Page 96 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

FROM WAYS OF LIFE TO LIFESTYLE

became impossible or irrelevant, that would clearly be a cause of great concern.
Not least because in making cultural choices ordinary members of society, at
least some of the time and in some respects, will be seeking out authenticity.
Whether it is in tourist destinations or home decorations or types of restaur-
ants, and so on, the fact of some place or thing being authentic or not is clearly
a relevant concern for some consumers (I have discussed elsewhere some of the
reasons for a quest for authenticity in musical choices amongst British suburban
residents; see Chaney 1997). The idea of postmodernity therefore matters
because it draws attention to the proliferation of choices in what I have called
virtual cultural supermarkets; we are forced to ask whether a blanket condem-
nation of the impossibility of meaningful judgments in mass consumerism is
another way of reiterating elitist despair at the popularization of cultural
discourse.
I suggest that much of the confusion over authenticity has arisen because in
the connection with traditional notions of culture it implies an essential truth
or rightness. The self-evident totality of ‘a’ culture is exemplified through
judgments that certain ways of acting or using symbols are authentic. As we
recognize that we use culture now not as a complete entity but as a symbolic
repertoire, our expectations of authenticity should shift from what is intrinsic-
ally true to the ways in which cultures are made. Authenticity is a cultural value
because it seems that when it is invoked people are talking about how
something is being done rather than what is being done. Authenticity con-
cerns representation and performance. That is why it should concern the
extent to which social actors are able to use symbolic repertoires in creative and
consistent ways.
In seeking to elucidate the distinctiveness of lifestyles as a social form I have
touched at several points on the reflexive character of the decisions they
embody. Now when drawing this chapter to a close, I should be more explicit
about what is meant by this idea. Clearly when people choose (or are allowed
to choose) whether or not to be married to their sexual partner, or what sort of
vacations they will take, or whether they accept a responsibility to maintain a
youthful body, they are making decisions about the organization of their life.
At varying levels of seriousness they are shaping or styling both who they are
and the way they are. Decisions about choosing from symbolic repertoires, in
the context of endless recursive discourse about the options and meanings of
symbolic discourse, are helping to constitute new accents and themes in those
repertoires. In all these ways lifestyle choices are re flexive. They constitute lines
of affiliation and association to form patterns that can be recognized and used
by others as well as themselves.
I suggest then that it is in a self-conscious commitment to sensibility as the
grounds of affiliative association that the novelty of lifestyle as social form
becomes clear. By sensibility I mean an attitude or perspective which enables
disparate activities or choices to be seen as consonant or consistent. A sens-
ibility is therefore a constellation of tastes that ‘hang together’: they form a

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