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Kodirov Javlon
magistr
National University of Uzbekistan,
Shermuhamedova Nigina
doctor of philosophical sciences, professor
National University of Uzbekistan
BAUDRILLARD’S VIEWS ON CONSUMER SOCIETY AND
ITS PRESENT IMPLICATIONS
The contemporary culture and society is marked by plurality, diversion, intense fragmentation, and
indirection. It can be discovered that it is mass media that create demands and seduction of objects and
ultimately make the contemporary society a powerful consumer society. Media have shaken the very
foundation of postmodern culture, giving a new direction to reality. The relationship between the real and
simulacra has undergone a sea change in the contemporary society. Now the very concept of a true copy is
thrown into the wind. Models and simulacra have become reality. In the postmodern media and consumer
society, everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a trans-aesthetic, and trans-political. The present
paper makes an investigation on the four points — (1) postmodern society is the society of communication
established by mass media; (2) postmodern society is a consumer society and (3) the culture of postmodern
society is based on simulation, simulacra, or hyper-reality, and (4) postmodern society is nearing the fractal
order. It also seeks to describe various postmodern trends in present Uzbekistan, the efficacy of the reforms
in the social sphere and the need to be more conscious of the various side effects of the formation of western-
type consumer society.
The argument
Deeply influenced by Saussure, Durkheim and Freud, Baudrillard starts as a Marxist sociologist, but
later on like his contemporaries, such as Althusser and Lyotard, he analyses Marxian capitalist production in
the light of structuralist theory of production and circulation of signs. But again after the tumultuous events
of 1968, he gets disillusioned and disoriented. There undergoes a radical change in his Marxist-structuralist
stance, which is inadequate to analyze the fundamental of the contemporary society. He develops a broader
and more analytical outlook toward society. He argues that there is a rupture between modernity and
postmodernity, marked by cyber-culture. This culture is completely in the clutch of mass media, pestering
and victimizing the individual.
Baudrillard finds Marx’s economic philosophy incapable of explaining life in the late capitalist
societies, because they are based on consumer. Throughout his life, Marx lays emphasis on the mode of
production so much that the other aspect of capitalism i.e. consumer and culture slips from his mind.
Baudrillard, by the way, supplements it by consumer, the focal point of his discussion. Now there is a shift
from production to consumerism. This idea—the analysis of society through consumer and culture—occurs
to his mind during his sojourn in America and writes a travelogue
America
in the lifestyle of the Americans.
He declares America the greatest consumer society and model for the rest of the world.
To explain postmodern society through the analysis of consumer and culture, Baudrillard takes the help
of structuralism and semiotic. His works—
The System of Objects, The Society of Consumption
and
For a
Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign—
combine a semiotic and structuralist study of culture with a
neo-Marxist analysis. Baudrillard’s view of object, therefore, is quite different from that of Marx. For Marx
an object becomes commodity and has natural
usevalue.
It has also exchange value and can be exchanged for
money. Nevertheless, Marx fails to pay any attention to the symbolic and semiotic aspect of the object. On
the other hand, Baudrillard explains an object with a semiotic analysis—an analysis of the meaning of the
object. To him an object has a
sign-value.
Marx evaluates object on the basis of utility, value and durability
i.e. emphasis on
use-value,
whereas Baudrillard argues that value is based on sign or simulation. Thus, he
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distinguishes “between a metallurgic and semiurgic form of society, that is based on the material manufacture
of commodities as opposed to one based on the production and circulation of signs in the form of
information.” (Jim Powell 31).
