Date: Fri, 08 Jan 1999 14:56:25 +0000
From: sam binkley <sbinkley-AT-erols.com>
Subject: Re: Foucault and ethical consumerism


Daniel Purdy:

This sounds extremely interesting, I'll have to check it out.  I am currently 
writing my dissertation propsal, which will deal with modes of what I am 
calling "therapeutic cosumption", stemming from responses to, and efforts to 
escape from consumer culture, and to create alternative ethical modes of 
consumption.  

I'm pretty much sticking to Foucault's later work, his studies of greek ethics, 
and his statements on asceticism and its place in a wider ethical program.  the 
movements I trace (largely counter cultural) shift from conspicuous 
consumption to ethical life, or, in foucualt's terms, code morality (judging acts 
for another) to ethical practice (judging acts for oneself).  

It sounds like your approach deals more with foucault's genealogical work, 
fashion as a sort of self disciplining  aparatus, no? 


sb








 wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 7 Jan 1999, sam binkley wrote:
> 
> > Folks:
> >
> > does anyone have anything to say about Foucault and consumerism and
> > ethical life?
> 
> It feels awkward to write this, but I just published a Foucaultian
> analysis of consumer culture in the late eighteenth century.  One
> particular wing of the Enlgihtenment understood bourgeois fashion as a
> mode of self-disciplining.  Anyway I go on about at some length.  The book
> is called "The Tyranny of ELegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Age of
> Goethe" and its published by Johns Hopkins University Press.