Aestheticization of Everyday Life

The Everyday and Identity

Early Marxists viewed consumption with a critical eye regarding its social, political, and cultural implications. Marxist ideology believed that consumption was based on the creation of false desires by the ruling captains of industry, which hindered the community as far as bettering living conditions and realizing an equitable society. The emergence of cultural studies relieved consumption from this onerous and dour thesis to explore how the everyday and consumption could in itself be the site of a more transgressive thesis. The everyday as a site of study seeks to examine the complex processes, both conscious and unconscious, that illuminate how the everyday is in fact not just “as it is” or an unproblematic given, but is bound up in questions of identity, status, creativity, beliefs, and ethics (to name just a few concerns) and need not be the site of an overly deterministic and unreflexive view of the everyday act of cultural consumption.

Just as our work and position in life was once the defining motif of our identities in the industrial and modernist era, currently our consumption capacity and choices at a more multifaceted level are becoming important distinguishing factors in identity formation. In the middle and later years of the twentieth century, it was consumption on a mass scale, often of mass-produced items with branding in and by a few major corporations, that set trends and gathered people into shared identities and group recognition. This started out with products such as cars and domestic household items, for example. However, in more recent years, the marketplace for consumer goods has not only fragmented into nuances of subcultural meanings and expression, but the trend toward the service economy and digital artifacts allows cultural consumption to flare out into slivers of everyday life at the most micro and personal levels. Where once the aesthetics of consumption of a particular object were more easily disentangled from the everyday or mundane (the purchase of a car or expensive handbag being a performative and exceptional event)—now the aesthetics of consumption is the everyday. This is not to underestimate the traditional meanings still attached to the purchase of one's home or car as major markers of cultural and social life. But even here, the complex array of what your car means and says about you is far more complex and touches on everything from alignment with a group to political membership (the green car) and issues of gender and class.

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