In other words, when a consumer buys an object, it signifies something more than a commodity. An
object, no doubt, has
use-value,
but at the same time it stands for a sign of the consumer’s prestige, rank, and
social understanding. An individual, after all, has a deep desire to distinguish himself from other human
beings through the system of social differentiation. For members of tribal cultures the differences might be
displayed by the use of certain tattoos or feathers. But in postmodern society, the consumer displays what he
buys, in order to differentiate himself socially. A need for the particular object is thrown into the background
and the need for social difference or meaning comes to the fore. The purchase of the object ceases to be a
natural need, differentiating the buyer socially from other people, and integrates him systematically into a
homogenous level of society, a level of society in which everyone uses the same object. Perpetually, one
group vies with another in consuming the quantity and quality of commodities. This act of consumption is
further enhanced by a number of increasingly familiar features: extended credit facilities, share ownership,
segmented markets, enticing offers and rebates, volatile consumer preferences, the rise of consumer
organization, pressure groups and media ‘watch dog‘ organize around issues of consumer rights. These
developments are conducive to mass consumerism, and in turn affect the nature of commodities and the
policies of producers.
In postmodern society, when a consumer buys an object, he is buying into a whole system of needs that
is at once rational and hierarchical. The aim of the modernist society was to establish a classless society
removing all differentiation, but the present society is fragmented because consumer objects create hierarchy
and groups in it.
The value or price of the object is determined by
sign-value.
Object is not concerned with utility or
durability as much as concerned with sign. In the market objects are not sold, but sign. An individual’s
recognition depends on which consumer object he uses. On the surface, it appears that the consumer is free
to buy anything, but it does not happen so because every individual is unique and wants to be equal in his
own group. He loans but never lets him go below the level of his own hierarchy. Constantly under the pressure
of sign, he succumbs to it. The consumer consumes sign, not the object. In this way, consumption is not
natural but cultural and rather becomes conspicuous consumption. The consumption, display, and the use of
objects operate on the basis of cultural codes. Previously the labor was exploited, now the consumer. It is
nothing but an incarnation of capitalism. This desperate consumption of objects or commodities, this search
for being, meaning and prestige makes man boring, fatigued, alienated, and he thinks of bringing a radical
change in society. Sheer consumption cannot yield joy and happiness but sometimes leads to an abnormal
human behavior. Other structuralists and postmodernists—Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes also
underline the present society in terms of consumerism and culture.
Baudrillard holds mass media or cyber-culture accountable for creating a society of consumerism. This
culture is made of disparate fragmentary experiences and images of music video, television, computer,
Internet, and numerous other information technologies. They imprint a tremendous effect on postmodern
economic systems creating widespread demand of objects. Media have rocked the very root of postmodern
culture, giving a new direction of reality. Baudrillard in
The Orders of Simulacra
describes that the
relationship between the real and simulacra has undergone a radical change in the new condition of media-
saturated society. It is heedless to the logic of representation, lacking a fixed referent or ground. The
‘cybernetization’ produces floating signifier that is a departure from the traditional understandings of sign.
Simulacra mean copies of real objects or events. Now there is no carbon copy, the very concept of the
carbon copy is thrown into the wind. Models and simulacra have become reality itself. That is why “the
cinema and TV are America’s reality” (Jere Paul Surber 222). The Canadian media theorist Marshall
MacLuhan in an interview with
Playboy
also observes that television “tattoos its message directly onto our
skin.” Media have become a main culprit and have taken postmodern man so far that he has forgotten the
real. Rather he is hooked into simulacra of reality. In
America
Baudrillard observes: Everything is destined
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to reappear as simulation. Landscape as photography, women as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing,
terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by virtue of this strange
destiny. You wonder whether the world itself is not just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world
(Jean Baudrillard 32).
In the world of cybernetization, consumerism and commercialization, postmodern societies flowing with
the images of media are drowned in the spirit of ecstasy. These signs have no resemblance to reality. The
dazzling spectacle of the media-space creating a nightmarish vision unearths surface glitter, emptiness and
hollowness. Michael Kelly writes: “everything becomes an image, a sign, a spectacle, a trans-aesthetic—just
as everything also becomes trans-economic, trans-political, and transsexual (Jean Baudrillard 104). Simulacra
or simulations do not occur all of a sudden. The relationship between the real and the simulacra has changed
through history systematically. Profoundly impressed by Foucault’s
The Order of Things,
Baudrillard
describes the distinct orders of simulacra. During the feudal era, it was a closed society, organized by a
relationship to a system of fixed hierarchies of signs, which were limited in number and supposedly divine.
