La vida es sueño.
Calderón de la Barca1
Overview
This chapter discusses the ImCon as a simulacrum of symbolic imaginary : as a myth or desacralized religion based on a transcendental ideology. Following the logics of total consumerism-capitalism, its colonization and fabrication of signification, imagination, fantasy, and dream imply the fabrication of an ideological hyperreality, which is discussed through the concept of dream-world. The concepts of fetish, phantasmagoria, and collective dream are then introduced to discuss the mythic-ideological character of the ImCon and some of its effects. The chapter concludes by exploring the possibility that, by simulating a symbolic imaginary, the ImCon colonizes the unconscious psyche and, through archaic identity and mimesis, institutes its subject as a consumer-commodity.
5.1 The ImCon as a Totalizing System of Signification
In this chapter, it will be argued that the imaginary of consumerism, more than being merely semiotic and semiological, functions as a simulacrum2 of symbolic imaginary: like the old symbolic systems, it is a totalizing social system of signification. As mentioned previously, this proposal should be seen as an ideal type, in Weberian tradition; it is a more radical and possibly exaggerated view, a theoretical elaboration of some possibilities, tendencies, and developments that were in fact pointed by the night dreams studied. As such, it may be situated in what Eco (1964) called “apocalyptic” theorization on culture industry—in this case, on its correspondent social imaginary.
5.1.1 Total Capitalism Logic and a Totalizing Imaginary
Such proposal complements the previous chapter3 and is derived from the perspective delineated by the concept of total capitalism, discussed in the Introduction: the characteristic totalizing imperative of consumer capitalism as a social order. Following its logic of unlimited expansion and colonization, the ImCon, as its regime of signification, exhibits a definite tendency to become total, to absorb and subordinate all other imaginaries (symbolic or otherwise) and imaginary forms under its logic. (Some contemporary authors, e.g., Jean Baudrillard, Félix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Paul Virilio, claim that this tendency has in fact been actualized). Differing from a mere semiotic imaginary, however, which colonizes and manipulates systems of meaning, here we should consider that the logic does not stop at colonizing but proceeds to manufacture and simulate social signification, seeking monopoly over it, and hence over reality: here we move from the order of signs (the semiotic and semiological) to the order of simulacra and hyperreality.
Commodity logic has become generalized and today governs not only labour processes and material products, but the whole of culture, sexuality, and human relations, including even fantasies and individual drives. Everything is taken over by that logic, not only in the sense that all functions and needs are objectivized and manipulated in terms of profit, but in the deeper sense in which everything is spectacularized or, in other words, evoked, provoked and orchestrated into images, signs, consumable models. (p. 191)
The outcome was, as mentioned, a society defined by the image. Twenty years ago , Jameson (1992) claimed that “no society has ever been saturated with signs and messages like this” (consumer) society, and, following Debord, pointed out “the omnipresence and omnipotence of the image in consumer capitalism today” (p. 22): a logic of total expansion gradually accomplished through the endless proliferation of images, attesting to “the fundamental character of consumption, its unlimited character ” (Baudrillard, 1968/1996a, p. 61).
Put simply, the unlimited fabrication of imagery and representations, which becomes progressively emancipated from any referents or reality, will ensure monopoly over signification. To recall the definition, the social imaginary corresponds to the order of signification: the social way of organizing and instituting meaning. This process of unlimited reproduction (coupled with unlimited consumption) of signification will engineer an unlimited, unreal, artificial imaginary, which simulates and replaces reality: a totalizing imaginary whose production follows the logic of the simulacrum. It completes the mutation of imaginaries delineated in this thesis: from the order of symbols, we have moved to the order of signs, and toward the order of simulacra. Next I briefly discuss the logics of the orders of sign and simulacrum, and their relations with the symbolic.
5.1.2 Order of Signs: Its Logics of Colonization and Fabrication
The logics behind the appearance of the ImCon as a semiotic order were seen in the previous chapter through the mechanics of advertising. First, it follows the logic of total colonization: sign-production entails manipulating meaning systems and colonizing symbolic images and narratives. As the sign will necessarily function as a commodity-sign, colonization here means the commodification of representation; the sign replaces the symbol with commodity-discourse. This process of semiotic formation demands colonizing progressively the whole of culture and history, manipulating and transforming every component of every system of meaning—narratives, images, representations, symbols—into commodity-signs.
Together with this process of colonization, there is a logic of fabrication of signification, which means that culture itself is mass-produced as (commodity-)signs. Thus the whole system of production comes to mean the production of signs: the commodity is now “immediately produced as a sign, as sign value, and (…) signs (culture) are produced as commodities” (Baudrillard, 1973/1981, p. 147). In other words, what was/is not produced as a (commodity-)sign is colonized; all the rest of culture is henceforth fabricated following commodity-logic. Here the logic of commodification is inescapable—it is total.
The result of both colonization and fabrication is that the semiotic imaginary gradually dissolves and incorporates all existing cultural, historical, social imaginary narratives and representations, including symbolic ones; or, in other words, culture, political economy, and the social are subsumed under the logic of the commodity-sign. This is related to the much-discussed process of declension, destabilization, and commodification of traditional institutions for identity-formation: family, school, work, education, class, and so on; or, as Bauman (2007) said, every (social) space is invaded. Such process, in fact, is extended to the whole of culture: there is a general volatilization, liquefaction, and commodification of values, referents, and culture (Jameson, 1992), which has been called the postmodern condition. From this viewpoint, postmodernity essentially means that both culture and history are debased into images and signs, thus becoming commodity-signs.
The implication for the symbolic orders is vast. Basically, everything eventually becomes mediated by signs, rather than symbols: the hegemony of semiotic imaginaries implies the loss of the symbolic. Due to its very nature, the order of signs not merely colonizes but effaces the symbolic: whereas the symbol unites realities, is dialectics itself, and signifies naturally and irrationally, the sign splits, reduces, and allows for emancipation from reality, for signifying artificially through the manipulation of disconnected signifiers and signifieds. With the sign, irrational signification (which, as we have seen, is founded upon the unconscious cultural, spiritual principle) is replaced by ideology: the political economy of the sign, summarized as consumption- and commodity-logic, defining all meaning a priori. As Baudrillard 4 (1973/1981) put it, “It is the semiological organization itself, the entrenchment in a system of signs, that has the goal of reducing the symbolic function. This semiological reduction of the symbolic properly constitutes the ideological process” (p. 98). Later Baudrillard qualifies this statement: beyond mere reduction, “the absolute condition for its ideological functioning is the loss of the symbolic and the passing over to the semiological” (ibid.; e.a.).
Ultimately this represents the collapse of transcendental values and the symbolic world, mentioned by Dufour (2001) as an important aspect of total capitalism; it is the breakdown and disappearance of the symbolic order. This assessment stands in sharp contrast to the hegemonic view maintained by social sciences today, which speaks of “symbolic consumption” and its “symbolic means of identity-formation”, “symbolic narratives and products”, and the like—as if anything that is somehow signified could be considered “symbolic”, including, and especially, the social system of consumption. The term “symbolic consumption” is an oxymoron. None of these things are truly and strictly symbolic, for they are fundamentally based on ideology and signs, not on symbols. Furthermore, they depend precisely on the absorption and abolishment of the symbolic order. That they are all called “symbolic” merely reflects the phenomenon of colonization (of language and signification), through which the very idea of symbol disappears.
However, for the system of signs to fulfill its inherent logic and become total, it cannot halt at eradicating the symbolic order and taking its place; it needs to emancipate itself from any reality, replacing reality. This part of the process represents the passing over to the order of simulacrum.
5.1.3 Order of Simulacra: Simulation, Simulacrum, and Hyperreality
There are subtle differences between the concepts of simulation and simulacrum. First, there is a passage of the semiotic to the simulation: whereas the sign presumably represents some reality—its signifier is connected in some way to the signified or referent, which represents its “real” basis—the simulation is a form of semiotic representation in which the sign does not refer back to any signified or referent; it merely simulates the real through its semblance or appearance, eventually colonizing and replacing the real. The simulation “not only presents an absence as a presence, the imaginary as the real, it also undermines any contrast to the real, absorbing the real within itself” (Poster, 2001, p. 6). The logic here can be summarized as the fabrication of signs but without referent, without representative equivalence or any necessary connection to any reality: logic of emancipated, combinatorial reproduction.
[S]imulation, in the sense that, from now on, signs are exchanged against each other rather than against the real (it is not that they just happen to be exchanged against each other, they do so on condition that they are no longer exchanged against the real). The emancipation of the sign: remove this “archaic” obligation to designate something and it finally becomes free, indifferent and totally indeterminate . (Baudrillard, 1976/1993, p. 7)
At the level of simulation, signs no longer stand for anything; they no longer represent anything that is real—they are empty. There is a short circuit of reality, of the connections between signifier and signified, between reality and representation. We reach the level of simulacrum and hyperreality when the empty signs take precedence over reality, that is, when the automatic reproduction of signs according to the code engenders a precessional semiurgy—of images, signs, information, and so on—that precedes any “reality”. Such semiurgy is hyperreal, that is, its semblance is more real than any real, and, preceding reality, it replaces it5 and finally erases it.
