Older and recently introduced technologies of body enhancement and improvement proliferate. The change in social acceptability of these technologies call for a macro-level understanding, in consumer research typically delivered through institutional or assemblage theories underlining the institutional-material embeddedness of these technologies. With a point of departure in Castoriadis’ notion of the social imaginary, we argue that in addition to these dominant material-institutional explanatory frameworks, the contemporary consumption politics of the body must be considered as also firmly anchored in the emergence of an altered social imaginary of the body as a malleable object. We outline the differences between the various approaches and propose a modelization of change in social imaginary significations. It is concluded that technologies of the body represent the ultimate consumer culture imaginary.
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