SAARUTU Source Brief · Reference Library
Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation (1970), Chris Turner trans. (Sage, 1998)
Part I · The Formal Liturgy of the Object: 1 Profusion · 2 Miraculous Status of Consumption · 3 Vicious Circle of Growth
Part II · The Theory of Consumption: 4 Social Logic of Consumption · 5 Towards a Theory of Consumption · 6 Personalization
Part III · Mass Media, Sex and Leisure: 7 Mass-Media Culture · 8 The Body · 9 The Drama of Leisure · 10 Mystique of Solicitude · 11 Anomie in the Affluent Society
Conclusion · On Contemporary Alienation, or the End of the Pact with the Devil
What follows reconstructs the book by its own organizing structure, so the joints of the argument can be retrieved at speed. Baudrillard moves from description (the profusion of objects) to a theory (consumption as a code), then applies that theory across media, the body, leisure, service, and anomie, and closes on a meta-claim: that the consumer society is its own myth, and that the critique of consumption belongs to the myth. The book's recurring operation is to take a phenomenon that presents itself as natural (happiness, need, the body, free time, the smile) and show it to be a produced sign indexed to a system whose only end is its own reproduction. The decisive theoretical figure, stated late but governing throughout, is that need is not the need for an object but the need for difference, and that consumption is therefore unlimited because difference is.
The book opens descriptively, not theoretically. The first datum of the age of affluence is that humans are now surrounded not by other humans but by objects.
Consumer Society, p. 25
"Strictly speaking, the humans of the 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."
Consumer Society, p. 25
"Just as the wolf-child became a wolf by living among wolves, so we too are slowly becoming functional. We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession."
The chapter's epigraph is Marx on the London shop-windows, where the riches of the world are reduced to price-tags.
Consumer Society, p. 26
"The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and the laconic symbols £.s.d. This is how commodities are presented in circulation. (Marx)"
Profusion is first piling high, which is already more than quantity.
Consumer Society, p. 26
"There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity, the maternal, luxurious sense of being already in the Land of Cockaigne."
Consumer Society, p. 26
"You buy the part for the whole. And this metonymic, repetitive discourse of consumable matter, of the commodity, becomes once again, through a great collective metaphor — by virtue of its very excess — the image of the gift, and of that inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterizes the feast."
Profusion is then organized into packages or collections, and here the first move of the whole book is made: the consumer relates not to the object in its utility but to a set of objects in its signification.
Consumer Society, p. 27
"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. Washing machine, refrigerator and dishwasher taken together have a different meaning from the one each has individually as an appliance."
Consumer Society, p. 27
"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."
Consumer Society, p. 27
"They may, in certain cases, imitate disorder the better to seduce, but they are always arranged to mark out directive paths, to orientate the purchasing impulse towards networks of objects in order to captivate that impulse and bring it, in keeping with its own logic, to the highest degree of commitment, to the limits of its economic potential. Clothing, machines and toiletries thus constitute object pathways, which establish inertial constraints in the consumer: he will move logically from one object to another."
The synthesis of profusion and calculation is the drugstore, where culture is not prostituted but "culturalized," and where every order of merchandise becomes interchangeable signs.
Consumer Society, p. 28
"This is generalized neo-culture, where there is no longer any difference between a delicatessen and an art gallery, between Playboy and a treatise on palaeontology."
The drugstore can become a town. Parly 2 ("the biggest shopping centre in Europe") is described in its own promotional copy, including the credit card.
Consumer Society, p. 29
"Naturally, for those who want it, the centre has introduced the most modern style of payment: the 'credit card'. This frees shoppers from cheques or cash — and even from financial difficulties. To pay, you just show your card and sign the bill."
The chapter ends on the homogenizing "digest," where every once-distinct activity is blended into perpetual shopping and the symbolic function is abolished.
Consumer Society, p. 30
"Work, leisure, nature and culture: all these things which were once dispersed, which once generated anxiety and complexity in real life, in our 'anarchic and archaic towns and cities', all these sundered activities, these activities which were more or less irreducible one to another, are now at last mixed and blended, climatized and homogenized in the same sweeping vista of perpetual shopping. All are now rendered sexless in the same hermaphroditic ambience of fashion!"
Consumer Society, p. 30
"Just as the gods of all countries coexisted syncretically in the Roman Pantheon in an immense 'digest', so all the gods — or demons — of consumption have come together in our Super Shopping Centre, which is our Pantheon — or Pandaemonium."
Consumer Society, p. 30
"There is no longer any symbolic function, but merely an eternal combinatory of 'ambience' in a perpetual springtime."
The governing fable is the Melanesian cargo cult: natives built a simulacrum aeroplane of branches and creepers, lit a landing-ground, and waited for the real aircraft to descend (p.31). The beneficiary of the consumer miracle does the same.
Consumer Society, p. 31
"The beneficiary of the consumer miracle also sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits (waits desperately, a moralist would say) for happiness to alight."
The thesis: consumption is governed by magical thinking, except that the operative belief is in signs rather than thoughts.
Consumer Society, p. 31
"consumption is governed by a form of magical thinking; daily life is governed by a mentality based on miraculous thinking, a primitive mentality, in so far as that has been defined as being based on a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts (though what we have in this case is a belief in the omnipotence of signs). 'Affluence' is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness."
The crucial qualification, made on the record, guards the analysis against being read as idealism: the society is first of all an order of production, with the order of consumption entangled in it.
Consumer Society, pp. 32–33
"This does not mean that our society is not firstly, objectively and decisively a society of production, an order of production, and therefore the site of an economic and political strategy. But it means that there is entangled with that order an order of consumption, which is an order of the manipulation of signs."
Consumer Society, p. 33
"the problem of the historical production of these significations and codes remains fully intact — that analysis having to articulate itself to the analysis of the process of material and technical production as its theoretical continuation."
The cargo myth is more alive in the West than in Melanesia, because abundance is experienced as a dispensation rather than as something produced.
Consumer Society, p. 32
"And so the cargo myth lives again in the West whereas it is declining in Melanesia. For even if abundance is becoming a banal, daily fact, it continues to be experienced as a daily miracle, in so far as it does not appear to be something produced and extracted, something won after a historical and social effort, but something dispensed by a beneficent mythological agency to which we are the legitimate heirs: Technology, Progress, Growth, etc."
The second movement is the news item [le fait divers]. Reality is consumed at the distance of the sign, and equally in cargo and in catastrophe.
Consumer Society, p. 33
"Cargo or catastrophe — in both cases, we have an effect of consumed vertigo."
Consumer Society, pp. 33–34
"The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology."
Consumer Society, p. 34
"What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [le vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this 'Heart' which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security."
The consumer's relation to the real is defined precisely between interest and indifference, and between knowledge and ignorance.
Consumer Society, p. 34
"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 locus of consumption is daily life, theorized as a closure that cannot bear itself without the simulacrum of the world.
Consumer Society, p. 35
"Everydayness as closure, as Verborgenheit, would be unbearable without the simulacrum of the world, without the alibi of participation in the world. It has to be fuelled by the images, the repeated signs of that transcendence. As we have seen, its tranquillity needs the vertiginous spin of reality and history. Its tranquillity requires perpetual consumed violence for its own exaltation. That is its particular obscenity. It is partial to events and violence, provided the violence is served up at room temperature."
Consumer Society, p. 35
"The TV image, like a window turned outside-in, opens initially on to a room and, in that room, the cruel exteriority of the world becomes something intimate and warm — warm with a perverse warmth."
The road accident is the exemplary "daily fatality," coupled with the weather forecast, and the chapter closes on the society's self-image.
Consumer Society, p. 36
"The crash is the finest exemplar of 'daily fatality'. If it is exploited with such passion, this is because it performs an essential collective function. The litany of road deaths is rivalled only by the litany of weather forecasts. In fact the two form a mythic couple — the obsession with the sun and the litany of death are inseparable."