Simplified comparative between the orders of sign and of simulacra
Logic | Practice | Consequence | |
|---|---|---|---|
Order of sign | Colonization and commodification | Colonize and commodify symbol (and imagery) | Loss of symbolic |
Fabrication, production | Culture is produced as signs; signs are produced as commodities | Commodification of culture and history | |
Order of simulacra | Fabrication without reference to reality, reproduction | Emancipation of representation from reality | Effacement of symbolic Hyperreality replaces reality |
5.1.4 Hyperreality of Consumerism and Total Colonization
Having commodified away the symbolic, total consumerism can proceed and substitute reality by its hyperreal dream-world: an all-enveloping semiurgy of consumption where hyperreal appearances, images, and illusions flow free and reign supreme, where it becomes impossible to distinguish simulations from reality—“reality” converts into the surface of images and their arbitrary, meaningless significations. That is the murder of reality, the “perfect crime”, the most important event of modern history (Baudrillard, 1996b, 2000). Such hyperreal dream-world represents the most insidious form of colonization under consumerism: a totalizing colonization of representation, and through it a colonization of the real.
However, my argument is that this goes beyond colonizing; it implies the fabrication of a synthetic imaginary and a synthetic reality: more than colonizing, this is the equivalent of fashioning reality as (and through) an imaginary. By monopolizing the power to manufacture the real, a real that is more real than real, consumerism actualizes its totalizing character. Baudrillard (1968/1996a) expressed this idea thusly: “consumption may be defined as a total idealist practice of a systematic kind which goes way beyond relations to objects and interpersonal relations and extends to every level of history, communication and culture” (pp. 221–222). As argued, behind such practice are the totalizing code of signification, the omnipresence of commodity-narratives, and the ethereal spectacle of their imagery. As a semiotic order passing over to the simulacra, consumerism thus attempts to define all signification and reality, an imaginary reality, the ImCon: a fiction, a faux imaginary construction, a gigantic artificial “dream” that replaces and effaces reality. Therefore what will essentially move the consumption machinery is the fabrication and circulation of such imaginary, which mediates every experience: an industry of unreality comes to define it.6
5.1.5 The Industry of Unreality and the Fabrication of Imagination
The social system of present consumerism thus becomes characterized by the apotheosis of the image, as its main commodity and product, as the element that signifies everything. Thus, as Retort (2004) put it, “control over the image is now the key to social power”—not only social but economic, political, and cultural power depend on the control of the means “to systematize and disseminate appearances, and to subject the texture of day-to-day living to a constant barrage of images, instructions, slogans, logos, false promises, virtual realities, miniature happiness-motifs”. Reiterating, control of the image-world, the imaginaries, and the imaginary function—imagination, fantasy, and creativity—becomes the vital factor: it determines the fabrication of reality and subjects, and the functioning of the entire system.7 It signals “how important capitalism deems its monopoly of the imagination to be” (Jhally, 2006, p. 107).
This radical shift of consumerism can be illustrated with the concept of imagineering: it explicitly states and instantiates concisely the logic, goal, and practice of fabricating imaginaries and imagination. “Imagineering” is a portmanteau word that fuses “imagination” and “engineering”, that is, it refers to the engineering of imagination. According to Wikipedia,8 the term “was popularized in the 1940s by Alcoa to describe its blending of imagination and engineering, and adopted by Walt Disney a decade later”. Appropriated by Disney , it came to mean Walt Disney Imagineering (or simply Imagineering), the design, building, and development arm of the Walt Disney Empire. Although it refers mainly to the fabrication of theme parks and other entertainment venues, it can be seen as representing the logic of fabricating synthetic imaginaries of consumption: the Disneyization of the cultural imaginary, “the process of capturing all the real world to integrate it into its synthetic universe, in the form of a vast ‘reality show’ where reality itself becomes a spectacle ” (Baudrillard, 1996c).
Juxtaposing Alcoa and Disney illustrates clearly the mutation of the system: from a capitalism based on the industrial production of concrete objects (and a logic of factory, Fordism, etc.), the exploitation of labor power, and the harnessing of desires, to a consumerism based on the industrial production or engineering of images and imaginaries, and through them, of imagination and minds. As Lash and Lury (2007, p. 3) comment, while discussing Adorno and Horkheimer, “Now the logic of the factory colonized the dream factories of the culture industry”; or was it rather that the dream factories absorbed the logic of production and reproduction of factories so as to industrially manufacture imaginaries, hyperreal dream-worlds, and became the main factories of consumer capitalism.
Disney was the model and pioneer of this capitalist revolution. As Baudrillard (1996c) wrote, Disney was “the precursor, the grand initiator of the imaginary as virtual reality”. Today his name and empire stand as a metonym for the mass production of dreams; yet the logic for such seems to be extending to globalized mass media, to all kinds of visual and imaginary products and narratives that use technologies of image (including games, movies, animation, ads, etc.), mass-produced by synergistic corporations. Although it follows the overwhelming logic of colonization through commodification, this giant process of cultural phagocytosis is clearly not restricted to advertising and marketing: this is the capitalist signification machinery.
Disney’s imagineering thus illustrates such logic, moving from the semiological to the simulacra, behind the advent of synthetic imaginaries. If, following a marketing logic, “producing marketable commodity signs depends on how effectively advertisers are able to colonize and appropriate referent systems” (Goldman & Papson, 1996, p. 9; e.a.), implying that all forms of discourse and image are liable to absorption and commodification, to becoming part of the code, the logic of imagineering is to effectively colonize all the historical forms of human imagination and creativity—all natural products of symbolic- and fantasy-thinking—and fabricate and reduplicate them as hyperreal imaginary narratives, under an ethos of marketed entertainment and leisure: as commodified imaginary worlds. This process crucially includes the wholesale colonization of the symbolic, archetypal, mythological wealth of humanity: fairy tales, myths, religious narratives, and so on—the fundaments of cultural imaginaries that used to signify the whole array of psychological functioning and human experience.
As mentioned, the tendency is for this process to follow a logic of simulation and simulacra: to colonize diverse elements from symbolic imaginaries and replicate them by recombining images, narratives, and motifs, in a typical process of technological bricolage, while erasing the referents, the original narratives, and symbols (which thus run the risk of disappearing). For instance, the countless mythic narratives about the hero and his quest are appropriated, simulated, and reduplicated by news, movies, videogames, and a myriad of other prepackaged images and narratives, and commercialized as a pastiche of mythic images, whose underlying ethics is that of profit, of unlimited accumulation of capital. Two factors are important here. One is that, with the effacement of the referents, the cultural image of the hero—what used to be a primordial image, a symbolic représentation collective derived from an archetype, inserted in a mythic system—is henceforth solely purveyed by the imagineers as a commodity, that is, it is fabricated as a simulacrum. The second factor is that such products usually leave no space for creative imagination—the narrative and imagery are already given (it is the merchandise itself), with all its significations readily presented in simplified, easily absorbed, transparent, spectacularized ways; thus fantasy-thinking is appropriated and presented as a synthesized, ready product to be consumed fast—as a manufactured experience.
If this is so, then imagineering becomes the main form of production and source of cultural and individual imagination. It produces not only consumption dreams but imaginary dream-worlds whose stuff is consumability: it creates simulacra worlds. This process of cultural dissolution and replication can be viewed as what Augé (1999) called a “systematic ‘fictionalisation’ to which the world is subjected” (p. 7)—a cultural mutation. “We have arrived at the ‘all-fictional’—in the same sense as we use the term ‘all-electric’. All the old collective imaginaries now have the status of fiction” (p. 103)—and, I would add, of commodities.
The domestication of fantasy in visual consumption is inseparable from centralized structures of economic power. Just as the earlier power of the state illuminated public space—the streets—by artificial lamplight, so the economic power of CBS, Sony, and the Disney Company illuminates private space at home by electronic images. With the means of production so concentrated and the means of consumption so diffused, communication of these images becomes a way of controlling both knowledge and imagination. (p. 221)
My argument is that this phenomenon is not restricted to the home: as a social imaginary of a society in which every experience is mediated, it is virtually everywhere, omnipresent in private and public spaces—including the consumers’ dreams, their psyche. The verb she uses is also interesting, “to illuminate”: it is the necessary requisite for perception, seeing, imagining—that is, it determines psychic functioning. Therefore imagineering, meaning the industrial production of synthetic imaginaries, can be viewed as representing a global effort “to alter the dreams and re-fashion the imagination ” (Augé, 1999, p. 6): to manufacture minds.
5.1.6 Hyperreal Imaginary as Cultural Discourse
Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. (p. 87; e.a.)
Facing the prospect of what seems to be a total “colonization of imaginaries ” (Gruzinski, 1988), Augé (1999) asked, “What is now our imaginary universe and are we still capable of imagination?” (p. 81). The answer may condense what has been argued so far: our imaginary universe is becoming a totalizing semiotic imaginary; as a self-reproductive system of signification, its logic is to imagineer a world of images into existence, a hyperreal world of surfaces that turns into an absolute, shaping and actually fabricating all cultural imagination and dreams.
Thus, if Morpheus was the “shaper”, the god that gave form (morphē) to the world through oneiric images, in contemporary consumerism this role has been hijacked by mass media , advertising, and imagineering. Under the ImCon, consumption dreams become the “messengers” of the market gods: by setting the mediatic gospels, it fashions the new cultural “gods”, the icons, idols, and models to be adored and followed through mass consumption. These commercial divinities guarantee the main product of such imaginary, the almighty commodity: “the consumable life, the buyable fantasy” (Ewen, 1989, p. 85), a life lived and purchased in a consumerist dream-world.
5.2 The ImCon as a Dream-World of Consumption Dreams
If dreams and symbol were the origins and stuff of previous symbolic imaginaries, and consumption dreams represent a semiotic ersatz dream-stuff … here we enter a dream-world of consumption—a simulacrum of imaginary, or imaginary made of simulacra and signs—a fantastic imaginary world in which reality becomes a dream-delusion.
