Das Subjekt des Konsums in der Kultur der Moderne: Der kulturelle Wandel der Konsumtion

“Consumption” is not only a specific sociological field of analysis; it must be taken into account appropriately, challenges the theory of society and modernity as a whole. The paper aims to accomplish two things: (a) In a historical-sociological scheme that is based on the 19 and In the 20th century, the emergence of the unusual consumption orientation of the modern subject form is to be explained by a cultural transfer of elements from aesthetic movements, countercultures of modernity (romanticism, modernism, postmodernism) into the dominant culture of modernity. The coding of the decidedly anti-consumerist bourgeois culture of classical modernity is thus completely reversed. To understand what “consumption” means in modernity and how it could emerge requires sociology to recognize the relevance of aesthetic movements for the development of modernity and to highlight the competition of bourgeois and post-bourgeois culture. b) The consumption orientation of state-of-the-art subjects can be understood as the acquisition of specific esthetic-expressive competences (experiential ability, creativity, self-stylization). This does not mean that the classical sociological question about social inequalities would become irrelevant. Rather, social inequality has to be conceptualized differently from classical understanding: not as an inequality of resources, but as an inequality of competences, namely competences that were first those of aesthetic countercultures. Under modern conditions, the social success and the successful identity of subjects depends on their ability to experience, creativity and self-stylize, their respective abilities to consume. Ironically, dispositions of the subject of “revolting” aesthetic countercultures have become a normative set of successful subjects, whose failure to do so pays the price of new social exclusion."(author’s abstract)