Consumer Society, p. 36
"The consumer society sees itself as an encircled Jerusalem, rich and threatened. That is its ideology."
This is the chapter densest with figures, and they travel, so they are carried whole. Collective expenditure met by third parties is tabulated in the prose (the original tables were removed; see apparatus).
Consumer Society, p. 37
"This proportion of collective expenditure meeting individual needs has risen from 13 per cent of total consumption in 1959 to 17 per cent in 1965. In 1965, the percentage of needs met by third parties was: • 1 per cent for food and clothing ('subsistence'); • 13 per cent for housing expenses, transport and communication networks ('the environment'); • 67 per cent in the fields of education, culture, sport and health ('protection and development of the person')."
Consumer Society, pp. 37–38
"The proportion of 17-year-olds in full-time education is 52 per cent: 90 per cent for the children of senior managers, professionals and teachers, less than 40 per cent for farmers and workers. In higher education, the chances of access for boys in the former category are more than 33 per cent, but only 1 or 2 per cent for the latter."
Consumer Society, p. 38 (E. Lisle)
"where social security alone is concerned, the ratio of contributions to total wage costs has risen from 23.9 per cent in 1959 to 25.9 per cent in 1967. Social security thus costs employed workers a quarter of their resources, it being fair to regard the so-called 'employers' contributions' as a deduction at source from workers' incomes, as is also the 5 per cent fixed-rate contribution. The total of these deductions is much higher than the sum deducted in income tax. Since the latter is progressive, but social security contributions and the fixed-rate contribution are regressive, the net effect of tax and other deductions is regressive."
The argumentative turn is the radical hypothesis: that redistribution's failure is not an anomaly but the system performing its real function.
Consumer Society, pp. 38–39
"Or should we, rather, formulate the radical hypothesis that the mechanisms of redistribution, which are so successful in preserving privilege, are in fact an integral part, a tactical element, of the power system — and hand in glove in that regard with the educational and electoral systems? There would then be no point deploring the repeated failure of a social policy: we should, rather, have to conclude that it was performing its real function to perfection."
Environmental nuisance. Growth generates nuisances whose correctives are themselves counted as growth.
Consumer Society, p. 39
"Does the flourishing mineral water industry permit us to speak of a real increase in 'affluence' since, to a large extent, it is merely a response to the deficient quality of urban water? And so on. We should never be done with listing all the productive and consumer activities which merely counteract internal nuisances generated by the system of growth. Once it has passed a certain threshold, extra productivity is almost entirely wiped out, swallowed up, by this homoeopathic treatment of growth by growth."
Consumer Society, p. 40 (E. Lisle)
"In short, the major cost of the consumer society is the sense of generalized insecurity it engenders."
Consumer Society, p. 41
"With 'dysfunctional' consumption, both individual and collective, rising more quickly than the 'functional', the system is basically becoming parasitic upon itself."
The Mystique of GNP. National accounting is a "white magic" of figures in which nuisances are entered positively.
Consumer Society, p. 41
"In this reference to mystique, we are speaking of the most extraordinary collective bluff on the part of modern societies — of an operation of 'white magic' on the figures which in reality conceals a black magic of collective bewitchment. We are speaking of the absurd gymnastics of accounting illusions, of national accounts. Nothing enters into these except factors which are visible and measurable by the criteria of economic rationality, and that indeed is the central principle of the magic. Research, culture and women's domestic labour are all excluded from these accounts on this basis, though certain things which have no business there do figure in them, merely because they are measurable."
Consumer Society, p. 41
"This is the logical result, expressed in figures, of the magical goal of production for its own sake: every article produced is sacralized by the very fact of its being produced. Every article produced is positive, every measurable thing is positive."
Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is read sociologically.
Consumer Society, p. 42
"It is, precisely, by its hidden defects, its balancing forces, its nuisances, and what seem like vices when compared with a rational system, that the real system prospers. Mandeville was accused of cynicism: it is the social order, the order of production, which is objectively cynical."
Waste. The chapter's most-cited material. Waste is not residual madness but a positive social function, the site where existence is felt.
Consumer Society, p. 43
"All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual — and society — feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive."
Consumer Society, p. 43
"In potlatch, for example, it is the competitive destruction of precious goods which sets the seal on social organization. The Kwakiutl sacrifice blankets, canoes, etched 'coppers', which they burn or throw into the sea to 'maintain their rank,' to assert their value."
Baudrillard stages Valéry's economy of foresight against the Nietzsche–Bataille economy of expenditure, quoting both at length.
Consumer Society, p. 44
"When one contemplates piles of imperishable foodstuffs, is one not looking at time in hand and activity spared? A box of biscuits is a whole month of idleness and life. Pots of conserves and fibre baskets stuffed with seeds and nuts are a storehouse of quietude; a whole winter of tranquillity lies hoarded up in their aroma … Robinson Crusoe could smell the presence of the future in the coffers and chests in his store-room. His hoard radiated idleness." (Valéry)
Consumer Society, p. 44
"Physiologists should think again before positing the 'instinct of preservation' as the cardinal drive in an organic creature. A living thing wants above all to discharge its force: 'preservation' is only a consequence of this. Beware of superfluous teleological principles! The entire concept 'instinct of preservation' is one of them … The 'struggle for existence' — this formula refers to an exceptional situation; the rule is much rather the struggle for power, the ambition to have 'more' and 'better' and 'quicker' and 'more often'." (Nietzsche, The Will to Power [Fragment 650])
The structural question is posed through King Lear (II.iv): survival or meaning.
Consumer Society, p. 44
"one of the fundamental problems posed by consumption is the following: do human beings organize themselves for purposes of survival, or in terms of the individual or collective meaning they give to their lives? Now, this value of 'being', this structural value may involve the sacrifice of economic values. And this problem is not metaphysical. It is at the centre of consumption and may be expressed as follows: does not affluence ultimately only have meaning in wastage?"
The Soviet dacha names the "something more" of symbolic value that mere appropriation can carry when it is "extra" (pp.44–45). The hero of consumption (after Riesman and Morin) supplants the hero of production.
Consumer Society, pp. 45–46
"The great exemplary lives of self-made men and founders, pioneers, explorers and colonizers, which succeeded those of saints and historical figures, have today given way to the lives of movie stars, sporting or gambling heroes, of a handful of gilded princes or globe-trotting barons — in a word, the lives of great wastrels (even if the imperative is often that they be shown, by contrast, in their daily 'simplicity', doing their shopping, etc.). With all these great dinosaurs who fill the magazines and TV programmes, it is always the excessiveness of their lives, the potential for outrageous expenditure that is exalted. Their superhuman quality is the whiff of potlatch that attaches to them."
Consumer Society, p. 46
"Like them, indeed, they are never so great as when, like James Dean, they pay for this elevated position with their lives."
Modern wastage has lost potlatch's symbolic and collective significance; the star's gown is caricatured by "disposable panties," and production itself is oriented toward death.
Consumer Society, p. 46
"The caricature of the magnificent dress which the star wears for just one evening are the 'disposable panties' which, 80 per cent viscose and 20 per cent non-woven acrylic, can be put on in the morning and thrown away at night, and need no washing."
Consumer Society, p. 46
"What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equalled only by the speed of price rises. This alone would be sufficient to throw into question the 'rationalistic' postulates of the whole of economic science on utility, needs, etc. Now, we know that the order of production only survives by paying the price of this extermination, this perpetual calculated 'suicide' of the mass of objects, and that this operation is based on technological 'sabotage' or organized obsolescence under cover of fashion. Advertising achieves the marvellous feat of consuming a substantial budget with the sole aim not of adding to the use-value of objects, but of subtracting value from them, of detracting from their time-value by subordinating them to their fashion-value and to ever earlier replacement."
The chapter peaks on the Accident, then states the destruction thesis that the whole of Part I has been building toward.
