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Concrete macro culture and psychology

Carl Ratner

in Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind

Concrete, political features of contemporary culture are articulated. A key example is the formation of the community college system in the United States. The political economic character and ... More

Concrete, political features of contemporary culture are articulated. A key example is the formation of the community college system in the United States. The political economic character and function of this system is related to the educational psychology of students. Concrete culture today is capitalist. Features of capitalist culture are explored. Its class structure is emphasized. The importance of this for psychology is explored. A concrete feature of contemporary capitalism is consumerism. Consumerism is presented as a concrete cultural factor whose effects on psychological phenomena are explored. Consumer psychology is presented as concrete cultural psychology that recapitulates consumer capitalism. Consumer psychology is shown to include a set of perceptions, sensitivities, sensations, reasoning, memory, self, and sexuality which all bear concrete features of consumer culture.Less

Uncle Sam's a Boy at Play

Woody Register

in The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements

Fred Thompson's determination to encourage visions of surplus and luxury placed him at the center of the development of early-20th-century consumer capitalism. Between 1890 and 1930, Americans laid ... More

Fred Thompson's determination to encourage visions of surplus and luxury placed him at the center of the development of early-20th-century consumer capitalism. Between 1890 and 1930, Americans laid the institutional foundation of its economy—department stores, advertising agencies, grand hotels and lavish saloons, restaurants, dance halls, and the great “world's fairs”—which showcased the marvelous array of consumer goods and technologies produced by the new industrial order. The architects of the urban marketplace enlisted these institutions and the social roles and practices associated with them not just to sell goods in new or more-effective ways, but to make consumer goods the very marrow of American life.Less

The Political Use of Emotion

Kieran Laird

in The Political Mind: or 'How to Think Differently'

This chapter goes on to complicate the idea of thought further, as well as introducing the social element of thinking through discussion of affect and emotional regimes. It also examines the ... More

This chapter goes on to complicate the idea of thought further, as well as introducing the social element of thinking through discussion of affect and emotional regimes. It also examines the emotional regime instigated by consumer capitalism though the lens of Zygmunt Bauman's concept of unsicherheit.Less

Marianne in the Department Store: Commercial Paris and the Civic Vision of the Republic

Lisa Tiersten

in Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siecle France

This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of ... More

This chapter examines the conflict between commercial Paris and the civic vision of the French Republic. It discusses the development of new forms of consumer capitalism and the emergence of bourgeois women as the primary consumers in the late nineteenth century. It describes the perception of the modern marketplace and traces the processes the led to the creation of a female commercial culture and the impulse shopper. It explains that as the ethos of the market collided with that of the civic public in late-nineteenth-century France, bourgeois elites found themselves forced to grapple with the question of how to map the boundaries between the market, the political public and the domestic sphere.Less

Let the Good Times Roll: Liminality and the Night-time Economy

Dick Hobbs, Philip Hadfield, Stuart Lister, and Simon Winlow

in Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-Time Economy

The chapter examines how the economy has changed during the years when night time industries emerged. The modern times is characterised by the further convergence of cultural and economic spheres. ... More

The chapter examines how the economy has changed during the years when night time industries emerged. The modern times is characterised by the further convergence of cultural and economic spheres. Consumer capitalism is the driving factor behind experiential consumption. Another concept employed in the chapter is the concept of leisure. Its attainment has become so valuable among the youth that it has become how they identify themselves. It also discusses the aspects that define the night time industry and examines how night life has become partnered with commercial interests in order to form lawlessness and disorder in the cities.Less

Books for the Seeker: Liberal Religion and the Literary Marketplace in the 1990s

Erin A. Smith

in What Would Jesus Read?: Popular Religious Books and Everyday Life in Twentieth-Century America

This chapter examines some of the best-selling mainstream religion/spirituality titles of the 1990s in light of increasing numbers of self-reported “spiritual seekers”—individuals with fluid, dynamic ... More

