A Person, Held in Words: ‘The Consumer Society’

Preface

The resultant considerations contour an abridged overview to how the prevailing power-structure come-orthodoxy of our times produces, maintains, declares and believes its great-myth - [the] ‘‘Civilization of the Object’’: one that has readily permeated into all aspects of individual and grouped life; implicit faith and explicit opinion, language syntax, what can be uttered and accepted as truth separate from what is censored, condemned verbally or exposed to violence; a sphere of invisible separation (‘secure’, unfathomable resistance) from those who speak a language that cannot be understood – it has become the global ‘religion’ par excellence, replacing the image of the Godhead with that of the repetitively wished, unfulfilled, detached image whose ambivalence is essential to its continuation, & ‘unconsciously’ acted upon.

This ‘cult’ of the image is reflexive around the idea of the ‘consumer society’, a designation sampled from the treatise which is to be elaborated – by the sociologist & philosopher Jean Baudrillard in his work: ‘The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures’, published in 1970 although of surpassed relevance in our current epoch. The forthcoming will consist of outlining, decoding, discernment and remarks around Baudrillard’s early postmodern composition. To scrutinize further you will need to read the investigation yourself [link beneath text], possibly followed by his 1981 ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ - and certainly this is one of numerous volumes in realms of sociology, semiotics, philosophy [notably post-structuralism].

Now, if you as reader would indulge some necessary clarifications before the vital formulations are demonstrated: that rather than the traditional definition of consumption as regarding material goods, products and services; it is the reflexive, discursive consumption of an image of consumption itself; a self-fulfilling discourse, perpetuated through a sign system of production/creation mediated through desires, ‘‘a mirror that takes delight in itself’'; [an individual absorption of signs & absorption by signs] - it signifies an ideological restructuring of values, a great myth inherited from that of the archaic ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’; the earthly accepted meme: ‘‘the body you dream of is your own. A kind of immense collective narcissism... inducing society to merge itself into – and absolve itself in – the image it presents of itself, to be convinced of itself in the way that advertising ends up convincing people of their bodies and the prestige values of those bodies. In short, it is becoming [become!] its own self-fulfilling prophecy’’(194).

An explanatory hint to the ‘flavour’ of consumption is as follows:

‘‘Consumption is an order of significations in the ‘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 (a language); a system of exchange (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’’ (Introduction, 15)

One can theorize ergo that the terms of defense & resistance against the structural ‘spider’ of consumption are already defined through its own mechanisms (terrorist, authoritarian, dictator; Marxist, libertarian, anarchist), enacted in an inhibitory & sumptuous set of a closed logic-system; such to be tamed within the consumptive language. It becomes difficult to symbolize any communication outside this vehemently discursive framework of the indicative-only, possessory cogito [that of uncensorable censorship & meaningful trivialities] for those embedded, and one’s language is largely already corrupted by its great myth; its pervasive arrangements are (almost?) impossible to subvert from decisively as they deny/suppress externality.

Growth here is dependent upon an inequality which cannot be remediated within the societal capital-caste as its perpetual deficit is an explicit symptom of said structure. There is no economic equilibrium, ideological domination of a minority is foundational, poverty/death/unachievable unfulfilled desire are its preconditions & enables preponderance. Moving spending from one condition to another with a social goal (e.g. military to education/health) doesn’t create system alterity; contra augments its duration.

The Social Logic/Theory Of Consumption:

Instruments of created shortage: time, space, greenery, water, silence, non-polluted areas. Possession of objects are comprised/relate through series of signs constituting structural hierarchy & individual classification/distinction within, simulating status; a seeking of salvation through consumption supplanting that of an impossible grace. Individual distinction only functions as an acceptance & maintenance of existing order, allowing oneself to obtain a position therein, while the structure itself as orders of difference remains. The indefinite circulation of signs implies permanent dissatisfaction. Consumption, as social labour, a structured social field via a pathway of needs whereby distinct objects are introduced to restore social distance between classes.