Consumer Society, p. 47
"'Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!' Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but — without doubt much more deeply than this — by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic 'happening', the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation)."
Consumer Society, p. 47
"The consumer society needs its objects in order to be. More precisely, it needs to destroy them. The use of objects leads only to their dwindling disappearance. The value created is much more intense in violent loss. This is why destruction remains the fundamental alternative to production: consumption is merely an intermediate term between the two. There is a profound tendency within consumption for it to surpass itself, to transfigure itself in destruction. It is in destruction that it acquires its meaning. Most of the time in daily life today, it remains subordinate — as a managed consumptivity — to the order of productivity. This is why, most of the time, objects are present by their absence, and why their very abundance paradoxically signifies penury. Stock is the excessive expression of lack and a mark of anxiety. Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth."
The chapter attacks the "naïve anthropology" of a natural propensity to happiness. The ideological force of happiness is traced not to nature but to its taking over the myth of Equality, which is why it must become measurable.
Consumer Society, p. 49
"The ideological force of the notion of happiness does not originate in a natural propensity on the part of each individual to realize that happiness for himself. It derives, socio-historically, from the fact that the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality."
Consumer Society, p. 49
"to be the vehicle of the egalitarian myth, Happiness has to be measurable. It has to be a well-being measurable in terms of objects and signs; it has to be 'comfort', as Tocqueville put it, already noting this trend of democratic societies towards ever more well-being as a reduction of the impact of social misfortune and an equalization of all destinies."
Consumer Society, p. 50
"This is the democracy of social standing, the democracy of the TV, the car and the stereo, an apparently concrete but, in fact, equally formal democracy which, beyond contradictions and social inequalities, corresponds to the formal democracy enshrined in the Constitution. Both of these, the one serving as an alibi for the other, combine in a general democratic ideology which conceals the absence of democracy and the non-existence of equality."
Consumer Society, p. 50
"At the meat-and-drink level (use-value), there are no proletarians, no privileged individuals."
Baudrillard frames the false problem (does growth promote or hinder equality?) and refuses both horns, making the chapter's signature inversion.
Consumer Society, p. 53
"There is not in fact — and never has been — any 'affluent society', any more than there is an 'indigent society', since every society of whatever kind and whatever the volume of goods produced or available wealth is geared both to a structural excess and a structural penury."
Consumer Society, p. 53
"Overturning the false problem of whether growth is egalitarian or inegalitarian, we shall say that it is growth itself which is a function of inequality. It is the need of the inegalitarian social order — the social structure of privilege — to maintain itself that produces and reproduces growth as its strategic element."
On Galbraith's claim that wealth no longer confers its old advantages, Baudrillard concedes the symptom and reverses its meaning: under-consumption is a higher distinction, not the abolition of distinction.
Consumer Society, pp. 54–55
"Now, admittedly, the rich man who drives a 2CV no longer bedazzles. What he does is more subtle: he super-differentiates himself, super-distinguishes himself by his manner of consuming, by style. He maintains his privilege absolutely by moving from conspicuous to discreet (super-conspicuous) consumption, by moving from quantitative ostentation to distinction, from money to culture."
Consumer Society, p. 55
"What Galbraith and the others fail to see is that the very fact that (economic) inequality is no longer a problem in itself constitutes a problem."
The two fundamental options are stated baldly. Option one is the magical-idealist expulsion of negativity as residual; option two is the structural view.
Consumer Society, p. 55
"The system only sustains itself by producing wealth and poverty, by producing as many dissatisfactions as satisfactions, as much nuisance as 'progress'. Its only logic is to survive and its strategy in this regard is to keep human society out of kilter, in perpetual deficit."
Poverty is therefore not locatable in persons or places, and the system is not morally malign but indifferent to content.
Consumer Society, p. 56
"If poverty and nuisance cannot be eliminated, this is because they are anywhere but in the poor neighbourhoods. They are not in the slums or shanty-towns, but in the socio-economic structure."
Consumer Society, p. 56
"Things are much more serious than this: the system knows only the conditions of its survival, it knows nothing of social and individual contents."
New segregations. As essential goods homogenize, scarcity migrates to space, air, silence, and finally to knowledge and power.
Consumer Society, p. 57
"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."
Consumer Society, p. 57
"Knowledge and power are, or are going to become, the two great scarce commodities of our affluent societies."
Consumer Society, p. 58
"The difference in expenditure between workers and senior managers on essential goods is 100:135, but it is 100:245 on household equipment, 100:305 on transport and 100:390 on leisure."
The new "rights" are read as symptoms of commodification, not progress.
Consumer Society, p. 58
"there is no right to space until there no longer is space for everyone, and until space and silence are the privilege of some at the expense of others."
Consumer Society, p. 58
"The 'right to clean air' signifies the loss of clean air as a natural good, its transition to commodity status and its inegalitarian social redistribution."
A class institution. Consumption is set parallel to the educational system: equality before objects is formal, and the abstract base is precisely what lets discrimination operate.
Consumer Society, p. 58
"Consumption no more homogenizes the social body than the educational system homogenizes cultural opportunities. It even highlights the disparities within it."
Consumer Society, p. 59
"But this equality is entirely formal: though bearing on what is most concrete, it is in fact abstract. And it is, by contrast, on this homogeneous abstract base, on this foundation of the abstract democracy of spelling or the TV set, that the real system of discrimination is able to operate — and to operate all the more effectively."
Consumer Society, p. 59
"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."
Consumer Society, p. 60
"It is a class logic which imposes salvation by objects. That is a salvation by works, which, in its 'democratic' nature, stands opposed to the aristocratic principle of salvation by grace and election."
The decisive theoretical statement. Consumption is analysable as signification/communication (a language) and as classification/differentiation. The governing principle:
Consumer Society, p. 61
"The principle of analysis remains as follows: you never consume the object in itself (in its use-value); you are always manipulating objects (in the broadest sense) as signs which distinguish you either by affiliating you to your own group taken as an ideal reference or by marking you off from your group by reference to a group of higher status."
Differentiation is lived as freedom but governed by an unconscious code, and the constraint of relativity is what makes consumption unlimited.
Consumer Society, p. 61
"The consumer experiences his distinctive behaviours as freedom, as aspiration, as choice. His experience is not one of being forced to be different, of obeying a code."
Consumer Society, p. 61
"It alone can account for the fundamental character of consumption, its unlimited character, a dimension which cannot be explained by any theory of needs and satisfaction, since, if the calculation were made in terms of a calorific or energy balance sheet or of use-values, a saturation point would very soon be reached."
Needs do not rise from below but trickle down from a "select package," so there is no spontaneous mass of consumers.
Consumer Society, p. 62
"There is no 'mass of consumers' and no need emerges spontaneously from the grassroots consumer: needs have no chance of appearing in the 'standard package' of needs if they have not already been part of the 'select package'."
Consumer Society, p. 62
"In fact, the field of consumption is a structured social field, where not only goods, but needs themselves, like the various cultural characteristics, pass from a key group, a leading elite, to the other social categories as these 'rise' relatively on the social ladder."
Consumer Society, p. 63
"the needs of the middle and lower classes are always, like objects, subject to a certain backwardness; they lag temporally and culturally behind the needs of the upper classes."
The gap between the production of goods and the production of needs generates a "psychological pauperization," and the social being's needs are in principle limitless.
Consumer Society, p. 64
"Hence the 'psychological pauperization' and the chronic, latent state of crisis, which is itself functionally linked to growth, but which can lead to a point of breakdown, an explosive contradiction."
Consumer Society, p. 64
"There are no limits to man's 'needs' as a social being (i.e. as a being productive of meaning and relative to others in value). The quantitative intake of food is limited, the digestive system is limited, but the cultural system of food is, for its part, indefinite."
Consumer Society, p. 65
"When the whole social world becomes urbanized, when communication becomes total, 'needs' grow exponentially — not from the growth of appetite, but from competition."
