Page 253 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 241

the move towards forms of industrial production which employ new ways
of making goods and commodities which differ sharply from the old
assembly lines of mass production. These in turn serve more differentiated
markets with high-quality goods which are sold in ‘niche marketed’ outlets
or through segmented retailing strategies. In addition a good deal more
attention is paid to the selling environment. Shopping becomes an even
more heightened social activity, one which is designed to enhance or
highlight the particular or nuanced meanings of the products, for example,
through the spatial arrangement in new supermarkets. Shopping
environments connect with the broader space of the city or the new town
or the out-of-town hypermarkets which in turn produce new experiences of
space, geography and region.
The shop or supermarket, as designed environment, is integral to the
growth of consumption in the 1980s which through the currency of the
‘gold cards’ brought an abundance of new goods to an eager population of
consumers. Frank Mort points to the way in which ‘lifestyle’ carried a
distinctively populist ring about it during the Thatcher years, offering, it
seemed, a consumerist endorsement of emergent identities such as that of
the ‘new man’ or the ‘career woman’ or even the ‘gay couple’. In
advertising copy these found their equivalent in yuppies, buppies, dinkies,
etc. In the New Times writing there is a recognition of the break-up of the
older points of collective identification especially that of social class and
the reformation of identity around other chosen sites of ‘belonging’. So for
a moment there appears to be a convergence of thinking between the
advertising agencies and the New Times writers. This is where, for the rest
of the left, the betrayal begins, the slide into accepting as a fait accompli
the ‘end of class’. Such an accusation assumes a shift of allegiances from
class to these consumer-led identities, but it is too easy to map the
flowering of a more pluralist, social movement-based politics, with the neo-
conservative language of Mrs Thatcher and her celebration of the ‘freedom
of the market’, the ‘right to choose’, and the ‘value of enterprise’. This is a
way of avoiding much more awkward theoretical questions such as the
nature of the political relationships which can or do exist between
emergent social identities. Instead of facing up to the challenge of their
possible ‘radical incommensurability’, much of the left prefers instead to
rely on the assumed centrality of class, as providing a kind of underpinning
for the politics of race or sexuality.
There is another issue of how, if identities such as those described by
Mort are to be taken seriously, they are to be understood in terms of the
market. What is the market and what role does it play? It is after all here
that Mort sees the critical shifts in working class masculinity occurring, as
‘lads’ come to perceive themselves in the Emporio Armani as actively
gendered rather than just neutrally male. The question of the
relationship between the centrality of the ‘market’ as an abstract but