Individual aspiration acts slightly beyond capabilities to internalize the normative expansion of power structure, aspirations themselves are inherently inegalitarian; desire to overconsume of lower classes perhaps acknowledgement of failure to arise in social hierarchy. There are no autonomous needs within the growth society, they only serve its expansive function.

‘‘The language of cities is competition itself. Motives, desires, encounters, stimuli, the endless judgments of others, continual eroticization, information, the appeals of advertising: all these things make up a kind of abstract destiny of collective participation, set against a real background of generalized competition’’ (65)

Poverty defined as not the reduced quantity/quality of goods available, nor the ability to achieve ends through means – it is the relation between human beings (transparency & reciprocity of social relations, no enforced scarcity or accumulation). Hence, wealth is valued in individual exchange, not the goods themselves; a real structural change will require revolution of social organization & its relations.

Manufacturers guide market behaviour, modelling social attitudes and needs, their quantity & price, and what will be desired; a ‘‘dictatorship of the order of production’’(72) through research, advertising, marketing, packaging – maintained within the leveled-hierarchy [homogenous identities] of becoming to a situation of becoming, multiplicand signifiers/signified operate as oxygenatory Stockholm witnesses & sadist captors to a Being inseparable from its image -sans which Being would encounter 'the abyss', the derivation of its concreteless essence, which is Nothing; the faceless nonentity, specter, ghost - the mannequin alludes to this, referring to a wordless comprehension, an empty Dasein; Wittgenstein's ''Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'' [Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, 7]. Non-Being posing as Being (a literary composition) appropriates its own objectives as social goals (e.g. non-segregation, rights of women, welfare state, economic regulation, tariffs, health – all produced further profits & social control of desires seemingly independent/liberatory yet imagined & cultivated by another―capital itself).

Needs are subsequently induced by the system of production, as the ‘‘most advanced form of the rational systematization of the productive forces at the individual level’’(75) – however Baudrillard rejects that a ‘‘free, conscious subject’’ free from the system of needs (that is, the desire for a social meaning, of real difference, resultant from a subject rather than the object) is possible. To ‘me’ this doesn’t mean that from recognition of its structures the system of needs cannot be revealed/disrupted/improved through replacement more ethically -an adherence to a modified humanistic corpus. To do so would require acknowledgement of the evolving societal pressures: ‘‘The generalized integration of the individual ‘private’ levels (needs, feelings, aspirations, drives) as productive forces cannot but be accompanied by a generalized extension at this level of the patterns of repression, sublimation, concentration, systematization, rationalization – and, of course, alienation! - which for centuries, but particularly since the nineteenth century, have governed the construction of the industrial system’’ (76)

‘‘One enters, rather, into a generalized system of exchange and production of coded values where, in spite of themselves, all consumers are involved with all others’’(78)

‘‘The People are the workers, provided they are unorganized. The Public and Public Opinion are the consumers, provided they content themselves with consuming’’(86)

Personalization or the Smallest Marginal Difference:

Baudrillard reminds us that the supreme product on demand is of achieving the self-ideal/image of personality (social media has such tools for you to ‘define yourself’, and clearly evident on steemit, a platform that designates ‘achievement’ of synthetic ‘self’ by pure-capital itself, which demonstrates why real decentralization cannot be tied to a singular master signifier); a person that does not exist - ‘‘the organizing myth of the subject’’ (88), a ‘‘synthetic individuality’’; an absent self, reconstituted abstractly through semiotics – an ‘‘industrial production of [non]differences’’.

Conspicuous underconsumption is regarded as applied restrictions by high-class individuals against their imitative middle-class competitors (according to the social code of values, ‘‘an unconscious field of social logic’’); a desire for lost simplicity. This exchange of opposing differences strengthens group integration as identified signs, via the trained language by which they are sent, received, and reinvented – to relieve their tension. Ergo, the narcissism of the consumer individual is a refraction of collective features, in fact, mistaking a reflection as oneself when it is the ideal of societies unconscious code, the illusion of a singular.

