From the System of Objects to the Consumer Society Jean Baudrillard was born in the.By Jean Baudrillard Originally published in French by Editions Galilee 1981 < CONTENTS > The Precession of Simulacra History: A Retro Scenario Holocaust. Jean Baudrillard The Consumer Society Myths And. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, . Myths and Structures, . Baudrillard-the consumer. In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard concludes by extolling. Kellner, Douglas, 1989a, Jean Baudrillard. Preview the PDF version of this entry. Baudrillard-The Consumer Society.pdf (890. Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) first emerged as an important theorist of consumption and the consumer society. Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society. Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard: pedagogy in the consumer society. Trevor Norris explores the contribution of Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard to our appreciation of the consumer society and education. Contents: introduction . Republic Book II, 3. We can’t let the terrorists stop us from shopping. George Bush, September 2. We can observe just how much our society has become a consumers’ society even within the last fifty years by considering that during World War II the Western world was called upon to demonstrate restraint and reduce their spending habits, while following September 1. Furthermore, we can observe that advertising and marketing to youths is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, and that over $1. Generation Y” in 2. The above quotation suggest that this danger was recognized as far back as ancient Greece; Socrates displays an understanding of the distinction between a healthy and . It is essential to address the growing prevalence of consumerism: Benjamin Barber asserts that the proliferation of Western consumerism and commercial values constitute a new “soft” power of “Mc. World’s assiduously commercialized and ambitiously secularist materialism”, which is responsible for breeding violent expressions of anti- Western sentiments and thereby “inadvertently contribute to the causes of terrorism.”. Through the lens of two contemporary philosophers, this paper will connect the progressive acceleration of Western consumerism and its manifestation within — and the complicit role of — modern formal educational practices. The twentieth century philosophers Hannah Arendt and Jean Baudrillard are rarely connected, yet there are significant areas of overlap regarding their account of consumerism and our consumers’ society. Both explain the recent trend of making what is private become public: Baudrillard describes this as making the private . Secondly, both observe that human relations have been altered and are increasingly mediated by objects. For Baudrillard this entails an eclipse of reality, while for Arendt it entails a loss of the polis and life in the public realm. Hannah Arendt opens The Human Condition with a description of Sputnik, an exemplar for all that is wrong and dangerous in modernity. The passengers on this “earth- born object made by man”. For Arendt, this event, a “rebellion against human existence as it has been given”. This rebellion means the loss of the polis and erosion of speech, in which we “adopt a way of life in which speech is no longer meaningful,” and “move in a world where speech has lost its power.”. Just as we come to inhabit the realm of the human artifice, so too do we dwell in the realm of signs, symbols, and simulations. Baudrillard’s original work in semiotics will provide a new analysis of consumer society, and help explain how communication structures and sign systems can preserve consumer society long after speech has been drained of its power and meaning. After a brief review of the first analysts of consumerism, I will consider Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Arendt outlines her key ideas regarding the polis, the oikos, and the three central human actions (labor, work, and action), and documents the historical ascent of the oikos to a place of political dominance such that the polis is undermined. I will then turn to Jean Baudrillard and consider his theory of the ascent of consumerism and the proliferation of signs. This will reveal a shortcoming in Arendt: although she does discuss communication and . Next, I will consider the consequences of this ascent: the loss of the polis in Arendt, and loss of . Unlike Baudrillard, while Arendt documents the ascent of the social realm and loss of the world through worldly alienation, she leaves a way out- natality and political action- and maintains a vision of politics which celebrates the possibilities and potentialities of action. Lastly, I will consider the political implications of consumerism within the realm of education . Corporate inroads into this realm have turned education into both an extension of the economy through the demand that education serve the dictates of the marketplace and its demand for economic growth, and through the inroads of advertising and marketing into youth culture within the educational environment. Arendt and Baudrillard will reveal that when our political realm is dominated by signs and images of consumption, when our schools are subverted by consumerism, reality is eclipsed and our public realm is compromised. Rise of consumerism. Before turning to Baudrillard and Arendt, a brief discussion of the rise of consumerism and its first analysts will be considered in order to set the historical context of our modern consumers’ society. Engaged with problems associated with the process of industrialization in the early nineteenth century, Karl Marx focused primarily on human labor and the material conditions of production, and did not extensively address consumption or the communication of symbolic meaning through the process of cultural signification. Furthermore, as we will see, Marx was unable to consider the extent to which signs and symbols could become commodities themselves just as much as the use- object. Yet power dynamics and social control are just as important regarding the development and regulation of signs; the control of the mode of signification is as important as the mode of production. Perhaps because of rising affluence and an expanding middle class, consumerism began to emerge towards the turn of the century as a social and political concern. It became an important topic of study to such sociologists as Thorstein Veblen, George Simmel and perhaps most notably Max Weber. In The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. While it may be the case that the early stages of modern capitalism was characterized by these values, Jean Baudrillard reveals that this account is limited in its ability to articulate the problems of modern consumer society: capitalism must unleash the desire to spend. It must advocate hedonism, not Puritanical self- denial. Simmel and Veblen described the extent to which consumerism arose as an attempt to mark oneself off as different from others so as to enable one to establish and express a distinct social identity. This emerged in response to the growing homogenizing forces of mechanization and technology caused by industrialization, and the implications of urbanization and crowding. In contrast to Weber’s theory of Puritanical self- restraint, people began to consume as a principal mode of self- expression; consumerism became a common language through which we . This pattern accelerated after World War II, such that the second half of the twentieth century has witnessed an unprecedented growth of consumerism, and the experience of participation and membership in society today is increasingly contingent on habits of consumption. As Mc. Laren and Leonardo state in their essay on Baudrillard, “. Because production is alienating, we seek fulfillment in consumerism; yet consumerism itself in turn has become a deeply alienating experience. Hannah Arendt: consuming the polis. Hannah Arendt provides a theoretical framework to explain how the public realm has been eroded by the emergence of the private forces of production and consumption and the ensuing eclipse of politics. Yet there is a great deal of misunderstanding of Arendt, particularly regarding her public/private distinction, which leads to a misreading of Arendt as a liberal. She is therefore thought to emphasize the importance of protecting the private sphere of free, rights- bearing, rational autonomous agents, who engage in politics only so as to preserve their privacy. However, Arendt’s distinction between public and private is grounded in what she terms the “ontological roots” of the three activities of human life, the corresponding three “conditions” of human existence. She terms these the “basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man . This distinction and these activities constitute the central themes of her best known work, The Human Condition and provide the conceptual structure Arendt uses to explain the rise of our consumers’ society. Labor is grounded within “the human condition of life”, the biological life- process to which we are bound by virtue of being human, compelled to submit to and preoccupy ourselves with self- preservation and species- preservation. Labor is the private activity that provides for the biological continuation of life, in which the human body “concentrates on nothing but its own being alive.”. It is the activity in which we are irrevocably bound to the unending cyclical process of production and consumption, the “two stages through which the ever- recurrent cycle of biological life must pass.”. However, Arendt does not simply condemn labor or the private realm: rather, labor is considered an essential human activity, and the oikos respected as a place where we can feel “sheltered against the world”. We are pulled into the cyclical process of production and consumption and exist in a “mere togetherness”. Action expresses our highest potentialities and possibilities, through which we are known by others, disclose our uniqueness, and participate in something larger than ourselves. A life without action “is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men . It is through action that our identity and our uniqueness can be disclosed and made known to others, through which we “insert ourselves into the human world.”. This human world Arendt calls the . The polis is where we not only differentiate ourselves from others, but also differentiate between “activities related to a common world and those related to the maintenance of life”.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2017
Categories |