The Consumer Society

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.

Part I · The Formal Liturgy of the ObjectDescription: the object-environment as it presents itself

Chapter 1Profusion

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.