Consumer society: Myths and Structures by Jean Baudrillard written by Saima Yasin

Introduction:

Translator introduces the reader with the key thinkers as influence for Baudrillard to write the book. First influence is Marx and Marxism which goes parallel with the Jean Baudrillard’s consumer society; myths and structures. The important role accorded to Marx and his ideas, especially commodities and their use-value and exchange-value, is interesting in light The Mirror of Production (1973/1975) and move progressively away from a Marxian perspective. For Marx, the primary place of capitalism is in the structure of the means of production and the relations of the

production. (Mirror of Production. 10). M arx shifted the center toward the "real" act of the production and the/ consumption of products, But for Baudrillard, in both cases the real logic is the same : it is the investment of things with value ; it is the placing of a sign

on a thing and the logic of this process of signification is the true essence of capital.

Émile Durkheim is a second classical theorist whose ideas had a profound influence on the book. From Durkheimian perspective consumption is not seen as from of an enjoyment or pleasure, but rather as something which is institutionalized, forced upon us, a duty. Baudrillard focuses his attention on collective phenomena, on Durkheimian social facts. Indeed, he describes consumption in very Durkheimian terms as `collective behaviour', `something enforced, a morality, an institution', and `a whole system of values'. According to Durkheim and Baudrillard production, like consumption, is viewed as a collective phenomenon. Thus, the pressure towards individualization in modern consumption is seen as being at odds with the nature of both production and consumption.

Another major modern theorist of influence in The Consumer Society is Thorstein Veblen,  his pioneering work on consumption, his famous concept of conspicuous consumption. Baudrillard not only usefully employs the notion of conspicuous consumption, but also spins off some interesting ideas of his own from it. For example, while the middle classes continue to engage in conspicuous consumption, the elites may engage in new forms of inconspicuous consumption in order to create new and more subtle differences between themselves and the rest of society. Baudrillard examines the `benevolence' of things like advertisements where a `free' television programme is offered in exchange for a few minutes of commercials. He sees this and things like it as conspicuous displays of disinterestedness.

 In heart of The Consumer Society Baudrillard argues for the study of signs, structural relations, the code and, more generally, unconscious social logic.

Consumption:

To Baudrillard, consumption is not merely a frenzy of buying a profusion of commodities, a function of enjoyment, an individual function, liberating of needs, fulfilling of the self, affluence, or the consumption of objects. Consumption is an order of significations in a `panoply' of objects; a system, or code, of signs; `an order of the manipulation of signs'; the manipulation of objects as signs; a communication system (like a language); a system of exchange (like primitive kinship); a morality, that is a system of ideological values; a social function; a structural organization; a collective phenomenon; the production of differences; `a generalization of the combinatorial processes of fashion`; isolating and individualizing; an unconscious constraint on people, both from the sign system and from the socio-economico-political system; and a social logic.

Baudrillard tries to relate the two theoretical perspectives in the book, there are two entangled social orders -- the order of production and the order of consumption.

For Baudrillrad consumption is structure that is external to and coercive over individuals.  Consumption is a system of codification and leads people to false idea of happiness and libration. In postmodern era every object has become a consumption and we are involved in consumption of a consumption. There is a insatiable need of consumption of consumption. from a structural perspective, what we consume is signs (messages, images) rather than commodities. This means that consumers need to be able to `read' the system of consumption in order to know what to consume. Commodities are no longer defined by their use, but rather by what they signify. And what they signify is defined not by what they do, but by their relationship to the entire system of commodities and signs. There is an infinite range of difference available in this system and people therefore are never able to satisfy their need for commodities, for difference. There is a sense that there is a series of structures that, in playing out their nature and relationship to one another, produce the consumer society.

The world of consumption is treated like a mode of discourse, a language  As a language, consumption is a way in which we converse and communicate with one another. Once we think of consumption as a language, we are free to deploy the whole panoply of tools derived from structural linguistics including sign, signifier, signified and code. As a result, instead of Marxian use-values and exchange-values, consumables become sign-values.

