Framing humanity consumerwise. Embodied consumer selves and their varieties

This paper investigates the specific historical and cultural configuration of a crucial tripartite relation in contemporary society, that which happens between the body, the self and material culture. The relation between the body, self and material culture in contemporary, post-industrial or late-modern societies has come to be largely defined through consumption. This happens at least at three levels: representational, subjective and institutional. Firstly, the imagery associated to consumption is central to visual representation in promotional culture which simultaneously revolves around the display of the body. Secondly, how individuals realize themselves as embodied subjects – that is how they manage corporeal identity participating in social interaction and how they experience and perform self and body - happens largely via the use of commodities and on the backdrop of a promotional imagery. Thirdly, a variety of consumer spaces, contexts and institutions increasingly address the individual as a sensuous, embodied subject in search of personal gratification and improvement. In this paper, I shall deal with all these three levels, considering the broad literature that may be brought to bear on how representations, subjectivities and institutions converge and diverge in the shaping of consumers’ embodied selves. The first level is, indeed, typically addressed by critical theories of consumer culture as advertising, image proliferation and promotional culture. Here the self is portrayed as being largely reduced to the (surface of the) body which in turn is objectified for consumption. When dealing with the second level we encounter at least two significant streams of work: one deriving from Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and considering that embodied dispositions of tastes are mapped onto social divisions, class in particular, which consumers’ lifestyles make visible; the other deriving from theories of reflexive individualization which stress the reflexive, strategic role of individuals in stylizing one’s own selves through a variety of body projects. In both streams, body and self are posited as in a dialectical relation mediated by commodities and mediating social reproduction (responding, respectively, either to class/gender divisions and hierarchies or to individualization and cultural de-classification). Reaching the third level we will then come across a quite varied set of suggestions, theories and even disciplines: just like contemporary marketing is very aware of the sensory and situational component of consumption, we get a number of studies on how, especially in the leisure sphere, institutions of consumption address the individual consumer as embodied self. The paper discusses these institutions focussing on the example of the fitness gym and considering how participants address their role as individual consumers of increasingly standardized products through which they are asked to express individuality. Finally, I conclude on the normalization of consumers’ subjectivity, dealing with how body/mind-self dualism has come to be rendered in contemporary Western consumer culture