The meaning of consumption?

the significance of Baudrillard's theory to the study of consumer culture

1.

Jean Baudrillard was an outstanding thinker in the French ideological circle after the 197s. His theory almost overthrew the Frankfurt School's theoretical method of criticizing capitalist mass culture before World War II, and analyzed the ideological essence of advanced capitalist consumer society culture from a brand-new perspective.

Baudrillard was born in a civilian family in the northeast of France in 1929. He taught German in a public middle school in the early 196s. In 1962-1963, he published literary comments on Calvino and others in New Times, edited by Sartre. He also translated the German works of Brecht and others and a theoretical work on the Third World Revolution. In 1963, he published a photo album (he was also a photographer). In March, 1966, he studied under the famous modernity scholar Henri Lefebvre at the University of Paris V, and completed the sociology thesis "Three Cycles of Sociology". In the same year, he worked as a teaching assistant at the University of Paris V.. After Sartre's influence, Baudrillard got to know roland barthes in 196s, and was influenced by Barthes semiotics. In 1968, his first theoretical work, The System of Things, was obviously a reference to the analytical method of roland barthes's The System of Fashion. After that, Baudrillard published a series of theoretical and creative works, including Consumer Society (197), Critique of Symbolic Political Economy (1972), Mirror of Production (1973), Symbolic Association and Death (1976), Simulation and Imitation (1978) and so on. 1

From Baudrillard's works, his theoretical background is mainly the combination of Marxism and semiotics. The Marxist background benefited from participating in the writing of the left-wing publications Utopia and Passage during the period of Nantes University. The semiotic background comes from Barthes. As he himself said, he did use Marxist analytical methods, but to a great extent he combined them with other methods, such as semiotics and psychoanalysis.

in Baudrillard's view, Marx's analytical method first showed the analysis of things based on production, but later it changed into the analysis of the relationship between things and symbols. According to the analysis of Marxism, the capitalist production before the 19th century mainly lies in the process of capital-production-products, and then returns to the circulation of capital, which produces surplus value or excess profit through the appreciation of goods (articles) produced by workers.

But the basic production process analyzed by Marx has actually added many more subdivided capital-production links after the post-industrial society, and these links can have a direct effect on the ideology of civil society alone. For example, advertising, advertising capital accounts for a certain proportion of investment capital in any big company today. Moreover, due to the influence of advertising and corporate brand strategy, global companies such as Coca-Cola and McDonald's have gained more excess profits. However, this kind of profit has nothing to do with Marx's traditional analysis of product production and sales, at least it does not directly come from industrial workers.

After a century-old enterprise with enduring capitalism has gained global fame, global enterprises such as Disneyland can even sell product models, trademarks and brand names to other countries and regions for the use of corporate branding or copying licenses, so that they can obtain excess profits without their own production process. This phenomenon of transnational capitalism is also outside the vision of traditional Marxist production process analysis.

Baudrillard started with the emerging links in such a post-industrial society, and what he conducted can actually be regarded as a semiotic analysis of commodities. Baudrillard's post-capitalist production is becoming more and more important, and it is also the missing link of Marxist economic analysis, which is actually symbolic capital or symbolic capital. On the visual level, Baudrillard called it Simulacra.

2.

In Baudrillard's view, today's cities are no longer places of politics and industry like those in the 19th century, but places where symbols, media and symbols are produced. Although this judgment is extreme, it also reveals the essence of post-industrial society and culture in a sense. Different from traditional cultural critical theorists, Baudrillard has always been sensitive to emerging cultures in consumer and media society, such as supermarkets, advertisements, popular cool culture, blockbusters and live TV broadcasts. Even like the live TV broadcast of the Gulf War, he can talk about it from a surreal perspective. Baudrillard holds that the question is not whether people are for or against war, but whether people are for or against "the reality of war". Because the "people-to-people contact" mode of war in the United States and the influence of public opinion by using the media system are more like a virtual war with video games and TV news performances, and the real significance of war on the battlefield has disappeared.

therefore, Baudrillard has always emphasized the concepts of surrealism and Simulation. He emphasized that in the post-industrial consumption society, the real significance of commodities is also disappearing, and the "imitation" cultural consumption of commodities occupies an important essence, and people's consumption of commodities is not necessarily entirely the consumption of commodity practicality. For example, young people are constantly promoting a new way of wearing because of advertisements and fashion magazines, so they buy cosmetics and clothes and dress up according to that image.

