Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s [Paperback]

Sam Binkley (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0822339897 | ISBN-13: 978-0822339892 | Publication Date: April 27, 2007

From “getting loose” to “letting it all hang out,” the 1970s were filled with exhortations to free oneself from artificial restraints and to discover oneself in a more authentic and creative life. In the wake of the counterculture of the 1960s, anything that could be made to yield to a more impulsive vitality was reinvented in a looser way. Food became purer, clothing more revealing, sex more orgiastic, and home decor more rustic and authentic.

Through a sociological analysis of the countercultural print culture of the 1970s, Sam Binkley investigates the dissemination of these self-loosening narratives and their widespread appeal to America’s middle class. He describes the rise of a genre of lifestyle publishing that emerged from a network of small offbeat presses, mostly located on the West Coast. Amateurish and rough in production quality, these popular books and magazines blended Eastern mysticism, Freudian psychology, environmental ecology, and romantic American pastoralism as they offered “expert” advice—about how to be more in touch with the natural world, how to release oneself into trusting relationships with others, and how to delve deeper into the body’s rhythms and natural sensuality. Binkley examines dozens of these publications, including the Whole Earth Catalog, Rainbook, the Catalog of Sexual Consciousness, Celery Wine, Domebook, and Getting Clear.

Drawing on the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and others, Binkley explains how self-loosening narratives helped the middle class confront the modernity of the 1970s. As rapid social change and political upheaval eroded middle-class cultural authority, the looser life provided opportunities for self-reinvention through everyday lifestyle choice. He traces this ethos of self-realization through the “yuppie” 1980s to the 1990s and today, demonstrating that what originated as an emancipatory call to loosen up soon evolved into a culture of highly commercialized consumption and lifestyle branding.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Getting Loose is a work of historical sociology that both draws on and challenges central theoretical perspectives on consumption and consumer culture, identity, postmodernism and late modernity, post-Fordism, and contemporary moral culture through exceptionally creative analyses of 1970s lifestyle philosophies and practices.”—Don Slater, author of Consumer Culture and Modernity

“Getting Loose is an important and quite interesting study of the discourses of the 1970s lifestyle movement. It casts a whole new light not only on that epoch but, more importantly, on its relationship to contemporary self, identity, and the economy, especially consumer culture. Sam Binkley moves comfortably and insightfully between the most abstract of social theories and the most prosaic of social phenomena, using the former to offer new insights into the latter. He presents a panoramic view of the movement from the 1970s era of the loosening of the self to the reality of the early twenty-first century, where ‘we’re all loose now.’”—George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, and founding editor, Journal of Consumer Culture

From the Publisher

"Getting Loose is an important and quite interesting study of the discourses of the 1970s lifestyle movement. It casts a whole new light not only on that epoch but, more importantly, on its relationship to contemporary self, identity, and the economy, especially consumer culture. Sam Binkley moves comfortably and insightfully between the most abstract of social theories and the most prosaic of social phenomena, using the former to offer new insights into the latter. He presents a panoramic view of the movement from the 1970s era of the loosening of the self to the reality of the early twenty-first century, where `we're all loose now.'"--George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, and founding editor, Journal of Consumer Culture

"Getting Loose is a work of historical sociology that both draws on and challenges central theoretical perspectives on consumption and consumer culture, identity, postmodernism and late modernity, post-Fordism, and contemporary moral culture through exceptionally creative analyses of 1970s lifestyle philosophies and practices."--Don Slater, author of Consumer Culture and Modernity

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (April 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822339897
• ISBN-13: 978-0822339892
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #837,675 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Sam Binkley Wants to Know If You've Gotten Loose, December 25, 2010

By 

M. hampton - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s (Paperback)

Sam Binkley's Getting Loose is a survey of print materials - whether how-to manuals, self-help books, and alternative health, dietary, spiritual and religious literature - that can be said to encompass the newer "lifestyle" culture of the 1970s. Interestingly the author is in the tradition of Michel Foucault and, as such, he occupies a most unusual position in 1970s history and studies. That is, you can feel he has some admiration for the material he covers; but he has just as much skepticism since he feels that the culture is both an effect of and precondition for concomitant changes in both political economy and psychology.

The best part of the book is Binkley's decision to dig deep into all sorts of publications - from the "Briarpatch", to "Whole Earth", and a plethora of subcultural movement periodicals. Many of these are intense in their feeling of being dated. Yet, and this is part of Binkley's larger thesis - much of it feels very mainstream from today's vantage point, as these once radical or fringe ideas have become in a sense commodified and mainstream. There is also an even larger point in Binkley's project. Lest all of this attention to lifestyle and aesthetics might lead a reader to assume that this is merely a history of a certain milieu of a certain time, Binkley is always aware of political economy. That is, for Binkley, new notions of selfhood, however liberatory they may initially appear, have uses for capitalism and the capitalist class. Indeed, they both reflect and create modes conducive to socioeconomic needs in global capital. Binkley is never didactic or forced in this argument and he is never reductionist in the book, but it is refreshing to read a book on aesthetic and lifestyle concerns (post-hippiedom) that connects such matters to political economy. In the spirit of Foucault, Getting Loose is best thought of as a GENEALOGY of a part of 1970s culture. But Binkley's spirit is friendlier to a far older Left, even Marx, in its remembrance of class analysis. According to Binkley, "getting loose" might appear to be a new form of getting strapped.

Binkley also gives biographies of the people who did these writing and how they came to be they people who made the 1970s so much of what they were.

A must in the library of anyone interested in print culture, non-fiction books or even American history.