The conclusion inverts the affluence thesis: growth society is a society of privileges, defined by reproduced penury.
Consumer Society, p. 66
"Before being a society productive of goods, it is in fact a society productive of privileges. Now, there is a necessary, sociologically definable relationship between privilege and penury. There could not (in any society whatever) be privilege without penury. The two are structurally linked. Growth is, therefore, by its social logic, paradoxically defined by the reproduction of a structural penury."
Consumer Society, p. 66
"Growth is not democracy. Profusion is a function of discrimination. How could it be the corrective to it?"
The Palaeolithic, or the first affluent society. Following Sahlins (cited Les Temps modernes, October 1968), Baudrillard locates true affluence in the reciprocity of primitive exchange, where wealth is relational.
Consumer Society, pp. 66–67
"For Sahlins, it was the hunter-gatherers (the primitive nomadic tribes of Australia, the Kalahari, etc.) who, in spite of their absolute 'poverty', knew true affluence."
Consumer Society, p. 67
"In the economy of the gift and symbolic exchange, a small and always finite quantity of goods is sufficient to create general wealth since those goods pass constantly from one person to the other. Wealth has its basis not in goods, but in the concrete exchange between persons. It is, therefore, unlimited since the cycle of exchange is endless, even among a limited number of individuals, with each moment of the exchange cycle adding to the value of the object exchanged."
Consumer Society, p. 67
"Where, in primitive exchange, every relationship adds to the social wealth, in our 'differential' societies every social relationship adds to individual lack, since every thing possessed is relativized in relation to others."
Consumer Society, p. 68
"It was social logic which brought primitive peoples the 'first' (and only) affluent society. It is our social logic which condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury."
Autopsy of Homo œconomicus. The discourse on needs is staged as a folk-tale and dismissed as tautology.
Consumer Society, p. 69
"A fairy story: 'Once upon a time there was a Man who lived in Scarcity. After many adventures and a long journey through Economic Science, he met the Affluent Society. They married and had lots of needs.'"
Galbraith and the revised sequence. Baudrillard concentrates on The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, granting Galbraith's account of the technostructure's capture of demand its critical value.
Consumer Society, p. 71
"The 'general effect' — either prior to the act of production (surveys, market research) or subsequent to it (advertising, marketing, packaging) — is to 'shift the locus of decision in the purchase of goods from the consumer where it is beyond control to the firm where it is subject to control'."
Consumer Society, p. 72
"In this new case, by contrast, the manufacturers control market behaviour, and guide and model social attitudes and needs. This is, at least tendentially, the total dictatorship of the order of production."
Consumer Society, p. 72
"In fact, the consumer is sovereign in a jungle of ugliness where freedom of choice has been forced upon him."
Consumer Society, p. 73
"The drugstore and the polling booth, the loci of individual freedom, are also the system's two mammary glands."
The three objections to Galbraith. Baudrillard sets out Galbraith's view fully, then corrects it on idealist grounds. (1) On authentic versus artificial satisfactions, he sides partly with the economists.
Consumer Society, p. 73
"It is nonetheless true that, from the point of view of the consumer's own satisfaction, there is no basis on which to decide what is 'factitious' and what is not. The enjoyment of TV or of a second home is experienced as 'true' freedom; no one experiences these things as an alienation. Only an intellectual can say such a thing, from the depths of his moralizing idealism, but this at most marks him out as being, for his part, an alienated moralist."
(2) On the "economic principle," Galbraith's example of forced acculturation to consumption is "seductive, but a false [one]." Baudrillard's text gives the example first as Filipino workers, and restates it as Puerto Ricans at p.81 (the same instance under two names; see apparatus).
Consumer Society, p. 73
"And he cites the example of Filipino workers in California: 'The pressure of debt, and the pressure on each to emulate the most extravagant, quickly converted these happy and easygoing people into a modern and reliable work force.'"
Consumer Society, p. 81
"The example quoted by Galbraith of the Puerto Ricans who have been turned from the passive, easygoing people they once were into a modern labour force by being motivated to consume is striking evidence of the tactical value of regulated, enforced, instructed, stimulated consumption within the modern socio-economic order."
(3) On "needs are the fruits of production," Baudrillard agrees with the words and corrects their sense. This is the chapter's hinge.
Consumer Society, pp. 74–75
"The truth is, not that 'needs are the fruits of production', but that the system of needs is the product of the system of production. This is quite different. 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."
The genealogy of consumption places needs as the fourth productive force, parallel to the machine, capital, and waged labour power.
Consumer Society, p. 75
"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."
This dissolves the "alienists'" puzzle that the puritan ethic persists in the age of affluence. (First locus of a formulation that returns at pp.80–82.)
Consumer Society, p. 76
"We may assert that the puritan ethic, with all it implies in terms of sublimation, transcending of self and repression (in a word, in terms of morality), haunts consumption and needs. It is that ethic which drives it from the inside and gives it this compulsive, unlimited character."
Shifting objects, shifting needs. Outside its denotative function the object becomes substitutable as sign-value, and the model is hysterical conversion.
Consumer Society, p. 77
"In hysterical or psychosomatic conversion, the symptom is, like the sign, (relatively) arbitrary: there is a chain of somatic signifiers — migraine, bowel disorder, lumbago, throat infection, general fatigue — along which the symptom 'wanders', just as there is a long sequence of signs/objects or symbols/objects over which wander not needs (which are always linked to the rational finality of the object), but desire and a further determination which is that of the unconscious social logic."
Consumer Society, p. 77
"The world of objects and needs might thus be seen as a world of generalized hysteria."
Hence the decisive figure of the whole book: need is the need for difference, and so is never satisfiable.
Consumer Society, pp. 77–78
"we may advance the hypothesis that, if one admits that need is never so much the need for a particular object as the 'need' for difference (the desire for the social meaning), then it will be clear that there can never be any achieved satisfaction, or therefore any definition of need."
Denial of enjoyment. The counter-intuitive central claim.
Consumer Society, p. 78
"The 'craving' for objects is 'objectless' (Riesman)."
Consumer Society, p. 78
"According to this hypothesis, paradoxical as it may seem, consumption is defined as exclusive of enjoyment. As social logic, the consumption system establishes itself on the basis of a denial of enjoyment. Enjoyment no longer appears there at all as finality, as rational end, but as the individual rationalization of a process whose ends lie elsewhere. Enjoyment would define consumption for oneself, as something autonomous and final. But consumption is never that. Enjoyment is enjoyment for one's own benefit, but consuming is something one never does alone."
A structural analysis. Via the Lévi-Straussian principle, consumption is a social fact by its break with nature, like the kinship system.
Consumer Society, p. 79
"Let us recall here the Levi-Straussian principle: what confers on consumption its character of being a social fact is not what it apparently preserves of nature (satisfaction, enjoyment/pleasure), but the essential procedure by which it breaks with nature (what defines it as a code, an institution, a system of organization). Just as the kinship system is in the last instance based not on consanguinity and filiation, on a natural datum, but on an arbitrary classification arrangement, so the system of consumption is in the last instance based not on need and enjoyment but on a code of signs (signs/objects) and differences."
Consumer Society, pp. 79–80
"The circulation, purchase, sale, appropriation of differentiated goods and signs/objects today constitute our language, our code, the code by which the entire society communicates and converses. Such is the structure of consumption, its language [langue], by comparison with which individual needs and pleasures [jouissances] are merely speech effects."
The fun system / enforced enjoyment. Enjoyment is recast as civic duty.
Consumer Society, p. 80
"One of the strongest proofs that the principle and finality of consumption is not enjoyment or pleasure is that that is now something which is forced upon us, something institutionalized, not as a right or a pleasure, but as the duty of the citizen."
Consumer Society, p. 80
"Conversely, but in the same way, consumerist man [l'homme-consommateur] regards enjoyment as an obligation; he sees himself as an enjoyment and satisfaction business. He sees it as his duty to be happy, loving, adulating/adulated, charming/charmed, participative, euphoric and dynamic."