Baudrillard's theoretical significance lies in the fact that in the consumer society, if people only consume functional practicality, it means that they have to face a sense of nothingness in material consumption and working for material gain. The vitality of consumer capitalism lies in its transformation of material consumption into an ideological aesthetic consumption, just as advertising is actually not a way to tell more people that such a product is practical. In the era of developed capitalism, advertising is actually creating a consumer culture. It must put a car with a group of successful handsome white-collar workers, or combine a mobile phone with the love details of a pair of lovers for visual narrative, so that advertising can lure customers to pay for goods or make money to buy them. At this point, consumer cars are actually consuming car culture. We should consider practicality when buying a car. But what kind of car we buy is actually influenced by the lifestyle scenes and images of using cars in advertisements, fashion magazines, a popular movie or a popular song MTV.

if we say that buying a car is only influenced by consumer fashion and advertising when choosing the type, then if a car is not broken, we will change it because the style is old. In many areas of pure mass cultural consumption, such as movies, music, literature, design and various soap operas, advertisements, fashion media and popular tastes have had an impact on customers before products.

In the consumer society, various means of cultural narration and visual art are used to construct consumer ideology. What Baudrillard wants to emphasize is that the parody culture has actually dominated our survival significance and ideology in the consumer society. He cited the example of Disneyland. He regards Disney as a kind of "surreal" parody culture. In Disneyland, he thinks that the boundary between truth and simulacra has been blurred in the depths of our ideology, and that truth is imitated to be extremely "real" and it is a kind of surrealism. In fact, from a philosophical point of view, consumer ideology culture is not only embodied in the advertising link of commodity marketing and publicity, but also manifested in the fact that the modern history of capitalist production and consumption of commodities has formed a ubiquitous cultural environment, as well as a sense of history and aesthetic consciousness.

Baudrillard's theory tries to prove that we first experience the image of that commodity and the life interest of using that commodity, and then make clear the meaning of our relationship with that commodity and the image of our own subject before we buy that commodity. It's like after movies and soap operas have a history, our ideology is already confused about whether movies are imitating life or life is imitating movies. In the post-capitalist era, at least consumer culture is actually in a cycle in which life needs and consumer ideology create and produce each other.

once consumer goods are in the realistic historical cycle of our daily needs and ideological experience, the images and meanings of consumer goods themselves become the ideological representations of art and philosophy. At the level of representations, the real representations and the quasi-real imitations are inseparable from each other. All intermediaries with consumption as the core, such as capital, commodities and trading patterns, will enter our subjective consciousness and affect our subjective feelings. The exhibition "Feeling Money" planned by Gao Ling and Ulrica in 22 was actually an earlier attempt to discuss the influence of capital and commerce on our ideological subjectivity through commodity consumption in China.

3.

Baudrillard's iconicity theory and consumption ideology analysis are of great methodological significance to the visual study of culture. In the history of art, andy warhol's canned coke, the simulated sculpture of Audenberg's giant industrial goods, and Jeff Koons's reproduction of consumer goods are actually visual representations of a commodity at the level of "imitation".

In the 199s, the process of urbanization and commercialization of cities in China also made many young artists reflect and express consumer culture. In particular, artists in Guangdong, such as Zheng Guogu, show young people imitating the lifestyle of Hong Kong underworld; Yong Yang and Yangfan show that after mainland girls go to the south, women's images quickly go local, and the sense of historical nothingness goes away in the commercial environment; Weng Fen shows the totem-like appearance of high-rise buildings symbolizing modernization.

These works unconsciously reflect the influence of consumer culture on the new generation in China. In fact, many young people in the mainland have already established the appearance of consumer capitalism and their yearning for it based on movies, TV plays and various fashion magazines in capitalist countries such as Hong Kong, the United States, South Korea and Japan before they come into contact with modernization and advanced consumer society. After many mainland girls went to the south, they began to repackage themselves quickly according to the images of movies, TV shows and fashion magazines. These phenomena actually reflect the influence of consumer ideology on China, and in a sense, it has replaced the influence of political ideology on China society in the past. Especially under the influence of consumer culture, the locality of urban culture in China is disappearing, urban architecture, entertainment culture and youth cool culture are converging, and they are becoming more and more Americanized or Korean-Japanese. These are all topics that contemporary art and cultural criticism need to face.

Therefore, Baudrillard's theory not only contributes to the methodological reference and inspiration of China's cultural criticism of art, but also contributes to the analysis of post-colonial ideology.