This chapter examines some of the best-selling mainstream religion/spirituality titles of the 1990s in light of increasing numbers of self-reported “spiritual seekers”—individuals with fluid, dynamic religious styles who move freely in and out of congregations across the life course, cobbling together a set of spiritual practices by combining elements of various traditions. In particular, it looks at Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul (1992), Karen Armstrong's A History of God (1993), Kathleen Norris's The Cloister Walk (1996), and Jack Miles's God: A Biography (1996), along with reviews by their readers on Amazon. These religious books have served as resources for spiritual seekers crafting their own religious identity narratives by modeling the formation of alternative spiritual faiths outside formal religious institutions, responding to the ills of consumer culture and consumer capitalism, and celebrating literary or poetic ways of being in the world.Less

Lure and Allure: Mirrors, Fugitive Agency, and Exiled Sexuality

Diana Tietjens Meyers

in Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women's Agency

Although Narcissus was a man, narcissism is commonly considered a feminine vice. Over the centuries, several symbolic systems mediate this transfer: the myth of Narcissus evolves to reassign ... More

Although Narcissus was a man, narcissism is commonly considered a feminine vice. Over the centuries, several symbolic systems mediate this transfer: the myth of Narcissus evolves to reassign narcissism to women; the image of a woman gazing into her mirror becomes a staple motif of western art; and psychoanalytic theory solidifies the bond between women and narcissism and extends it to gay men. Meanwhile, to satisfy its appetite for expanding markets, consumer capitalism manufactures unattainable, ever‐changing beauty ideals that keep women hooked on self‐beautification products and services. This symbolic and economic legacy encodes a no‐win “feminine” psycho‐corporeal dynamic of eroticized estrangement from self – a subjectivity of self‐doubt, perplexity, and frustration, which I term the psychic‐psyché economy. In contrast, a number of contemporary feminist artists ironically appropriate and critically repudiate conventional woman‐with‐mirror imagery, and five of their self‐visionary projects are explored.Less

Farewell to the Free Trade in Doctoring

Nancy Tomes

in Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

This chapter examines the end of “free trade” in doctoring in the late 1800s and the rise of modern consumer capitalism in the nineteenth century that transformed patients into consumers. It first ... More

This chapter examines the end of “free trade” in doctoring in the late 1800s and the rise of modern consumer capitalism in the nineteenth century that transformed patients into consumers. It first provides a background on how the free trade in doctoring operated and how it began to be curtailed in the late 1800s. It then looks at the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drugs Act that allowed the federal government to get involved in consumer protection. It also explores institutional reforms implemented gradually after the American Civil War that laid the foundation for a much more confident medical professionalism; the emergence of the so-called “pioneers of novelties” that manufacture proprietary drugs; and how medicine figured in the postwar consumption economy. Finally, it reflects on how developments such as the new health dangers posed by prosperity and the increasingly rich variety of information and advertising surrounding every aspect of health fueled the growing expectation that ordinary Americans become more skilled at making medical choices.Less

The Fourth Necessity

Nancy Tomes

in Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

This chapter examines how medical care became the “fourth necessity” of modern life—after food, clothing, and housing—during the postwar period. There were disagreements on what shape America's ... More

This chapter examines how medical care became the “fourth necessity” of modern life—after food, clothing, and housing—during the postwar period. There were disagreements on what shape America's medical order would take after World War II. Some advocated for an American equivalent to Britain's National Health Service, whereas others agreed that a more “free enterprise” system would better suit the nation. In the late 1940s, the business-backed model of free enterprise prevailed, giving rise to a medical economy that moved in the opposite direction from what consumerists had hoped for. In the short run, these free enterprise modifications to the medical economy paved the way for the remarkable expansion of the health care system. This chapter considers how American medicine came into even closer alignment with the dynamics of postwar consumer capitalism, which brought a dramatic increase in the number of medical products and services available to patients but also led to more consumer dissatisfaction.Less

