Consuming Life

Abstract

This article posits a ‘mutual fit’ between consumer culture and the task posed to individuals under conditions of modernity: to produce for themselves the continuity no longer provided by society. It therefore explores the new forms of consumption formed from a shift from the functionality of needs to the diffuse plasticity and volatility of desire, arguing that this principle of instability has become functional to a modernity that seems to conjure stability out of an entire lack of solidity.