Emotions as Commodities: Capitalism, Consumption and Authenticity

ISBN-13: 9781138628236 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 222 str.

Eva Illouz

Opis

Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises a puzzle: 　how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional?　 The Emotional Market offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption - emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherial or mood-producing commodities; relation-marking commodities, and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self. Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through　psychotherapy, The Emotional Market will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

O autorze

Eva Illouz is Rose Isaacs Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and Directrice d'Etudes at the EHESS, Paris.