‘‘Woman is sold to women… while doing what she believes is preening herself, scenting herself, clothing herself, in a word ‘creating herself’, she is, in fact, consuming herself’’[Évelyne Sullerot reference]. Baudrillard separates natural, functional, non-consumptive, ‘genuine qualities’ of beauty, charm and taste as ‘‘spontaneous and natural relation’’ (95); against artificial, performative, self-consuming relations mediated by signs as constituted – this distinction isn’t applied with any validity, as the abstract universals are polluted already to an (immeasurable?) extent by the uniform unconscious code system.
[utility vs social function is non-persuasive as self is always fashioned]. Such contradiction he ascribes to beauty and culture as evidence of superfluity, an ‘alienated’ social function performed by proxy.

Societal conceptions of gender fashion’s Being-for-itself into sculpted ‘model ideal’s’ - Male model ideal: a correct choice, ascetic, noble behaviour, knowing how to choose, belonging to the elect, aim of distinction. Female model ideal: vicarious pleasure/indulgence, self as non-autonomous proxy, derived (from men, the misogyny/androcentrism of an imposed male-centredness, a conception to implicit uniformity within said gender thoughts/behaviors). Their heterogeneity is unchanged by identified hybridity.

Proliferation of lowest common culture (LCC) through a technical medium, obsessed with immediacy, imposed ‘fashion’ according to conventions, detesting analytical, rational, deliberative thinking [although with its own ‘empirical’ obsessions]; the concerning with ‘correct’ answers to questions so as to ‘‘engage[s] the individual in the collective ritual of consumption’’(105), not of utility but fantasy play. Culture becomes its own object of consumption, subject to replacement, homogeneous with other objects.

A tautological continual reference of a total chain of signifiers/signified which is unconsciously decoded by the viewer – the image/sign/advertisement; its message is produced by the medium itself, not context – a neo-reality, that of the pseudo-artifact; which replaces the previous reality. The act of purchasing ratifies a truth that is beyond empirical validation, or truth/falsity; their imperatives become a self-fulfilling prophecy – speech has become subject to commodification, produced to operate within the sequentially tautologous, repetitively self-referencing arrangement of signs. Connotation parenthesizes denotation, making the latter indistinguishable.

The Finest Consumer Object – The Body:

The conversion of reverence for a sacred soul/spirit to a sacred body is commented upon, its conflictions attempted to be remedied by medicine, ‘self-care’; rejection of this through repression/harm against the body within system of signs.

Baudrillard gives furtherance to how instantiations of sexual signifiers are censored - ‘‘The real conditioning we are subjected to by the machinery of erotic advertising is not some ‘deep-level’ persuasion of unconscious suggestion, but rather that censorship of the deep meaning, the symbolic function, the fantasmic expression in an articulated syntax – in short, the censorship of the living emanation of sexual signifiers. All this is blotted out, censored, abolished in a codified play of sexual signs, in the opaque obviousness of the sexual that is deployed on all sides, in which the subtle destructuring of syntax leaves place only for a closed, tautological manipulation. It is in this systematic terrorism, which operates at the level of signification itself, that all sexuality empties itself of its substance and becomes material for consumption’’(148-149)

Example – sex doll: Deposed from symbolic function (the denial of sexuality beyond functional division, its capacity for subversion) by transposing it with individualized Eros, assigning a sex to the individual & individual to the sex, a technical & social division of labour – sex becomes a fragmented ‘private property’. Its lost, disembodied sexuality collapses to use-value, and commodity sign/exchange-value. Ergo the emphasis of assigning a sex to children is to castrate them through exhibition of signs & not unindividuated Eros.

