Book Review: Mike Featherstone - Undoing Culture Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity

In this book, Mike Featherstone examines how culture changes in modern societies and how those changes intersect with debates about globalization, postmodernism, and identity. His central argument is that culture is not a unified, stable structure that automatically organizes social life. Cultural meanings are continually reshaped through everyday practices, consumption, cultural production, and global relations. The “undoing” of culture should therefore be understood not simply as a loss, but as a reordering of cultural boundaries and authority. The early chapters explore the growing autonomy of the cultural sphere in modernity. As science, art, and morality became distinct value spheres, artists and intellectuals gained greater influence over cultural production. Cultural specialists have sought both to protect art and thought from market pressures and to reach wider audiences in order to extend their influence. This tension shows that the boundaries between high and popular culture are historically formed and subject to change. The expansion of consumer culture and the culture industries has made cultural products more widely available while also raising questions about the autonomy of cultural life. Featherstone also considers the modern individual’s pursuit of a coherent, “ordered” life. Drawing on Max Weber, he examines the ideal of a unified life in which personality, conduct, and thought form a consistent whole. Set against this ideal is the “heroic life,” defined by exceptional achievement, self-dedication, and an effort to transcend the limits of everyday existence. Everyday life, by contrast, is associated with routine, care, social reproduction, and the maintenance of relationships. As ideals of heroism and elite culture have weakened, everyday life, popular culture, and the experiences of previously excluded groups have gained visibility. Featherstone treats this change not only as cultural decline, but also as a transformation that creates room for new forms of identity and expression. In discussing postmodernism, the book addresses fragmentation, plurality, hybridity, and the erosion of boundaries between high and popular culture. Featherstone is cautious about describing postmodernism as an entirely new age, wholly disconnected from what came before. Some aspects of cultural complexity, he argues, were already present within modernity; the circulation of images, commodities, and information has intensified them. Cultural signs have become harder to interpret in relation to meaning and social status, while the shared, tacit knowledge that once guided everyday life has become less reliable. Globalization provides the broader context for these changes. Featherstone does not equate globalization with the emergence of a single, homogeneous world culture. Global flows bring cultures into closer contact, but this contact can also make differences more visible. Accounts that assume Americanization or the uniform spread of Western modernity fail to capture the particularities of local cultures and the varied experiences of modernity. The global and the local are therefore not opposing poles; they are interdependent processes that continually shape one another. Global relations do not simply erase local attachments. They can also intensify the search for locality, home, and community. The final chapter explores identity and images of social life through travel, migration, and mobility. Migration, border crossing, and travel challenge fixed ideas of identity and place. Featherstone does not, however, treat mobility as automatically liberating: travel and migration take place within unequal power relations. Throughout the book, culture emerges not as a fixed whole, but as a field produced, circulated, and reinterpreted by different groups within historical and global relations. Undoing Culture thus makes sense of postmodern cultural change through the connections between globalization, consumption, everyday life, identity, and power.