A Philosophical Happy Hour on our having become consumers and how we might escape consumerism.

I am uncomfortable in nearly all shopping environments (used bookstores being the primary exception).  I do not know when this began—but it became very noticeable to me while in graduate school; perhaps because I was rather poor in those years.  Trips to the mall were never something I enjoyed.  Comparison shopping different products makes my spine crawl.  Even going to the grocery store, my intention is and long has been to arrive with a clearly organized list of what I need, to grab those items and nothing else, and depart.  Browsing items for sale—in person or online—I often want to flee.

Prices, reviews, options upon options upon options: walls of food, walls of booze, the fit and cut and style of clothes, this versus that laptop computer, new phones (this one comes with earbuds, that one with two years of free streaming!) thousands and thousands of hours of entertainment, games, movies… everywhere we turn, choices to make, laden with information intended to facilitate our decision but overflowing, overloaded, overbearing.  Do we feel obliged to purchase?  To get ourselves a little “something new” every now and again?  To have the latest and greatest?

But is it just items for purchase that we see this way?  Or is it the whole of life that now we consume?

Becoming Consumers

In his 1970 book, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, Jean Baudrillard claimed that the material abundance of the twentieth-century reflected “something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species.”  Our mode of inhabiting the world, that is, seems to be that of the consumer.  In other words—and I will say more about the nature of “consumerism” in a moment—we are consumers.  Consumption is not something that merely we do.  It has instead become integral to the way we hold ourselves towards the world.

What does it mean to consume?  If we look it up in a decent dictionary, we find these six definitions: “1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.  2. to eat or drink up; devour.  3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning.  4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.  5. to absorb; engross.  6. To undergo destruction; waste away.”  Should we be comfortable with the thought that this action constitutes our way of living?  And constitute our way of living it does.  We purchase, we use; we use up.  The “terminal use” of many products comes, curiously enough, not from the inutility of the object itself, but from a change in the environment that demands replacement: as we replace our phones not simply because they do not work as such, but because new apps and devices and networks will not work with them.  As Baudrillard writes:[1]

We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession.  Today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grown to maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived the generations of human beings.

We can see this “ceaseless succession” everywhere.  It permeates not only the things with which we fill our homes, but often the houses themselves—whether they are apartments or condominiums or standalone structures, everywhere we see efforts to build new, to renovate, not only to fill but to integrate them with the latest technologies and amenities.  (This seems to deprive us of the very feeling of “home” in a way—can something ever-changing truly be a home?)

So too, it seems to permeate all our lives outside the house as well.  From traveling the globe to commuting to work, everything seems presented to us as an experience to be consumed.  How you travel—the music or podcast or videos you consume along the way—the beverage you drink on the way—the way you look in your car or on the train—all this belongs to the environment of consumerism.

The Environment of Consumerism

Put otherwise, we do not merely hold ourselves as consumers (conscious of the fact or not), but live in an environment that almost, as it were, forces us to be consumers.  We find ourselves compelled to purchase, and that these purchases are never simple but always complex.  Turning again to Baudrillard, we read:[2]

There is all around us today a kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods, and this represents something of a fundamental mutation in the ecology of the human species.  Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects.  Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather – on a rising statistical curve – with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages.

I believe a true insight is presented here.  The ecological shift to one dominated by objects works even in the pre-modern sense I prefer.  Though we are physically surrounded by realities, we do not perceive their reality.  Often, we do not even see other human beings as realities.  Celebrities are the most obvious example of this de-humanized perception: they are entertainment to be consumed—used up and forgotten.  It is not just as Baudrillard said, however, that we chiefly deal on the day-to-day with goods and messages, but rather that we reduce all things to the status of goods and messages (“information”).  There are no things behind that which we perceive as objects.  We never get beyond the surface.  Looking beyond the surface of something, after all, might show us it is not something simply to consume, but rather to preserve.

The constitution of our environments often go unnoticed.  We are habituated to them as “normal”.  I recall, as a child, the weekly shopping trip: often, it included Wal-Mart (where one could find both Legos and G.I. Joes, among other toys), Walden Books (purveyor of comic books), sometimes McDonald’s, and the video store to rent a movie or a Nintendo game.  I suspect this kind of regularity was shared by many children my age.  This is not to say that I always got something, but it was nevertheless a pattern that constituted the environment of my youth.

Now, with the dominance of Amazon (and all the other online retailers), purchases are always at our fingertips.  So too, entertainment.  We have made consumption frighteningly efficient.  Perhaps, the rate of our consumption does not even occur to us, given how fundamentally integrated it is into the environment of our lives.

Escape from Consumerism

It is one of the curiosities of the digital environment that, while it enables the consumerist mindset inherited from the material abundance of the twentieth-century to continue, it also offers us opportunities for more-human ways of interacting.  The medium of communication can re-establish personal connection—if we approach it the right way.  Our Philosophical Happy Hours are efforts to create such personal relationships.  This week, I think we can escape from the consumerist environment for a time through immersion in good conversation.  To facilitate our chat, I recommend reading this handful of pages from Baudrillard’s book and considering these questions:

• Are “environment” and “ambience” themselves today objects of consumption?  How can that be?  What signs indicate their commodification?
• Do we truly live today in a “throwaway” culture?  How do our behaviors of consumption conflict or contrast with the ideas (or ideologies) of recycling, renewability, sustainability?
• Baudrillard describes the abundance we observe in our large stores giving to us a sense of the “inexhaustible feast”.  What do we think when we walk in and see a gigantic pile of Coca-Cola boxes?  A large display of some boxed, pre-packaged good?  A clothing line or a set of books—in person or online?  How does the internet modulate this sense of abundance?
  • Are we all today “collectors” in some sense?  Do we find ourselves perhaps (accusing myself here) overly concerned with the aesthetics of completeness and uniformity in the things we purchase, such as sets of books?
• What does it really mean to be a consumer?

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[1] Jean Baudrillard 1970: The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (revised edition; Sage Publications, 2007), 43.

[2] Ibid.