First Published in 2004. In contemporary shopping sites new modes of subjectivity, inter-personal relationships and models of social totality are being tried on, taken off and displayed in much the same way that one might shop for clothes. These are not the modernist spaces of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects. Rather it is a space of carnivalesque inversions of the present order of things. The multiple masks of the postmodern person who wears many hats in different groups and surroundings form a veritable dramatis personae. In such masks of the individual and the social world may be found a new spatialization and new intuitive perceptions of time and space. This representation of contemporary social life grows out of the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Maffesoli, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin. It is an attempt to take seriously the idea that we live in a postmodern consumer culture and to follow through the implications and possibilities of this idea. Cases are drawn from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore to illustrate the new intersections between people, mass culture and consumption.
1. Spaces for the Subject of Consumption, Rob Shields 2. Watching the World Go Round Atrium Culture and the Psychology of Shopping, Harvie Ferguson 3. Neon Cages, Shopping for Subjectivity, Lauren Langman 4. Stonehenge and its Festival Spaces of Consumption, Kevin Hetherington 5. The Individual, Consumption Cultures and the Fate of the Community, Rob Shields 6. Shopping for Women's Fashion in Singapore, Beng Huat Chua 7. Ritual Space in the Canadian Museum of Civilization: Consuming Canadian Identity, Jill Delaney 8. Have You Got the Look? Masculinity and Shopping Spectacle, Sean Nixon 9. Changes in the Adamless Eden - The Spatial and Sexual Transformation of a Brisbane Department Store 1930-1990, Gail Reekie 10. Aesthetics of the Self - Shopping and Social Being in Contemporary Urban Japan, John Clammer 11. Notes from Storyville North, Circling the Mall, Janice Williamson.
