The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

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Summary: Symbolic exchange
Review: This book is an earlier text of Baudrillard. Baudrillard is considered as a major theorist of postmodernism. But at the time he wrote this book, he was not postmodernist but Marxist. In 1973, Baudrillard divorced with Marxism. But before that year, he maintained the Marxist stance. His main subject was the political economy in Marxist style and the society of consumption in Frankfurt school¡¯s style. He was a pupil of Henry Lefevre who expanded the scope of Marxism into the study of everyday life. Baudrillard took the area his mentor opened up, but approached it somewhat differently: he borrowed frameworks of structuralism. He transformed Marx¡¯s distinction of use value/exchange value into the semiotics of consumption. Society is the field where symbolic exchange, in Marcel Mauss¡¯s term, takes place. What is exchanged in symbolic exchange is not use value but exchange (or symbolic) value. We consume the object not only of its use value but of its symbolic value. Object is exchanged as sign in symbolic exchange. Goods could signify the social status. Object could be desired not only in its use value but in its symbolic value that make difference to its owner from others: consumption could be interpreted as the logic of social distinction. In later texts, he asserted that capitalist society is centered not on production but on consumption. There could be not much objection upto this point. But, he argues, the logic of social distinction is not produced by consumer. It¡¯s the system of signification that is imposed on consumer. In this point, Baudrillard depicts such an unreal picture of iron cage as Frankfurt school did. The system of signification is illustrated as the something of a big brother we can¡¯t exercise any say. But that kind of image is not the one we experience in daily life. Marx said, ¡®Men make history, but not in their own choice.¡¯ Social fact like language transcend individual. We didn¡¯t choose our own mother tongue. We were born into it. But it doesn¡¯t deny the point that we make history. The system Baudrillard delineated is not unearthly fantasy. But where does it come from? It¡¯s the creature we make and change day by day. But in Baudrillard¡¯s world, such a point is lost. On Baudrillard¡¯s picture, the individual is lost. Baudrillard only takes a shot of horror film. In terms of methodology, Baudrillard makes non-sense.