In the first set of shots of the movie "Breakfast of Tiffany", Holly played by Audrey Hepburn stopped in front of the window of the Tiffany jewelry store for a long time, focusing on the glittering jewelry. What she only looked at was the jewelry itself, or the attributes attached to the consumer goods behind the jewelry. Whenever Holly was restless, she was facing the glitter of quiet and noble jewelry, and her melancholy mood swept away. Countless Holly-like girls on Fifth Avenue in New York are constantly influenced and even shaped by the consumer society created by these gorgeous luxury goods.
Valentine's Day, 618, Chinese Valentine's Day, Double Eleven, Double Twelve, Black Friday, all holidays are infected with the atmosphere of consumption, and merchants are reminding you, as consumers, that you should pay for these time nodes, and the atmosphere of tradition and holidays themselves is diluted by consumerism. When you finally clear your shopping cart, do you realize that your consumption is carefully created?
"Making Consumers"
So was the society 200 years ago so deeply influenced by consumerism? How did the consumer society penetrate into our lives omnipresent? Today, we have really become puppets of the consumer society and are they enslaved by consumption? French scholar Anthony Galuzzo's "Making Consumers" attempts to interpret how consumerism, business culture, and media communication jointly build today's consumer society and how to make us "consumers" by studying the evolution of consumption over the past two hundred years.
The gradual formation of the consumer society
What was the society like before the formation of the consumer society, how did the goods circulate, how did collective activities such as social interaction be carried out, and where did consumption begin to occupy the central position of society. Galuzo screened out precise and reliable cases from the voluminous materials, verified them in detail, and told us.
In a pre-capitalist economy, the significance of a product depends on its rarity, complexity and usefulness, which are characteristics related to production and circulation. Social production is also in the process of transitioning from self-sufficiency agricultural production, small workshop-style handicrafts and other decentralized production methods to large-scale production.
began to explore from the source of the formation of market economy . With the process of human industrialization, production has begun to be centralized and large-scale, and the rapid development of transportation and communication means, the circulation of food and other commodities has ushered in a major acceleration. Various raw materials are processed in a standardized manner, and the material begins to enrich, so that food, the most important means of living on which humans rely for survival, gradually moves away from the processing process of means of production. People eat pork but don’t know how pigs grow, domesticate, feed and slaughter and process them. The separation of production and consumption has led to people becoming increasingly unfamiliar with daily necessities. The circulation of
products promotes the division of labor. In the past, there was almost no communication between various independent small communities, but now people are starting to move around and interact with each other more and more frequently. The outdated production mentality gradually disappeared, the original collective social order fell apart, and with it the rise of autonomy, self-expressionism and individualism, the consumption mentality began to take root and sprout.
"Work, Consumption, New Poor "
British sociology master Zigmon Bowmann argued in his "Work, Consumption, New Poor": From the "producer society" to the "consumer society", correspondingly from a society guided by work ethics to a society dominated by consumer aesthetics. Both types of society have some members responsible for production, and obviously all members will consume as well. But the focus of society has shifted, which has also created huge differences in various aspects of society, culture and personal life.
Galuzo cited a very interesting example to illustrate the process of the formation of a consumer society. Before the 19th century, singing and dancing were activities with practical functions in peasant communities. People sing to add dynamic feeling to their work and improve work efficiency. Dance is given magical meaning and is even used as a ritual for praying for a prolific harvest. In the collectivist order, many dances are collective, with simple movements and easy to learn. They are rhythmic and suitable for the participation of the whole people. People who dance together are familiar with each other and have similar life backgrounds.By the 19th century, commercialization changed the way dance was, which no longer had the traditional collectivist and functionalist nature. The dance became more personal. Dance has become a paid service, and the dance venue completely separates producers and consumers. Through these changes, dance loses its functionality and no longer exists as a ceremony to protect villagers, encourage production or celebrate harvests, but becomes a happy, good-looking, interesting, and spontaneous hedonistic activity.
Balzac wrote in "Yusuer Miroe": Whether it is moral or economic perspective, people who only consume but do not produce are excluded. No one is allowed to occupy a position in the world without doing good or doing evil, because evil is also a kind of good, but the consequences are not revealed immediately. It can be regarded as the last afterglow of the producer's social aesthetics and values.
The birth of the brand and the rise of department stores
With the rise of industrialization, the issue of trust has become a prominent issue that people are concerned about. Why do people hand over control of production to large companies they don’t know? Products are separated from the circle of mutual trust and have lost their personalization. People cannot rely on direct social relations to confirm whether the product is worth the money as usual, and the trust relationship has undergone drastic changes.
