Baudrillard Reframed by Kim Toffoletti

Author:Kim Toffoletti [Toffoletti, Kim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

The consumer society

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Baudrillard – along with others such as Roland Barthes, Henri Lefebvre and the Situationists – analysed everyday life at a time of growing interest in the influence of culture on capitalist systems. This turn towards exploring cultural phenomena was prompted in part by the scant attention paid to such questions in a Marxist focus on the political and economic imperatives of capitalism. Throughout his early writings, Baudrillard moves away from a productivist paradigm as the means of understanding social structures and human behaviour. Despite this, George Ritzer rightly notes that Karl Marx – as well as classical sociological thinkers like Émile Durkheim, Marshall McLuhan and Daniel Bell – still exerts considerable influence on Baudrillard at this stage (Baudrillard 1998: 3–4). Hence Baudrillard’s stance on consumption is in keeping with a more conventional sociological approach. Further, in this period he is mainly concerned with Western culture and capitalist systems, as evidenced in his discussion of various phenomena like department stores, traffic jams, urban air quality, drugstores and pop art. In later writings, however, he confronts the dilemmas of consumerism in a global context. This leads us to question whether his theories regarding the ascendancy of consumption are still applicable in today’s climate of multi-national corporations, global marketing and offshore production.

Few would dispute that we live in a consumer-oriented world. With industrialisation enabling the mass-production of goods and media advertising imploring us to buy, consumption has become a way of life. Yet the consumer society is more than a tagline for an era typified by the relentless purchasing of commodities. For Baudrillard, it is an entire system that organises individual and collective practices, relationships, beliefs, perceptions and attitudes. He argues that increasingly the order of production is becoming ‘entangled’ with that of consumption (Baudrillard 1998: 33). While once our role as producers within an industrial system defined who we were and how we lived our lives, Baudrillard says that it is as consumers that we now principally engage with the world. This is because people in modern times are

surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in 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. (Baudrillard 1998: 25)

So there is a representational, or communicative, dimension to consumption. In the schema outlined by Baudrillard, consumption is not primarily an economic activity, nor is it a means of fulfilling needs and experiencing personal pleasure. Rather, ‘the subject of consumption is the order of signs’ (Baudrillard 1998: 192). That is, consumption is first and foremost a signifying activity that occurs at the level of everyday life. As a system, or ‘order of signification’, the consumer society appropriates, organises and reproduces signs in a way that is not dissimilar to how language operates.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.