In such a society, one was assigned to a fixed social space, like a caste, and mobility between social classes
was impossible. A serf, laboring in the fields, could not become a knight. In other words, it would reflect the
basic reality. Then, in the period of early modernity, from the Renaissance to the beginning of the industrial
Revolution, the rigid order of the feudal era broke down due to the rise of bourgeoisie. During this period,
images, signs, and symbols were not divine but artificial and proliferated in the fields of theatre, fashion, art,
and politics as the new rising class attempted to create the world in its own image, in its own naturalized
world. Thus, in the first order of simulacra, signs were taken to represent the external reality of nature; still
referring to the original extends their scope. The second order of simulacra appears with the advent of the
Industrial Revolution. The simulacra now become limitlessly reproducible through mechanical and industrial
mass production of commodities of exact replicas. All of which have equivalent value.
In Baudrillard’s view, at the end of the twentieth century, society is passing through the third order of
simulacra known as hyper-reality—somehow related to the digital. It is “an artificial yet heightened sense of
reality,” (Michael Kelly 218) a condition, a state, an effect, and the mos
developed form of simulacra. The swirling images are produced and reproduced in such a way that they are
preferred to their original i.e. the copies or simulacra are more real than the real. They acquire “more
legitimacy, value and power than the original themselves” (Jim McGuigan 153). Thus, the sudden explosion
of new technologies, particularly, mass media paves a healthy ground for new reality. Pointing to an
implosion, effect, Baudrillard despairs that images and reality implode and images become reality. Surber
comments: Numerous examples of this implosion of images and reality in postmodern culture can be cited:
infotainment, infomercials, docudramas, and of course, virtual reality are all by now familiar genres in which
the boundaries between image and reality have been obscured or erased (Victor E. Taylor & Charles E.
Winguist 183).
In
Simulation and Simulacra
(1981), Baudrillard argues that hyper-reality is autonomous and free from
all references to the real, and there exists no distinction between the images and their referents. Also in the
essay, “The Precession of Simulacra,’ he articulates that postmodern culture breeds ‘the society of the image,’
which is frantically searching for the real badly eroded. Baudrillard is pessimistically confident of this effort
as meaningless and futile; because the media dominated, society would return with nothing but an
“exacerbated experience of hyper-reality.” Baudrillard sees other aspects to hyper-reality: simulation is make-
believe that one has something that he/she does not have. It also reminds of Umberto Eco (b.1932), the Italian
semiologist who holds that hyperreality is associated especially with cultural tendencies and a prevailing
sensibility in contemporary American society. In his essay “Travels in Hyperreality” (1980), he detects “the
Absolute Fake” from the vacuum of the present depthless society. This society of ‘consumerism’ produces
the new ‘ambience’ of the shopping mall and an emblematic scene of contemporary mentality when
consumers are seduced and stupefied all at once by the display of diversity. What characterizes Baudrillard’s
perception about the postmodern world is grim and gloomy. Unlike the modernist thinkers, he rejects the
concept of the progress of humanity and history. In
Symbolic Exchange and Death
(1976), his apocalyptic
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vision signals the death and destruction of the contemporary society. It is a dazzling but wounded, fractured,
hypocrite and indefinable society, a kind of Disneyland, where nothing exists except fantasy. Production in
huge quantity, formation of metropolitan cities, globalization, new neighbors, diversity, flexibility, pluralistic
cultures are waxing without any tinge of hope, depth, form, and progress of the society. All traditional and
modernist ideas and values are shattering into pieces. Man is destined to dwell in glamorous cyber-culture, a
culture—fragmented, shallow, and rudderless, where everything is available to be purchased except peace,
cheerfulness and satisfaction. Thus, he is growing more and more inert and bored; the spirit of revolution is
gradually dwindling. Jean Paul Surber spells out: The postmodern individual becomes merely an exhausted
indifferent and passive observer of the cultural spectacle to which it is continually subjected, a mere channel
through which passed a meaningless bacchanal of the most diverse images and information, which ultimately
signify nothing. Postmodern culture’s extreme diversity and variety is, a monolith of meaningless
substitutions of one image for another a fractal structure where apparent depth is continuously being dissolved
by endless repetition, in every cultural domain and at every cultural level, of the some monotonous cycle of
substitutions (Jean Paul Surber 223).