In order to solve the trust problem, large companies have done a lot of work on their brands. The primary function of a brand is to give consumers a sense of security, rather than letting consumers feel that the products come from small workshops that are not trusted. Brands help consumers identify manufacturers and ensure product quality, so that consumers can quickly find the products they want among all kinds of products. Brands also prompt large companies to make big fuss about imagination and expression. A brand can show the characteristics of a product, and it can even connect an item to a certain place, a certain position, or a certain type of people. Brands use to Lenovo to influence people, and it incorporates a series of ideas and values into the product, which are essentially irrelevant to the product itself. This process is fetish, and even has a bit of religious feeling. The brand projects power and values in the form of totem.
Jean Baudrillard commented on this: Behind the products is the opacity of production relations and the reality of the division of labor. Opacity makes it impossible for people to grasp the true value of symbols, so they have to determine its exchange logic by symbolic meaning. This is the value of a brand, which achieves a kind of blended similarity between the characteristics of consumer objects and fetishism. The emergence of the
brand has also given rise to department stores as a place to showcase their brand image and flourish. Starting from the 19th century, due to the change in the relationship between production and consumption, citizens' demand for leisure in their lives increased day by day. Various beverage shops, cinemas, concert halls and art galleries swept the lives of citizens like mushrooms after a rain. Business has brought countless fun to people, and various large-scale leisure industries have turned the city into an amusement park. Department stores began to appear in Paris and other metropolitan cities in the second half of the 19th century. It is very different from the shops under the old business culture. In the United States and Western Europe , the previous stores were mostly small stores, and the stores were usually small and exquisite. The purpose is to let these small vendors share the market, rather than compete with each other. Department stores include all people's imagination of rich substances, where goods become a magical and independent treasure. During the period when fetishism was overwhelming, goods and labor were cut off, causing the illusion of consumers.
The luxurious marble, carpet and furniture in department stores are the backgrounds behind it, setting off the exquisiteness of the goods and immersing customers in an aristocratic atmosphere. In this atmosphere, some commodities that have no use value or exchange value are also given great symbolic value, as if purchasing them is to gain luxury and escape mediocrity.
Zola said: "The woman in the store is the queen. The store is like a temple of glory, celebrating her victory." The purpose of the
department store is to make women regard this place as the second home, even bigger, more beautiful and more luxurious than the home. All employees and business models here are designed to attract and retain women.
"The Cursed Part"
Back to the Tiffany Jewelry Store at the beginning of the article, George Bataille answered our question in "The Cursed Part": Jewelry is just beautiful and brilliant, and it can be done with alternative imitations: people prefer a diamond necklace, and the loss of wealth is essential to the charming features that make up the necklace. This fact should be associated with the symbolic value of jewelry, which is universal in psychoanalysis.
Media contributed to the consumer society
Since the 1890s, advertising has become the dominant source of commercial profits by print media. The publisher adopts a business model of lowering prices, which greatly increases sales and subscription volume and attracts more readers. The huge readership becomes a resource for sale, and advertisers pay to publish newspapers or magazines to spread their message. Balzac said in " Disillusioned " by Balzac, "Big property, friend! In less than ten years, the consumption of paper will increase ten times more than now. The luckiest thing in this era is journalism!" It indicates that Paris and Europe in the 19th century will be influenced by the media. The popularity of images and magazines has fueled the spread of consumerism and formed an irreversible trend. The emergence of the
magazine perfected the duality of images. The word magazine comes from "shop" (magasin), which originally meant a warehouse of goods. Magazine is like a warehouse on hand, similar to the liquidity of goods in the warehouse, and the images in the magazine are also flowing, constantly impacting the readers' vision and psychology.
At the end of the 19th century, it was spread through the media of magazines, allowing residents in remote areas to intuitively feel the world of flowers outside the villages and towns through images. Although most readers are still out of reach for expensive consumption materially and economically, magazines make shopping natural and ordinary, and people can easily see new things and new lives that were once unimaginable. At the same time, magazines will instill new vocabulary, new standards and new anxiety in people.
Anthony Galuzo pointed out incisively: Consumer freedom is nothing more than the freedom to choose among a bunch of things imposed by others.
The arrival of the 20th century, the emergence of movies has further aggravated the expansion of consumers' desires in the commercial society. In the 1940s, a study showed that 61% of the protagonists of Hollywood movies were rich people, even very rich, while only 0.05% of such people in the actual population. Hollywood movies generally carry the following three functions: consumer education, implantation of social imagination, and normalization of goods.
The history of the consumer society can be understood as the growth of images and entering the history of people's lives. In other words, the growth of consumption can be explained by the accelerated circulation of images. The spatial boundaries of human beings in the 21st century still exist, but they can travel the world through images to learn more. Emerging media are favored, and watching brings both happiness and knowledge. This spiritual journey allows consumers to learn the style grammar of goods. For merchants, the popularity of images makes ubiquitous products a universal symbol and language.
