ΚΑΤΑΝΑΛΩΤΙΚΗ ΚΟΥΛΤΟΥΡΑ

Greek translation of R. Sassatelli "Consumer Culture" with Preface for Greek Edition. The debate about consumer culture and its organisation is quite rich today in and beyond academic circles. Such debate is fuelled not only by polemical or celebratory writing but also by a growing international body of empirical research addressing issues as varied as the impact of the crisis on middle-class family lifestyles (Cooper 2014; Sassatelli et als. 2015), ethical and alternative consumer networks (Dubuisson-Quellier 2009; Goodman and Sage 2013; Lewis and Potter 2011; Osbaldiston 2013) and the increasing commercialization of feelings and shifting gender balances (Hochschild 2013; Pugh 2009), to mention but a few. Still, on the whole, the debate about consumer culture remains rather fuzzy. This is partly due to the lack of a common understanding of what is meant by consumption and to the different emphasis given to its many semantic relatives. To summarise, for the majority of the social scientists, consumption is understood as the use and appropriation of commodities for the creation of meaningful worlds. In its turn, consumer culture is often used as a catch- all-phrase indicating both the actual and varied cultures of consumption that people as consumers construct in everyday life and the rather reified and typically normative images of consumption which are put forward by promotional institutions such as advertising. Correlates of the latter are terms such as consumer society often likened with consumerism, negatively associated with possessive or acquisitive individualism, markets dominated by ever more global and massified brands, the rise of waste and commodity obsolescence, the increased dominance of promotional culture even in the public sphere, and so on. In this book , I set out to offer a broad perspective on the roots of consumer culture, considering ambivalence as a fundamental characteristics of its organization. An endless dialectic movement and ambivalent possibilities have been inbuilt into prevalent notions of the consumer and consumer culture(s). To some palates, though, referring to the ambivalence of consumption may appear far from final. The careful reader of this book will certainly spot some hints for a step ahead into a more normative terrain. This entails, first and foremost, recognizing structural unbalances in the commodity circuit as they are evident today. Different, contrasting arenas converge in the commodity circuit: the cultural and the economic, at least. As I have recently reckoned elsewhere (Sassatelli 2015), while the cultural arena of the commodity may allow for consumers to articulate meanings deploying creativity and critique, the economic arena pushes for surplus to be generated and monopolised in the hands of producers. The set up of the economic arena partly thrives on the relative disarticulation of the cultural arena, whereby (some) symbolic creativity and even critique among consumers fuels economic surplus generation. It also accounts for the unbalances of power between, consumers as individual and often individualised actors, and producers as industries and corporate actors. What is more, it promotes a novelty-gripped, obsolescence-driven, territory-disarticulating temporality of consumption which structurally limits consumers’ creativity, enjoyment, critique and ultimately power. However, engaging more closely with consumer power, its workings and its dimensions does not does not mean that we have to only fall back son forms of consumers’ responsibility or duty: consumer practices are powerful as sources of pleasure for the self, and it is first on the definition of pleasure that we should act. Viable pleasure, sustainable enjoyment, enriching flourishing – these are some of the rich semantic textures we should consider again. And on the backdrop of such reflection we can built an argument for ways of organizing consumer practices which slow down the pace of consumption and embed it reflexively in social relations. This may bringing forth different, less self-directed ways to pleasure, reminiscent of eudemonic visions of wellbeing whereby individual enjoyment is inherently coupled with long-term of collective, human flourishing (Sassatelli 2015). As against consumerist views which end up equating the serial fulfilment of transient desires as the realisation of individual happiness, slowness and relational embedment may be considered key elements for the appropriation of taste and the realisation of wider-than-self Self capable of facing our ever-smaller yet unevenly interconnected world.