The man with the proper imagination is able to conceive of any commodity in such a way that it becomes an object of emotion to him and to those to whom he imparts his picture, and hence creates desire rather than a mere feeling of ought.
W. D. Scott, Influencing Men in Business (1911)1
Overview
This chapter discusses the imaginary of consumption (ImCon) as a semiotic and semiological imaginary: a regime of signification composed of signs as social signifiers, which, like symbolic imaginaries, is also based on imagery and the irrational. Its logics of consumption, founded on consumption of social signification through commodity-signs, and of commodification, as the production of sign-values, are discussed. Consumption dreams, as fundamental constituents of the ImCon, are presented as the imaginary social representations that, being mass-produced following the logic and practices of advertising, determine and colonize desires and irrational factors, and signify and institute the social subject as a consumer.
4.1 The ImCon as a Social System of Images and Signs
The social imaginary of consumption —the ImCon—refers essentially to three elements that are fundamental for contemporary consumerism: the image, the irrational, and signs.
Indeed, our culture can be defined by the epochal role that the image has for it. As Fine (2002) correctly notices, such role is perhaps its most conspicuous and obvious characteristic: “But what precisely is it that makes up consumer society? A flood of images immediately suggests itself” (p. 155). Expressing the same idea differently , Jameson (1991) called our postmodern, late capitalist society the “image society”, the age of “media capitalism” (p. xviii). In many senses, the image has become the main product of our society. Contemporary global consumerism seems to be inexorably and fully engaged in what is one of its central activities: to turn everything into an image. It might be said that the economy itself becomes an economy of images. “Symbolic capital”—a truly eerie neologism that, in my opinion, summarizes our age—in fact means essentially this: how one’s images are valued in the markets. Thus we can affirm with Debord (1967), “the image has become the final form of commodity reification” (quoted in Jameson, 1991, p. 17). Image, accompanied by appearance and signification, thus determines production, reproduction, and exchange. Accordingly, some contemporary social theorists have asserted that the fantastic and important role played by imagery today configures consumerism as a new, unprecedented social reality. Discussing Baudrillard, one of such theorists, Mike Featherstone (2007) notes that “it is the build-up, density and seamless, all-encompassing extent of the production of images in contemporary society which has pushed us towards a qualitatively new society in which the distinction between reality and image becomes effaced and everyday life becomes aestheticized” (p. 67). As noted, Jameson (1991) identifies in the full aestheticization of postmodern culture one of its marking characteristics; consumer society as “a new culture of images” is defined not merely by superficiality, but by “depthlessness” (p. 5). De Zengotita (2005) called it a “society of surfaces” (p. 100).
Somehow incongruously, what has traditionally been considered as the depths of the psyche—the realm of the unconscious—also plays a fundamental role in consumer society: consumption is essentially based on irrational and imaginary forces and elements, such as desires, emotions, affects, and impulses. Bauman (2007), for instance, ascribes to such elements a central import: “‘consumerism’ is a type of social arrangement that results from recycling mundane, permanent and so to speak ‘regime-neutral’ human wants, desires and longings into the principal propelling and operating force of society” (p. 28). Such “wants and desires” are of an irrational nature; to paraphrase Bell (1976), the axial principle for consumption is functional irrationality.2 Bauman (2007) concludes that ultimately consumerism relies “on the irrationality of consumers, not on their thoroughly informed and sober calculations; on arousing consumerist emotions, not on cultivating reason” (p. 48).
From this point of view, the system of consumption is founded on what is intangible, immaterial, and essentially psychic: emotions are aroused and felt as psychological experiences; desires are ultimately based on our all-too-human longings and needs for meaning, value, and signification, or, more specifically, for a sense of individuality and of belonging socially (the desires for individuality and sociality already mentioned)—that is, for things or experiences that are thought, imagined, pictured. This idea constitutes the proper psychological side of the system: it depends on imagination.
If we now recall that everything psychic is by definition an image (a representation); that the basic functioning of the psyche rests on its capacity for imagining, for creating a flow of images (as imagination, fantasy, dream); and that such capacity is extensively sociocultural, then we can imagine the tremendous importance and power the social imaginary will have for consumption: the power to deploy, create, and fashion the “proper imagination”, and thus “impart pictures”, as the epigraph above goes, will be central for the system and will impact everything psychic, starting with the subject.
What is sociologically significant for us, and what marks our era under the sign of consumption, is precisely the generalized reorganization of this primary level [the natural and biological order: nature] in a system of signs which appears to be a particular mode of transition from nature to culture, perhaps the specific mode of our era . (Baudrillard, 2001, pp. 47–48)
Such system of signs, together with the overwhelming imagery that accompanies it, corresponds to the ImCon as a semiotic imaginary.
4.1.1 The Social Logic of Consumption and the Sign
According to Baudrillard’s (1970/1998) semiological theory on consumption, which grounds this chapter, it can be affirmed that the key principle of the social logic of consumption is: consumption is never based on the object per se—on its functionality, materiality, instrumentality, its use-value—but on signification and difference. What is fundamentally consumed (through the object) is social meaning. Hence what defines our consumer culture now is not the Marxian mode of production but the mode of signification (Baudrillard, 1975): the systematic production, consumption, and manipulation of social signifiers. The form these social signifiers assume under consumerism, and which is the central determinant of the system, is the form of signs.
