Consumer culture does not deliver individual autonomy, as liberals think. The loss of the natural feeling and of stable social values weakens and disorientates the individual. How do we conceptualise the ‘self’ in the modern consumer culture?

‘Post-traditional society’ is marked by pluralisation. There is a bewildering variety and fluidity of values, authorities, symbolic resources and social encounters out of which an individual’s social identity emerges. There are five features of this:

• identity emerges from choice – identities are not ascribed;
• each individual negotiates multiple and contradictory identities, crossing different public and private spheres, each with different roles, norms, etc.;
• modernity replaces traditional authority with ‘methodological doubt’ – truth is contextual, expertise provisional;
• the modern life is mediated experience through mass media, and translated into consumer choices;
• pluralisation is intensified, by subordinating culture to economic ends – consumption regulated by money rights and culture used in selling.

Identity-Crisis: Modernity involves the production, display and interaction of many possible ways of life, none of which has a cultural authority or value. Individuals must, by force of circumstances, choose, construct, maintain, interpret, negotiate, display who they are to be or be seen as, using a bewildering variety of material and symbolic resources. This is an ideal condition for identity-crisis on a mass scale.

The identity crisis connects with consumer culture in several ways:

• Modern identity is best understood through the image of consumption and the metaphor of individual choice. We choose a self-identity from the shop-window of the pluralised social world.
• Identity can be seen as a saleable commodity. We have to produce and ‘sell’ an identity to various social markets in order to have intimate relationships, social standing, jobs and careers.
• The resources through which we produce and sustain identities increasingly take the form of consumer goods and activities. Consumerism exploits mass identity crisis by offering its goods as solutions to the problems of identity.

In terms of consumer culture, there is a great anxiety because every choice seems to implicate the self, or express/constitute an identity. Consumer culture increases the individual’s experience of risk and anxiety by offering ever more choice and images of different identities and by increasing the sense of social risk involved in making the wrong choice. This is unjust because consumer culture also speeds up through the fashion system.

Two key terms emerge when theorising pluralisation and identity crisis: ‘expertise’ and ‘lifestyle’.

Expertise: Expertise manages and organises anxieties about modern identity and at the same time exploits and intensifies them. For instance:

• Commodity culture creates and solves problems in the production and maintenance of the self; e.g. face & body and cosmetics.
• Although the self as a project involves forms of ignorance and doubt, this is addressed by commodities; e.g. self-help books, programmes and courses.
• Consumer culture offers extensive guidance on the meaning and experience of consumption and the project of the self; e.g. consumer magazines & advertisements.

Lifestyle: Lifestyle also manages plurality. Lifestyle orders things into a certain unity, reducing the plurality of choice and affording a sense of security and belonging. Lifestyle is different from traditional status order and modern structural divisions:

• lifestyle indicates a purely ‘cultural’ pattern – made of signs and is changeable
• switch from one lifestyle to another – identity, belonging and membership are superficial, temporary and subject to changing tastes

Individuals conform to the expectations of their immediate social surroundings, accept the authority of changing public opinion, media, peer groups. Socialisation is directed not towards maintaining inner standards but towards developing sensitivity to the actions and wishes of others.

Moreover, the ‘other-directed’ character is driven by anxiety, about measuring up to the expectations of others. In dealing with this kind of world means that the consumer must master a wide range of consumer preferences and the mode of their expression.

Romanticism addresses the cultural deficits of modernity. Yet romanticism and ‘the ideal of culture’ have a double and ironic relation to consumer culture:

• the romantic view of culture is a critique of the material civilisation
• consumer culture constantly promises precisely those values that romanticism believes were destroyed by civilisation; e.g. advertising

For example, consider an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola. It is about feeling, imaginative desiring and longing, rather than reason; it is about collective values, social acceptability as much as about individual choice, it deploys images of the exotic, the natural, and the surreal.

According to Colin Campbell, modern consumption can be seen as hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure. In modern hedonism, emotions are stimulated, incited, made into an obsession, through the use of imagination, the production of longing and day-dreaming.

Thus, ‘culture’ and consumer culture are less opposed and more deeply connected than usually thought. They are connected through the romantic concern to make up for the deficits of modernity by revaluing the emotional, aesthetic and spiritual notions of the self.

Modernity dismantles a stable social order that provides fixed identities. Post-traditional society represents a plurality of values, meanings, selves and others, both filling in the cultural deficits of the modern world and intensifying and exploiting them.