| Using an inter-disciplinary approach, the dissertation offers a new way of thinking about the constitution of mass society even as it explores the emergence of its most salient features in July Monarchy Paris. It contends that consumerism can never be understood solely in terms of material exchange, and argues that trends like the popularity of theaters, dance-halls, and commercial passages promoted a new pattern of socialization. In this way, consuming practices became a vehicle not only for social exchange, but also for the generation of a new social language of mutual recognition and reference. Mass society can be understood, then, in terms of a new system of identification based on the social coding of consumer practices.; The coding of consumer practices took place in the context two important new developments. From the 1820s, Paris witnessed a diversification and centralization of commercial venues, public entertainments, and leisure activities, which linked consumer practices and spectacle ever more explicitly. These spectacular consumer spaces and practices became the emblems of a new Paris. The second development, the emergence of an integrated media system, also played a crucial role in promoting spectacle and a new cultural map of Paris. The press, theater, advertising, caricature and illustration were increasingly linked culturally and economically. Because consumer practices and their attendant social meanings were routinely represented across media, they effectively multiplied the layers of consumption. It was now possible to consume things in themselves and their representations in an escalating process which defines modern consumerism.; Vaudeville receives special consideration in this project. Vaudeville was both the most popular and commercial theatrical genre of the nineteenth century. Like the modern situation comedy, it wrapped up novelty in the spectacle of everyday life. Always in search of new material, vaudevillists frequently turned to the latest happenings in Paris as the inspiration for new plays. In its emphasis on desire, novelty, and self-fashioning vaudevilles reflected an emerging consumer logic, one that reproduced itself through the structures of fashion itself. Once the social and economic mechanisms for reproducing the social codes of consumerism coalesced, the elements of mass society were themselves fully in place. |