Here I use “dream-world ” in four possible senses. The first refers to what Langman (1992, p. 48) called “a new dream-like order of commercial reality”: a reality made up by the ImCon. It serves to describe how everyday postmodern life, fully mediatized by representational technological apparatuses, becomes flooded by a barrage, indeed a deluge of dreamy commodity-signs, imagery, and information. Through a massive deployment of a semiurgy of images, narratives, and messages circulated fast through global mediascapes, the ImCon intertwines and proliferates emotions, desires, affects, representations, and fantasies . Permeating and pervading all reality, it creates a sort of dream-world made of consumption dreams, which amplifies the latter’s characteristics: an endless and unavoidable flow of emotionally charged, desirable images, with a neon aura, a fantastic magic, even hypnotic power that seems “unreal”, more than real, hyperreal, and embrangles, mesmerizes, enchants. It is a “dream-world” also because, through saturating the senses with a white noise of information, it produces an effacement of the distinction reality/dream, or reality/imaginary; everything becomes dreamy images to be consumed and discarded at growing speed. It means a hyperreality of consumption fully dominated by the surface of images—what Baudrillard (1983) called an aesthetic hallucination of the real. Or, as Mike Featherstone (2007) has described it, a “surfeit of images and information which threatens our sense of reality. The triumph of signifying culture leads to a simulational world in which the proliferation of signs and images has effaced the distinction between the real and the imaginary” (p. 83). To illustrate the point with a movie, as The Truman Show (Weir, 1998) depicted, here the imaginary approaches a saturation in which the difference between reality and mass-marketed fantasies and imagery blurs and implodes: everything becomes an ad, reality becomes a reality show. Or, as Marcuse (1964, p. 14) put it, “There is only one dimension, and it is everywhere and in all forms.”
The second sense is the one mentioned in the Introduction: it refers to shopping malls, giant department stores, McDonald’s, and Disneyland as dream-worlds of consumption (Benjamin, 1999; Buck-Morss, 1989, 2000; Williams, 1991), that is, as global symbols of the ImCon and the concretization of its dream-worlds. As the scenarios or “dreamscapes” of the night dreams analyzed in this work, they will be discussed in the next chapter.
financial capital does not fabricate commodities like the industrial capital does: it fabricates worlds. But what worlds are those? Worlds of signs through advertisement and mass culture. Now it is known that more than half of the earnings of transnational companies is dedicated to advertisement, an activity that precedes the fabrication of products and commodities . In the advertisement campaigns images of worlds [e.a.] are created, with which the consumer will identify themselves and then will desire.
The first refers to what I called the “paradise of childhood” in Chap. 2: a sort of dreamy unconscious world in which everything is available, abundantly and immediately: a cornucopia-world of fantastic and unlimited goods and experiences that are ready for grabs, which is interrelated to a dream of immediate and never-ending gratification . Ritzer (2001) has described it thusly: “The dream here, and one that is played to by most of the new means of consumption, is to be immersed in a world filled with everything one could ever imagine, with all of these things there for the taking. It is akin to the childhood dream of finding oneself in a land in which everything is made of candy and all of it is within reach” (p. 121).
The second is similar, or related: the dream-world of a “Land Without Evil”—without poverty, lack, difference, or even bad weather—a total capitalist “society of divine happiness” (Clastres, 1974/1989, p. 215) and unfettered hedonism, without conflicts or contradictions. A sort of commercial, ethereal paradis artificiel—a paradise of consumption.
The third relates more to the subject: a dream-world of unlimited freedom in which personal responsibility is erased—every judgment and every opinion can be consumed, politics is either non-existent or equated with sign exchange, ethics means consuming and expressing whatever is deemed politically correct, and so on, that is, a world in which every choice is viewed as a consumer choice (and thus implies no real choice at all). A bit like a postmodern dream.
The fourth can be called a dream of omnipotence, a dream-world in which everything is possible, every way of being is reachable—through consumption, and only through consumption. This is related to what I called the dream of “deep and instantaneous personal transformation”, “the omnipotent dream of the consumer as a demiurge of himself”, in the previous chapter. Jhally (2006) mentions it as a magical world of consumption in which people can be magically and instantaneously transformed (by objects, by images and signs).
Probably more dream-worlds could be added to this list (e.g., a dream-world of an eternal present, effacement of time and history and mortality; a dream-world in which progress through consumable technology is certain, inevitable, and independent of human action: like an almighty divinity, technology guides and transforms mankind, with all its misery, into posthumans; and so on). However, it can be perceived that all such dreams and dream-worlds are related; they may be seen as central to the ImCon, its main constituents as a hyperreal world, the supernatural “commodity-world” (Jhally, 1989, p. 217). In fact, as central metaphysical beliefs, as archaic ideas, they work like myths: they inform transcendent, ideal, imaginary worlds, which condense the social utopias, litanies, and liturgies of total consumerism. As such, they are behind the fact that, under global consumerism, the imaginary itself is the fundamental commodity; the myth is what is essentially sold and consumed, what moves the whole social system. As Juremir Machado puts it, “What needs to be sold is an imaginary, i.e., a reservoir of images and sensations and an engine that impulses the actions of every consumer” (Silva, 2007, p. 161); these dream-worlds can be seen as the main ideological motors for such.
And, finally, the fourth and perhaps most disturbing sense, it is indeed a dream-world, for, with globalization, the fantasy world of consumption, the ImCon, goes global: it progressively colonizes all imaginaries, absorbing their elements and replicating them, relentlessly homogenizing and commodifying all cultures. In 1983, Hamelink had already pointed to this process: “the impressive variety of the world’s cultural systems is waning due to a process of ‘cultural synchronization’ that is without historical precedent” (p. 3). Such “synchronization” I call colonization: the logical conclusion of a totalizing pan-consumerism, global colonization corresponds to the extension of commodity-discourse and imagery through mass media, everywhere—produced and reproduced globally as a techno-imaginary (Balandier, 1985, p. 222).
Although this is a controversial subject (pace the advocates of glocalization, hybridization, etc.), some authors have affirmed the same idea: that the culture industry, dominated by advertisement and marketing logic (i.e., by commodity- and sign-logic), is going global. Lash and Lury (2007), for instance, analyze extensively such idea in their book The Global Culture Industry. That means that the ImCon is turning, or has already turned, into a global collective consciousness. If that is so, it represents an unprecedented cultural and anthropological mutation, and corresponds to what Hannerz (1989, 1992) called a “global ecumene”, a world culture defined by the ImCon. Cultural critic Naomi Klein (2000) expressed it brilliantly as a “monoculture” that is redolent of a “global mall” (p. 117). If that is so, it means that all cultures and all imaginaries—all the historical wealth of mankind—are going through a behemoth process of commodification and simulation; the end result might be the total deconstruction of reality and its reconstruction as a total imaginary of consumption.
5.3 ImCon as Simulacrum of Symbolic Imaginary
Here we re-approach the central theme of this chapter: how the ImCon seems to function as a totalizing imaginary. The basic proposition is that it represents a simulacrum of symbolic imaginary that, by colonizing, replacing, and eventually effacing the old symbolic systems, simulates and functions like them: as a totalizing social system of signification, a myth or desacralized religion. In what follows I attempt to develop such proposition.9
The first idea is that the ImCon constitutes a globalitarian collective consciousness, in the same sense of the concept developed by Durkheim: at its most basic level, it functions as an archaic, primitive, “mythic” collective mentality, founded on a specific form of imagery and imagination (its order of signs and simulacra), and based not on rationality, but on irrational factors: on emotions, desires, fear, the instinctual—the unconscious psyche. Through its code, it monopolizes how meaning, value, signification, and difference are ascribed and consumed socially; thus it institutes social and individual life. However, it does not provide social cohesion—as one of its central beliefs is crass individualism, it can only foster weak and volatile bonds—but rather social homogeneity.
The second related idea is that the ImCon operates as an ensemble of représentations collectives, with more or less the same dynamics and consequences that they have in relation to so-called primitive societies. However, the main difference is that its représentations are not symbolic, mythic narratives that are natural and direct expressions of the unconscious psyche. They do not correspond to a natural “new interpretation of archetypal motifs10” (Vieira, 2003, p. 57), but rather to the absorption of all narratives and imagery that have a mystical, archetypal, “transcendent”, and metaphysical character, and their fabrication and reduplication as a fetishized system of signs that functions as an ersatz symbolic order. This is perhaps the central idea of this thesis: under the ImCon, the symbolic is erased and substituted by a mass ideology. The political economy of the sign and its code and the logics of capital, consumption of signification, commodification, market, unlimited accumulation , and so on are erected into a transcendental ideology.
Accordingly, the constitutive elements of such ideology function as supraordinate ideas. Tentatively, one could say that the kernel ideas are commodity, capital (and money), market, and consumption. However, consumption seems to represent the dominant, the highest supraordinate, idea in the system that defines its ideology, to which all the system’s constituents are connected, refer, and function according to the social system’s fundamental drive, main categorical imperative , or absolute principle (Baudrillard, 1970/1998). It would correspond to the main archetype of such imaginary, were “consumption ” an archetype.
