Jean Baudrillard’s book The Consumer Society is a masterful contribution to contemporary sociology. It certainly has its place in the tradition which includes Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in Society, Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd.
Baudrillard analyses our contemporary Western societies, including that of the United States. This analysis focuses on the phenomenon of the consumption of objects which he has already tackled in The System of Objects (Gallimard, 1968; translation, Verso, 1996). In his conclusion to that volume, he formulates the plan of the present work: ‘It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system.’
He shows with great perspicacity how the giant technocratic corporations foster irrepressible desires, creating new social hierarchies which have replaced the old class differences.
A new mythology has arisen in this way. As Baudrillard writes,
The washing machine serves as an appliance and acts as an element of prestige, comfort, etc. It is strictly this latter field which is the field of consumption. All kinds of other objects may be substituted here for the washing machine as signifying element. In the logic of signs, as in that of symbols, objects are no longer linked in any sense to a definite function or need. Precisely because they are responding here to something quite different, which is either the social logic or the logic of desire, for which they function as a shifting and unconscious field of signification.
Consumption, as a new tribal myth, has become the morality of our present world. It is currently destroying the foundations of the human being, that is to say, the balance which European thought has maintained since the Greeks between our mythological roots and the world of the logos. Baudrillard is aware of the risk we are running. Let us quote him once again:
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 myth other than itself.
The Consumer Society, written in a concise style, should be carefully studied by the younger generation. Perhaps they will take up the mission of breaking up this monstrous, if not indeed obscene, world of the abundance of objects so formidably sustained by the mass media and particularly by television, this world which threatens us all.
J.P. Mayer
University of Reading