There is no way-out but to sleep and awake with the information of computer and television. Watching
TV has become a discipline, a culture, and an instinct. Influx of files, videos, serials, and other electronic
communication technologies, particularly, Internet, breed images and signs which are floating in great speed,
flow and flux all over the world all the time. They are nothing but images devoid of depth, coherence, and
originality. Human mind, like a black box, wittingly or unwittingly, is perpetually recording those images. In
The Medium Is the Message: An Inventory of Effects
(1967), MacLuhan describes a world remade by
electronic media in which the individuals are battered by an endless stream of information. He claims
“television and telephone had the effect of transmitting the communicator rather than the communication”
(Ibid. 223-224). Thus, postmodern culture is passing through a crucial stage, where signs, simulacra, and
images determine human behavior. There is a need of remapping of societal, cultural and market structures
through instantaneous and omnipresent communication systems of cyber-culture. Ultimately, Baudrillar
visualizes this historical phase of society nearing a state of utter collapse. He argues: “Today we are not
approaching the end of history but moving into reverse, into a process of systematic obliteration”
(Encyclopedia of Postmodernism,
75).
Conclusion
Man has become a passive victim and is hypnotized by the obscene flow of images. Obesity and
obscenity are the major problems and characteristics of postmodern culture. Fatigued and failure to bear the
burden of his own belly—burden of his own hollowness, the individual visits from clinic to clinic to reduce
his weight. He is free, uncontrollable, and running with an indeterminate serpentine speed only to be steeped
in perspiration and exhaustion. Why do all these things happen? Why such an electrical speed? Why such
impatience, and restlessness and accumulation? A volley of other questions crops up before the contemporary
man. Baudrillard responds all such questions and deduces that media, sign, code of simulation and
communication makes man an escapist. Commercialization and consumption have transported men to a state
of ecstasy. He has caricatured himself to a robot. In
Transparency of Evil
(1990), Baudrillard forecasts a very
sad state of imminent culture, seized with incurable disease, whose death is inevitable. Neither is there any
remedy nor is any spiritual power, which could prevent it from decay. This state of culture is the fourth order
of simulacra, which Baudrillard designated to Fractal Order. Thus, in the Chapter “Vanishing Point” of
America,
he declares the Death of Meaning, the Death of Reality, the Death of History, the Death of the
Social, the Death of the Political and the Death of Sexuality in postmodern society.
Now, some aspects of the postmodern culture can also be witnessed in Uzbekistan! society, where,
despite the fact that it is relatively new to the free market relations compared to, for instance, Western
societies, the consumer culture and the rise of the consumerism have already proven to be significant part of
the lives of individuals.
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REFERENCES:
1.
Baudrillard, J. (1988). America. London & New York: Verso.
2.
Encyclopedia of Postmodernism.
3.
Ibid. (p. 104).
4.
Kelly, M. (1998). Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York: Oxford University Press.
5.
McGuigan, J. (1999). Modernity and Postmodern Culture. Philadelphia: Open University Press.
6.
Powell, J. (1998). Modernism. Chennai: Orient Longman Ltd.
7.
Surber, J. P. (1998). Culture and Critique. Colorado: Western Press.
8.
Taylor, V. E., & Winguist, С. E. (Eds.). (2001). Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. London & New
York: Routledge.
9.
Shermuhammedova, N. "Methodology and phylosophy of science." (2012): 165.