Baudrillard denies the egalitarian ideal of equal value of time in leisure, it has for him no objective utility-value, it has been ‘liberated’ as an object subject to capital & production; hours, months, day et cetera are individually ‘invested‘ ‘‘Promethean myth’’; functions governed by the semiotic system – the appropriation of an imitative desire already absent.

The advertising operation therefore converts individual character, autonomy & an inherent value of the self into a signified code where one is a ‘personality’, dependent for values/desires to be told and affirmed, imperfections ignored (or offering how to ‘remove’ them if you just buy X), affirmation through flattery, the declaration ‘no man is an island’ so as to enforce faux sociality & obedience to a perpetual pursuit of a mysterious, unknowable known dream of another’s creation – only intuitively perceived as an ‘ambience’ [the diffuse network of relations, consumed & produced within a group], a mild frustration consequent of a latent, persistent anxiety.

‘Cult of sincerity’ (a consumption of dialectical distinction of genuine/artificial with no real qualities, only signs) reminders to the insufficient trust in oneself/others; & a mistrust/fear of being deceived/rejected by social structure/culture. Tolerance connotes the moral generalized relativity of mediated functions/objects/Beings/relations/ideas with signs.

Anomie in the Affluent Society:

‘‘Now, perhaps it quite simply means that something [absolute/unknown/universal/ being/eros/thanatos/will (to power?)/’unconscious’? - would argue thanatos as this is what bodies/cosmos itself are ‘programmed’ to proliferate] far exceeds the conscious objectives of satisfaction and well-being by which this society justifies itself (in its own eyes) or, rather, by which it reinstates itself within the norms of conscious rationality. In this sense, this unexplained violence must cause us to reassess all our thinking on affluence: affluence and violence go together; they have to be analysed together’’(175).

‘‘A gigantic process of primitive accumulation of anxiety, guilt and rejection runs parallel to the process of expansion and satisfaction and it is this source of discontent which fuels the violent, impulsive subversion of – and murderous ‘acting out’ against – the very order of happiness...Guilt, ‘malaise’ and profound incompatibilities are at the heart of the current system itself, and are produced by it in the course of its logical development’’(176) [thanatos, human urge for destruction effected in societal structure].

If one cares to know the reason for mass shootings, homicide, rape, abuse, arguments of ideas/ideologies or violence in general, this inherent, forever dissatisfied thanatos is a reason one ‘sees’ only through symptoms [why ‘banning guns’ is not a solution, lest when 3d-printed en masse]. Art hence appears to be a commentary towards thanatos/for some a reaction against it (eros is to be included here).

Society attempts to diminish the force of general ‘life anxiety’ by (1) offering malaise as a metaconsumptive object, which perpetuates the dialectic; or (2) ‘soothing processes’, therapy, roles/functions of a ‘meaningful life’, ideologies, individual & group cathexis (‘hippies’/zen/psychedelics as a luxury, pacifying product of consumption)– to acculturate one in the endless, repetitive, absurd, aimless [it literally has no objective] horizon of ‘becoming’ (this has similarities to universe extension as embodying one universal, a negative; so wouldn’t surprise one if a ‘big crunch’ follows to compensate; perhaps a predisposition dormant within ‘dark matter’ until a certain imbalance/shift of cosmic energy/’will’/force occurs. One could argue philosophy as the formulation of the most pervasive, immutable control structure (in accordance with tensions’ dialectic, largely ‘unconscious’, unacknowledged, surreptitious)).

