Towards a Poetics of Consumerism

Abstract

The influence of Gaston Bachelard's studies of the ‘poetic’ or ‘material imagination’ on the ‘nouvelle critique’ has long been acknowledged. Similarly, the importance of Bachelard's work in the history of science to social theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu has received considerable critical attention. What has been largely unexplored, however, is the impact of Bachelard's studies of the ‘material imagination’ on social theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes, in their analyses of the advent of mass consumerism in post-war France. This article examines the use made by these theorists of Bachelard's concept of the ‘material imagination’ as an index of everything authentic that risked being lost in France's embrace of mass consumerism. It also shows how Bachelard's ‘material imagination’ could serve as a powerful tool for explaining the affective appeal that the new spaces and mass-produced commodities of post-war France possessed for French consumers.