Zigmon Bauman also believes that if desires can be fully met without waiting, consumers' consumption capacity may far exceed the limitations of all innate and acquired needs, or exceed the limitations of the physical durability of consumer goods. The relationship between demand and meeting demand may be reversed: the expectation or expectation of satisfaction will precede the demand and will always be greater than the existing demand, but it will not be too big to make people lose their desires. In fact, the more unfamiliar the needs are, the more attractive they are. The unknown life experience you can obtain will bring a lot of fun.
In magazines and movies, the product represents the attitude of "modern" life, conveying its worldview, aesthetics, and imagination of beauty and happiness. These media enable merchants to induce people to perceive the meaning of goods, bring about cultural changes, and support the development of new behaviors and new forms of expression. In short, the media of communication with images as symbols gives merchants unprecedented influence.
The consumer is manufactured
Galuzzo has weaved a multi-dimensional, large-scale history of business economy and consumer society development and evolution for us through sociology, marketing , mass communication, cultural research and history. How people put the crown of consumers step by step on themselves, and what charming trajectory is clearly and fascinatingly presented to us.
Today, with the rapid development of technology, networks and algorithms have had a revolutionary impact on business logic, and a square LED screen is installed in a more comprehensive and richer product window than any department store. People have surpassed any previous era in terms of freedom of product selection. But do you think you have truly become the master of your consumption choices?
is a pity when you open any website or app. Enter any keyword you want to search for, and an invisible large network has been shrouded in by technology companies and commercial companies. The operator records your personal preferences through cookie and displays user portraits, so as to recommend products to you through big data and algorithms. You should have asked this question more than once, why do I just type in the air fryer on social media? When I visit shopping websites or grass planting websites, I will automatically associate the recommendation of different brands of air fryer on the page. My shopping psychology seems to be monitored and spyed all the time.
Now we have made a lot of impulse consumption. Is it our real needs or the consumption temptation created by commercial products? The moment we get pleasure in shopping has made the truth insignificant. Zigmun Bowman may be able to give us the answer: if you want to improve consumers' consumption capacity, you cannot let them rest. They need to constantly accept new temptations, continue to be in the endless excitement, continue to be in doubt and dissatisfaction. The bait that lures them to divert attention requires affirming this suspicion, and at the same time provides an outlet for catharsis: "Do you think this is all? The good show is still coming!"
seems that we have an exit mechanism for impulse consumption. The online second-hand trading platform provides us with an opportunity to take "regret medicine", and we can minimize the losses of impulse consumption. But it is difficult to guarantee that when we as sellers, we will not make new consumption on the platform when we transfer consumer products that have lost their satisfaction and show off. Thus, it falls into a cycle of continuous consumption.
There is a "Don't buy|Consumerist retrograde" group with 300,000 members of the group on Douban . The purpose of the group is: not to follow the trend blindly, not be swept by consumerism, and be a retrograde in the consumerist market! However, the ubiquitous short videos and streaming media are still engulfed by consumerism. The attitude of leaving behind and minimalist life may also be another way of consumption packaged by merchants. Haven’t you seen the expensive products launched by the so-called healthy life concepts such as fat-reducing packages and meal replacement sticks, which are still another manifestation of consumerism under the new consumption concept.
George Bataille has long pointed out in his famous Concept of General Expenditure: In any case, conspicuous expenses are still generally associated with it as the latest function of wealth. A certain evolution of wealth, its symptoms are of disease and exhaustion, leading to people's inner shame and stinginess. All generous, revelry and overdoing are gone: competitive themes that continue to influence individual activities develop in the dark, like a shameful hiccup .
Consumers are created in the "identity" of desire, material desire satisfaction, identity, class, etc. Everyone is determined to leave a good impression on others and always care about whether they are outstanding and mediocre. Self-esteem and image maintenance bring not only ambition, but also anxiety. Anxiety can only be displayed most intuitively through consumption and consumption quality.
"Philosophical Language of Modernity"
Habermas further elaborates on the views of Bataier in "Philosophical Language of Modernity"."He (Bataier) saw a profound contradiction in consumption: on one side, the labor necessary for life reproduction of , and on the other side, luxury and waste; this luxury consumption allows labor products to get rid of the inevitable areas of life, and then get rid of the dominance of metabolism, and is used for consumption. This is a non-productive form of consumption. From the economic perspective of a single commodity occupant, it is a loss, but it can at the same time realize and prove human autonomy and human real existence."
Is the commodity a tool to meet people's actual needs and psychological needs, or a magic weapon for conspiracy between the market and business. Whether people’s recognition of identity needs to be confirmed by becoming a “consumer”. Galuzo's book "Making Consumers" has given us a guide. Only when we travel through the fog and learn and explore where consumption and ourselves should be, can we find ways to get rid of consumerism's kidnapping. Only then can we become rational consumption people and become our true masters.
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