SAARUTU Source Brief · Reference Library

The Consumer Society

Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation (1970), Chris Turner trans. (Sage, 1998)

Argument in one line. Consumption is not the appropriation of objects for use or enjoyment but a logic of signs and differences, a code that classifies persons and integrates society, and which functions as one and the same process with production; affluence is a myth that the society tells about itself, and its own moralizing critique is part of that myth.

Source file. Cited from the Sage 1998 reprint PDF. File-to-print offset is steady throughout: print page = PDF page − 13. All page references below are to Turner's printed pagination. Quotations are transcribed against the printed text; scan-spacing artifacts (line-break hyphenation, ligature glitches) are silenced while wording, punctuation, and emphasis are left as printed. Genuine source anomalies are preserved verbatim and flagged in the apparatus.

Quotation standard. This brief is built to serve as a full-quote reservoir: every load-bearing formulation is carried as a complete, page-anchored block quote that can be dropped into later writing or checked against the source. Paraphrase carries the move-structure (what is established, attacked, conceded, sequenced); block quotes carry the formulations. Where a concept is stated and then restated, extended, qualified, or reversed elsewhere in the work, each locus is quoted in its own place rather than collapsed to the clearest instance.

Version 1.1 · evidence-layer upgrade to the maximal full-quote standard. Re-pulled verbatim from the source every formulation previously carried as an embedded fragment; split every stitched multi-page citation into separate page-anchored quotes; added recurrence loci where a concept returns across the work (code/difference/language; consumed vs. real violence; the persistence of the puritan ethic; potlatch/destruction; the puritan-to-hedonist substitution; self-fulfilling prophecy; the ambivalence of desire). Move-structure, section order, apparatus, and finished prose preserved from v1.0 (started 21 Apr 2025). No quote in this brief was expanded from memory or inference: each was re-copied from the cited page of the source PDF.

Structure of the work (Turner's chapter numbering)

Part I · The Formal Liturgy of the Object: 1 Profusion · 2 Miraculous Status of Consumption · 3 Vicious Circle of Growth

Part II · The Theory of Consumption: 4 Social Logic of Consumption · 5 Towards a Theory of Consumption · 6 Personalization

Part III · Mass Media, Sex and Leisure: 7 Mass-Media Culture · 8 The Body · 9 The Drama of Leisure · 10 Mystique of Solicitude · 11 Anomie in the Affluent Society

Conclusion · On Contemporary Alienation, or the End of the Pact with the Devil

Apparatus · source anomalies & bibliographic note

What follows reconstructs the book by its own organizing structure, so the joints of the argument can be retrieved at speed. Baudrillard moves from description (the profusion of objects) to a theory (consumption as a code), then applies that theory across media, the body, leisure, service, and anomie, and closes on a meta-claim: that the consumer society is its own myth, and that the critique of consumption belongs to the myth. The book's recurring operation is to take a phenomenon that presents itself as natural (happiness, need, the body, free time, the smile) and show it to be a produced sign indexed to a system whose only end is its own reproduction. The decisive theoretical figure, stated late but governing throughout, is that need is not the need for an object but the need for difference, and that consumption is therefore unlimited because difference is.

Part I · The Formal Liturgy of the ObjectDescription: the object-environment as it presents itself

Chapter 1Profusion

The book opens descriptively, not theoretically. The first datum of the age of affluence is that humans are now surrounded not by other humans but by objects.

Consumer Society, p. 25

"Strictly speaking, the humans of the age of affluence are surrounded not so much by other human beings, as they were in all previous ages, but by objects. Their daily dealings are now not so much with their fellow men, but rather — on a rising statistical curve — with the reception and manipulation of goods and messages."

Consumer Society, p. 25

"Just as the wolf-child became a wolf by living among wolves, so we too are slowly becoming functional. We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession."

The chapter's epigraph is Marx on the London shop-windows, where the riches of the world are reduced to price-tags.

Consumer Society, p. 26

"The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and the laconic symbols £.s.d. This is how commodities are presented in circulation. (Marx)"

Profusion is first piling high, which is already more than quantity.

Consumer Society, p. 26

"There is something more in this piling high than the quantity of products: the manifest presence of surplus, the magical, definitive negation of scarcity, the maternal, luxurious sense of being already in the Land of Cockaigne."

Consumer Society, p. 26

"You buy the part for the whole. And this metonymic, repetitive discourse of consumable matter, of the commodity, becomes once again, through a great collective metaphor — by virtue of its very excess — the image of the gift, and of that inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterizes the feast."

Profusion is then organized into packages or collections, and here the first move of the whole book is made: the consumer relates not to the object in its utility but to a set of objects in its signification.

Consumer Society, p. 27

"And this changes the consumer's relation to the object: he no longer relates to a particular object in its specific utility, but to a set of objects in its total signification. Washing machine, refrigerator and dishwasher taken together have a different meaning from the one each has individually as an appliance."

Consumer Society, p. 27

"This is, then, no longer a sequence of mere objects, but a chain of signifiers, in so far as all of these signify one another reciprocally as part of a more complex super-object, drawing the consumer into a series of more complex motivations."

