Emotions, Imagination And Consumption Summary

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This paper will firstly sums up Eva Illouz' thoughts on emotion in her article of Emotion, imagination and consumption and John Fiske's idea about the role of pleasure in his paper of Reading the beach. Then I will compare and discuss the emotion and the role of pleasure to see if they are the same concept or not.

In Emotions, Imagination and Consumption, Illouz tries to explain why emotion is a necessary component to better understand the society of consumption. She illustrates the characteristics of consumer culture to propose the necessity of the notion of emotion. First of all, a variety of meanings and ideas are embedded in the consumer culture, but are convergent in a broad notion: in pursuit of the good life. She states that no matter in what form these beliefs are, there is likelihood that these beliefs …show more content…

Furthermore, Illuoz argues that compared with the notion of desire, emotion can provide better insights into the drives which propel consumers to purchase goods. Emotion can be also used to describe both positive and negative drives that make people to act. According to Illuoz, not only one single emotion can account for the reason why people purchase, but also a cluster of different emotions can be an explanation sometimes(Illouz 384-385). Next, Illuoz mentions that emotion is meaningful for individuals because people perceive the world through emotion. Thus, emotion can reflect individual's consciousness. On the other hand, emotion also tells about how a person should react or feel in a certain social context. In that sense, emotions does not necessarily reflect individual's self-consciousness. Due to the dual feature, emotion can compensate for the flaw of desire that it has "either too much or too little agency"(Illouz 385). Last but not least, Illuoz argues that because both emotions and the

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