Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (Mike Featherstone)

“I first became interested in consumer culture in the late 1970s. The stimulus was the writings of members of the Frankfurt School and other proponents of Critical Theory which were featured and discussed so well in journals like Telos and New German Critique. The theories of the culture industry, reification, commodity fetishism and the instrumental rationalization of the world directed attention away from a focus on production towards consumption and processes of cultural change.” (excerpt from “Preface to the First Edition”)

Download: Mike Featherstone – Consumer Culture and Postmodernism

Commonwealth (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri)

“War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterize our globalizing world. There are so many reasons to seek refuge in realm ‘outside,’ some place separate from the discipline and control of today’s emerging Empire…One primary effect of globalization, however, is the creation of a common world, a world that for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no ‘outside.'”

Download: Commonwealth