However, and to recall Jung’s (CW16, §247) expressions, all such ideas can be seen as subsumed under one “collective formula” or hegemonic representation: the commodity-sign, as “general idea” and “value-category”. In comparison with symbolic imaginaries, within the ImCon its atom, the commodity-sign, replaces the symbol as its radix, origin, and primal form of representation. Indeed, if for Marx the commodity-form was the central form of representation within capitalism, under total consumerism the commodity-sign becomes the only form. Like a primordial image, it functions as an “idea ante rem”,11 defining production and reproduction—commodities are produced as signs, signs (culture) are produced as commodities (Baudrillard )—and apperception—things, social relations, persons are perceived as and through commodity-signs. If we take the analogy with the primordial image to an extreme, the commodity-sign also orders experience and directs action (consumption) through a determined meaning (signification, difference: social signification given by the code); thus it can be seen (with some exaggeration) as the archetypal image of the ImCon.
If commodity-signs function as the primary particles of the ImCon as collective consciousness, it is chiefly by their formulation and agglutination into consumption dreams and dream-worlds that they operate as its représentations collectives. Consumption dreams and their dream-worlds articulate and communicate the ImCon’s ideology; they carry and convey its metaphysics, collective formulae, its code and gospel. Just like a religious narrative, each consumption dream carries the sum total of collective practices and social ideology of consumerism12; the whole structure of consumption society and its logic are condensed in it. Just like myth, consumption dreams function as the dynamis, the prime mover that mobilizes and directs social and individual energies and affects (desire: libido) toward rituals of consumption (Belk, Wallendorf, & Sherry, 1989), the fundamental, monadic social act that constitutes consumer society.
Thus, as représentations collectives, the ideology of consumerism functions as typical and collective mental categories, except categories based on irrational, primitive thought, which is associative, pre-logical, magical: they are categories founded on fantasy- and dream-thinking. As categories of imagination (Jung, CW8, §254) and understanding that are interposed between the subject and reality, they condition how reality—both inner and outer—is experienced and represented. They are not merely “impervious to experience” and “indifferent to contradiction”, like représentations collectives; as argued, the system of signs is a priori based on denial of reality, and eventually effaces reality, taking its place. That is, such semiotic representations define reality itself as hyperreality. As mental categories, they condition experience: approaching a totalizing functioning, every experience will bear the mark of consumption- and commodity-logic, that is, the world and its subjects are seen as functioning according to such logics; just like an archaic collective consciousness, such perception and functioning are taken for granted, naturalized (das Fraglos-gegeben): the hyperreal becomes the real.
Finally, the ImCon’s représentations collectives also function based on the irrational, archaic psychic substratum (instincts, emotions, desires, etc.): they engender functional irrationality through their emotional, fascinating, magical power—their mystical character , to use Lévy-Bruhl’s expression. To recall, the représentations are collective because they embody powerful collective feelings, emotions, and values; they are “contaminated” emotionally, and their contamination follows a collective pattern, shared by the whole of culture: their typical mana , expression of the numinosity of the collective unconscious. However, here the representations’ fascination and spell do not come from archetypal images (projected as symbolic systems) but from the manufactured sign-value, the aura of the commodity (Tomlinson, 1990, p. 15). It is the sign-value, arbitrarily and artificially manipulated as a dream narrative, that gives the representations (and the objects) their emotional color and affective value, their dreamy, magical semblance. The emotional and affective value (libido, as numen), which the primitive projected upon the object, here is given a priori, inducing and forcing projection. Like mana , it channels the subject’s affective value, emotions, feelings (desire, irrational elements) to the commodity-sign, to consumption as the great habitude directrice de la conscience.
Therefore, here numinosity is fabricated through manipulation of image and signification; thus it systematizes, directs, and ultimately engineers the irrational substratum in the subject that was the original source of such numinosity—unconscious substratum that is inevitably moved and caught by the aura of the commodity, which is extended till reaching omnipresence as a global regime of the image. That is the fundamental origin of the ImCon’s mana , of its fascinating and mysterious character, its sacred aura, “the sanctification of the system as such, of the commodity as system ” (Baudrillard , 1973/1981, p. 92): its fetish.
5.3.1 Fetish and Phantasmagoria as the ImCon’s Numen
Indeed, if social signification defines consumerism, the commodity fetish (sign-value) is the key element for its imaginary as a surrogate symbolic-mythic system: instead of symbols and numen, the ImCon is defined by signs (and simulacra) and ideology congealed as fetish (or phantasmagoria). In what follows I discuss the concepts of fetish, phantasmagoria, and ideology based on the works of Baudrillard , Marx , and Walter Benjamin.
a fabrication, an artifact, a labor of appearances and signs. It appeared in France in the 17th century, coming from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “artificial”, which itself derives from the Latin factitius. The primary sense is “to do” (“to make”, faire), the sense of “to imitate by signs”. (p. 91)
To sum up, as “feitiço”, fetish connotes an enchantment (numen) obtained by (artificial) sorcery: a fakery, a semiotic simulation that fascinates and deludes.
Marx’s theory of capitalist fetishism is still valuable to us, however, for its articulation of fetish with the religious and sacred, and with the phenomenon of projection. Indeed, the original Enlightenment concept appropriated by Marx referred to religious fetishism, the “primitive, natural and irrational African practice of attributing material things with supernatural powers and therefore a special social value, or animism” (Osborne, 2005, p. 17). As we have seen, that describes the basic functioning of symbolic thinking: the “supernatural powers” correspond to mana , the primordial religious form that informed symbolico-religious imaginaries. Naturally, Marx employed the concept of fetish to discuss the religious-like aspects of the commodity and capitalism. In the Capital, fetish is the illusory mythic force that animates the commodity, and thus the world made in its image; it establishes mystical (geheimnisvolle) and mysterious (raetselhafte) forms of relation between things—hegemony of commodified, reified relations—forming a capitalist world that abounds in “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties ” (Marx, 1867/1990, p. 163), derived from a fetishist worldview. Marx then speculates that the source of such worldview can only be found in the “nebulous realm of the religious world13” (Nebelregion der religiösen Welt) (Marx, 1867/1993, p. 86), which, psychologically, corresponds to the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and their numen.
The archetypal numen is what used to be “attributed” by the primitives to material things: a projection of the sacred upon the environment. However, what was a “natural and irrational” practice, which sustained an organic connection with the sacred and the world, is artificially engineered and reified under capitalism. This process will result in colonization, desecration, and volatilization of both the sacred and the world—including the human world, or reality—which sublimate into an ethereal “nebulous realm”.
Such result was concisely expressed as the famous phrase in The Communist Manifesto (1848), “All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned”. The original German, “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”, signifies a process of sublimation; while “melts into air” still denotes something solid becoming liquid and then gaseous, verdampft means to volatilize, to vaporize.14 This process of volatilization refers not only to the gargantuan process of dematerialization of the world (Ward, 2009) inherent to the process of producing commodities, as “not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values ” (Marx, 1867/1990, p. 138), and of consuming them, as “eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption ” (Arendt, 1958/1998, p. 115), or to the generalized monetization of all social values. This process is indeed equivalent to a dissolution of all sense of solidity—a dissolution of reality itself. My argument is that the second part of the sentence, “alles Heilige wird entweiht”, all that is sacred is desecrated, points not merely to a phenomenon parallel to the volatilization but to its central genealogy. The profaned sacred here is not limited to the past, tradition, beliefs, and loyalties , as Bauman (2000, p. 3) contended; it fatefully refers to what has always been their very foundation—the mythic, religious, irrational realm: the symbolic-archetypal.
The central event of modernity: Nietzsche expressed it not as the mere profanation of such realm but as the “murder of the gods”, slaughter of the symbolic. The symbolic—expression of the gods, of the transcendental—was what provided society with a stable, hierarchic system of meaning that underlay all social life; it gave it solidity, as origin and foundation of culture itself (in fact, as principium, beginning and principle: arché15), through the guarantee of absolutes (as symbolic manifestations of archetypes, the archai).16 Without the symbolic, culture and reality are volatilized (and commodified); Nietzsche’s “murder of the gods” in the marketplace is followed by Baudrillard’s “murder of reality”.
“Heilige” and the English “holy” have the same etymological source: “whole”, integral, healthy, indicating an original wholeness—the totality of the sacred, symbolic domain, the transcendental or suprasensory, with the human realm of senses and experiences, the sensory. A totality that functioned through and was embodied in symbolic imaginaries: the symbol is what naturally represents and unifies the sensory and the suprasensory, the irrational-transcendental and the rational-physical, into a totality, a wholeness.
Such wholeness is fragmented, and the suprasensory, alienated from the human world (“murdered”), is then volatilized and projected upon the commodity-form, which contrives and mesmerizes the sensory through its empty appearance. The commodity becomes imbued with both: ein sinnlich übersinnliches Ding (Marx, 1867/1993, p. 85), a sensible suprasensible thing; it acquires a numinous (“sacred”) character, its fetish, but in a perverted, both supernatural and unnatural, inhuman form: Marx calls it the “ghostly objectivity” (gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit) (Marx, 1867/1993, p. 52), the autonomous phantasmagoria of the commodity-form.
5.3.2 Phantasmagoria: A Technological Dream-Delusion
The concept of phantasmagoria—die phantasmagorische Form—appears in Marx’s Das Kapital as a metaphor for the capitalist ideology of fetishism: it connotes how the volatilization and commodification of what was once both human and transcendental, when projected upon the commodities , endue social relations and the world with a dreamy, illusory, mystical character, as a sort of ghostly vapor that pervades everything. What was once a living human substance then animates the commodity-world—“Things [commodities] have gained autonomy, and they take on human features”, as Benjamin (1999, p. 181) quotes Marx—and social relations become reified and sort of undead, not quite living, immaterial, a mere appearance: “There is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic [phantasmagoric] form of a relation between things ” (Marx, 1867/199317).