Hence the radical assertion: “If it has any meaning at all, consumption means an activity consisting of the systematic manipulation of signs” (Baudrillard, 1968/1996, p. 200). Positing such fundamental role of the sign reflects the fact that there is a structural homology between sign and commodity: as the commodity functions as a sign, and the sign follows commodity-logic, the unit of analysis and elemental form of consumerism consists in the commodity-sign; it defines and summarizes the whole social system of consumption.3
To recall the previous discussion, what primarily characterizes the sign is that it is the form of representation in which signifier and signified are split; there is a fundamental schism between them, which is only united as an artificial (conventional) construction. Put differently, the relationship between them is always arbitrary. To simplify the argument, let us say that signifier and signified correspond to image and meaning. If seen as a sign, the meaning of the representation is by definition exterior and relatively arbitrary in relation to the image. The meaning is only united to the image through (1) convention and (2) fabrication. An example for (1) is a common social convention: a red cross represents a hospital. There is nothing in the image of the cross that naturally signifies “hospital”. (Though the cross can have a wealth of meaning if seen as a symbol). In (2), meaning and value (signified) can be artificially attached to, or grafted into, the image: for instance, a logo for a brand, the Nike swoosh sign. There is absolutely nothing in that sign (well, maybe something resembling a wave) that signifies anything; the meanings and values (victory, sportsmanship, transcendence, success, etc.) that are crafted into it are completely arbitrary and external to it.
The sign here is the opposite of the symbol: whereas the symbol naturally unites, the sign splits and unites arbitrarily and artificially signifier and signified. While the symbolic image is its own reality, the sign substitutes for the reality of image an artificial (differential) meaning or convention, a significance that is by definition external to the image (if not completely, at least to some extent). Therefore the sign allows for non-reference to reality, for a certain emancipation from the real; this corresponds to its (possible) ideological character.
4.1.2 Commodity-Sign and Commodification
Let us return to the theme of consumption. From a semiological perspective, what is consumed is the sign, as the object or good that it signifies: the commodity-sign. This is a basic principle of consumption and its process of commodification—the fabrication of commodities as signs, through the systematic manipulation of signs. Baudrillard (1968/1996) explains such process referring to objects. First and foremost, “To become an object of consumption, an object must first become a sign. That is to say: it must become external, in a sense, to a relationship that it now merely signifies” (p. 200). This reflects the external character of signification in relation to the image, in the sign. Here the object cannot be taken in its concrete, objective functionality (for then it would not be consumed). In a way, it has to lose its real character and become external to a living, real, symbolic relationship with human beings and with other human artifacts—as, for example, a tool for the primitive: it remains at once material, concrete, and symbolic, and mediates symbolically the relationships with work, self, and others; it is thus not arbitrary.
In contrast, like the signified in a sign, the object has to become arbitrary: “only thus can it be consumed, never in its materiality, but in its difference” (Baudrillard, 1968/1996, p. 200). To sum up, in becoming a sign, an (arbitrary) object is consumed because of its (arbitrary) difference and signification (social meaning), which are external to the object itself. For example, a table (or a toothpaste, or cars, etc.) is consumed not for anything intrinsic or material about it, but because it represents “family life”, signifies a certain taste, confers status, and so on. That is, the process of commodification is based on the social assignment of sign exchange value, or sign-value, to the object. Its arbitrary difference, meaning, and value are signified in relation to all other sign-objects within the social system of differences and signification: sign-value is always and by definition established in relation to the code, which personalizes the sign-object, the commodity-sign.
4.1.3 The Code as a System of Social Signification
An important concept in Baudrillard’s theory, the system of exchange, or its abstract model, consists in what is known in semiotics as the code (le code, la grille: Baudrillard, 1968/1996, 1970/1998, 1973/1981; Gottdiener, 1996): the signifying system of “differences”, of social values, a key to sociocultural interpretative frameworks, the ways we interpret signs and hence ascribe meaning. “A code is the overarching mode of sign organization that provides the social and cultural context for the ‘correct’ or widely accepted interpretation of specific symbols. Sometimes we also use ‘semantic field’ or ‘the universe of meaning’ for the concept of code” (Gottdiener, 1996, p. 10). To put it simply, under consumerism, such cultural codes become subsumed under one general code of sign exchange value, which reflects sign logic and commodity-logic and determines the political economy of the sign prevalent in consumerism. The code functions (including, and especially, in its acculturative role) as a grammar, or a language4 without a syntax: it “is undoubtedly the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. It is a language of signals” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 20). It is in this sense that Baudrillard (1968/1996) says that consumption is a system of meaning, like a language; its code is equivalent to consumer society’s “signifying fabric” (p. 200), its regime of signification.
Therefore, being a system of social signification, the code determines consumption through its logic of social differentiation and personalization—applied not merely to the commodities but to the consumers. The fundamental idea here is that commodities are consumed because their sign-value, their signification, and difference (as social meaning, and as social classification: status values in a social hierarchy) are magically transferred to the consumer. By consuming the sign (as a commodity), the consumer is personalized and differentiated: she is (imaginarily) socially signified, acquires social meaning, is assigned a place in the social order, and so on. By positioning herself in relation to the sign (her choice of a product), and therefore to the code (partaking of the code), she is integrated into consumer society, and positioned within it in relation to the other consumers and to herself: the meaning, significance, and difference that constitute the relationship with world, others, and self are instituted by the sign-value and its consumption. It must be noted that the code (and therefore consumerism as a totalizing social system) is inescapable. Even if one does not consume—for instance, by making one’s own clothes—such political attitude and its image are viewed (i.e., socially signified in their difference) as a sign in terms of the code: as “rebellious”, “green”, “environmentally responsible”, “creative”, or whatever; thus it can—and in fact has—become a commodity as well, indeed a whole market niche. Of course, the same is valid for any other practice, stance, or value.