The Formal Liturgy of the Object

1: Profusion

humans of the postmodern age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather-- on a rising statistical curve -- with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages. This runs from the very complex organization of the household, with its dozens of technical slaves, to street furniture and the whole material machinery of communication; from professional activities to the permanent spectacle of the celebration of the object in advertising and the hundreds of daily messages from the mass media.

In this age we are becoming functional. We live by object time: We have to describe these objects as we see and experience them, never forgetting, in their splendour and profusion, that they are the product of a human activity and are dominated not by natural ecological laws, but by the law of exchange-value.

Profusion, piling high, stacking are clearly the most striking descriptive features of this consumer society. Markets, shops showcase bundle of things filling with neon lights unable to fill the insatiable need to own these objects. Consumers are tempted by various tactics on bonus, % off, buy one get one free, every object if available in cluster, nothing alone. And this changes the consumer's relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. The shop-window, the advertisement, the manufacturer and the brand name, which here plays a crucial role, impose a coherent, collective vision, as though they were an almost indissociable totality, a series. This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations.

The Miraculous Status of Consumption

`Affluence' is, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness. The satisfactions which the objects themselves confer are the equivalent of the fake aircraft. In everyday practice, the blessings of consumption are not experienced as resulting from work or from a production process; they are experienced as a miracle. Consumer goods thus present themselves as a harnessing of power, the profusion of goods is felt as a blessing of nature, as a manna, a gift from heaven, manipulated by the order of consumption.

The usage of signs is always ambivalent. Its function is always a conjuring -- both a conjuring up and a conjuring away: causing something to emerge in order to capture it in signs (forces, reality, happiness, etc.) and evoking something in order to deny and repress it. consumption of images, of facts, of information aims also to conjure away the real with the signs of the real, to conjure away history with the signs of change.

Talking about world of communication, mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality. we live, sheltered by signs, in the denial of the real. A miraculous security: when we look at the images of the world, we can’t distinguish ourself from the fake world. The image, the sign, the message all these things we `consume’ represent our tranquility consecrated by distance from the world, a distance more comforted by the allusion to the real.

the praxis of consumption. The consumer's relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility -- nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity. On the same pattern, we can say that the dimension of consumption as we have defined it here is not one of knowledge of the world, nor is it one of total ignorance: it is the dimension of misrecognition.

The Vicious Circle of Growth

Consumer society is not characterized merely by the rapid growth of individual expenditure. It is also accompanied by the growth of expenditure met by third parties for the benefit of private individuals, the purpose of some of this being to reduce the inequality of the distribution of resources. But this `redistribution' has little effect on social discrimination at all levels. As for inequality of standards of living, comparison of the two studies on family budgets made in 1956 and 1965 shows no reduction in the discrepancies.

Environmental Nuisance

The advances of production, of the possession of ever more goods and individual and collective amenities have been accompanied by increasingly serious `environmental nuisances' which are obviously a consequence of industrial development and technical progress, and of the very structures of consumption.

Part II: The Theory of Consumption

4: The Social Logic of Consumption

The Egalitarian Ideology of Weil-Being

Happiness is made measurable in order to perform a distinctive function, to register in a consumer society. It becomes measured in accordance to the egalitarian ideal that equal amounts will be distributed, but this is just an alibi. This measuring of happiness rules out immeasurable inner happiness, and only accepts as happiness that which can be displayed, signified. We accept this change because it promises a means to legislated equality.

The "right" to happiness signifies the disappearance of actual enjoyment of happiness. Just as the right to clean air indicates clean air’s manufactured scarcity. Capitalism systematically turns natural values into rights, or commodities, which enable economic profit and mark social privilege.

Affluence is creating new examples of shortage: shortages of space and time, fresh air, greenery, water, silence. Certain goods, which were once free and abundantly available, are becoming luxuries accessible only to the privileged, while manufactured goods or services are offered on a mass scale.