However, beyond articulating fetish and ideology with the resulting mystical, dream-like life that they fashion, what makes the concept of phantasmagoria even more appropriate to describe the ImCon is that—differing from the concept of “fetish”—it connotes the technological character of fetishization, the fundamental artificial character of the projection, and its logic of illusion , spectacle, and entertainment. That is, the concept simply condenses the ontology of the ImCon as a techno-imaginary. Such connotations can be seen in the origins of the term.
Originally, the phantasmagoria was a mechanical apparatus, a lantern or projector, used in magical illusionist spectacles to “conjure up” the ghosts of the past.18 By concealing the back projection of ghostly images, it simulated their apparition, creating an autonomous, fascinating, and artificial reality. “The images were intended to appear as if they just emerged and had a life of their own” (Hetherington, 2005, p. 193). Marx used this trope to illustrate how labor is concealed in the production of value, which, as commodity fetish, is emancipated from labor and projected upon the world, thus producing a false, misty, ideological reality redolent of myth, dream, and primitive religion.
The analogy with the dynamics of the ImCon and the functioning of représentations collectives for the primitives is clear. The ImCon: projection by technology of magic images onto a smoke screen of empty commodities—creating a phantasmagoria with the spectral semblance of a mythical reality. What was “attributed” naturally by the primitives—that is, through the unconscious autonomous mechanism of projection of symbols, the operations of symbolic fantasy, imagination, and dream—here is artificially conjured up as disconnected images through an automated, technological artifact. Yet, if we connect this trope with my previous argument, it can be used in a more radical way: under the ImCon, what is “conjured up” and projected, the “ghosts of the past”, ultimately represents what was named before as “all that is solid and sacred”—history, culture, and fundamentally the archetypal, the mythical, symbolical, transcendental realms. That is, what was the domain of the unconscious—of nature, symbol, and dream—is colonized, volatilized, manufactured, and mechanically projected onto a commodity-world: that is its fetish, its phantasmagoria. Another form of saying the same, etymologically, phantasmagoria can be read as phantasma agoreuein (Cohen, 2006, p. 209), the ghosts of the agora, the ghosts of the marketplace. And who were murdered in the marketplace of capitalism? The gods. Hence, the commodity-world is imbued with the ghosts of the gods (i.e., of the archetypes as symbols), their supernatural, spectral numen what fascinates and haunts us.
In fact, the etymon of phantasmagoria does point to a connection with a god. In Greek mythology, Phantasos was one of the Oneiroi, the gods of dreams, sons of Hypnos. Whereas Morpheus and Ikelos, his brothers, sent people dreams in human and animal forms, Phantasos was the one responsible for sending dreams of inanimate objects, of lifeless things, in fact, according to Ovid,19 vacant anima: things devoid of soul—and in deceptive shapes—in opposition to Morpheus, he never announced the truth.
Phantasos would then correspond to the god of semiotic consumption dreams, which “never tell the truth” (are artificial, unreal, and deny reality); the god who endows inanimate things with a dreamy character, and replaces true human dreams (sent by Morpheus) and imagination with deception, a phantasmatic, hypnotic illusion or phantasy. As Hetherington (2005, p. 191) commented, “His is the figural message (…) of a modern bourgeois civilization dreaming itself into existence through the commodity. In a capitalist society Phantasos has become the god of the commodity fetish.” Indeed, Phantasos would be the apposite god of the ImCon dream-world and its surrogate religion—if it had any real, historical gods….
5.3.3 Consumerist Phantasmagoria as Collective Dream
Walter Benjamin , in his Passagen-Werk, published in English as Arcades Project (1999), reinterpreted such Marxian insights while focusing more on the transition from capitalism to consumerism; he articulated capitalism-consumerism’s mythic, religious traits with the concepts of dream and phantasmagoria.
Benjamin (1999) first proposed seeing life and psychic functioning under capitalist ideology and its commodity fetishism as dream, a “dreaming collective”—a concept that allowed for illuminating all the oneiric and irrational elements of capitalism. He emphasized the central role played by the irrational aspects in the modern apotheosis of the commodity: through new technologies, images, and spectacles, high capitalism sought to conjure the supernatural dimension, the mystique, the powers of “the visceral unconscious” (p. 396), in order to manufacture a dream life in a “primordial landscape of consumption” (p. 827) governed by the commodity-fetish as “wish-image” (p. 46) (i.e., what I called a consumption dream, a desire image). Its signifying edifices were the Parisian arcades, galleries, and world fairs—predecessors of shopping malls, department stores, and Disneyland-like thematic parks. They embodied the first dream-worlds of consumption, as the “dream houses of the collective” (p. 405), the producers of the “dream- and wish-image of the collective” (p. 905), that is, the factories of an artificial irrational, emanating exclusively from the commodity fetish, which mystified and acted as a fermenter “of intoxication in the collective consciousness” (ibid.). Benjamin expressed the religious character of such inebriating, enchanted dream-worlds calling them “temples of commodity capitalism” (p. 36).
Following Marx , Benjamin later exchanges fetish and ideology for the concept of commodity phantasmagoria, which condenses the commodity’s spectacular, hypnotizing power, its “ghostly objectivity”. For Benjamin , it was as if all the dissolved cultural and irrational elements—history, value, meaning, dream , desire, organic social relations—projected upon the commodity returned and, as a spectral presence, saturated and conditioned all experience as ghost-like, immaterial, illusory, and unreal, and yet forceful and moving, supernatural, mythic.
The arcades embodied socially such uncanny, mystical experience—a phantasmagorical dream. However, such form of collective consciousness was not limited to the arcades. In a society defined by the production and consumption of commodities , their properties, and specifically their fetish character, come to define how society “represents itself and thinks to understand itself ” (Benjamin, 1999, p. 669). Hence ultimately the whole of culture and modernity become defined by their phantasmagoria: Benjamin saw “the culture of the commodity-producing society as phantasmagoria 20” (Benjamin, 1991, p. 1172), and technological modernity as the world dominated by its phantasmagorias (Benjamin, 1999, p. 26).21
For Benjamin , mass culture—in fact the whole of modernity—was overtaken by the ideological superstructure of consumer capitalism , which has the phantasmagorical appearance of a collective dream: the “collective dream of the commodity phantasmagoria” (Buck-Morss, 1989, p. 271), whereby the “collective consciousness sinks ever into deeper sleep ” (Benjamin, 1999, p. 389). For Benjamin , the masses of commodity society live in a somnambular dream state, a dream-world : the phantasmagoric dream of capitalist ideology, raised to the role of a Hegelian Geist (or a phantasmal imaginary) that animates, and at the same time anesthetizes, consumer society.
The politico-psychological consequences of such society are condensed in another quote: “capitalism is a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep [Traumschlaf] came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces” (Benjamin, 1999, p. 391; e.a.). Traumschlaf represents the cultural lethargy, alienation, and unreality that compose the phantasmagorical collective dream. Its accompanying mythic reactivation, the return of the alienated, colonized irrational aspects, was fatefully actualized as Nazism: underneath the illusory, “mythical” dream-world of consumption lurked destructive, indeed devastating, irrational elements. In the same way that the phantasmagoria represents the eerie, dark aspect of the appropriation of irrational forces by the commodity, ultimately the whole system, the capitalist machine, sits upon primeval, alienated unconscious factors: for Benjamin , capitalism is a cultic, nihilistic religion “which offers not the reform of existence but its complete destruction ” (Benjamin, 1921/1996, p. 289). That is, the Traumschlaf hid the reappearance not only of relatively harmless “barbaric” elements such as the treadmill, poor laws, and so on, as pointed by Marx,22 but of sheer destructive, nihilistic barbarism, an atavistic nightmare skulking in the subterranean stream of capitalism: masses marching like somnambulant ghosts not in the arcades, but inside a “mythic”, techno-mechanical totalitarianism. The modern dream-worlds of consumption became death factories.
5.3.4 ImCon as a Mythic Dream-World: The Myth of the Cave
After this historical digression, let us return to the contemporary ImCon. The reader can infer that the idea of phantasmagoria as a technological projector advanced the theme of mass media, communications industries, and the massive circulation of (fetishized) images they promote. The argument delineated above is that, through their global extension and all-pervasiveness, these forms of technological proliferation of images constitute a “global projector”, which institutes collective consciousness as a mythical imaginary (a simulacrum of symbolic reality). Perhaps this idea of a mythical ImCon, as a sort of all-abiding dream-delusion within which we live relatively unawares, might be best illustrated with an analogy to Plato’s myth of the cave, found in his Republic, a sort of mythic fairy tale.23
It is as if the modern Platonic man, feeling like a prisoner and terrified by the light, transcendence, and ethical imperative of the images that used to be seen in the world-cave (images that came from his “back”: from the unconscious, the world of Ideas and Forms, eidos, the archetypal ideas), decided not to believe in them, and to build a projector instead…. Concealed from view, the projector is henceforth what manufactures the ideas and their images, and confers them veracity and reality—artificial eidolon that shapes the world through technology. The projection is made upon the ethereal canvas of empty commodity-signs; capturing and dazing all the senses, the cave becomes a consumption world of fantasy and dream. The phantasmagoria referred to such apparatus: the projection of icons of desire, endowed with a mystical (numinous, phantasmagorical) character, that conduce to a ghostly unreality. The fascinating nebulous power of the projection occupies all the Platonic caveman’s mental and spatial fields; mesmerized and giddy by the artificial enchantment of such disfigured world, he never leaves the cave, for the cave becomes his world: inner and outer world dissolved into a dream-world.