Consumer Society, p. 80
"'Try Jesus!' runs an American slogan. You have to try everything, for consumerist man is haunted by the fear of 'missing' something, some form of enjoyment or other."
Consumption as the emergence and control of new productive forces. Consumption is an institution; credit is its disciplinary training, and the parallel is the nineteenth century's training of rural populations for industrial work.
Consumer Society, p. 81
"Consumption is an active, collective behaviour: it is something enforced, a morality, an institution. It is a whole system of values, with all that expression implies in terms of group integration and social control functions."
Consumer Society, p. 81
"Credit is a disciplinary process of the extortion of savings and the regulation of demand, just as wage labour was a rational process of extortion of labour power and increases in productivity."
Consumer Society, pp. 81–82
"It is difficult to grasp the extent to which the current training in systematic, organized consumption is the equivalent and extension, in the twentieth century, of the great nineteenth-century-long process of the training of rural populations for industrial work."
Production and consumption are one process; the "Human Revolution" of the age of consumption is only its semblance. (Second locus of the puritan-to-hedonist substitution; cf. p.76.)
Consumer Society, p. 82
"Production and consumption are part of one and the same process of expanded reproduction of the productive forces and their control."
Consumer Society, p. 82
"The themes of Spending, Enjoyment and Non-Calculation ('Buy now, pay later') have taken over from the 'puritan' themes of Saving, Work, and Heritage. But this is merely the semblance of a Human Revolution: in fact, it is an internal substitution, within the framework of a general process and a system which remain in all essentials unchanged, of a new system of values for an old one which has become (relatively) ineffective."
Consumption is anchored as civic levy in the period's own voices.
Consumer Society, p. 83
"'Thrift is un-American,' said Whyte."
The logistical function of the individual. The individual is irreplaceable today precisely as consumer, and consumption is itself social labour.
Consumer Society, p. 83
"Where the individual as such is required and is practically irreplaceable today is as a consumer."
Consumer Society, p. 84
"Once again, consumption is social labour. The consumer is required and mobilized as worker at this level too (perhaps as much today as he is at the level of 'production')."
Consumer Society, p. 84
"The 'fanatical egoism' of the consumer is also the subconscious rough sense of being, in spite of all the emotional rhetoric on affluence and well-being, the new exploited subject of modern times."
The Ego consumans. Where the exploitation of labour power generates solidarity, the possession of consumer goods atomizes.
Consumer Society, p. 85
"The managed possession of consumer goods and objects is individualizing, atomizing and de-historicizing. As a producer, by the very fact of the division of labour, the worker presupposes others: exploitation is the exploitation of all. As a consumer, man becomes solitary again, or cellular — at best, he becomes gregarious (watching TV with the family, part of the crowd at the stadium or the cinema, etc.)."
Consumer Society, p. 85
"Can one imagine car drivers organizing against road tax? Or collective action being mounted against television? Every one of millions of TV viewers may be opposed to advertising, but it will still be broadcast."
The signal historical instances of consumer revolt offered are slight.
Consumer Society, p. 85
"apart from a few strikes by American housewives and the sporadic destruction of consumer goods (May 1968 and the 'No bra day', when American women publicly burned their bras)."
Consumer Society, p. 86
"The People are the workers, provided they are unorganized. The Public and Public Opinion are the consumers, provided they content themselves with consuming."
Two adverts set the field, at opposite ends of the social scale but on the same pattern of value.
Consumer Society, p. 87 (advert quoted)
"You can choose your Mercedes-Benz from 76 different colour styles and 697 selections of interior decor."
Consumer Society, p. 87 (advert quoted)
"And this Recital blonde, which is so natural, has not changed me. I am more than ever myself."
Consumer Society, p. 87
"They are at opposite ends of the social scale, but united by the same constraint of differentiation, personalization. The one is 'A', the other 'non-A', but the pattern of 'personal' value is the same for both."
The contradictions surface in the language of the slogans themselves, and the over-reflexive injunction "Personalize your own home yourself!" gives the game away.
Consumer Society, p. 88
"What all this rhetoric says, while floundering about unable to say it, is precisely that there is no one there — no person."
The industrial production of differences. The most cogent definition of consumption is offered here.
Consumer Society, p. 88
"In other words, they are of the order of the industrial production of differences — and this might, I believe, serve as the most cogent definition of the system of consumption."
Consumer Society, p. 88
"As a result, to differentiate oneself is precisely to affiliate to a model, to label oneself by reference to an abstract model, to a combinatorial pattern of fashion, and therefore to relinquish any real difference, any singularity, since these can only arise in concrete, conflictual relations with others and the world."
Consumer Society, p. 89
"There is monopoly concentration of the production of differences. This is an absurd formula: monopoly and difference are logically incompatible. If they can be combined, it is precisely because the differences are not differences."
Consumer Society, p. 89
"Here, too, it is upon the loss of differences that the cult of difference is founded."
The naturalization effect names the same operation in the environment.
Consumer Society, p. 89
"Thus, for example, a forest is cut down to build a group of buildings, which are then given the name 'Park Estate' and a few trees are planted to create a 'natural' feel."
Personalization is realignment to the SMD, and the differences are strictly hierarchical.
Consumer Society, pp. 89–90
"personalization consists in a daily realignment to the smallest marginal difference (SMD): seeking out the little qualitative differences by which style and status are indicated."
Consumer Society, p. 90
"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."
Metaconsumption. The rejection of consumption is itself the ultimate consumption; Riesman supplies the class strategy.
Consumer Society, p. 90
"Differentiation may then take the form of the rejection of objects, the rejection of 'consumption', and yet this still remains the very ultimate in consumption."
Consumer Society, p. 91
"One of the few restrictions on the consumption of the mobile person is the resistance of the upper class to the arrivistes by exercise of the strategy of conspicuous underconsumption; in this way the already arrived attempt to impose their own limits on those who would become their peers." (Riesman)
Distinction or conformism. The basic logic is differentiation in terms of the code, where parity is an effect of difference from another group.
Consumer Society, pp. 92–93
"It is the difference from the other group which creates the parity (rather than the conformity) of the members of a group. Consensus is established differentially, and the effect of conformity is merely the result of this."
Consumer Society, p. 93
"In the past, differences of birth, blood and religion were not exchanged: they were not differences of fashion, but essential distinctions. They were not 'consumed'. Current differences (of clothing, ideology, and even sex) are exchanged within a vast consortium of consumption."
Code and revolution. The ideological pay-off: contradiction is replaced not by equality but by difference, against which no revolution is possible.
Consumer Society, p. 94
"What is politically effective is the creation not of a situation in which contradiction is replaced by equality and equilibrium, but of one in which contradiction is replaced by difference. The solution to social contradiction is not equalization, but differentiation. No revolution is possible at the level of a code — or, alternatively, revolutions take place every day at that level, but they are 'fashion revolutions', which are harmless and foil the other kind."
Consumer Society, p. 94
"it is not by creating more creature comforts, but by getting them to play by the rules of the game. This is how consumption can on its own substitute for all ideologies."
The structural models. The "body you dream of" tautology, then the masculine and feminine models as a differential pair.
Consumer Society, p. 95
"'The body you dream of is your own.' This admirable tautology, which self-evidently resolves down to an argument for a particular kind of bra, brings together all the paradoxes of 'personalized' narcissism."
Consumer Society, p. 95
"The narcissism of the individual in consumer society is not an enjoyment of singularity; it is a refraction of collective features."
Consumer Society, p. 96
"The masculine model is the model of particularity [exigence] and choice. All masculine advertising stresses the rule of choice, in terms of rigour and inflexible attention, as a matter of 'professional ethics'. The modern man of quality is particular or demanding. He will countenance no failing and he neglects no detail. He is a 'select' individual, though he is not so passively or by natural grace, but by practising selectivity (the fact that that selectivity is orchestrated by others is a quite separate matter). There is no question of letting himself go or indulging himself; his aim is to achieve distinction. Knowing how to choose and not to let one's standards slip are equivalent to the military and puritan virtues: intransigence, decisiveness, valour. These virtues will be possessed by the least young dandy who buys his clothes from Romoli or Cardin. The masculine model is, then, a model of competitive or selective virtue."