‘‘In the generalized process of consumption, there is no longer any soul, no shadow, no double, and no image in the specular sense. There is no longer any contradiction within being, or any problematic of being and appearance. There is no longer anything but the transmission and reception of signs, and the individual being vanishes in this combinatory and calculus of signs. Consumer man never comes face to face with his own needs, any more than with the specific product of his labour; nor is he ever confronted with his own image: he is immanent in the signs he arranges. There is no transcendence any more, no finality, no objective: what characterizes this society is the absence of ‘reflection’, of a perspective on itself. There is, therefore, no maleficent agency, like that of the Devil, with whom one could enter into a Faustian pact to gain wealth and glory, since one is given these things by a beneficent, maternal ambience – the affluent society itself… There is only the shop-window – the site of consumption, in which the individual no longer produces his own reflection, but is absorbed in the contemplation of multiple signs/objects, is absorbed into the order of signifiers of social status, etc. He is not reflected in that order, but absorbed and abolished. The subject of consumption is the order of signs...For there is no longer, properly speaking, any ‘selfsame’, any ‘subject itself’, or, therefore, any ‘alterity of the selfsame’, and therefore no alienation in the strict sense...The ludic dimension of consumption has gradually supplanted the tragic dimension of identity’’(191-192).

One can associate then the formless idea of ‘America’ (its ‘dream’ a complete fabricated belief & believed fabrication) - as the preeminent abstract force of consumption: ‘‘a whole society speaks itself in the mode of prophecy, but a prophecy which does not have future ideals or transcendent heroes for its substance, but solely the reflection of itself and of its immanence’’(194)

Which follows is that through the obvious allusion to the celebrity; everything has become imitation, performance [Baudrillard astutely reminds us that the French definition of personne means no-one]: ‘‘By imitating a tautology, we ourselves become a tautology standing for what we stand for...We look for models, and we see our own image’’[Daniel Boorstin, The Image, p.83]

But to take position of a negatory countering to the ‘positive’ aspects of the consumption myth is to accept the opposing role which strengthens the illusion [there is nothing behind its machinations]; a moralizing anti-discourse [example of the May 1968 protests] – as through denouncement the value of consumed objects is ennobled. 68’ was still fascinated by the object. It is the element of death drive, éskhatos, autothanatography; a violence which the referent semiotic circularity requires.

Baudrillard consummates the ouroboros back on himself by these closing sentiments - ‘‘Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation...a society with no history and no dizzying heights, a society with no other myth than itself...But here we are once again speaking in morose, prophetic terms, caught in the trap of the Object and its apparent plenitude. Now, we know that the Object is nothing and that behind it stands the tangled void of human relations, the negative imprint of the immense mobilization of productive and social forces which have become reified in it. We shall await the violent irruptions and sudden disintegrations which will come, just as unforeseeably as-certainly as May 1968, to wreck this white Mass’’(196).

Conclusive Discussion:

In reflection to all aforesaid, it is important to have an air of caution if proposing adjustments to the anti-fragile system of fragility; although personal awareness, removal of projections to a nation/tribe/ideology/absolute (inc. God)/hero worship (inc. oneself)/avoidance of Buddhist ‘emptying oneself’ [as it is biased towards negation of self, the non-sovereign nay; one should endeavour ambivalence, neutrality, ne uter]. The result of such is that a continual mediation of assertive eros (ambition, expression, ego/super-ego) and thanatos (violence to self & others, not simply physical, words can be doubly impactful, & legal/accepted conventions) – will attempt to dominate each other. One must recognize these are opposing complementary sources that must not be wholly indulged (and avoided if possible).

A Hegelian influence is imminent throughout (thesis/antithesis as consumption/violent denigration), so if one was to criticize the discourse it can be through this (the opposition doesn’t really exist, any position is a linear minima, a designated expectation towards the already-vanished vanishing point – there is only an echo – no ‘empirical’ evidence et cetera). Baudrillard would argue vis-à-vis that the reification of the Object – conjunctive to Lacan’s objet petit a – within such tautological structure endures beyond the reaches of historical expulsions of libidinal energy. This introduces a Fukuyama-ist vein of an ‘end of history’, an impervious, reigning post-modern (at the time) liberal capitalist democracy. As events since then deems this economic theory mistaken [or critically reformulated]; it is possible, although contingent, that the selfsame judgment can be applied to the consumptive theory.

