The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures

By Jean Baudrillard

Book Overview

Jean Baudrillard's classic text was one of the first to focus on the process and meaning of consumption in contemporary culture. Originally published in 1970, the book makes a vital contribution to current debates on consumption. The book includes Baudrillard's most organized discussion of mass media culture, the meaning of leisure, and anomie in affluent society. A chapter on the body demonstrates Baudrillard's extraordinary prescience for flagging vital subjects in contemporary culture long before others. This English translation begins with a new introductory essay.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1473982383
• ISBN13: 9781473982383
• Release Date: March 2017
• Publisher: Sage Publications Ltd
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

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.