Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book provides a fascinating examination of the relationship between consumption, the idea of the body and the formation of the self. In tracing these connections, The Consuming Body develops a profile of individuality in the late twentieth century - in both its bodily and mental aspects. Pasi Falk offers a major synthesis and critical assessment of the debates surrounding the body, the self and contemporary consumer culture. The author explores two fundamental issues for modern social theory - the delineation of modern consumption and the body's historically changing position in various cultural orders. In the course of his argument he examines both metaphors of consumption and investigates the issues of representation i
Consuming Desire
Consuming Desire
There is, of course, no reason to deny that consumption — even in its modern forms — involves the satisfaction of needs and rational use of tools. But to construct the concept of consumption on these anthropological universals does not lead us to a deeper understanding of the specificity of modern consumption which is, primarily, something over and above ‘eating’ (using up) and ‘building’ (using tools). The universalistic postulations naturalize the dynamics of consumption into an abstract principle which is not so very far from the definitions of matter/energy-transformation offered by physics.
After all, consumption in the universalistic sense is simply a synthesis of entropic and negentropic processes; matter dissolving into energy and maintaining or producing more complex and ordered forms of matter, ...
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