On Consumer Society

Abstract

Jean Baudrillard is on the staff of the sociology department at the University of Paris X at Nanterre. A growing number of his writings are available in English, among them The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena , translated by J. Baddely (London: Verso, 1992); America , translated by C. Turner (London: Verso, 1988); The Ecstasy of Communication , translated by B. and C. Schutze (New York: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agent Press, 1988); Simulations , translated by P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agent Press, 1983); For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign , translated by C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981); and The Mirror of Production , translated by M. Poster (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975). Baudrillard is at present a decidedly mercurial thinker, perhaps a "semiotician" but theoretically elusive. He may be best known, in Europe and in the United States, for the argument of Simulations: that the contemporary Occident is a place in which signs have lost their referents, a place of "models," of "simulacra," of endless copies that no longer allude to any original. The argument has its sheerly semiological interest. But it is also of interest as one among many facets of Baudrillard&s;s distinctive perspective on the production and reproduction of "consumer society." The term serves as the title of one of Baudrillard&s;s earliest monographs and the monograph from which I have taken the excerpt that follows. In this excerpt, Baudrillard provides the outline of a diagnosis of the European—for that matter of the American—present that bears fruitful comparison to Touraine&s;s. He, too, examines the rationale and the motivations that sustain an economy the output of which is no longer simply a supply of "goods and services," Baudrillard, too, examines a society that has superseded its "industrial" forebear. But Baudrillard&s;s consumer society is perhaps less essentially a programmed or technocratic society than a society that systematically gives rise to the sociopsychological fuel, the system of "needs" that feed and fire the continuous expansion of its material infrastructure. Baudrillard&s;s consumer society gives rise to something more as well. Or rather, to someone: to yet another subject, constituted not simply to "be in want" but never to be satisfied.