If this image correctly portrays the ImCon as a mythic world, the essence of its worship may be seen as precisely this promise: that the consumer will never have to leave the “cave”, the dream-world where metaphysical dreams proliferate. Such dreams, the transcendental dream-worlds mentioned before, constitute the passion of consumption, its “religious” essence. Nordström and Riddestråle (2005) offer a somewhat different (and more crude and concise) formulation of them; in the ImCon’s advertising worldview, they can be summarized as “the five perpetual dreams of mankind: eternal life, eternal youth, eternal richness, eternal virility, eternal happiness” (p. 229). These “eternal” dreams represent “the basic urges of people” (ibid.) in metaphysical mode. The ImCon, therefore, is based on the promise of their satisfaction through consumption. But more than that, the central and metaphysical idea underlying such imaginary is that it promises a fusion, a religious immersion with a sort of paradise, the mythic world of commodity-dreams, in which eternal happiness, progress, transcendence, richness, and immortality can be bought. That underlies all consumption.
Therefore, what ultimately defines consumerism as a simulacrum of mythic system is that, through “the exaltation and worship of signs on the basis of a denial of things and the real” (Baudrillard, 1970/1998, p. 99), it offers a mystical symbiosis, a communion with the utopic collective imaginary, a state of synthetic wholeness in which all consumers partake of the same phantasmagoria coagulated in different images. A simulacrum of religion defined by full participation mystique with the ImCon: the dystopic epiphany of the consumystic.
5.3.5 ImCon as a Myth, or Desacralized Religion
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence (…) illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
Illusion, imagery, and ideology as a sacred system: According to Baudrillard (1970/1998), thus, consumption becomes “our new tribal mythology—the morality of modernity” (p. 194). A global mythology dreamt into being through the relentless absorption of all other myths and their re-fabrication as myths of consumption—ultimately, by the colonization of the very myth-making, symbolic function of imagination: the ImCon as a myth represents the epochal effacement of myth. “If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. (…) That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption” (p. 193).
The “idea of consumption”: Elemental religious form, archetypal idée force of its imaginary, revelation of its First Commandment. If for Baudrillard (1976/1993) the power of capital is “based in the imaginary”, consumerism as a religion25 announces itself as the parousia of its “fantastic secularisation” (p. 129)—a mythic religion of hierophanous signs in which the sign-value remains the only mystical or transcendental signifier, instituting society and consumers. As Maffesoli (2008) reminds us, myths are the “crystallization of collective dreams, [which] make a society what it is” (p. 11). Analogously, the ImCon as a dreaming collective is the crystallization—or rather the permanent flow—of collective consumption dreams. It institutes a social order defined by the idolatrous cult of image—omnipresent, all-signifying, transcendent—as a new Eucharistic sacrament of contemporary religiosity (Maffesoli, 1990, p. 112; 1993, p. 179).
Image and idea, omnipresent: Through them the social ideology of consumption works like a mythic imaginary, totalizing its consumer-subject—the ImCon as “a structurating force (like myth for Lévi-Strauss) that socialises, informs and, in fact, produces the individual of contemporary consumer society ” (Baudrillard, 1973/1981, p. 147). My contention is that it is by becoming a global simulacrum of myth that “consumption can on its own substitute for all ideologies and, in the long run, take over alone the role of integrating the whole of society, as hierarchical or religious rituals did in primitive societies ” (Baudrillard, 1970/1998, p. 94).
5.3.6 ImCon as a Totalitarian Ideology
Therefore, if the ImCon functions like a simulacrum of symbolic imaginary—like a myth or desacralized religion—it constitutes a signifying template through which world , self, and life are perceived. Like some religions (e.g., like colonial pan-Christianity) that allow for nothing outside themselves, it is an all-encompassing, total worldview, but an ideological one. Like a total religious system, thereby it governs every aspect of social and psychic life, becoming a totalizing force in fabricating, shaping, and controlling subjectivities.
Such process would thus constitute a globalitarian colonization of mentalities, corresponding to the same totalizing capitalist logic of unlimited expansion and colonization—but inner-directed, turned inward: directed to the subject’s psyche. In this sense, total consumerism and its imaginary do indeed have many similarities with totalitarian ideologies and their propaganda methods (starting with the common origin of both). An excellent presentation of this theme can be found in Curtis (2002). Jhally (2006) also touches on the subject when he states plainly that “Twentieth century advertising is the most powerful and sustained system of propaganda in human history” (p. 99). Three ideas seem crucial for this work. The first regards the analogy between the ImCon and totalitarian ideology. If we see the ImCon as a semiotic order, then it corresponds to a totalizing ideology in Arendt’s sense: a coherent and all-embracing fictitious explanation of reality, the logic of a system of ideas that provides reality with a “fantastically fictitious consistency ” (Arendt, 1958, p. 352). However, if seen as a simulacrum of imaginary, it is not even a “fictitious explanation”: as Baudrillard contended, it fabricates reality itself based on its ideological premises, in fact abolishing the difference between reality and fiction (or dream). Much like the totalitarian “phony world of propaganda” that, in order to be believed, had to be fabricated as reality (Arendt, 1946/2005, p. 199). Indeed, as argued throughout this work, the ImCon is such phony (dream) world.
The second idea is that, like totalitarian ideology and propaganda, the imaginary of consumption exploits and leads the masses fundamentally through manipulating, conditioning, and indeed engineering the irrational, unconscious psyche. In this sense, the ImCon’s fashioning of consumers’ mentalities closely resembles the indoctrination of “Nazi militants who, according to Goebbels, obey a law they are not even consciously aware of but which they could recite in their dreams” (Virilio, 1994, p. 11).
The third idea is that such totalization of subjectivities , of the psyche, is engineered from birth—indeed, even before the subject is born. Such phenomenon has been referred to as the colonization and commodification of childhood (Molnar, 1996; Gunter & Furnham, 1998; Schor, 2004), a process whose quintessence was pointed by Bauman (2005), quoting Adatto (2003): “‘the soul of the child is under siege’ … Childhood turns into ‘a preparation for the selling of the self’ as children are trained ‘to see all relationships in market terms’ and to view other human beings … through the prism of market-generated perceptions and evaluations ” (Bauman, 2005, pp. 114–115; e.a.)—that is, trained to see through the “prism” of the ImCon, in which relationships, human beings, and in fact the whole of life are ultimately viewed as commodities. Bauman (2007) is quite right when he writes that “the battles waged over and around children’s consumer culture are no less than battles over the nature of the person and the scope of personhood” (p. 55).
Myth has always been described as the result of an unconscious activity and as free product of the imagination. But here we find myth made according to plan. The new political myths do not grow up freely; they are not wild fruits of an exuberant imagination. They are artificial things fabricated by very skilful and cunning artisans. It has been reserved for the twentieth century, our own great technical age, to develop a new technique of myth. Henceforth myths can be manufactured in the same sense and according to the same methods as any other modern weapon (…). That is a new thing—and a thing of crucial importance. It has changed the whole form of our social life. (p. 282; e.a.)
5.4 The ImCon and the Fabrication of a Commodity-Subject
This section concludes the chapter by summarizing how the ImCon institutes psychological subjectivity—now from the perspective that it functions like a simulacrum of symbolic imaginary. It consists in a more schematic and speculative discussion, essentially based on what the empirical material, night dreams, brought to light, and intends to function as a theoretical framework to understand how subjectivity (and its colonization) is represented in them, in very broad terms. Such discussion will be brief, as it repeats many arguments already presented above. As in the previous chapter, its focus is on irrational psychic elements; although the imaginary also molds ego consciousness (and rationality), its subjectivation force is fundamentally based on the unconscious psyche—on a functional irrationality grounded in primitive, archaic functioning. As with symbolic imaginaries, the formation of subjectivity here may be described through two main ideas: how the ImCon’s représentations collectives shape or “fill up” the subject’s psyche, and how the subject’s identity is instituted in participation mystique with the commodity fetish (with consumption dreams), and on a deeper level with the whole system of représentations collectives, with the ImCon as (hyper)reality itself.
5.4.1 Représentations Collectives and the Fabrication of the Irrational
The basic idea here is that the totalizing ideology of consumerism—translated as general beliefs, values, rites, models, codes, and so on—functions as archaic collective representations: a totalizing worldview that is simply taken for granted as reality. Within such reality the subject’s psyche is molded, or unconsciously conditioned: the semiotic representations operate as social categories—of apperception, imagination, understanding—and aim at totalizing perception, experience, and behavior. (On the level of the simulacra and hyperreality, the representations do totalize perception and experience, for they totalize reality.)
To recall the classical expression, they thus institute collective and unconscious habitudes directrices de la conscience, as a sort of unconscious conditioning since birth: the subject simply functions in near-complete accordance with the ideological mass mentality. As such, the ImCon shapes the consumer’s psyche on two levels. The first was discussed in the previous chapter: personal identity is equalized with multiple personae, or identikits, with which the ego identifies; thus the subject becomes more or less identical with segments of the collective consciousness. The second level corresponds to the feeling-toned complexes. To the extent that the collective representations determine all reality and experience, they will mold and form the personal unconscious: the subjects’ complexes, their unconscious subjectivity, are “filled up” by the représentations collectives. Indeed, if the représentations are seen as consumption dreams, they function very much like complexes.26 Theoretically, the ideology of the ImCon thus becomes the main content of the personal unconscious psyche, that is, of unconscious subjectivity.
