History of Bourgeois Perception

by Donald M. Lowe

Building on the insights of phenomenology and Marxism, Donald M. Lowe proposes the history of perception as a new methodology. With this method, he studies perceptual transformation in the modern West from the bourgeois society of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption in the twentieth century. Lowe show how perception in bourgeois society ordered the experiences of time, space, and bodily self. He then argues that since the perceptual revolution of 1905-15 the old orders of time, space, and person have been subverted by the meta-communication of image. An unprecedented work, ' History of the Bourgeois' cuts across traditional academic disciplines and will appeal to rreaders interested in history, philosophy, aesthetics, communications theory, and social-cultural criticism.

226 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1982