towards 'a new politics of consumption'

NEW? Delhi - in need of new postconsumption politics. 

There are no two opinions about the fact that our age is one of consumerism. As Oswald Spengler has argued, life in the contemporary world is exclusively economic in structure and lacks any depth, a feature inherent in any society and at any time when the economic prosperity of a people is judged by the quantity of consumption. 

Commodity fetishism and market seduction that go hand in hand are the villains of the contemporary hunger for hedonistic greed, a love of the material that determines and constitutes us and our “reality” in a more fundamental manner than we can imagine.



The book draws on interviews with activists across three continents, focussing on the debate surrounding consumerism and its rampant practice over the long march of history as well as the need to counter certain forms of consumption. Dismantling of public welfare in the name of private enterprise and the brutalisation of the inner city space only provoke a language of resistance—of land, poetry, art, ecology and dignity underpinned by the question: Do we let ourselves be claimed by this affliction or should we consider our existence, in the words of the philosopher-critic Giorgio Agamben, “a possibility or a potentiality” where the act of resistance remains the only human force to counter the decadence of an ugly world proliferating with objects which confer social prestige on consumers? This calamity of unbridled economics can be countered through a celebration of creativity by an act of imagination and a transgression of modern-day production that cater to unquenchable consumer fantasy with equal extravagance.



Humphrey provides a comprehensive overview and an analysis of what has come to be called the “new politics of consumption”, a politics visible in movements such as “culture jamming, simple living, slow food and fair trade”.

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20130125300108600.htm