The following is a line from the small Turkish section of the Rebâbnâme of the sufi poet Sultan Veled (son of Mevlânâ), followed by my feeble attempt at transliteration and E. J. W. Gibb’s translation: كندوزندن يوز صورت بر جان الر * شهر الر بازار الر دكان الر (Gibb 1909: 2) Kendüzinden yüz surat bir ...
As I am gearing up to re-working my paper on Plessner’s notion of eccentricity and Campbell’s analysis of romantic consumer selfhood I notice that a reference to Sennett’s Fall of Public Man is not quite contemporary enough to highlight the concerns about the dissolution from ceremonial division of (mostly public) roles and the (mostly private) ...
[this post is a bit of a mess – it’s initial occasion was Emre Kongar’s article (see below) on tolerance and secularism. My reaction to it got, somehow, entangled with my plan to write a socialist defence of consumer culture…] A distant colleague of mine is fond of saying that he will dance on the ...
I just found out that somebody (from behind a pseudonym) has accused me of engaging in “fascist cultural production” – mainly on the basis that I reject “paternalistic systems of domination” which my accuser identifies with “all non-capitalist relations”. That’s nonsense, of course, as fascist cultural production is, for the most part, precisely this: a ...
The problem with definitions is that they are either too narrow or too wide – and they always fall short of pinning down the concept. One example I came across recently is Adam Arvidsen’s (2010: 4) definition of the “ethical economy” as one ‘creating the values and norms that keep a particular web of social ...
I’ve always found the ease with which some who would count themselves towards the radical left take to Schmitt’s “critique of democracy” or Heidegger’s “critique of technology”. Johannes Thumfart highlights a very worrying example in die tageszeitung – English version at signandsight. Thumfart sums up the anonymous (and at least in France and Germany celebrated) ...
http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=9780415669368&bci=252%7CMarketing%20%26%20Advertising*23%7CComing%20Soon update May 2014 no longer works – the link used to refer to Tesco selling the volume Cultural Studies and Anti-Consumerism edited by Sam Blinkley and Jo Littler that also contains my “Consuming the Campesino” … ...
[Presentation at the Research Workshop “Emerging Issues in Uncertainty and Ethical Consumption”, 13th June 2011, University of Glasgow] pdf Why Fairtradeand Fear? When first encountering the concept of consumer anxiety in connection with fair trade I was sceptical: It seemed all too vague and not quite clear what consumers are afraid of. The uncertainties said ...
As this will sound like an all round defence of consumerism, I should start by saying that this is not my aim. So straightaway: consumer capitalism is a problem in terms of its ecological consequences and if those consequences can be mitigated by more social control over the production of consumer goods (aka socialism), I’m ...
Here’s my answer Health may well have become “our new salvation” (Williams 1998: 440), which we try to achieve through consumerist rituals that are imbued with magical powers. In this respect the healthy body has indeed become a major new religious territory. But there are important differences to traditional religiosity. The new consumerist self-religiosity of ...