Thereby what becomes crucial for consumerism is that its systematic fabrication or conversion of objects (here meaning any object) to the status of signs “implies the simultaneous transformation of the human relationship into a relationship of consumption—of consuming and being consumed” (Baudrillard, 1968/1996, p. 201). This logic will eventually apply to all human relationships: with objects, society, and self. The object as sign becomes the inescapable mediation of such relationships—“and, before long, the sign that replaces it altogether”. The result is that the “relationship is no longer directly experienced: it has become abstract, been abolished, been transformed into a sign-object, and thus consumed” (ibid.).
To summarize and conclude, ultimately what is consumed is never the material object but the imaginary and artificially signified social relationship—between consumer and object, and between consumer and society; the social relationship is consumed as a sign—as sign-value, which replaces both use-value and exchange value, and determines the political economy; in consuming it, one consumes the code, the system of imaginary differences and significations, the system that signifies relationships (of consumption).
4.2 The ImCon and Consumption Dreams
4.2.1 The Fabrication of the ImCon: Advertising Logic
From this viewpoint, consumption society is marked by a shift from the production and consumption of objects to the production and proliferation of signs (and sign-values); from the importance of the means of production to the central role of the means of consumption as means of signification. The whole process of production, reproduction, and proliferation of signs, as commodity-signs, and their articulation with the irrational (desires, emotions, fantasies , etc.) and imagery (images and accompanying narratives), corresponds to the fabrication of the ImCon as an artificial semiotic imaginary; this process follows the logic of advertising and marketing.
Let me first briefly note that “advertising” (and also “advertisement”) here means: the main engineers of the ImCon and its dreams, which are fabricated, circulated, and so on according to its social logic.5 That is, here I employ that term more or less in the same sense that, for instance, Fairclough (1989) does, in order to explain a social logic, for which it serves as a metonym. Such logic, however, is seen in marketing, mass media, information, communications, fashion, and entertainment industries: broadly, it corresponds to the logic of our present-day culture industry (or at least an essential part of it). It can be argued that, in contemporary consumer societies, all these cultural fields largely depend on advertising for their existence, and they function socially mostly through advertising; advertising is what moves them today. Another argument is that, as all these fields are more and more dominated by the same giant corporations, these distinctions—advertising, entertainment, and so on—are imploding and fading away. But the overall logic remains the same.
Advertising embodies the cultural mechanics for constructing sign-value and commodity-signs (Goldman & Papson, 1996). Such mechanics are based on a systematic manipulation of signs, and can be briefly defined thusly: “The commodity sign is formed at the intersection between a brand name [or any commodity] and a meaning system summarized in an image” (Goldman & Papson, 1996, p. 3; e.a.). Images and narratives are manipulated and arbitrarily attached to other images and products (brands, commodities ); the resulting commodity-sign thereby functions as a social signifier of particular relations and experiences; that is, it is socially endowed with a certain value, meaning, and difference, always in relation to the code.
For example, some image of a signifier—a representation of “manliness”—is detached from its context (from its “system of meaning”) and arbitrarily attached to some brand or product (e.g., a car, or cigarettes, or a politician). The product is suffused with such semiotic content, wherefore becoming endowed with, and functioning as equivalent to, the original image, as its sign—that is, cigarette (brand) = manliness, manliness = cigarette (brand).
The same logic applies to any other “object” of consumption (ideas, people, experiences, one’s own body, etc.). It is a requisite that both the object and the signification and difference attached to it be relatively arbitrary. As the signifiers are unchained, that is, they become autonomous in relation to referents or underlying reality, they can be hinged onto anything. Put differently, different systems of meaning can be combined arbitrarily, so that a wide range of differential significations (success, failure, happiness, love, affluence, sex appeal, manliness, etc.) can be attached to any commodity, and the same commodity can signify anything.6
This process corresponds to the fabrication of sign-value, which is generally equal to desire: desire and emotion are elicited by the sign-value (its capacity for signifying meaning, value, difference, etc., socially) and attached to the commodity by the arbitrary restructuring of the relation between word, image or meaning, and referent (Poster, 2001, p. 1). What we have here is a dynamics of fetishization, of producing and educing desire and emotion for commodities —the irrational ingredient of consumption—through the deployment of systematically manipulated sign-images, the ingredient of imagery and signs. The articulation of these elements with that other fundamental ingredient of consumption—fantasy, or imagination—defines both consumerism and its imaginary. Illouz (2009) summarizes this idea, quoting Slater: consumerism is a culture in which “emotions are stimulated, incited, made into obsession through the use of imagination, the production of ‘longing’ and imaginative dissatisfaction, along the model of day-dream” (Slater, 1997, p. 96; e.a.). This daydream form, this model—what McLuhan (1964/1994, p. 291) called “the most magical of consumer commodities”—is what is referred to as consumption dream in this work.
