The Consumer society

the Société of Consommation is a work of the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard going back to 1970. Baudrillard defines in it the role of consumption in the Western companies like a structuring element of the social relations. Consequently, consumption is not any more, for each individual, the means of satisfying its needs (Théorie of the needs) but rather of being different. This Personnalisation tends to replace the real differences between the individuals essentially contradictory.

“very whole publicity does not have a direction, it carries only significances. These significances (and the conditions to which they appeal) are never personal, they are all differential, they are marginal and combinative. I.e. they raise of the industrial production of the differences, by what would be defined, I believe, with the most force the system of consumption. ”

In our companies where consumption takes the place of morals, the body becomes an object, a capital subjected to a requirement of development. And even if publicity has recourse to erotic representations, they are in fact a censure the deep sense the phantasms. The latter are choked by a codified set of sexual signs. Generally, which is destroyed by the consumer society is recreated artificially in the form of signs (the human relation is replaced by smiling receptionists charged to lubricate the social reports/ratios, in the residential areas nature is recreated in the form of green areas…).

The consumer society rests on its own myth: “If the consumer society does not produce any more a myth, it is that it is itself its own myth. A Devil which brought Gold and the Richness (at the price of the heart) replaced pure and simple Abundance. And with the pact with the Devil the contract of Abundance. ”

Popular culture

  • In November 2007, in a Publicity campaign of Posting and Television for the collection Man of the Galleries Lafayettes, Frederic Beigbeder appears holding the Consumer society between its hands. The author, who is also an ex-advertizing executive, was already accustomed to adopting in his novels, in particular 99 francs , an ironic tone with regard to his old trade.

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