Reiterating, the main difference in relation to symbolic representations is that the ImCon’s representations are not projections of the unconscious psychic structure, of archetypes, but artificial, ideological constructions. Yet, they coordinate and direct libido, fantasy, imagination—the whole unconscious functioning—in much the same way. The argument delineated before is that imagination—the imaginative activity, as embodiment of what Castoriadis called the poietic function of the psyche, its capacity to creatively engender forms (morphē)—is annexed and conditioned by the ImCon. Its semiurgy progressively replaces all symbols, and thus all symbolic thinking; symbols as “emotionally charged images” here are supplanted by commodity-signs. Thus, the imaginary function—symbolic-, dream-, and fantasy-thinking, the pre-logical, archaic mode of thinking of the unconscious mind—is taken over by ideological représentations collectives as categories of imagination.
Here we rediscover, in its most extreme expression, the formal logic of the commodity as analysed by Marx: just as needs, feelings, culture, knowledge—in short, all the properly human faculties—are integrated as commodities into the order of production, and take on material form as productive forces so that they can be sold, so likewise all desires, projects and demands, all passions and all relationships, are now abstracted (or materialized) as signs and as objects to be bought and consumed. (p. 202)
However, we must not forget that libido is fundamentally an expression of instinct. By fabricating and directing desire and fantasy, the imaginary also coordinates the instincts—just like archaic représentations collectives did. If the symbol expressed, directed, signified, and transformed the primitive’s instinctual libido according to a cultural and spiritual principium, such role is seized by the sign and its fetish: the semiotic system thus defines all patterns of behavior (or habitudes directrices de la conscience), whose categorical imperative turns into consumption, as supraordinated and primordial idea, as totalizing principium or arché.
This process of colonization and fabrication of desire, fantasy, libido, and instinct is equivalent to a generalized mass production of functional irrationality. Indeed, if, as argued, consumerism is fundamentally based on irrational elements, to the extent that it determines the contents and functioning of the subject’s irrational, instinctual foundation, the ImCon manufactures and totalizes the subject by commandeering his archaic functioning—the depths of his psyche.
5.4.2 Participation Mystique: Archaic Identity with the ImCon
If the ImCon functions as a surrogate symbolic system, then what characterizes its consumer-subject is participation mystique—an archaic and unconscious identity as particular mode of psychic functioning and form of subjectivity instituted by the imaginary.27 In fact, Castoriadis (1975/1987) affirmed a similar idea in relation to modernity, although he did not elaborate on it: “[T]he life of the modern world is just as dependent on the imaginary as any archaic or historical culture. (…) In both cases [in archaic societies and modern society] we see at work that particular form of the imaginary, the subject’s identification with an object” (p. 101; e.a.). However, there are crucial differences between archaic imaginaries and the ImCon. While the primitives identified with the symbolic image projected upon the object (with all its numen), the consumer’s identification is not with the object (which would correspond to a non-semiotic, “normal” identification, the object or commodity in its materiality) but with the idea attached to it: the sign, and specifically the sign-value, the mystical signifier, the ideology congealed as fetish.
- 1.
Partial identity with sign-values, with consumption dreams and the artificial identities they confer. This corresponds to the ego’s identity with personae (as identikits): personal identity seen as identification with the semiotic dreams of a social status, social positioning, ways of being and expressing oneself, and so on, all defined by the consumption of signs. The subject here is unconsciously bound (by identity) to consumption dreams.
- 2.
Archaic identity with the system of consumption dreams, or dream-world—with the représentations collectives and the whole ImCon. To produce this archaic identity is the ImCon’s objective; at this level it fully operates as a mythic imaginary. Full identity with the imaginary means that the subject’s psyche is practically indistinct from the semiotic system and its ideology; it is another form of describing the full colonization or “filling-up” of the unconscious psyche by the représentations collectives. Here the subject is not merely “bound” to the imaginary—the imaginary defines his psyche, and thus his reality and existence.
The other crucial difference regards projection. Primitives naturally project their own unconscious contents upon the environment as symbols, and according to collective patterns, the représentations (the culturally elaborated forms of unconscious archetypes, i.e., of the psychic structure). The ImCon’s representations are not projections of the unconscious psychic structure, of archetypes or complexes, but artificial, ideological constructions; and everything that is socially recognized as subjective or individual contents—value, meaning, difference, signification—is already “projected” as semiotic products. The reader will recall the trope of the phantasmagoric projector: the environment already carries all the “symbols” (as semiotic signification and imagery), what was supposed to be projected, a priori.
That means that psyche and subjectivity are already outside, before any subjective projection. If we connect this idea with the notion that the ImCon ideology, as représentations collectives, fills up the subject’s psyche, the conclusion will be that the unconscious subjectivity will always and by definition be outside, in a state of fusion with the imaginary. In other words, in a radical inversion, what in fact projects “subjectivity” (as semiotic contents ) is the imaginary upon the consumer.
No longer the Narcissist subject who allegorizes the reflex of the same as an other; who falls ill from phantasmagoria is the subject as a mere reflex of the projection composed in society’s mirror. Primacy of reflex, of the play of nexuses of consumption and capital, of images fabricated on a global level. (p. 5)
The state of full participation mystique induced and fabricated by the imaginary implies a number of other effects upon the subject. Narcissus, as some authors (Baudrillard, 1970/1998, p. 166; Lasch, 1984, p. 19; McLuhan , 1964/1994, pp. 42–51) have pointed out, means narcosis, narcotic: participation means remaining in a dreamy, lethargic state, the “primordial unconscious state”, as Jung (CW6, §741) mentioned. That is, identity with the imaginary keeps the subject functioning in a dream-thinking mode, in a state of abaissement or unconsciousness, both of which are typical of primitives and children. This idea corresponds to what Walter Benjamin called Traumschlaf, a “dream-filled sleep”, the collective dream characteristic of consumer society and its dream-worlds. Some other authors have connected such unconscious dream state with consumerism and its imaginary. For instance, Marcel Gauchet (2009) says we are living under an anesthésie collective, and Berry (2010) speaks of a “collective trance state”. While Adorno and Horkheimer (1944/2002) had already diagnosed a sort of mass trance typical of industrial consumer society, Rosalind Williams (1991, p. 67) mentions the “numbed hypnosis” of consumers. Thus, if participation for the primitive and the child means living in an unconscious symbolic world, in a dream—for the consumer-subject it means living in full unconscious identity with a dream-world of consumption, enchanted, mesmerized by its phantasmagoria.
Other logical effects of forceful participation include dependency and inferiority. Indeed, if the psyche is “outside”, if subjectivity is by definition exteriorized, that will engender an unconscious sense of emptiness and inferiority, a sort of “lack” of psyche, of individuality, which the primitives call “loss of soul”, and an unconscious bond (dependency) to the signs that socially signify subjectivity, that is, to the whole ImCon. Both effects are connected to a central characteristic of unconscious identity: alienation from subjectivity and individuality. The subject remains massified, undifferentiated from the imaginary, always in need of guaranteeing a state of fusion with it. Indeed, one can say that consumerism is founded precisely on this state of utter alienation, which corresponds to the perpetual “lack” behind the dynamics of desire: lack of personhood and complete alienation from oneself. Baudrillard (1970/1998) advanced this idea: “Alienation cannot be overcome: it is the very structure (…) of market society”, such structure referring to “the generalized pattern of individual and social life governed by commodity logic” (p. 190). And I mention Kellner (2009), who, commenting upon Baudrillard , connected utter alienation to what I have termed total consumerism: “in a society where everything is a commodity that can be bought and sold, alienation is total. Indeed, the term ‘alienation’ originally signified ‘to sale’, and in a totally commodified society where everything is a commodity, alienation is ubiquitous”.
From the standpoint of Jung’s psychology, it is important to consider that such alienation refers not only to alienation from subjectivity but also from the unconscious foundations in instinct and archetype, what Jung (CW18, §474) called “the world of instinct”. It presupposes that, even if the ideological représentations shape the personal unconscious, thus directing and coordinating desire and instincts, the depths of the unconscious psyche can be manipulated but cannot be totally colonized, for they are autonomous and transcend both individual and culture. I am referring to the dynamics between shadow and persona, mentioned previously, but in a more radical context: the more alienated, superficial, or emptied the ego-persona subject is, the more one can expect the unconscious depths to return in the form of psychic disturbances; dissociated, they can remain as an archaic shadow, activated, primitive, and destructive. These dynamics are essentially related to the replacement of the symbol by the ideological sign. As mentioned, the instincts are blind compulsions without the symbol, without the symbolic image that naturally expresses their meaning and direction. Moreover, the symbol is the natural, irrational connection between consciousness and the instinctual foundations. Replacing the symbol, the semiotic ideology may organize, direct, and force instinctual expression; however, without the symbol, the instinctual foundation remains alienated from consciousness, and thus primitive, compulsive, unrefined—as barbaritas. These dynamics correspond to the psychological formulation of what Marx termed “leprous barbarism”—hidden in the consumer’s psyche as an atavistic force.
Such force can be related to a characteristic psychological functioning that the ImCon, as a mass ideology, induces and produces in its subjects: a typical crowd psychology, or mass mentality. Indeed, if consumerism functions based on the manipulation of irrational, unconscious forces, the control of pre-logical thought (of dream-thinking, symbolic thinking, etc.), and the fostering and commercialization of mass feelings, emotions, and dreams, then the unconscious functioning that it engenders can only be seen as that of the horde: unstable, irrational, suggestible, easily carried away. Actually, it is characteristic of archaic identity, or participation, to engender psychic contagion and collective hypnosis. As Jung (CW6, §742) wrote, unconscious identity “forms the basis of suggestion and psychic infection”. Therefore we may expect that, underneath consumer society’s astounding rational and technological development, in the psychic depths of its anesthetized, anodyne masses, a mob mentality28 may be prowling.