Consumer Society, p. 27

"They may, in certain cases, imitate disorder the better to seduce, but they are always arranged to mark out directive paths, to orientate the purchasing impulse towards networks of objects in order to captivate that impulse and bring it, in keeping with its own logic, to the highest degree of commitment, to the limits of its economic potential. Clothing, machines and toiletries thus constitute object pathways, which establish inertial constraints in the consumer: he will move logically from one object to another."

The synthesis of profusion and calculation is the drugstore, where culture is not prostituted but "culturalized," and where every order of merchandise becomes interchangeable signs.

Consumer Society, p. 28

"This is generalized neo-culture, where there is no longer any difference between a delicatessen and an art gallery, between Playboy and a treatise on palaeontology."

The drugstore can become a town. Parly 2 ("the biggest shopping centre in Europe") is described in its own promotional copy, including the credit card.

Consumer Society, p. 29

"Naturally, for those who want it, the centre has introduced the most modern style of payment: the 'credit card'. This frees shoppers from cheques or cash — and even from financial difficulties. To pay, you just show your card and sign the bill."

The chapter ends on the homogenizing "digest," where every once-distinct activity is blended into perpetual shopping and the symbolic function is abolished.

Consumer Society, p. 30

"Work, leisure, nature and culture: all these things which were once dispersed, which once generated anxiety and complexity in real life, in our 'anarchic and archaic towns and cities', all these sundered activities, these activities which were more or less irreducible one to another, are now at last mixed and blended, climatized and homogenized in the same sweeping vista of perpetual shopping. All are now rendered sexless in the same hermaphroditic ambience of fashion!"

Consumer Society, p. 30

"Just as the gods of all countries coexisted syncretically in the Roman Pantheon in an immense 'digest', so all the gods — or demons — of consumption have come together in our Super Shopping Centre, which is our Pantheon — or Pandaemonium."

Consumer Society, p. 30

"There is no longer any symbolic function, but merely an eternal combinatory of 'ambience' in a perpetual springtime."

Chapter 2The Miraculous Status of Consumption

The governing fable is the Melanesian cargo cult: natives built a simulacrum aeroplane of branches and creepers, lit a landing-ground, and waited for the real aircraft to descend (p.31). The beneficiary of the consumer miracle does the same.

Consumer Society, p. 31

"The beneficiary of the consumer miracle also sets in place a whole array of sham objects, of characteristic signs of happiness, and then waits (waits desperately, a moralist would say) for happiness to alight."

The thesis: consumption is governed by magical thinking, except that the operative belief is in signs rather than thoughts.

Consumer Society, p. 31

"consumption is governed by a form of magical thinking; daily life is governed by a mentality based on miraculous thinking, a primitive mentality, in so far as that has been defined as being based on a belief in the omnipotence of thoughts (though what we have in this case is a belief in the omnipotence of signs). 'Affluence' is, in effect, merely the accumulation of the signs of happiness."

The crucial qualification, made on the record, guards the analysis against being read as idealism: the society is first of all an order of production, with the order of consumption entangled in it.

Consumer Society, pp. 32–33

"This does not mean that our society is not firstly, objectively and decisively a society of production, an order of production, and therefore the site of an economic and political strategy. But it means that there is entangled with that order an order of consumption, which is an order of the manipulation of signs."

Consumer Society, p. 33

"the problem of the historical production of these significations and codes remains fully intact — that analysis having to articulate itself to the analysis of the process of material and technical production as its theoretical continuation."

The cargo myth is more alive in the West than in Melanesia, because abundance is experienced as a dispensation rather than as something produced.

Consumer Society, p. 32

"And so the cargo myth lives again in the West whereas it is declining in Melanesia. For even if abundance is becoming a banal, daily fact, it continues to be experienced as a daily miracle, in so far as it does not appear to be something produced and extracted, something won after a historical and social effort, but something dispensed by a beneficent mythological agency to which we are the legitimate heirs: Technology, Progress, Growth, etc."

The second movement is the news item [le fait divers]. Reality is consumed at the distance of the sign, and equally in cargo and in catastrophe.

Consumer Society, p. 33

"Cargo or catastrophe — in both cases, we have an effect of consumed vertigo."

Consumer Society, pp. 33–34

"The news item is thus not one category among others, but the cardinal category of our magical thinking, of our mythology."

Consumer Society, p. 34

"What mass communications give us is not reality, but the dizzying whirl of reality [le vertige de la realite]. Or again, without playing on words, a reality without the dizzying whirl, for the heart of Amazonia, the heart of reality, the heart of passion, the heart of war, this 'Heart' which is the locus of mass communications and which gives them their vertiginous sentimentality, is precisely the place where nothing happens. It is the allegorical sign of passion and of the event. And signs are sources of security."

The consumer's relation to the real is defined precisely between interest and indifference, and between knowledge and ignorance.