Consumer Society, p. 97
"The masculine choice is 'agonistic': it is, by analogy with the challenge, the noble behaviour par excellence. It is honour which is in play, or Bewährung (proving oneself), an ascetic and aristocratic virtue."
Consumer Society, p. 97
"At bottom, men are still being invited to play soldiers, and women to play dolls with themselves."
Consumer Society, p. 97
"the housewife does not produce; she does not show up in the nation's accounts; she is not recorded as a productive force. She is, in fact, fated to be of value as a force of prestige, by her official uselessness, by her status as a 'kept' slave."
The closing extension is load-bearing for the whole book: the feminine model is generalized to all consumers.
Consumer Society, p. 98
"Furthermore, what we are seeing very generally today is the extension of the feminine model to the whole field of consumption. What we have said of women in their relationship to prestige values, and of their 'proxy' status, goes, virtually and absolutely, for Homo consumans in general — men and women together. And it goes for all members of social categories whose destinies lie more or less (increasingly, as the current political strategy has it) with 'paraphernalia', household objects and 'proxy' pleasures. Entire classes are thus fated, in the image of Woman (who, as Woman/Object remains emblematic of consumption), to function as consumers. Their promotion to the rank of consumers might thus be said to seal their destiny as serfs."
The "neo". After Marx on Napoleon III (history recurring the second time as farce), cultural consumption is defined as the parodic resurrection of what no longer exists. The Esso "neo-log-fire" and the Gold-Rush tourists illustrate it.
Consumer Society, p. 99
"Cultural consumption may thus be defined as the time and place of the caricatural resurrection, the parodic evocation of what already no longer exists — of what is not so much 'consumed' as 'consummated' (completed, past and gone)."
The general law of the "neo" follows: as a structure historically disintegrates, it is glorified. The body is the case in point.
Consumer Society, p. 100
"the body is glorified precisely as its real possibilities are atrophying and it is increasingly harassed by the system of urban, professional and bureaucratic control and constraints."
Cultural recycling [le recyclage]. The occupational imperative to update one's skills is read against the cycle of fashion, with the same built-in obsolescence.
Consumer Society, p. 101
"What all the acculturated receive is not culture, but cultural recycling. (Ultimately, not even the truly 'cultured' escape this, or at least they will not.)"
LCC, the lowest common culture. Through the radio game tirlipot and the quiz machine, knowledge is reduced to recognition, and communion to technical contact. What is shared is the cultural counterpart of the "standard package."
Consumer Society, p. 103
"To know is to see"
Kitsch and the gadget. Kitsch is a pseudo-object of weak distinctive value and maximum statistical profitability, with its own social history (the Renaissance, the Baroque, the German Gründerjahre of 1870–90). The gadget periodizes the shift.
Consumer Society, p. 111
"The machine was the emblem of industrial society. The gadget is the emblem of post-industrial society."
The pinball player's relation to the machine is strictly magical, and consumption is recast as combinatorial play emptied of passion. (This is a second locus of the "exclusive of enjoyment" thesis stated at p.78.)
Consumer Society, p. 114
"Consumption is combinatorial investment: it is exclusive of passion."
Pop: an art of consumption? Sustained engagement. Pop transposes the object-world while itself becoming a pure object of consumption, and the two are not in contradiction.
Consumer Society, p. 115
"In short, is pop the form of art contemporaneous with the logic of signs and consumption we are speaking of, or is it merely an effect of fashion, and hence itself a pure object of consumption? There is no contradiction between the two. We may accept that pop art transposes an object-world, while at the same time simply issuing (by its own logic) in objects pure and simple."
Consumer Society, p. 116
"Pop signifies the end of perspective, the end of evocation, the end of testimony, the end of the creative act and, last but not least, the end of the subversion of the world and the curse of art."
If the society has no critical perspective on itself, then complicity is the only honest position for its art, which is why pop paints the brand name.
Consumer Society, p. 116
"If the consumer society is trapped in its own mythology, if it has no critical perspective on itself, and if that is precisely its definition, there can be no contemporary art which is not, in its very existence and practice, compromised by and complicit with that opaquely self-evident state of affairs."
Consumer Society, p. 116
"This is neither play nor 'realism': it is recognizing the obvious truth of the consumer society which is that the truth of objects and products is their brand name."
Warhol is the most radical instance, the artist who wills himself a machine.
Consumer Society, p. 118
"The canvas is an absolutely everyday object, like this chair or that poster" (Warhol)
Consumer Society, p. 118
"'I would like to be a machine,' says Andy Warhol, who does in fact paint with stencils, silk screens, etc."
Pop's affect is a cool one, and its smile is read as the tell of the whole system.
Consumer Society, pp. 120–121
"Pop is a 'cool' art: it demands not aesthetic ecstasy or affective or symbolic participation ('deep involvement'), but a kind of 'abstract involvement', a sort of instrumental curiosity."
Consumer Society, p. 121
"This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion."
Medium is message. The orchestration of broadcast messages imposes a single pattern of reception, which is a pattern of consumption. The real consumption effect lies not in any one message but in their succession.
Consumer Society, p. 122
"The real effect is more subtle: it is the imposition upon us, by the systematic succession of messages, of the equivalence of history and the minor news item, of the event and the spectacle, of information and advertising at the level of the sign. It is not in the direct discourse of advertising, but there that the real consumption effect is to be found."
Adopting McLuhan, the true message is the disarticulation of the real into equivalent signs.
Consumer Society, p. 122
"it is the normal, programmed, miraculous transition from Vietnam to variety, on the basis of a total abstraction of both."
Consumer Society, p. 123
"This, then, is the truth of the mass media: it is their function to neutralize the lived, unique, eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such, are homogeneous one with another, signifying each other reciprocally and referring back and forth to each other."
Consumer Society, p. 123
"In the extreme case, they each become the content of the others — and that is the totalitarian 'message' of a consumer society."
Beyond the true and the false. With Boorstin's The Image, advertising is the pseudo-event that constructs the object as a model. (First locus of the self-fulfilling-prophecy figure; it returns at p.194 as the society's relation to itself.)
Consumer Society, p. 126
"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."
Consumer Society, pp. 126–127
"like all myths and magic formulas, advertising is based on a different kind of verification, that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. 'The successful advertiser is the master of a new art: the art of making things true by saying they are so. He is a devotee of the technique of the self-fulfilling prophecy.'"
Consumer Society, p. 127
"it is beyond the true and the false, just as fashion is beyond ugliness and beauty and the modern object, in its sign function, is beyond usefulness and uselessness."
Consumer Society, p. 128
"'Persil washes whitest' is not a sentence; it is Persil-speak."
Consumer Society, p. 128
"Reality is no longer anything but the model speaking itself."
The body is the finest consumer object, and the chapter's opening move is to set it as the heir of the soul.
Consumer Society, p. 129
"the body has today become an object of salvation. It has literally taken over that moral and ideological function from the soul."
The Elle article. "The secret keys to your body" stages a managed reappropriation of the body, which Baudrillard reads as colonization rather than liberation.
Consumer Society, p. 131
"it is a managed narcissism, operating on the body as in colonized virgin 'territory', 'affectionately' [tendrement] exploring the body like a deposit to be mined in order to extract from it the visible signs of happiness, health, beauty, and the animality which triumphs in the marketplace."
Consumer Society, pp. 131–132
"The body is not reappropriated for the autonomous ends of the subject, but in terms of a normative principle of enjoyment and hedonistic profitability, in terms of an enforced instrumentality that is indexed to the code and the norms of a society of production and managed consumption."
