Subjectivity, the Unconscious and Consumerism by Marlon Xavier

Author:Marlon Xavier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319968247
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.4.5 Consumption as Definer of Existence and the Homo Simulacrum

Thus, more than mere sources of identity and definers of social relations, under a totalizing ImCon, the commodity-sign and the act of consumption become the only foundations of being. As Benson (2000) claims, mutating Descartes’s cogito, I shop therefore I am: shopping (consuming) thus becomes “the basic certainty ” (C. Campbell, 2004, p. 33), guarantee, and guarantor of existence, its immanent principle. The commodity-subject, or commodified self, is thus instituted as the subject of contemporary consumption societies.

Logically, the commodity-subject will mirror the characteristics of the commodity: transient, disposable, superficial, artificial, and so on. But more than that, as argued in the previous chapter, inasmuch as the subject is formed in identity with the imaginary and becomes identical with its consumption dreams (an idea illustrated by phantasmagoric personae), s/he will resemble an assemblage of unchained signs, disconnected from reality, exchangeable against other signs or commodities . Theoretically, this idea reveals how a cultural mutation (total capitalism-consumerism) is connected to a mutation of imaginaries (from symbolic to semiotic to simulacric); both mutations thus shape a corresponding anthropological mutation: the subject as a (commodity-)sign, turning into a simulacrum.

A parallel process: As culture is dissolved and volatilized into signs to be consumed—and the signs are emancipated from any reality—so is its subject . Baudrillard (1973/1981) mentioned this phenomenon of consumerism in an important passage that in fact summarizes the whole argument of “total colonization” by the ImCon of both reality and subject: “Homology, simultaneity of the ideological operation [of commodification] on the level of psychic structure and social structure” (p. 100).

Here we have homology between commodity-logic and subjectivation: the subject becomes a (commodity-)sign and, as referents disappear (signs become unchained simulacra), the subject turns progressively into a simulacrum. After the advent of homo commoditas, the consumer-commodity, and in line with the process of mimesis with consumption society and its imaginary, this daunting prospective signs a total anthropological mutation: the epiphany of the homo simulacrum.

Under such homology, the prospect is for the subject to be produced, reproduced, exchanged, and circulated as a hyperreal sign, or, put differently, a surface, a one-dimensional persona that is not even a mask but a mere screen for the projections of commodity-imagery. The model more illustrative for such subject is not even the replaceable identikit, but a radicalization of the “personal branding” model: the online avatars, virtual subjectivities instantaneously exchangeable and replaceable, through which the omnipotent dream of being anything and everything (by in fact being nothing) is experienced and consumed. The consumer-commodity thus “becomes a pure screen, a pure absorption and re-absorption surface of the influent networks ” (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 27), a volatile refraction of the ImCon. A bit less hyperbolic, Augé (1999) described it as “the fictional self”:The fictional self, the peak of a fascination which is begun in any relationship exclusive to the image, is a self without relationship and as a result without any basis for identity, liable to be absorbed by the world of images in which it believes it can rediscover and recognise itself.

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