Consumption, like the education system, is a class institution: not only is there inequality before objects in the economic sense (the purchase, choice and use of objects are governed by purchasing power and by educational level, which is itself dependent upon class background, etc.) --in short, not everyone has the same objects, just as not everyone has the same educational chances--but, more deeply, there is radical discrimination in the sense that only some people achieve mastery of an autonomous, rational logic of the elements of the environment (functional use, aesthetic organization, cultural accomplishment). Such people do not really deal with objects and do not, strictly speaking, `consume', whilst the others are condemned to a magical economy, to the valorization of objects as such, and of all other things as objects (ideas, leisure, knowledge, culture): this fetishistic logic is, strictly, the ideology of consumption.

5: Towards a Theory of Consumption

 Man `endowed' with wants or needs which `lead' him towards objects which `give' him satisfaction. Since man is, nonetheless, never satisfied, the story of Affluent society begins over and over again, with the sterile self-evidence of old fables.

The system of needs is the product of the system of production. By system of needs, we mean that needs are not produced one by one, in relation to the respective objects, but are produced as consumption power, as an overall propensity within the more general framework of the productive forces. following genealogy of consumption is traced:

1 The order of production produces the machine/productive force, a technical system radically different from the traditional tool.

2 It produces capital/rationalized productive force, a rational system of investment and circulation, radically different from `wealth' and from earlier modes of exchange.

3 It produces waged labour power, an abstract, systematized productive force, radically different from concrete labour and the traditional `workmanship'.

4 And so it produces needs, the system of needs, demand/productive force as a rationalized, integrated, controlled whole, complementary to the three others in a process of total control of the productive forces and production processes. Needs as a system are also radically different from enjoyment and satisfaction. They are produced as system elements, not as a relationship of an individual to an object (just as labour power no longer has anything to do with--and even denies--the worker's relation to the product of his labour, and just as exchange-value no longer has anything to do with concrete, personal exchange, or the commodity form with real goods, etc.).

According to Baudrillard, consumers are not passive victims, but actors within a social system that is perpetuated by the use of it, no matter for what end. Consumption, and its attendant social system, survive as a language, which consumers choose to speak through, perpetuating it. Consumption “is directly and totally collective.” “When we consume, we never do it on our own (the isolated consumer is the carefully maintained illusion of the ideological discourse on consumption). Consumers are mutually implicated, despite themselves, in a general system of exchange and in the production of coded values.” Consumption “assures a certain type of communication” in society; failure to communicate would be regarded by others in this context as anti-social. Needs are like symptoms in a hypochondriac, a hysteric. There is no necessary connection between need/symptom and object/body; just an arbitrary one. The “need” is an unfulfillable desire for distinction; it has nothing to do with pleasure, except for maybe the denial of pleasure. Pleasure is the rational end, not the objective, it is a constraint, a compulsion, a social imperative without which one becomes anti-social, inexplicable, alien and scary. This is “fun morality,” which mandates a universal curiosity and a complete exploitation of things according to the rules for extracting pleasure.

Credit is one means of socializing groups to the fun morality; it prevents their having an excuse for not participating. Finally, consumption helps atomize the individual, enhancing social control and legitimizing an increase of bureaucracy which circumscribes the freedom simultaneously offered within the system. So one is urged to consume, and then urged to accept the social responsibility inherent in the consumption. The world of goods treats consumers as a group in order to classify them into different statuses, but the individuals within the group feel no collective impulse; have no sense of being a part of a group – so the process is impervious to collective resistance. The individual feels his voice as a consumer is strong and powerful as long as he is consuming; if he refused to consume, he would be stripped of the power/pleasure afforded him – this is even more true of women, who are constituted as subjects primarily by consuming in the early days of commodity capitalism. This explains why consumerism is embraced and accepted early on, it shows what task culture performs; illustrating the “power” of the “freedom” of consumer choice; illustrating the “autonomy” one has over her own experience of pleasure (when in fact such pleasure is less autonomous, more dependent, or at least as dependent on the social system that classifies and neutralizes the individual).