4.2.2 Consumption Dreams
Consumption dreams can be defined as:
(a) The matter of ads: elaborations of sign-value as fetishized narratives and imagery that articulate cultural fantasies and desires, and determine the commodity-forms that promise to satisfy such desire-fantasy (or are at least connected to it);
(b) The fantasies of consumers: the desires, fantasies , and ideals about goods and experiences—and, in fact, life in general—that have consumption as their underlying idea or motif. Here the dream is seen as a more or less personal desire or object of desire, image of the future, main goal, the “good life”, and so on—all of which are imagined to be reachable, fulfilled, or attainable through consumption.
The whole point, however, is that, far from being personal, the consumption dream (b) merely reproduces the discourses elaborated as (a): it reflects the logic of advertising, the code, the system of sign-values; as a “commodity-narrative” (Goldman & Papson, 1996, p. 3) morphed into a dream, in fact it represents an atom of the code. Through the social manipulation of imagination and fantasy, advertisements function as seductive, persuasive consumption dreams, industrialized so as to elicit, arouse, and ultimately engineer desire and longing; to provoke and promise pleasure, passion, emotions, and sensations (Hirschman & Stern, 1999; Illouz, 2009); and to inculcate (and profit from) imaginary, arbitrary ideas and ideals, reified social relations and subjectivities. However, they can also work through the opposite message: frightening subtly or not so subtly, menacing, inducing envy and discomfort, some “consumption bad dreams” are designed to induce fear, displeasure, disquiet, dissatisfaction.7 Together with continuous, omnipresent social scrutiny (which, ideally, is introjected), the point is to keep the consumer in a permanent state of self-conscious discontent, “constant uneasiness and chronic anxiety” (Lasch, 1984, p. 28), with a feeling of lack and emptiness, so as that desire (for consuming) peaks and the promise (embodied by a commodity or the act of consuming) seems more enticing. Therefore consumption dreams and consumption “bad dreams” are expressions of the dual role of advertising as both “merchants of discontent” (Packard, 1961, p. 269) and “merchants of mystique” (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003, p. 327).
It is easy to see that the aim of both types of consumption dream is the same, however: to center all such irrational factors on consumption, that is, on the basic imaginary promise that consuming the commodity-sign will instantaneously fulfill such desires, cause the appropriate and coveted emotions, alleviate the pains and fears, and so on, and that failing to consume it will turn the consumer’s life into a bad dream or nightmare. Thus, consumption dreams are based on irrational elements that manipulate, control, and ultimately produce more irrational psychic contents. The whole system therefore is contingent upon functional irrationality, geared through stylized hollow images toward the consumption of more hollow images: to create, control, and direct functional irrationality is the objective of the “dream-images which speak to desires, and aestheticize and de-realize reality” (Haug, 1987, p. 123).
4.2.3 Consumption Dreams and Desire
Such functional irrationality is commandeered through desire, which is elevated to and exalted as the motor of social consumption (Ewen, 1976, 1988; Ewen & Ewen, 1982; Forty, 1986; Williamson, 1986), the motivational structure of consumerism (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003; Illouz, 2009; Slater, 1997). This development is only logical. If mass production required capitalism to produce a mass society of consumers, under total consumerism the functioning and reproduction of the system will depend on the (re)production of desires as a function of unlimited mass production and mass consumption: engineering mass desires represents the control over production not merely of consumers, but of their unlimited demand. To attain that kind of control, the system of consumption had to tap into the irrational and the imaginary sides of existence, to dominate and engineer not mere needs or wants—which are finite and limited, of a more rational nature, and related to use-value—but desires, which are unlimited and related to sign-value and sumptuary value. That is, as desires are by definition connected to imaginary, intangible, irrational things, the objects of desires become unrestricted: anything can be the object of desire. Needs and wants refer to more logical, rational processes, which are more easily subjected to individual control and will. “Desires, on the other hand, are overpowering; something we give in to; something that takes control of us and totally dominates our thoughts, feelings, and actions” (Belk, Ger, & Askegaard, 2003, p. 99). The objective, therefore, will be to create and program desire as an unlimited, objectless passion that consumes—an all-consuming desire as the central mode of psychic functioning of a mass society. As Marcuse (1955/1966) noted, this process is equivalent to a form of social control that does not aim at reason and mind—it aims at managing and dominating the gut feelings, the emotional, the irrational, the very foundations of our psychological being: the instincts, the irrational libido. To colonize and control desire means to determine the directions and forms of psychic energy: it is tantamount to controlling the functioning of psyche. As the contemporary British artist Lily Allen (2008) sings, “And I am a weapon of massive consumption. It’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.”
To retain that control and keep the system moving, desire must be both unlimited and never satisfied: both its object and source must be imaginary. “Desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire. The reason images are so desirable is that they never satisfy” (Taylor & Saarinen, 1994, p. 34). However , Baudrillard (1968/1996, 1970/1998) went further: the reason why desire is irrepressible and insatiable is because it is founded on a lack. If what is desired is ultimately social meaning, such lack is a dearth of meaning and difference, a lack of social signification—which is consumed as images. The whole system is therefore based on a fundamental emptiness; “I can’t get no satisfaction” (The Rolling Stones) and the more contemporary “I just can’t get enough” (Depeche Mode) become mass mantras.
