If anything, the growing commodification of society, the increased … Instead of seeing it as an existential threat and closing it off in traditionalisation and regulation, as under an ancien régime, the culture of modernity creates, according to Plessner, social arrangements that allow and foster individuality that dwells in potentiality. In simple cases, and under strict ceremonialisation, a role set may define person and the role functionary may mistake themselves for nothing more than a function in a social organism. Nationalism vs Globalism: the new political divide, Dating a Spanish girl: 7 things you should know, Sex in Spain – 5 things you need to know about hot Spanish lovin', Dating British Men – advice from a woman who loves them, Pros and Cons of Living in Madrid – 10 best and worst things, Pros and Cons of living in Barcelona – 10 best and worst things. “Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Notify me of follow-up comments by email. We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions; we must sample various kinds of relationships; we must try different cuisines; … Lokke also shows that de Staël’s Corinne – in whom she realises the enthusiastic eccentricity she theorised in the Influence of Passions – maintains detachment beyond the formalistic role in an passionate way (along the lines that Plessner saw as the move from ceremonialism to art). This concern brings us back to the part the bourgeois wife/mother plays in romantic consumerism. (2004: 1), I am not even half through the (slim) book, but I’m already quite enthusiastic about it – this really seems to confirm the point about “female culture” at the heart of romantic consumerism not being one of diffuse emotionality and a collapse of role-distanced autonomous personhood. It is as if we, ‘change our existence’ – thus creating – I quote – a ‘distance to our social existence which can be consoling: Man, the individual never entirely is what he is. But the result denies women precisely this precondition of romantic love: autonomous personhood. (2004: 42). Tenbruck, Friedrich H. (1986): ‚Bürgerliche Kultur.’ In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 27: Kultur und Gesellschaft, pp.263-85, Update 12th November 2009 : Women’s Romanticism…, I am currently reading Kari E. Lokke’s Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History and Transcendence (London: Routledge 2004). Plessner, Helmuth (1976): Die Frage nach der Conditio humana, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Schmitt, Carl (1986) Political Romanticism, Cambridge, Mass. is, without exaggeration, the best book I’ve read in the last 5 years. In this respect consumerist ambiguity may be shallow – but at the same time life-affirming. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no. Consumerism may be defined as a social movement of consumers seeking redress, restitution and remedy for dissatisfaction that they have accumulated in the purchase of products / service and their performance. Evidently there is an affinity between the structural romanticism of money and this central element of societal life (Gesellschaft) – as Plessner says: ‘The distance the role creates, in the life of the family as well as in that of work, occupations, office is the detour to the other which characterises human beings, the mediation of their immediacy.”. (Paper presented at the 4th International Plessner Conference, 16th to 18th September, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands). Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is, without exaggeration, the best book I’ve read in the last 5 years. Finally, I also very much like the way Lokke delineates Romanticism by going back to Schiller’s notion of sentimental poetry in which, in her words, the appeal of the sentimental or the sublime is its ineffability which is that of the infinitely receding horizon (2004: 19). Anyway, I recently published an article about tourism ruining Spain and wanted to quote what Harari says, in Sapiens, about travel. It is mainly an analysis of Germaine de Staël, Mary Shelley, Bettine von Arnim and George Sand who, according to Lokke, all envisage self-transcendence, both artistic and spiritual, as participation in historical process. In one respect Simmel does have a point in that the situation in which the bourgeois mother and wife lived is one that deprives her of (or – from Simmel’s point of view spares her) the existence in differentiated role sets, role complexity that, in Rose Laub Coser’s terms, is a “seedbed of autonomy”. Having moved beyond necessity the traditional hedonist tries to recreate the pleasure of need satisfaction by intensifying and refining the sensual stimuli involved. The holistic existence Simmel celebrates was already a broken one – and that brokenness is closely related to Romanticism. the occasionism Schmitt bemoans… (and that escaped Campbell’s attention). Consumer culture has few defenders and there are even fewer who dare to argue that consumer culture may in a sense make us broader and deeper personalities. The latter retains a doctrine of signs in which feeling and taste, vision, imagination, expressiveness, creative energy, and unhappiness with the status quo replace economic success as vindication of the individual soul. A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighboring chimpanzee band. Download Citation | Introduction: Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience | Weddings are big news and big business. In contrast Plessner explicitly asks us to embrace such sensual overload as civilisational achievement, sees strength in the embrace of ‘the refinement of life, and the intensification of possibilities for stimulation’ (1999: 69). ‘as an intermediate link between man and thing,’ Simmel says, money ‘enables man to have, as it were, an abstract existence, a freedom from direct concern with things and from a direct relationship to them, without which our inner nature would not have the same chances of development’ (1990: 469), ‘… our whole life becomes affected by its remoteness from nature, a situation that is reinforced by the money economy and the urban life that is dependent upon it.’ He suggests: ‘the distinctive aesthetic and romantic experience of nature is perhaps possible only through this process.’ (ibid), So money opens a gap, a space that entices a longing for that which is now no longer directly at hand. 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