Functional beauty and eroticism. Beauty for women is an absolute imperative because it is a form of capital, and the model body is reduced from a body to a shape.
Consumer Society, p. 132
"For women, beauty has become an absolute, religious imperative."
Consumer Society, p. 132
"beauty is such an absolute imperative only because it is a form of capital."
Consumer Society, p. 133
"It is no longer, strictly speaking, a body, but a shape."
The economic conversion is stated as a triple slogan, the body liberated precisely so that it can be exploited.
Consumer Society, p. 135
"The body sells products. Beauty sells products. Eroticism sells products."
Modern strategy of the body. The body's "discovery" once carried a critical, offensive value against spiritualism; today it functions as resacralization, the soul's successor as mythic instance. Norman O. Brown supplies the principle.
Consumer Society, p. 136
"We must not be misled by the flat antinomy of the sacred and the secular, and interpret as 'secularization' what is only a metamorphosis of the sacred." (Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death)
Is the body feminine? Sustained engagement, and one of the book's sharpest moves: woman and the body share the same servitude, and the structural reason a category is sexualized is that it is exploited.
Consumer Society, p. 137
"Blacks are 'sexualized' for the same reason, not because they might be said to be 'closer to Nature', but because they are exploited and kept in serfdom. The repressed, sublimated sexuality of a whole civilization inevitably combines with the category whose social repression and subjection form the very basis of that culture."
Consumer Society, p. 137
"it is in so far as she 'liberates' herself that woman becomes more and more merged with her body."
Emancipation is therefore recuperated: the very categories that liberate are the ones indexed to a functional practice, and the strategic operation neutralizes the social peril by routing it through the Woman/Object.
Consumer Society, p. 138
"that immense strategic operation which consists in containing in the idea of woman and her body the whole social peril of sexual liberation, in confining the peril of women's liberation to the idea of sexual liberation (in eroticism), in calling down on to the Woman/Object all the perils of the social liberation of women."
The medical cult, slimness, the sex-exchange standard. Health becomes a status imperative and a prestige display, while slimness drives a self-destructive frenzy whose figures Baudrillard preserves.
Consumer Society, p. 142
"an American study has shown that 300 adolescent girls out of 446 are on a diet"
Consumer Society, p. 143
"It is estimated that 30 million Americans either are, or believe themselves to be, obese."
Consumer Society, p. 143
"Eroticism for the elite; pornography for the masses" (Jacques Sternberg)
Symbols and fantasies in advertising. Against the "hidden persuaders" school, Baudrillard denies that the erotic advert mobilizes real fantasy or the unconscious; its material is "atmospheric," a codified play of sexual signs, and its real operation is the censorship of the symbolic function. The Gillette razor-blade framing "two velvety female lips" works precisely because it does not express the fantasy it alludes to (pp.146–148).
The sexed doll. Sexuality as a total symbolic structure of exchange is deposed by being split off into manifest sexual signs and assigned to the individual. The brassiere on a pre-pubescent girl and the sexed doll carry the same meaning, and the operation is named bluntly.
Consumer Society, p. 150
"on the pretext of sexual education, carry out a veritable castration on the child by the over-exhibition of sexual signs where they have no place at all."
The Club Méditerranée fable (harpoon-fishers who turn out to be the technical director and the nightwatchman of the same factory) sets up the myth that all are equal in leisure. Against the metaphysical postulate that time is a transcendent dimension pre-existing its contents, Baudrillard makes time a product of production, subject to exchange-value, so that the demand to "waste" time is self-defeating.
Consumer Society, p. 152
"All that remains is consommé of desire."
Consumer Society, p. 153
"'Time is money': this slogan etched in letters of fire on Remington typewriters is also written above the factory gates, and inscribed in the subjugated time of daily life."
Consumer Society, p. 153
"the consumer's own free time is being sold to him. And there is logic in this, since 'free' time is in fact time 'earned'; it is capital on which a return can be had, potential productive power, which has therefore to be bought if one is to have control of it."
Within this logic one can never waste time, because one can only earn it; the holiday-maker is bound to his time as to a productive force.
Consumer Society, p. 154
"one can only earn one's time: this fatality weighs upon leisure as it does upon work."
Consumer Society, p. 154
"He is tethered to 'his' time as Prometheus was tethered to his rock, tethered to the Promethean myth of time as productive force."
Consumer Society, p. 155
"objectivized by it, and manipulated by it as exchange-value, it is we who have become the excrement of money, it is we who have become the excrement of time."
Consumer Society, p. 155
"in spite of the fiction of freedom in leisure, 'free' time is logically impossible: there can only be constrained time."
Leisure is constrained because it reproduces the constraints of productive time, and the obligatory tan, the smiles, and the duty of joie de vivre belong to the "fun-morality" (Riesman). The reversal Baudrillard foresees is that work itself becomes the thing consumed.
Consumer Society, p. 157
"'Conspicuous abstention from labour becomes the conventional index of reputability', writes Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class."
Consumer Society, p. 157
"The consumation of empty time is, therefore, a kind of potlatch, in which free time serves as a material of signification and sign-exchange (in parallel with all the activities subsidiary and internal to leisure). As in Bataille's The Accursed Share, it assumes value in its very destruction, in being sacrificed. And leisure is the site of this 'symbolic' operation."
Consumer Society, p. 158
"And leisure is not the availability of time, it is its display. Its fundamental determination is the constraint that it be different from working time."
The chapter opens on the generalization of "service": nothing is sold as a product, everything as a personal gratification. The Airborne chair is the emblem.
Consumer Society, p. 159
"everything is a service. What is available to be consumed never presents itself as pure and simple product, but as a personal service, as gratification."
Consumer Society, p. 159
"This chair is no longer a chair, it is a total social service for your benefit."
Consumer Society, p. 159
"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."
The pathos of the smile. What is consumed is the sign of solicitude, because the underlying loss is the loss of reciprocal human relations.
Consumer Society, p. 161
"The loss of (spontaneous, reciprocal, symbolic) human relations is the fundamental fact of our societies. It is on this basis that we are seeing the systematic reinjection of human relations — in the form of signs — into the social circuit, and are seeing the consumption of those relations and of that human warmth in signified form."
Examples accrue (Sofitel's service with a smile, the verres de l'amitié, TWA's employee-of-the-month bonuses); Swift's Directions to Servants (1745) supplies the historical contrast of the service relation in crisis. The modern functional smile resolves the tension into something openly warm and calculated (pp.162–164).
The ambiguity and terrorism of solicitude. The hinge of the chapter is the double meaning of the verb "solicit."
Consumer Society, p. 168
"1 The dimension of 'solicitude', in the 'caring', 'favouring', 'mothering' sense. The gift. 2 The opposite meaning it assumes in the sense of 'requesting' (soliciting a reply), 'demanding', or even 'commandeering'. This is a sense which is even more clearly seen in the modern usage of the term ('soliciting information', etc.). What is involved here is a diverting, a seizing of something; turning it to one's own ends. This is precisely the opposite of what is meant by solicitude."
Consumer Society, p. 168
"the gift which is conveyed by 'solicitude' serving always as an alibi for the real conditioning which is that of his 'solicitation' or entreaty."
Advertising is read as a perpetual referendum that leaves no way of saying "no" (the Boussois/Saint-Gobain takeover as case). The chapter closes on sociometric compatibility (Riesman), where the person as a determining instance is replaced by personalization.
Consumer Society, p. 170
"The person as a determining instance disappears and is replaced by personalization. From this point on, the individual is no longer a centre of autonomous values, but merely the expression of multiple relations in a process of shifting interrelationships."
Cult of sincerity / functional tolerance. Tolerance is no longer a virtue but a structural property of the system of signs.
Consumer Society, p. 173
"Tolerance in this context is no longer either a psychological trait or a virtue: it is a modality of the system itself. It is like the total compatibility and elasticity of the elements of fashion: long skirts and mini-skirts 'tolerate' each other very well (indeed they signify nothing other than the relationship which holds between them)."