Introduction

Timothy E. W. Gloege

in Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

This introductory chapter charts a brief history of how American Protestantism had developed in conjunction with modern consumer capitalism. There are many points of entry to this corporate ... More

This introductory chapter charts a brief history of how American Protestantism had developed in conjunction with modern consumer capitalism. There are many points of entry to this corporate evangelical network, but the story that follows focuses on one of its key institutions, the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago. The MBI was founded by the salesman-turned-revivalist Dwight L. Moody, the most important evangelical of the late nineteenth century. He ingeniously weaved disparate ideas drawn from business and religion into a compelling, if unstable, form of evangelical Protestantism. After Moody's death in 1899, a second generation of evangelicals led by Henry Parsons Crowell transformed MBI in significant ways. They shifted focus from converting the working classes to influencing middle-class Protestantism and swapped their overarching metaphor of industrial work with modern consumption.Less

Postmodern Allegory: The Global Economy and New Technologies

Gina Marchetti

in Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs - The Trilogy

All the indicators of modern “progress” in Infernal Affairs point in a downward direction. Liberation from colonialism, the promise of modern technology, and the potential pleasures of global ... More

All the indicators of modern “progress” in Infernal Affairs point in a downward direction. Liberation from colonialism, the promise of modern technology, and the potential pleasures of global consumer capitalism fall from the heights as well. Postmodern texts tend to favor allegory. Infernal Affairs also slips among allegorical associations with religion, morality, nation, as well as with a more general condition of postmodern life. It envisions the movement of the global economy from processed raw materials driving imperialism (e.g. opium) to manufactured goods (e.g. electronics like stereos) at the base of postwar neocolonialism to the postmodern “information society” in which communication becomes commodified, and the economy moves from a base in production (of material things) to one based on reproduction (replication of images and information). In many ways, it provides a portrait of the new economy through its depiction of new technologies in action in the marketplace of information.Less

A Consuming Faith

Timothy E. W. Gloege

in Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism

This chapter charts the key pivot by corporate evangelicals at the Moody Bible Institute (MBI), from religious identities rooted in Christian work to consumer identities branded as “pure religion.” ... More

This chapter charts the key pivot by corporate evangelicals at the Moody Bible Institute (MBI), from religious identities rooted in Christian work to consumer identities branded as “pure religion.” Evangelicals at the MBI had forged a consuming faith from the ideological overlap between modern consumer capitalism and religion—both advertisers and evangelists were tackling the same problem of individual human choice, after all, and both groups welcomed any art or science that gave them an advantage. The ideas that had been lifted from marketing and advertising strategies helped transition evangelicals from Moody's conviction that an authentic faith produced Christian workers to a new ideal embodied by the savvy consumer—a believer who rightly judged and appropriated correct belief and practice from the options in the religious marketplace.Less

Fundamentalism and the Business Turn

Timothy E. W. Gloege

in The Business Turn in American Religious History

This essay traces the development of fundamentalism in the context of wider changes in evangelical Protestantism and business in the United States. The need for social stability in antebellum America ... More

This essay traces the development of fundamentalism in the context of wider changes in evangelical Protestantism and business in the United States. The need for social stability in antebellum America and the role of Protestant religion in maintaining it tamped down the intrinsic individualism of both evangelicalism and business. But a series of social and business transformations after the Civil War, and the growing influence of the state in social and economic life, provided the impetus and opportunity for a fundamentalist movement to emerge in the 1910s. The firm establishment and naturalizing of modern consumer capitalism after World War II allowed a business-infused fundamentalism (known now as “neo-evangelicalism”) to thrive. Throughout its development, fundamentalism borrowed from business ideology and techniques for religious ends.Less

Taste Outraged: Byron

Denise Gigante

in Taste: A Literary History

This chapter argues that Byron's legacy is the oxymoronic paradox of the tasteful cannibal, whose taboo desires resist incorporation into the symbolic economy of consumer capitalism. In particular, ... More