The Logistical Function of the Individual

The individual serves the industrial system not by supplying it with savings and the resulting capital; he serves it by consuming its products. The system needs people as workers (wage labour), as savers (taxes, loans, etc.), but increasingly it needs them as consumers. Where the individual as such is required and is practically irreplaceable today is as a consumer.

6: Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference

Advertising: the industrial production of differences, the production of the system of consumption. This creates the individual’s goal of “personalization” through seeking out smallest marginal differences. “All men are equal before objects as use-value, but they are by no means equal before objects as signs and differences, which are profoundly hierarchical” – that sums up conspicuous consumption’s logic, and why that logic is rigorously reproduced – it allows not only for individuals to compete for distinction, but also products for market-share and profit margin. Advertising helps produce conformity, not in the naïve, particular sense, but in the sense that all share the code of differentiation through objects. Thus revolutionary tensions are diffused not through luxury but the code itself, which channels such energy into fashion revolutions. People become invested in the rules they are playing by, don’t want to discard them even though they subjugate.

The Masculine and the Feminine Models

Functional femininity has its counterpart in functional masculinity or virility. The models are, quite naturally, arranged in twos. They are the product not of the differentiated nature of the sexes, but of the differential logic of the system. The relation of the Masculine and the Feminine to real men and women is relatively arbitrary. Increasingly today, men and women play equally on the two registers in creating their significations, but, for their part, the terms of the signifying opposition only derive validity from their distinction. These two models are not descriptive: they govern consumption.

Part III: Mass Media, Sex and Leisure

7: Mass-Media Culture

everyone who does not wish to fall behind, be left on the shelf or lose their professional standing must `update' their knowledge, their expertise, their practical range of skills on the labor market. This is the logic of Re-cycling in this age which undercover means consumption of more goods.

The logic of consumption, as we have seen, can be defined as a manipulation of signs. The symbolic values of creation and the symbolic relation of inwardness are absent from it: it is all in externals. The object loses its objective finality and its function; it becomes a term in a much greater combinatory, in sets of objects in which it has a merely relational value.

In TV, radio, press and advertising, are sequences of the periods of neutrality and impersonality the discourse about the world does not seek to generate concern. This tonal `blankness' contrasts with the highly charged nature of the discourse on objects, with its cheery, elated note, its vibrato.

he truth about advertising is that it is beyond true and false in the same way objects are beyond use value and fashion is beyond beauty – such things, he might say, are the alibis of those discourses. Advertising is “prophetic language, insofar as it promotes not learning or understanding, but hope”.

Advertising has a strategic position in this process. It is the reign of the pseudo-event par excellence. It turns the object into an event. In fact, it constructs it as such by eliminating its objective characteristics. It constructs it as a model, as a spectacular news item. `Modern advertising began when the advertisement was no longer a spontaneous announcement and had become "made news"'

8: The Finest Consumer Object: The Body

Also included is a chapter discussing the body as “the finest consumer object,” as both capital and fetish. “one manages one’s body; one handles it as one might handle an inheritance; one manipulates it as one of the many signifiers of social status”. The body is alienated in the process of its social “liberation” and is exploited – it displays, lives the structures of the consumer society, embodies them without choosing them or profiting by them. For Example: woman’s sensible, expressive body in the culture of sensibility – it demonstrates the cultural prerogative without really gaining through it – conforming to that ethic is disciplinary rather that pleasurable.  developing this further: “the ethics of beauty, which is the very ethics of fashion, may be defined as the reduction of all concrete values – the use values of the body – to a single functional exchange value, which itself alone, in its abstraction, encapsulates the idea of the glorious, fulfilled body, the idea of desire and jouissance, and of course thereby also denies and forgets them in their reality and in the end simply peters out into an exchange of signs.” The alienation of labor power, individual freedom, and the body itself finally are all enlisted in order to support the “productivist option.” All is turned to account by the productivist system, but apparently, not individual producers.