The logical conclusion is that consumerism, the ImCon, and its subject are all intrinsically founded on hypocrisy and outright deception (Bauman, 2005). The sacred promise of consumerism—the consumption dream—is that our desires for value, meaning, and identity will be satisfied through the commodity (i.e., through its sign-value). However, the continuous functioning of the whole system relies precisely on the unfulfillment of such promise; it depends on eternal dissatisfaction. The instant gratification reached through consumption must be ephemeral, vanishing immediately after the act of consuming, so that dissatisfied consumers not only consume more, but keep consuming. Bauman (2007) called this phenomenon “economics of deception”. Dissatisfaction is guaranteed because the whole system functions based on the opposite of what it promises (one could say that it is fundamentally based on a Big Lie, or, in more technical terms, its logic is absolutely ideological): instead of differentiation and personalization, it works based on dedifferentiation and mass production; instead of individuality and uniqueness, it engenders and delivers massification (everyone is a consumer, no matter what). Therefore, if the consumption dream is empty, not only is the lack behind desire never solved: it is actively fed by the dynamics of the system. Restless dissatisfaction and everlasting desire generate and accelerate the relentless cycle of waste, consumption, and disposal, or, as Ewen and Ewen (1982) put it, “continual waste and spending would be elevated as a social good, driven by a cycle of continuous dissatisfaction” (p. 73).
The characteristics of desire will therefore mirror and sustain system reproduction: the continuous and accelerated process of production, consumption, and waste is met by continuous and unlimited desire, instantaneous gratification and dissatisfaction, and more desire. The consumer, in this sense, turns into a sort of addict—for the goal of consumerism is to industrialize desire as analogous to a craving for potent drugs and their vanishing effects, to engineer a psychic “objectless craving” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 47), a boundless voracity for meaning. “Consumerist society thus proves to have become, today, (…) toxic, not only for the physical environment, but also for mental structures and psychic apparatuses: as drive-based, it has become massively addictogenic” (Ars Industrialis, 2010).
This compulsion towards liquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital must circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value must radiate endlessly and in every direction.
For all that to happen and keep happening, the imagined object of desire must be fickle, transient, transitory, volatile, elusive. It must be like a dream: a consumption dream.
4.2.4 The ImCon as a System of Cultural Consumption Dreams
Seen from the viewpoint of social imaginaries, contemporary consumerism thus becomes centered on the consumption of dreams and their celebration of desires, imaginary fulfillment, escape, freedom, autonomy, fun, entertainment, and hedonism. A society defined by the mass consumption of the image (Taylor & Saarinen, 1994), of the illusion (Debord, 1967)—of the dream.8
Taking all the above into consideration, the expression consumption dream (sonho de consumo, sueño de consumo) seems perfect for the description of consumer society and the ImCon: it defines a society based on what is immaterial, intangible, fictional (Augé, 1999)— on what is imaginary. It evokes an irrational, magic world—the oneiric world of advertising, marketing, and mass media—in which nothing is impossible, animals and things speak, everything can appear undifferentiated and contiguous, fragmented, connected: success and cigarettes, toothpaste and sparkling happiness, bubble gum and god-like transcendence. It conjures up a fantastic imaginary world, a dream-world that defines social fantasies and imagination: the imaginary of consumption.
Although such description resembles quite closely the world of the unconscious and its night dreams, under consumerism the nocturnal imaginary has other masters and products. Advertising and marketing—as the factories of commodity-narratives (Goldman & Papson, 1996), the industries of image-production (Mitchell, 1986)—are the kings of this magic world of dreams ruled by capital and globally circulated across mass mediascapes. As the makers of the ImCon, these prime-magicians of sign combinatorics function as social architects of desire, as the society’s designers of dreams—in fact, as the dream industry (Biocca, 1991; Fournier & Guiry, 1993). By fashioning this semiotic imaginary, they also fashion its subjects: the consumers.
4.2.5 The Mass Production of Consumers
As discussed above, the primary objective of the ImCon is manipulation, colonization, and configuration of desires (and fears) through images and narratives (Zayas, 2001), through dreams; such colonization aims at rendering desires—libido—mimetic with the code, with the ImCon. However, consumerism goes beyond that. Ewen (1976) has showed that, since the very beginning of advertising, publicity, marketing, and PR, the objective of the dream industry was social production: social management through the mass production of consumers. For that, it sought actively to “mobilize the instincts” (p. 31) and engende r identity with models of what kind of person the subject should be, what kind of life s/he should lead, and so on—all models, of course, being variations of a single homogeneous form: the consumer.
In that sense, the advertisement industry has always been more a machine of production of consumers, rather than an attempt at selling products. Its core social function has been summarized by Fairclough (1989): “Advertising has made people into consumers, i.e. has brought about a change in the way people are, in the sense that it has provided the most coherent and persistent models for consumer needs, values, tastes and behaviour” (p. 207).
If advertising began by developing a highly effective strategy—identifying the product with an “imaginary state of being” (Lears, 1983, p. 19), the consumption dream—it moved on to producing imaginary forms of being, and finally to defining what being is and means: an imaginary existence, an imaginary life, an imaginary self. How to be an individual, a subject, was to be expressed and defined through the consumption of identities formed by commodity-signs: identikits.
4.2.6 Subjective Identities: Identikits
An identikit can be defined as a purchasable, prepackaged narrative-visual-psychological identity.9 The commodity here is subjectivity, a self: a prefabricated personality, which is not necessarily coherent but provides a sense of social identity. It corresponds to the social significations conferred by the consumption of commodity-signs, which, combined and articulated in the form of a self-image, personalize and differentiate the consumer socially.
contemporary ads operate on the premise that signifiers and signifieds that have been removed from context can be rejoined to other similarly abstracted signifiers and signifieds to build new signs of identity. This is the heart of the commodity sign machine. (Goldman & Papson, 1996, p. 5; e.a.)
