Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 83

in chapter 4? Could it be that ordinary people, so vilified by garden legislators, might
have a stake in being part of mediated British garden history?
The Importance of 'Lifestyle' in Contemporary Culture
From ways of life to lifestyle
Contemporary culture is still in the process of a social and cultural transition: mass
societies are moving from 'ways of life' to 'lifestyle'. In his most recent work on
lifestyle, Chaney argues that traditional conceptions of culture are no longer tenable
in social theory (Chaney 2001). The idea of culture as a whole way of life, based
on shared traditions and communal identity has lost its capacity to define social
existence as a totality. Today, social life is characterised by the severed 'umbilical
link' between culture and community (Chaney 2001, 77). Whereas culture was
once conceived as a set of firm beliefs and normative expectations, shared within a
relatively stable community, in mass societies there are, 'a multiplicity of overlapping
cultures with differing relationships with social actors' (Chaney 2001, 78). In an era
of mass communication and entertainment, culture is in part about the relationship
between the identities represented in media discourse and how people identify both
themselves and members of other social groups. Culture, according to Chaney, has
become a 'symbolic repertoire' (Chaney 2001, 78). Repertoires are adapted from
images and symbols available in a mass-mediated environment which are then
assembled into performances associated with particular groups. A repertoire is a set
of practices through which people symbolically represent identity and difference.
According to Chaney, traditional conceptions of culture have virtually given
way to new social forms. One of the most significant examples of a new social
form which typifies social change is the growth of lifestyles. Lifestyles draw on the
resources provided by consumer choices out of the symbolic repertoires on offer in
contemporary culture. Indeed the lifestyle, in contrast to the traditional conception
of a 'way of life', is utterly dependent on the leisure and culture industries and
consumer patterns. Playfully and reflexively constructed by those who invest in
them, lifestyles are performed improvisations in which authenticity is conceived as
an entity which one can manufacture. In these ways lifestyle projects are unstable
and open to re-improvisation, they converge in 'loose agglomerations'; any effort
to pin down a typology of lifestyles is simply, 'chasing after a vague and constantly
changing constellation of attitudes' (Chaney 2001, 86).
Lifestyle: the new coping mechanism
The cultural and social shift from ways of life to lifestyle has important consequences
for subjectivity. Traditional cultural forms offer a high degree of social stability to
their subjects; whereas those in the process of building lifestyles out of the freeplay
of cultural symbolism lack firm social grounding and are relatively insecure. In
this way, the lifestyle project as a new social form becomes a primary identity
marker. People make serious investments in using cultural forms as a means to