This chapter argues that Byron's legacy is the oxymoronic paradox of the tasteful cannibal, whose taboo desires resist incorporation into the symbolic economy of consumer capitalism. In particular, it reads the cannibalism episode in canto 2 of Don Juan as a critical moment in the literary history of taste, one that launches a critique of the cultural ideology of taste with its nationalist claims to distinction. While famous for its outrageous depiction of cannibalism, Don Juan rewrites cannibalism as vampirism, a paradoxically tasteful mode of consuming the other. So long as the enemy to aesthetic community was simply precivil appetite, it was possible to locate bad taste out there, in the barbaric hinterland or dark abyss beyond the pale of tasteful society. However, once appetite has been successfully repressed and made a driving force of society, to be aesthetic was to be extraordinary, or defined in ways other than commodity consumption.Less

Conclusion

Noelle Gallagher

in Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that ultimately, venereal disease was used to explore many of the fundamental institutions on which ... More

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some concluding thoughts. It argues that ultimately, venereal disease was used to explore many of the fundamental institutions on which eighteenth-century British society was based: patriarchy, consumer capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy. While it was only one of many metaphors that could be used to address these concerns, its potency and flexibility meant that it remained prominent not just in the literature and art of the Restoration and the 1700s, but also well beyond. Its persistence as a topic of literary and artistic representation likely speaks not only to the longevity of systems like patriarchy and consumerism, but also to our ongoing fascination with the human body and its complexities.Less

Introduction: The Political Mind

Kieran Laird

in The Political Mind: or 'How to Think Differently'

This chapter introduces three interlinked aims. The first is to introduce neuropsychological material that may help to generate interesting political theory at the most base level of the creation of ... More

This chapter introduces three interlinked aims. The first is to introduce neuropsychological material that may help to generate interesting political theory at the most base level of the creation of new thoughts, as well as serving to problematise some existing theory on a psychological basis. The second aim is to show how such psychological material may be used to critique contemporary Western society through an analysis of consumer capitalism. The third is to demonstrate how self-creation in today's society is in some qualitative way different from the selfhood elaborated in response to previous societies. The chapter presents an overview of the ways in which other psychological theories have been used for political ends: behaviourism, Freud's politics of the unconscious self and society, humanism's self-centred politics and postmodernism.Less

CODICIL Intimations of a Human Rights International: “The Rights of Man; or, What Are We [reading] For?”

Joseph R. Slaughter

in Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law

Thematically within Adama and The Kite Runner, and in their public reception, as with the other Bildungsromane that have been examined in this book, the worlds of geopolitics, consumer capitalism, ... More

Thematically within Adama and The Kite Runner, and in their public reception, as with the other Bildungsromane that have been examined in this book, the worlds of geopolitics, consumer capitalism, literary subjectivity, and human rights law, discourse, and practice overlap in a single world. The book is suggesting that the effective limitations of human rights are related not merely to the institutional frailty of the international legal regime but to the historically nationalist limitations of literary imaginations — cognitive limitations that make it possible, in the era of a global “war on terror,” to reduce The Kite Runner to “a story of two childhood friends in Afghanistan” and to read Adama as the expression of a “free voice” from an “empty quarter” rather than to consider the places of the writers and their readers themselves within overlapping world systems.Less

The (Re)Discovery of Sex

in Global Sex

Within rich societies over the past few decades there has been a marked politicization of sex. This is a product of both consumer capitalism and political movements. Within the scale of roughly a ... More

Within rich societies over the past few decades there has been a marked politicization of sex. This is a product of both consumer capitalism and political movements. Within the scale of roughly a generation the “double standard” has moved from being “taken for granted” to a central concern in relations between women and men, as women have demanded the right to social and economic equality, and along with this equal access to pleasure and protection from harassment. The rapidity of the changes is marked yet again by the marital histories of the British royals. At the same time the open expression of homosexuality has gone from being a radical political gesture to a phenomenon associated with niche marketing to the extent that some theorists speak of a “postgay” world, meaning one in which sexual identities no longer have political significance.Less