5.4.3 Colonization of the Unconscious
A central idea that arises from all the arguments above is that consumerism depends on the colonization of the unconscious psyche: alongside its obvious manipulation of emotions , desires, and so on; by instituting a global semiotic imaginary that seizes dream, imagination, and fantasy, consumerism seeks to control and manufacture the entire unconscious, and, through it, the whole psyche. Perhaps this idea can be seen as the fulcrum of the ImCon’s telos: to fashion the unconscious as a mere replication of its ideology.
Strangely enough, to my knowledge such an important hypothesis appears only in very few contemporary authors.29 One is Fredric Jameson (1991), who mentions it in ways that are analogous to what has been argued here, as the “new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the unconscious” by capitalism and “the rise of media and the advertisement” (p. 36); and in a later work, he alerts to “diagnoses of the colonization of the Unconscious by commodity reification, consumerism and advertising”—colonization that becomes known as postmodernism (Jameson, 1992, p. 202). In a passage, he actually coincides with my hypothesis (albeit he does not use the concept of imaginary): postmodern capitalism and the processes instituted by its new reproductive technology (including media) “constitute a system, a worldwide disembodied yet increasingly total system of relationships and networks hidden beneath the appearance of daily life, whose ‘logic’ is sensed in the process of programming our outer and inner worlds, even to the point of colonizing our former ‘unconscious’” (p. 61; e.a.). And, of course, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote profusely about the production of the unconscious by capitalism, calling it the “machinic unconscious” (Guattari, 1979/2010), the basis for the hegemonic fabrication of subjects as “desiring-machines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/2004).
Nevertheless, such idea (or hypothesis) appeared in two important cultural products.30 One has already been mentioned: the movie Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999), in which Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, reappears and wakes Neo from a world that has been manufactured as a dream (a computer-generated dream-world): colonization of dream and colonization of mankind, inseparable, engineering a completely unconscious and machinic existence inside a virtual dream. The other is Sandman (Gaiman, 1989), a series of graphic novels whose main character is Morpheus (as the Sandman, Oneiros, or Shaper): an incarnation of the archetypal human imagination, of Dream.31 In the first story of the first volume of the series, Sleep of the Just (which was interpreted in depth by Duarte, 1998, 1999; my commentary here is based on his works), Morpheus, the Dream, is captured and held prisoner by Roderick Burgess: by the bourgeois ethos, capitalism-turning-consumerism and its imperative of total expansion and domination. An unknown syndrome ensues globally, the “sleepy sickness”: “people fell asleep, and did not wake up … they lived their lives like sleepwalkers; eating if fed, sometimes talking nonsense, dream-stuff…” (Gaiman, 1989, p. 14). A situation that resembles quite closely what Benjamin called the Traumschlaf of commodity capitalism; both depictions of “collective dreaming” are preludes for the world wars. At the end of the story, Dream frees himself—only to find out that dream and the imaginary had been conquered by mass culture and the capital (Duarte, 1998).
Both art products depict critically the central theme of this work: a global process of colonization and domination of Dream. Here I argue that such process is being actualized, under total consumerism, through its artificial techno-imaginary: its phantasmagoria replaces dream and imagination. Controlling Dream signifies the power to expropriate the imagination and the irrational, the symbols and the gods: thus consciousness is colonized, instinct is guided and shaped, the unconscious is controlled; from homo symbolicum , capable of creatively giving shape (imagining!) to the world and to himself, the human being then can be transformed into a thing, an automaton, or the homo commoditas. Capturing dream means capturing the imaginary; and capturing the imaginary means subjugating the psyche—the human soul.
5.4.4 Mimesis with the ImCon: The Commodified Subject, or Commodity-Self
Today this private space [the psyche] has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual, and industrial psychology has long since ceased to be confined to the factory. The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions. The result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole. This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization. (p. 14)
My argument is that, under total consumerism, this “primitive form of association” corresponds to a state of participation mystique with its entire techno-imaginary. What founds it and makes it possible is a fundamental inversion: it is not the subject’s or the collectivity’s unconscious that, through dreams, fantasies , and so on, produces and institutes the (symbolic) imaginary; rather, the artificial simulacrum of imaginary, a fabricated ImCon, produces subject, collectivity, and the unconscious psyche.
The possibility of mimesis and participation mystique with an imaginary made of commodity-signs logically represents the total commodification of the subject: the subject is thus manufactured as both consumer and commodity, and remains inseparable from the imaginary, which becomes his sole reality. Therefore, this process would be equivalent to the mass production of commodity-selves: accomplishment of a totalizing imperative, realization of total consumerism.
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.
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. (pp. 116–117; e.a.)
The imperative of this “world of images”—the global ImCon—is to render the consumer-subject not only “liable” to, but indeed fully absorbed, produced, and constituted by, their flow: its trend of total colonization means that all consumers ought to become fictional commodity-signs, in complete massification. As social life is defined by (partial or full) identity with the ImCon, we insert ourselves in the dream-world of consumerism by becoming commodities , by buying, wearing, displaying, showing off signs, trying to mold them into “unique”, hyperreal performances, that is, by becoming unchained commodity-signs—by dreaming the same dream.
Put another way, consumers are socialized by becoming atoms of the ImCon, parts of the commodity-discourse: by living like moving images in urban or virtual advertisements, displaying full-time what Arendt (1958, p. 332) called “heterogenous uniformity”—a uniformity that is spectacularly heterogeneous in appearance: mirroring the infinite variety of commodities, the images with which we identify are infinitely varied, yet they are one thing only, commodity-signs. And, the more standard and homogenized the commodity-subjects become, the more “individuality” (uniqueness, difference, distinction) and meaning become not merely a demand but a craving to be satisfied through sign consumption, which is never satisfied, for the sign is empty. The more massified society and subjects get, the more the consumer will crave for difference: massification and consumerism (as provider of difference through the code) are two parallel forces; the latter depends on the first.
5.4.6 The Consumer-Commodity as an Empty Self
Within the perspective of a total colonization of the subject, what one has is not a self that is merely decentered, distributed, flexible, fragmented, saturated—what has been described as the postmodern self (Gergen, 1991; Spears, 1997; Wetherell & Maybin, 1996). As the sign is empty, the end product of participation mystique with it is an empty self (Cushman, 1990). My proposal is that such idea is behind some subjective phenomena that have been much discussed in our consumption societies. The empty self is a self whose unconscious feeling of emptiness is accompanied by everlasting restlessness and insecurity or fear, which are constantly fed by the ImCon. The main effect of such feelings appears as a Pantagruelic desire for consumption: an extreme longing for sensations, instant stimuli, constant overexcitement, and pleasure—a craving for full immersion in the dream-world of commodities and images that provides fast meaning and sense, instantaneous fulfill of the emptiness by signs and their technicolor phantasmagoria, consumerism’s oneiric opiate or soma. Without which—without the participation mystique—life seems empty, for the self feels empty: there seems to be no interaction with the outside world; meaninglessness and feelings of dreary aridness and vapidity32 might ensue, or else an utter incapacity for feeling anything or desiring anything, a pervasive numbness, in sum, a ghostly sense of inner, corroding vacuum, of non-existence.
At this stage, consumption releases more and more compulsive automatisms, and the consumer becomes dependent on the consumption hit. He suffers, then, from a disindividuating syndrome that he only manages to compensate for by intensifying his consumer behaviour, which at the same time becomes pathological.
In simple terms, both reality and self seem empty, hollow. Consumption and its imaginary then offer strong doses of unreality: their core best-selling promises are the transcendent beliefs that there is no reality and that the consumer can be anything; every subjectivation is possible; “consumer society offers the individual the opportunity for total fulfillment and liberation ” (Baudrillard, 2001, p. 12). Mirroring the emptiness of the commodity-sign, which allows it to carry any sign-value, the consumer-subject flies rootless and ruthlessly through the seemingly infinite possibilities of being promised by the commodity. No roots, no substance, no limits: an omnipotent yet empty commodity-subject with a firm belief (nay delusion) that he or she is original, unique, free, electing sovereignly his or her lifestyle and personality. Servitude sold as self-fulfillment.
When existence and identity are defined by communion with commodity-signs and the imaginary, if for some reason consuming them is made impossible, or denied (or else if the whole economic system crumbles), then the masses fall back into their emptiness and—without personae made of signs, without the consumption system as a guarantee of existence—may feel they are about to disappear; and Benjamin’s “mythic forces” may reemerge catastrophically.
To conclude this chapter, let me summarize it by recalling Lefebvre (1971, p. 131): “We are surrounded by emptiness but it is an emptiness filled with signs”. Indeed, and by consuming and identifying with the ImCon, we become that emptiness filled with signs. Or , as T. S. Eliot (1925) wrote just before the great catastrophe: We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Total consumerism needs and seeks to engineer hollow women and men, atomized, stuffed, and stupefied with dreams of consumption. (In fact, we are now such stuff as consumption dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a narcotic sleep.) For the mass of consumer commodities , life then becomes a succession of commodity-dreams, consumed and discarded, in a perpetual dream-world. Under the ImCon, La vida es un sueño de consumo; y los sueños, mercancías son (Life is a consumption dream; and dreams are commodities ).