“Medical cult” develops from the notion of body as prestige object. This creates “a virtually unlimited demand for medical, surgical, and pharmaceutical services .health today is not so much a biological imperative linked to survival as a social imperative linked to status”.

There is in no sense, of course, any natural affinity between beauty and slimness. Beauty cannot be fat or slim, heavy-limbed or slender as it could in a traditional definition based on the harmony of forms. It can only be slim and slender, according to its current definition as a combinatorial logic of signs, governed by the same algebraic economy as the functionality of objects or the elegance of a diagram.

9: The Drama of Leisure or the Impossibility of Wasting One's Time

Time is commodity, occupying major place in consumption society. “we are in an age where men will never manage to waste enough time to be rid of the inevitablility of spending their lives earning it”. Leisure means time away from rational scheduling, from productivity, but holidays themselves become rationalized pursuits of pleasure, which can only be found through producing distinctions. Leisure is itself consumption, showing how much extra time, wealth and capital one have.

10: The Mystique of Solicitude

Nothing is purely and simply consumed today -- that is to say, bought, possessed and used for particular ends. Objects no longer serve a purpose; first and foremost they serve you. Without this direct object, the personalized `you', without this total ideology of personal service, consumption would not be what it is. It is the warmth of gratification, of personal allegiance which gives it its whole meaning -- not satisfaction pure and simple. It is in the sun of this solicitude that modern consumers bask.

Alongside the economic and political institutions, there are non-institutional systems of social relations. This is that entire network of `personalized' communication which is invading everyday consumption. For we are indeed talking of consumption, the consumption of human relations, of solidarity, reciprocity, warmth and social participation standardized in the form of services a continual consumption of solicitude, sincerity and warmth, but consumption in fact only of the signs of that solicitude, which is even more vital for the individual than biological nourishment in a system where social distance and the atrociousness of social relations are the objective rule.

In this network of anxious relations, in which there is no longer any absolute value, but only functional compatibility, it is no longer a question of `asserting oneself', of `proving oneself', but of relating to and gaining the approval of others, soliciting their judgement and their positive affinity. This mystique of gaining approval is everywhere gradually supplanting the mystique of proving oneself. The traditional individual's objective of transcendent accomplishment is giving way to processes of reciprocal solicitation. Everyone `solicits' and manipulates, everyone is solicited and manipulated.

11: Anomie in the Affluent Society

The consumer society is at one and the same time a society of solicitude and a society of repression, a pacified society and a society of violence. We have seen that `pacified' daily life thrives on a daily diet of consumed violence, `allusive' violence: news reports of accidents, murders, revolutions, the atomic or bacteriological threat -- the whole apocalyptic stock-in-trade of the mass media.

Our economic attitudes are rooted in the poverty, inequality, and economic peril of the past' This difficulty of living in affluence should itself show us, that the alleged `naturalness' of the desire for well-being is not so natural as all that. Otherwise, individuals would not have so much trouble getting used to it; they would embrace plenty with open arms. This should indicate to us that there is in consumption something quite different, and perhaps even something opposite: something for which people have to be educated, trained, even tamed. It should tell us that there is here, in fact, a new system of moral and psychological constraints which has nothing to do with the realm of freedom.

On Contemporary Alienation or the End of the Pact with the Devil

The Student of Prague is a remarkable illustration of the processes of alienation, that is to say, of the generalized pattern of individual and social life governed by commodity logic.

the age of consumption, being the historical culmination of the whole process of accelerated productivity under the sign of capital, is also the age of radical alienation. Commodity logic has become generalized and today governs not only labour processes and material products, but the whole of culture, sexuality, and human relations, including even fantasies and individual drives. Everything is taken over by that logic, not only in the sense that all functions and needs are objectivized and manipulated in terms of profit, but in the deeper sense in which everything is spectacularized or, in other words, evoked, provoked and orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models.