Product Description

This is the first English-language translation of Jean Baudrillard's contemporary classic on the sociology of consumption. Originally published in 1970, the book was one of the first to focus on the processes and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. At a time when others were fixated with the production process, Baudrillard could be found making the case that consumption is now the axis of culture. He demonstrates how consumption is related to the goal of economic growth and he maps out a social theory of consumption. Many of the themes that would later make Baudrillard famous are sketched out here for the first time. In particular, concepts of simulation and the simulacrum receive their earliest systematic treatment.

Written at a time when Baudrillard was moving away from both Marxism and institutional sociology, the book is more systematic than his later works. He is still pursuing the task of locating consumption in culture and society. So the reader will find here his most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure and anomie in affluent society. There is also a fascinating chapter on the body which shows yet again Baudrillard's extraordinary prescience in flagging the importance of vital subjects in contemporary culture long before his colleagues.

Baudrillard is widely acclaimed as a key thinker in sociology, communication and cultural studies. This book makes available to English-speaking readers one of his most important works. It will be devoured by the steadily expanding circle of Baudrillard scholars, and it will also be required reading for students of the sociology of culture, communication and cultural studies.

This edition is published with a long, specially prepared introductory essay written by the noted cultural commentator and social theorist, George Ritzer, author of The McDonaldization of Society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #117092 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
`The Consumer Society is the young Baudrillard at his best... a sociological study of the society of consumption of the finest order, this text continues to shed light on the subject and object of consumption, around which contemporary societies are organized' - Douglas Kellner, University of Texas

About the Author
Jean Baudrillard is the author of Symbolic Exchange and Death (1993), and most recently, The Perfect Crime (1997)

Customer Reviews

A Great Introduction to a General Theory of Consumption
Of Baudrillard's many books, The Consumer Society is a ground breaking work and a clear advance from Liberal and Marxist interpretation of the capitalist economy. Baudrillard deploys structural analysis to decode what he later develops into theories of simulation, hyperealty, among others. In the consumer society his approach is still grounded in structuralist and Marxian approaches.

Despite its academic approach, this is one of Baudrillard's most accessible works and, truthfully, a better place to start that his later work - Simulacra and Simulations - popularized by the Matrix.

His work really extends arguments made by Veblen, Galbraith and Vance Packard, with regard to consumption operating as a system of communicating social status. However, he develops these themes more systematically, borrowing from Barthian semiology to begin his development of a enlarged theory of consumption as a communication system with the power of reordering society toward a system based no longer on needs but desires. The result is a more thorough analysis and broader critique: it is a cornerstone work in the development modern consumer theory and the beginning of a psychology of consumption.

For Baudrillard, this is the start point to a fatalistic system whose telos is not some Hegel cum McLuhan universal spirit but one of catastrophe and implosion. A world where realty has been exchanged for an image or sign that increasing has no reference to the real.

Since consumer has been reordered from a firm basis of need to a slippery one based on desire, the consumer society is insatiable and superficial creating an unstoppable advance that Baudrillard believes can only end in catastrophe.

Baudrillard is a prolific writer and perhaps the most important social thinker of the past 20 or 30 years. I recommend this book as one of his most relevant and accessible texts.

Symbolic exchange
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.