For ‘me’ 'personally', the prime emotion as a reaction to aforesaid is of profound listlessness, a boredom with life, life has already been lost – as the individual ‘I’ is in reality empty, nothing, non-being, a false-artifact; similarly it seems a fundamental untruth [at least from an ethical, singular-general yearning] lies at the heart of reality. It translates all one’s desires, hopes, preferences, thoughts as ‘objectively’ (precisely l'objet sujet) meaninglessness. This doesn’t mean detachment from illusory self creation-of-self is possible, one simply recognizes this ‘I’ as decentred, without being acted upon by guilt/anxiety to [dis]embody an ascetic ideal; hence the use of quotation marks. Although it renders personhood a childish narrative; and can induce thanatos to wish dissimulation of self/others—one should plausibly comprehend ‘nothingness’/zero/neutrality as the ultimate, unachievable goal of the cosmos; while constructing a meaning (the horizon of becoming), to contain the least self-deception as possible. 'My' preference is a wish for this dialectic to be a false one, for the contradiction between consumption/destruction, eros/thanatos, self/other, earthly/transcendent, phenomenal/noumenal, nothingness/totality, subject/object, female/male, +1/-1, finite/eternal – to be overcome, dissolved. Likely this would involve multidisciplinary reformulations of the question without reflexivity -of which there are already unanswerable answers -to who? [E.g., a nascent supervening post-neo-Kantian model: ‘given the organizing principles of the life-imperative’...]

I do not know the reason for such ‘salvation’ except for that it is an ascendant instinctual drive, and conceivably that of the inherent will of [undefinable] nothingness. I will now conclude, as the discussion to beyond-Cartesian opposites inevitably results in repetition and unresolvable cycles (Mandala//ouroboros/forever mañana ascribed to nature; the non-existent, fleeting, present, unable to be possessed present as it is the continual nothingness/disposition for neutrality of being/cosmos). Compassion [why not?] without deceptive motives to one’s self/other/self-other (minimum possible) should be noted, remember, nobody knows themselves. This unrelenting need for henosis [‘salvation, repentance, God, neutrality’] is likely something DNA instills upon us [e.g. sex as union of opposites within monism].
A terminal (eccentric?) unrelated-relating point in regards to the ‘holy triad’, Jesus as representing earthly life, who becomes God through death (God as vanished-vanishing death itself); resurrection as metaphorical emergence of holy spirit [to ‘bear one’s cross’]; the ever-present nothingness/neutrality which would explain its unseen, impersonal substance. That is, the eventual ‘aim’ is neutrality/HS using death/HF as a conduit.

Of course, ‘I’ may be wholly incorrect in ‘my’ summary/translation (of a translation, originally French dialect) of Baudrillard’s thesis to the current orbicular structure of the life-system here & the interpretation thereof, however it rationally accords with the current prevailing rituals of global consumption; the treatment of all things as signs in endless reference; and the unconscious training within the structural code of determined needs, identity as image, and difference as conformity.

Read Jean Baudrillard's 'The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures' (1970): https://archive.org/details/BaudrillardJeanTheConsumerSocietyMythsAndStructures1970
Linked Reading Material: ‘Society of the Spectacle’ Guy Debord (1967) https://archive.org/details/DebordSocietyOfTheSpectacleDonaldNicholsonSmithTranslation
Roland Barthes: 'Mythologies' (1957) https://archive.org/details/BarthesRolandMythologiesEN1972
Henri Lefebvre: 'Critique of Everyday Life' (1947)

[Post-Note: It would be helpful if an IPFS crypto replacement for archive.org was created (where books would be censorship resistant, free, not limited to one borrow, multiple nodes). I know Florin Coin’s 'Library of Alexandria' has developed a related project however it is only a database (for download), you can’t read any books on the website, the progression is quiet & some are charged. If you know of any projects having created/creating a solution ‘I’ would appreciate, & so will you too!]

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