I spent an hour sitting on the floor in the sociology aisle at *******, reading a book about luxury. this book was written on the premise that we no longer have a shared cultural ideology based in art or literature or even religion, but rather based in the shared experience of (or desire for) consumption of luxury items: namely, starbucks and evian and rolex and dolce & gabbana and mercedes or porsche.
this book said that marx and adam smith are obsolete, because we no longer identify ourselves based on our labor or even the products of our labor, but based on what we consume. we aren’t shopping to fill needs, we’re shopping to create identity. we feel fulfilled when we’re shopping because we feel as if we’re producing something – as if we’re having an individual experience, when what we’re doing is aligning ourselves with a concept of the group – choosing objects, clothing items, etc, that we think define culture and subcultures through our shared consumption of them.