Page 35 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

26 Cultural change and ordinary life

of society and culture. In this section, I explore further ideas of fragmentation
and rapid cultural change, drawing especially on the work of Lipovetsky
(2005). In addition I introduce research on the idea of the cultural omnivore
(see also Chapter 8).
Lipovetsky’s argument is that advanced western democracies have
moved into a new phase of cultural and social life. The postmodern, which
is not in this book discussed in any detail, has been overtaken by the hyper-
1
modern. For Lipovetsky, the postmodern was a transitional period between
the modernity of the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth and the
hypermodern that was born in the 1980s. The postmodern therefore enabled
the birth of the hypermodern from the modern. The hypermodern con-
tinues the progress of three key areas or processes: ‘the market, technocratic
efficiency and the individual’ (p. 32).
While he discusses all three, it is the consideration of what in his intro-
duction to this book, Charles (2005) labels ‘paradoxical individualism’ that
forms the core of Lipovetsky’s argument, as it is the mode of individualism
that captures the nature and dynamic of hypermodernity. Given that indi-
vidualism can often be seen as fragmenting collective actions and modes of
belonging, these themes are very important to the argument here. The form
and content of this hyperindividualism are summarized by Lipovetsky in a
further three themes, which he says describe a ‘society of fashion’: ‘ephemeral-
ity, novelty and permanent seduction’ (p. 36). Lipovetsky’s discussion rests on
his earlier work on fashion (Lipovetsky 1994). Here, Lipovetsky examines the
meaning of fashion, its development and, most significantly, how the pro-
cesses involved in the changing modes of fashion as dress have generalized to
epitomize contemporary cultural and social life. The processes involved in
fashion have become extended across many different aspects of life. Lipovetsky
referred to this as ‘consummate fashion’ and saw it through the lens of the three
similar processes of ‘ephemerality, seduction, and marginal differentiation’
(1994: 131).
As fashion has democratized and spread as a principle it has allowed the
individual freedom to define who they are, to consume more and a greater
variety of goods and services. This mode of individualism can be seen as a form
of fragmentation into increasingly smaller lifestyle enclaves. For Lipovetsky,
it also means that the individual has become more reflexive and thus able to
choose outside tradition and constraint how they perform who they are and
how, for example, they attach themselves to political movements. Lipovetsky
ranges wide across regions of social life to show how these processes are
working out in different fields.
The most innovative and useful part of Lipovetsky’s analysis for my
argument rests with his consideration of the paradoxes of hypermodernity
and hyperindividualism. The current hyperindividualism of the hypermodern
as characterized by fashion is double edged, ‘we’ are both disciplined and free
and we constrain ourselves but assert our individualism. In further individual-
izing and fragmenting, society is not becoming simply atomized, with no
connections between people. However, the nature of the connections between
the fragments and the hyperindividuals are becoming more contingent and
subject to ongoing change and relative lack of constraint. Social capital (see