The History of Consumption (original) (raw)
What we choose to consume, and what we refuse to consume, has become an important part of how we define ourselves. Consumer activists, for example in anti-sweatshops movements have contributed to give high visibility to consumer advocacy. It is, however, hardly a recent political cause. Why and when did we start speaking of consumption society? How has consumption become central in defining human activity? What is a citizen-consumer? In this course we will explore the emergence of new forms of consumption from the late 19th century, and read about the critiques addressed to them. Answering critiques, enterprises and public institutions have in turn developed skills to communicate with the consumer. The line between information and persuasion will be a topic of debate in the course, as well as the transfers and exchanges in know-how and experts. Cases will approach the history of multinational advertising agencies, the evolution of marketing and propaganda techniques under totalitarian regimes, and renewed forms of consumers’ activism. These questions will be further explored up to and including the Cold War.
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Inter-subjective time: Emmanuel Levinas's interpretation of time
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Focusing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, the dissertation examines Levinas’s understanding of time as inter-subjective. A discussion of Levinas’s interpretation of time is needed since he does not provide a systematic theory of the subject, and his views are scattered throughout his works. The thesis explored and defended in the dissertation is that even though we find in different periods of Levinas’s writings apparently inconsistent views of time, a coherent and consistent structure of time can be extracted from his thought. Examining Levinas’s views against the background of two of his most influential predecessors, Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger, leads to conclusions not only concerning the nature of Levinas’s understanding of time, evolutionary rather than contradictory, but also concerning Levinas's unique views concerning the relation between time and ethics. Levinas presents an innovative interpretation of time, which can be considered as an attempt to overcome the dissatisfaction with the egological interpretations offered by Bergson and Heidegger. Levinas accepts the relevance of time to the human structure of existence, but at the same time does not consider the time pertinent to our existence among other people as a degradation of inner-time. Since Levinasian time occurs in the framework of inter-subjective relations, it has an ethical meaning, which is manifested in the relation between responsibility and time, as well as in the relation between time and the formation of the self.
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