as situated in the institutionally required and rewarded activities where selfhood is realised and subjectivity experienced in typical routines, performances and discourses. These various perspectives suggest that selfhood is expressed in everyday practices and typifications that also allow expression of identity(ies) drawn from elements of the culture as well as the persons earlier identifications. Thus in a differentiated society with a plurality of life worlds there are specific regions for self presentation where salient aspects of an identity may be realised.

page 46
The routines of everyday life, like the commodity, appear at first to be quite simple. But closer scrutiny of these routines shows them to be like Marx's descriptions of commodities, 'very queer, to have strange metaphysical powers.' Everyday life, or at least its images and representations, have become a new realm of aesthetics (Featherstone, 91)

Page 47
The routines of everyday life depend on commodified mass marketing of goods and images to provide emotional gratifications to all consumers.

Page 55
Identity consists of reflexive awareness of who one is, personal standards of evaluating situations and actions, a continually revised biography, goals for the future and plans to attain them.

Page 66
There are increasing disjunctions between such situationally specific expressions of selfhood. Some go as far as to question the very possibility of selfhood as transitional, self reflexive image and practice. The post modern consumer culture has witnessed a pluralisation of life worlds and ever greater multiplicities of feelings, gratifications and self-images provided by mass mediated imagery.

Page 71
In so far as the commodified images of the hyper real characters of movies, TV and the commercials seem to have more recognition and gratification than we do, we feel especially envious.

Page 73
Starting with penetrating observations of Simmel and Goffman and a depth psychology of feelings, we noted how a postmodern society of spectacles colonizes childhood to appropriate desires and images of self t be realized in the intertwining of hyper real consumption and mundane routines of everyday life in the pluralisitic life worlds of amusement society.

Have you got the look
masculinities and shopping spectacle 
sean nixon

Page 152
This narcissism, which could permeate acts of looking, provided Freud - and later, within a more rigorous framework, Lacan - with the mechanics for theorizing the dynamics of identification, the pathways which form the identities lived by individuals. Identification, then, involves an act of self-recognition in an image, a representation, a from of address.