Therefore an identikit would correspond to an ensemble of such signs, consumed as images of a social self: self-images, social imaginary models of being. As a mass-produced sign, or combination of signs, the identikit is arbitrary, and only derives its signification and difference from the code. If seen from the viewpoint of the desires for individuality and for the social, the identikit offers fulfillment of both, and at the same time feeds them and channels them to commodity-signs. The desired subjectivity (individuality) is bought and consumed in the personality of the product (its “distinctive” sign-value). This represents a reversal: what has personality, discourse, uniqueness, and so on is the commodity, not the human being. The desired social insertion, sociability, is bestowed in the same way: the consumer is socially signified through the sign, and thus inserted and differentiated socially.
This is one of the most alienating aspects of advertisement and consumerism. (…) We are both the product and the consumer; we consume, buy the product, yet we are the product. Thus our lives become our own creations through buying; an identi-kit of different images of ourselves, created by different products. We become the artist who creates the face, the eyes, the life-style. (p. 70)
“We are the product”: when identity and self are solely defined by (consumed) social signs (i.e., one is what one consumes), a process of thorough reification and commodification of the consumer is made possible. Only through identity with the product (in fact, with the imaginary dream—of personhood and social insertion—behind the product) the consumer is: that defines his reality, the “reality” of the ImCon, imaginary, fabricated, and arbitrary. As Lasch (1979, p. 91) contends, for the consumer “the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions”—that is, a reality and an identity mimetic with the reified images of the ImCon.
If that is so, it means that consumption becomes fundamentally enshrined upon dreams and fantasies about who one can and should be: upon consumption dreams of identity. All such dreams are based on some main underlying (ideological) dreams that sustain the ImCon. One refers to the promise of social mobility and deep personal transformation (Featherstone, 2007, p. xv) through consumption. The consumer can be socially mobile and cultivate refined identities through the continuous expression of a lifestyle through the consumption of signs: “carefully choose, arrange, adapt, and display goods—whether furnishings, house, car, clothing, the body or leisure pursuits” (Lyon, 2001, p. 82) to make a personal statement. This series of personal statements defines the consumer’s self, and can change (and thus appear more upwardly mobile) according to his will and means of consumption. The related dream (and imperative) here is the creative expression of a “true” self, of individuality, through mass-produced signs. However, perhaps the main basic dream is that, ultimately, any form of subjectivity ( identity, self) is possible, or purchasable, consumable: by manipulating signs of identity, consumers can become any of their “possible selves” (Markus & Nurius, 1986), and be whatever they want (De Zangotita, 2005)—the way one changes clothes10 or, to use a more appropriate image, the way one changes avatars in cyberspace. The omnipotent dream of the consumer as a demiurge of himself.
Fulfillment of these dreams is to happen by consumption of commodities (and their respective identities) and identification with them. Therefore, what defines the subject here is their identification with the sign as a social signifier, and through it with the social imaginary that confers signification: their identity with the ImCon.
4.2.7 The ImCon as an Artificial Semiotic Imaginary: Final Remarks
Before further discussing the subject and colonization, here are some final summarizing and concluding remarks on the imaginary of consumption. Based on the arguments above, the ImCon can be described as a form of social imaginary that is semiotic and semiological, that is, it is characterized by the hegemony of sign as its form of representation. As commodities are produced as signs, and every sign (every representation) can be commodified, it follows that the commodity-sign is the primal form of representation within the ImCon. As a massive system of sign-values, an ensemble of social signifiers, a semiotic template, the ImCon strives to mediate all social signification, and hence all social relationships under the regime of consumerism. Its representations are signified and stem from the code, following the logic of advertising (i.e., of sign-value production). The signifying code, therefore, corresponds to the framework of the ImCon as a social system of signification: “The object/advertising system constitutes a system of signification, but not language, for it lacks an active syntax: it has the simplicity and effectiveness of a code” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 22). This code of signification is empty of meaning, arbitrary, and by definition “external” to reality. Its discourse, the discourse of the commodity—the discourse-form of advertising—corresponds to the discourse of consumption: the commodity-narratives, their imagery (and their dreams) that represent and proliferate the code as typical forms of seeing the world and self, of ascribing meaning to, understanding, and experiencing both of them, and their interrelationships. It thus corresponds to a cultural imagination that signifies (and thus institutes) society and subjects, and interpellates11 its subject as a consumer through typical imaginary forms: “the images through which society sees itself and makes us see ourselves, an imaginary that defines how to work and desire” (Martín-Barbero, 1987, p. 61)—and, in fact, largely defines experience and how to live.
In comparison with the symbolic imaginaries studied in the previous chapter, the ImCon represents an artificial, fabricated social imaginary: it is not symbolic12 but semiotic, made of sign s that are, by definition, artificial constructions. Although it is also founded on the irrational and the image, instead of dreams (the origin and foundation of symbolic imaginaries) what defines the ImCon are synthetic dreams: its fundamental societal factors, its mythic monads, are the consumption dreams. They too are social imaginary narratives, yet fashioned as semiotic images that are full of meaning for both the collective and the subject. They also speak an emotionally charged, pictorial language; they too seem unreal, or more than real; they are fantastic, magic, mesmerizing, even numinous. They are not symbolic unconscious products, however: the main difference is that these dreams (and the whole ImCon) are ideological. Each commodity-sign with its sign-value, each industrialized dream of consumption, stems from the code, and therefore carries the social logic, the ideology of consumerism.