Violence. Consumed "allusive" violence (the room-temperature accident report of Ch.2, p.35) is distinguished from the real violence that affluence itself secretes. This is the second locus of the consumed-versus-real distinction first drawn at p.35.
Consumer Society, p. 174
"The real problem of violence arises elsewhere. It is the problem of the real, uncontrollable violence secreted by plenty and security once a certain threshold has been reached. This is no longer integrated violence, consumed with the rest, but the uncontrollable violence which well-being secretes in its very achievement."
Consumer Society, p. 174
"That violence is characterized (precisely like consumption as we have defined it, though not as superficially understood) by the fact that it is aimless and objectless."
Anomie and the psychoanalytic reading. The new violence is read as the return of the negativity of desire that the total positivity of need has censored, a death drive for which the system has no reception structures.
Consumer Society, p. 177
"That violence, which is radically different from the violence engendered by poverty, scarcity and exploitation, is the emergence, in action, of the negativity of desire which is omitted, occulted, censored by the total positivity of need."
Consumer Society, p. 177
"It is — against the imperative of productivity/consummativity — the emergence of destructiveness (the death drive) for which there can be no bureaucratic reception structures, since these would then become a part of a process of planned satisfaction and, hence, a system of positive institutions."
The event-catalogue is preserved, since the dates and figures travel: the audience screaming "Kill him!" at The Chase; July 1966, Richard Speck murders eight young women aged about 20 in Chicago; August 1966, C. J. Whitman in Austin, 13 dead, 31 injured; Amsterdam, June 1966, the revolt of the "Provos"; Montreal, October 1969, two killed, 10 bank raids, 19 armed attacks, three terrorist explosions; the murder at the Polanski villa, exemplary because both savage and ritualistic, indexed to spectacular models, in this case Polanski's own films (pp.178–179).
Subculture of non-violence. Hippies, LSD, and flower-power reject socialization through status and productivity, but Baudrillard reads them sceptically as the inverted, complementary image of the same order. After Margaret Mead via Riesman, the "Kwakiutl" and "Pueblo" styles are placed on the same axis, meeting as on a Möbius strip; J. S. Mill is quoted on non-conformity as itself a service (pp.179–181).
Fatigue. Like the new violence, fatigue is objectless and is a prerogative of rich societies. The decisive inversion is that fatigue is not passivity but the only available form of activity against general passivity.
Consumer Society, p. 183
"True passivity is to be found in the joyful conformity to the system of the 'dynamic' young manager, bright-eyed and broad-shouldered, ideally fitted to continual activity."
Consumer Society, p. 183
"And it is because it is a (latent) activity that it can suddenly go over into open revolt, as the month of May [1968] everywhere showed. The spontaneous, total contagion, the 'powderkeg' of the May movement can only be explained by this hypothesis."
The depressive logic of wandering, interchangeable symptoms echoes the logic of consumption itself, splitting the ambivalence of desire. (This restates at the level of the symptom the negativity-of-desire formulation of p.177.)
Consumer Society, p. 184
"all the positivity of desire passes into the series of needs and satisfactions, where it resolves itself in terms of managed aims; all the negativity of desire, however, passes into uncontrollable somatization or into the acting-out of violence."
The Student of Prague. The conclusion is built on two fables. In The Student of Prague (described in the text as "an old silent film from the 1930s"; see apparatus), the Devil buys the student's mirror-image for a pile of gold, the image is peeled from the mirror, and the revived double hounds the student until, shooting it, he kills himself, "since, without his noticing it, the image has become living and real in his stead" (p.188). The decisive reading is that the image is not lost but sold: it enters the commodity sphere, and that is the structure of alienation.
Consumer Society, p. 188
"It falls into the commodity sphere, we might say, and this is indeed the sense of concrete, social alienation. At the same time, the fact that the Devil can pocket this image as an object is also the fantastic illustration of the real process of commodity fetishism: from the moment they are produced, our works and our acts fall out of our grasp and are objectivized; they fall, literally, into the Devil's hands."
Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl (the sold shadow) is the looser fable, since Schlemihl saves his soul; the tighter one yields the lesson that the alienated being is turned inside out, an enemy to itself, and that alienation has no exit.
Consumer Society, p. 190
"Alienation cannot be overcome: it is the very structure of the bargain with the Devil. It is the very structure of market society."
The end of transcendence. The decisive theoretical pivot of the conclusion: the alienation schema may no longer apply, because consumption is not Promethean but a regressive absorption of and by signs.
Consumer Society, p. 191
"It is, therefore, characterized, as Marcuse says, by the end of transcendence. In the generalized process of consumption, there is no longer any soul, no shadow, no double, and no image in the specular sense."
The individual no longer confronts his own split image; there is no mirror in the modern order, only the shop-window. The "selfsame" dissolves, and with it alienation in the strict sense.
Consumer Society, p. 192
"The subject of consumption is the order of signs. Whether we define this latter structurally, as the instance of a code, or empirically as the generalized ambience of objects, the involvement of the subject is no longer, at any event, that of an 'alienated' essence in the philosophical, Marxist sense of the term. It is not that of an essence which is dispossessed, taken over by some alienating agency and become foreign to itself. 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."
From spectre to spectrum. Tragic duality (which the situationists restore as the "society of the spectacle" and radical alienation) had its great myths, but the ludic ramification of the person into a spectrum of signs has found no equivalent myth, and that is no accident: myths disappear with the transcendence from which they are inseparable (p.193).
Consumption of consumption. The book's final thesis: the society no longer produces myth because it is its own myth.
Consumer Society, p. 193
"If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth."
Consumer Society, p. 193
"Consumption is a myth. That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption."
The society's relation to itself takes the form of the advertising slogan turned motto, and the figure that named advertising at p.127 now names the society as a whole. (Second locus of the self-fulfilling-prophecy figure; cf. p.127.)
Consumer Society, p. 194
"When we say that this 'affluent' society is its own myth, we mean that it takes over, at a general level, that admirable advertising slogan which might happily serve as its motto: the body you dream of is your own. A kind of immense collective narcissism is 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 its own 'self-fulfilling prophecy'."
The closing move turns on critique itself: the moralizing counter-discourse (Chaban-Delmas's "give it back some soul," the rebels of May 1968 who reified the object by according it diabolical value) is part of the myth it thinks it opposes.
Consumer Society, p. 196
"This negative discourse is the intellectual's second home. Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation. Though at least around the Devil heresies and black magic sects could organize. Our magic is white. No heresy is possible any longer in a state of affluence. It is the prophylactic whiteness of a saturated society, a society with no history and no dizzying heights, a society with no other myth than itself."
The book ends not on closure but on a wager.
Consumer Society, p. 196
"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 and as certainly as May 1968, to wreck this white Mass."
Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Translated by Chris Turner. Theory, Culture & Society. London: Sage, 1998. Reprinted 1999. ISBN 0 7619 5691 3 (hbk); 0 7619 5692 1 (pbk). Originally published as La société de consommation: ses mythes, ses structures (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1970). With a foreword by J. P. Mayer and an introduction by George Ritzer.
Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998), 61.
Baudrillard, Consumer Society, 78.
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State (the principal foil, Chs. 4–5); David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd and Abundance for What? (other-direction, the "standard package," the cult of sincerity); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image (pseudo-event, self-fulfilling prophecy, the celebrity tautology); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media ("the medium is the message"); Marshall Sahlins, "the first affluent society" (Les Temps modernes, Oct. 1968); Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (conspicuous / vicarious consumption); Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (the metamorphosis of the sacred); Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (epigraph, Ch. 1); Nietzsche, The Will to Power (Fragment 650); Bataille, The Accursed Share; Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees. Baudrillard also back-references his own The System of Objects and "The Ideological Genesis of Needs" (in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign).
SAARUTU (Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground)
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