Such ideology is circulated as an (global) imaginary, shaping minds and bodies, especially through the socially situated deployment of cultural fantasies (Illouz, 2009, p. 377): through what Walter Benjamin saw as “the mass marketing of dreams within a class system” (Buck-Morss, 1989, p. 284)—now a system in which the classes are progressively reduced to sellers and buyers, that is, consumers. Writing about the beginnings of the last century, Benjamin saw the primordia of what now arguably defines our culture, our imaginary—an imaginary made of mass marketing dreams.
Nordström and Riddestråle (2000) illustrate this point: “Power exists—as it always has—in providing people with dreams. Dreams that touch people, excite and arouse them. (…) The question must be how you can provide relevant and potent dreams for the tribes of the world” (p. 245). In their works, these “business gurus” inadvertently describe perfectly the dynamics of capitalism-consumerism, the ImCon, and consumption dreams: a system in which the markets (i.e., capital) seek to become the vis motrix of life—especially psychic life—through the economies of the soul and the management of dreams (Nordström & Riddestråle, 2000). The objective is to turn desires, emotions, and fantasies into commodities (which, strangely enough, would convert capitalism into a “ humanism”). The power for that is “in providing people with dreams”; and “shopping and fucking shape the dreams of our times” (Nordström & Riddestråle, 2000, p. 210). And who engenders, provides, and promises to fulfill those dreams? Great corporations and leaders of business (Nordström & Riddestråle, 2005), engaged in a struggle for the total colonization of bodies, minds, and dreams, in a sort of Hobbesian nightmare-society: “dream against dream, organizations around the world in a total global battle for a share of customers’ money and minds” (p. 243, e.a.). This war of dreams (Augé, 1999) pictures the ImCon and its colonizing power over the subject: the consumer’s mind becomes the greatest commodity.
4.3 The ImCon and the Production of Subjectivity
This section concludes the chapter by summarizing how the semiotic ImCon institutes psychological subjectivity, a social subject: how it conditions being under its regime of signification.
4.3.1 The Subject as Consumer: Identity
The ImCon, at this level of analysis (i.e., seen as a semiotic imaginary), produces the subject as a consumer defined by partial identity with commodity-signs and sign-values, congealed as identikits. “Identity” here refers to two distinct phenomena, both of which, however, coalesce into the idea of “subject”. First, as discussed in Chap. 1, identity refers to the meaning ascribed to it in analytical psychology: the subject’s (unconscious) identification with something. Second, it denotes the more common meaning: a self-definition, a “singular” personality, a sense of identity or individuality.
Therefore, the consumer’s social identity is equivalent to his identification with identikits: as cultural and imaginary roles, models, lifestyles that are socially recognized in a hierarchy of values and involve a continuous “personal” combination and recombination of commodity-signs. In sum, social identity here derives essentially from the consumer’s patterns or styles of consumption, which personalize and signify him socially within the code.
Such self-definition or sense of identity is defined in relation to others: in relation to the imagined relationships with the collective, the social field. As mentioned, social insertion and inclusiveness are signified within and through the code. Instead of social class—and profession, work, religious affiliation, and so on—what is determinant here is the consumption, manipulation, and disposal of commodity-signs, which inscribe the consumer in a certain group and (imaginarily) differentiate him within the group and from all other consumers. By consuming consumer-identikits and identifying with them, the subject gains inscription within the system of social exchange: personal identity requires conformity with the code, with the ImCon.
The existential setting that came to be known as the “society of consumers” is distinguished by a remaking of interhuman relations on the pattern, and in the likeness, of the relations between consumers and the objects of their consumption. This remarkable feat has been achieved through the annexation and colonization by consumer markets of the space stretching between human individuals; that space in which the strings that tie humans together are plaited, and the fences that separate them are built. (p. 11)
We identify our real selves by the choices we make from the images, fashions, and lifestyles available in the market, and these in turn become the vehicles by which we perceive others and they us. In this way, (…) self-formation is in fact exteriorized, since the locus is not on an inner self but on an outer world of objects and images valorized by commodity culture. (p. 44)
4.3.2 Logic and Effects of Consumer-Subject Production
As the reader can see, such process is analogous (and parallel) to the fabrication of signs, or commodification: the sense of identity must become external and more or less arbitrary in relation to the individual subject and their inner psychic reality; thus it can be consumed as models (identikits). Individual difference, value, and meaning—which define individuality—simply cannot originate in inner experiences, substances, or essence. They must be abstracted, so that “difference” only exists as defined through the code, through the (consumed) commodity-sign—as defined by social perception, in complete exteriorization of value and difference. As my favorite purveyors of illustrations Nordström and Riddestråle (2005) express so tenderly, “Basically, there are only two ways in which you can be different—either you are perceived as cheaper or you are perceived as better” (p. 251; e.a.).13
Two other requisites, as typical dynamics, appear to be inherent to such subject-formation: projection and emptying. If the sense of identity, or self, is always to be found in the outer world, in the images and signification provided by the ImCon, and in the perception of others, then subjectivity is by definition projected unto the environment: it is an imaginary construction entirely dependent on the latter. This is related to the fundamental sense of lack, of inner emptiness, upon which the whole mechanics of desire is founded: simply put, signification cannot be found inside, in the inner world, for then the consumer would not crave for it outside (as social signs).
However, what seems to underlie all the processes of fabrication of the subject-as-consumer is that his sense of identity depends vitally on an identity with the fabricated desires, with the consumption dreams—and through them with the whole ideology of consumerism. Again, “identity” here refers to irrational identification: an emotional, imaginary, unconscious identity that bonds the subject to something external to his psyche.14 This identity with consumption dreams represents the basic foundation for the whole process: on the primary colonization of desires and fantasies—of the irrational, emotional, imaginary, unconscious foundation of the subject’s psyche—rests the identity with the whole consumption system, which institutes a self-definition as a consumer. To put differently the same idea, “desire” means libido, psychic energy. Therefore, to the extent that the consumer identifies with consumption dreams, the ImCon colonizes his libido, and thus directs and forms his psychic functioning, working mostly through its irrational—unconscious—aspect.
In this logic, the consumer-subject’s identity is fashioned with fragments of the imaginary—as consumption dreams, and their respective assemblage of commodity-signs. Thus oneiric identikits become the grand purveyors of identity, the cultural ideas of personhood as distinct images of what being a consumer means. Under this semiotic imaginary, you are made of what signs you consume, how you consume them, and, most importantly, what images this whole process conveys: the all-important thing here is appearance, the images we project through consumption. Being a consumer-subject means being defined by management and marketing of self-images, exchanged at the market of social identities—a pastiche personality, as Gergen (1991) called it.
4.3.3 Commodification of Self: The Homo Commoditas
Such description corresponds to the apotheosis of “Homo consumens” (Bauman, 2007, p. 99 ), a new subject whose identity amounts to near-complete identification with the persona. However, this is also a new, postmodern persona. Jung’s concept referred to an idealized (imaginary) and stereotyped social role (the doctor, actor, bohemian, etc.) that, though collectively fabricated, was fairly fixed and had some concreteness about it. The new ImCon personae are not merely imaginary but arbitrary, artificial, and superficial: they are composites of image-signs of identity industrially produced and socially recognized . Maffesoli (1989) writes that such personae have replaced the notion of modern individual, and describes them: they are fluid, deindividualized, directionless identities, peripheral and performative. Each consists in an “amalgam of roles” (Tester, 1993, p. 77); as the consumer-subject is supposed to consume and change them according to the logic of the markets, constantly upgrading his self-image, his mutating identity will be defined by “perpetually playing roles (…) in a pointless theatre of the world” (ibid.) . Maffesoli (1988) affirms that, in opposition to individuation, this is a subject characterized by almost complete dedifferentiation and deindividualization, by “the ‘losing’ of self into a collective subject” (p. 145)—or, in fact, its dissolution into a social imaginary of signs.
From this point of view, what defines the consumer-subject is the salability of the persona(e) chosen and consumed. That means that identity is formed according to these questions: Are you, your identity, marketable? How is it positioned in the “personality market” (Fromm, 1955)? What is your sign-value? All answers to these questions are relatively arbitrary and change all the time by definition, in accord with market demands.
If this is so, it signs a further anthropological mutation. If, as argued in the previous chapter, the human being under symbolic imaginaries was defined as homo symbolicum, and under a semiotic imaginary we have the homo consumens, defined by the consumption of signs, here there appears a transition from homo consumens to homo commodity (or commoditas). If consumer society and the ImCon establish and impose a process of subjectivation, or identity-formation, that becomes essentially identical to commodification, then they will engender a subject whose identity is defined by being a commodity. The logic and practice of this process of commodification of self (Davis, 2003) appear clearly in the contemporary movement of “personal branding”15 (Hearn, 2008; Lair, Sullivan, & Cheney, 2005; Wee, 2010), which consists in manipulating signs and images of oneself in order to become a brand—a process of self-commodification, of turning oneself into a commodity-sign. “Sell your soul” here is not merely metaphoric. Again, Nordström and Riddestråle (2000) innocently instantiate this imperative: “We must brand, package and market ourselves so that we are desirable. Under what slogan will you be sold?” (p. 242).
The imperative for the consumer-subject is thus to become a carefully crafted image, a successful brand, a good working package that makes him more sellable—the perfect persona for that specific moment, for that specific market. In a mass society characterized by the implosion of differences, the ultimate need and desire is to be different somehow, to stand out in a sea of commodities and consumers; and the promise of difference is conveyed through images, fashioned into consumption dreams. As Bauman (2007) puts it, “In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable and desired commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made” (p. 13).
To summarize and conclude, the ImCon thus manufactures the subject as both consumer and commodity: a subject in identity with its consumption dreams, and turning into a consumption dream. Inasmuch as the consumer identifies with such dreams (i.e., makes his personal identity dependable on commodity-signs, on consuming-buying-displaying-disposing them), he follows the social logic of consumption and is signified and differentiated like a commodity: he progressively becomes a commodity too, part of the capital of consumption society. Thus the ImCon institutes and colonizes subjectivity: “I come to view my ‘self’ as a project—as my own bit of capital, to be developed, marketed, packaged and sold” (Knights & Wilmot, 2006, p. 68).