Consumer Society, p. 34

"The consumer's relation to the real world, to politics, to history, to culture is not a relation of interest, investment or committed responsibility — nor is it one of total indifference: it is a relation of curiosity. On the same pattern, we can say that the dimension of consumption as we have defined it here is not one of knowledge of the world, nor is it one of total ignorance: it is the dimension of misrecognition."

The locus of consumption is daily life, theorized as a closure that cannot bear itself without the simulacrum of the world.

Consumer Society, p. 35

"Everydayness as closure, as Verborgenheit, would be unbearable without the simulacrum of the world, without the alibi of participation in the world. It has to be fuelled by the images, the repeated signs of that transcendence. As we have seen, its tranquillity needs the vertiginous spin of reality and history. Its tranquillity requires perpetual consumed violence for its own exaltation. That is its particular obscenity. It is partial to events and violence, provided the violence is served up at room temperature."

Consumer Society, p. 35

"The TV image, like a window turned outside-in, opens initially on to a room and, in that room, the cruel exteriority of the world becomes something intimate and warm — warm with a perverse warmth."

The road accident is the exemplary "daily fatality," coupled with the weather forecast, and the chapter closes on the society's self-image.

Consumer Society, p. 36

"The crash is the finest exemplar of 'daily fatality'. If it is exploited with such passion, this is because it performs an essential collective function. The litany of road deaths is rivalled only by the litany of weather forecasts. In fact the two form a mythic couple — the obsession with the sun and the litany of death are inseparable."

Consumer Society, p. 36

"The consumer society sees itself as an encircled Jerusalem, rich and threatened. That is its ideology."

Chapter 3The Vicious Circle of Growth

This is the chapter densest with figures, and they travel, so they are carried whole. Collective expenditure met by third parties is tabulated in the prose (the original tables were removed; see apparatus).

Consumer Society, p. 37

"This proportion of collective expenditure meeting individual needs has risen from 13 per cent of total consumption in 1959 to 17 per cent in 1965. In 1965, the percentage of needs met by third parties was: • 1 per cent for food and clothing ('subsistence'); • 13 per cent for housing expenses, transport and communication networks ('the environment'); • 67 per cent in the fields of education, culture, sport and health ('protection and development of the person')."

Consumer Society, pp. 37–38

"The proportion of 17-year-olds in full-time education is 52 per cent: 90 per cent for the children of senior managers, professionals and teachers, less than 40 per cent for farmers and workers. In higher education, the chances of access for boys in the former category are more than 33 per cent, but only 1 or 2 per cent for the latter."

Consumer Society, p. 38 (E. Lisle)

"where social security alone is concerned, the ratio of contributions to total wage costs has risen from 23.9 per cent in 1959 to 25.9 per cent in 1967. Social security thus costs employed workers a quarter of their resources, it being fair to regard the so-called 'employers' contributions' as a deduction at source from workers' incomes, as is also the 5 per cent fixed-rate contribution. The total of these deductions is much higher than the sum deducted in income tax. Since the latter is progressive, but social security contributions and the fixed-rate contribution are regressive, the net effect of tax and other deductions is regressive."

The argumentative turn is the radical hypothesis: that redistribution's failure is not an anomaly but the system performing its real function.

Consumer Society, pp. 38–39

"Or should we, rather, formulate the radical hypothesis that the mechanisms of redistribution, which are so successful in preserving privilege, are in fact an integral part, a tactical element, of the power system — and hand in glove in that regard with the educational and electoral systems? There would then be no point deploring the repeated failure of a social policy: we should, rather, have to conclude that it was performing its real function to perfection."

Environmental nuisance. Growth generates nuisances whose correctives are themselves counted as growth.

Consumer Society, p. 39

"Does the flourishing mineral water industry permit us to speak of a real increase in 'affluence' since, to a large extent, it is merely a response to the deficient quality of urban water? And so on. We should never be done with listing all the productive and consumer activities which merely counteract internal nuisances generated by the system of growth. Once it has passed a certain threshold, extra productivity is almost entirely wiped out, swallowed up, by this homoeopathic treatment of growth by growth."

Consumer Society, p. 40 (E. Lisle)

"In short, the major cost of the consumer society is the sense of generalized insecurity it engenders."

Consumer Society, p. 41

"With 'dysfunctional' consumption, both individual and collective, rising more quickly than the 'functional', the system is basically becoming parasitic upon itself."

The Mystique of GNP. National accounting is a "white magic" of figures in which nuisances are entered positively.

Consumer Society, p. 41

"In this reference to mystique, we are speaking of the most extraordinary collective bluff on the part of modern societies — of an operation of 'white magic' on the figures which in reality conceals a black magic of collective bewitchment. We are speaking of the absurd gymnastics of accounting illusions, of national accounts. Nothing enters into these except factors which are visible and measurable by the criteria of economic rationality, and that indeed is the central principle of the magic. Research, culture and women's domestic labour are all excluded from these accounts on this basis, though certain things which have no business there do figure in them, merely because they are measurable."

Consumer Society, p. 41

"This is the logical result, expressed in figures, of the magical goal of production for its own sake: every article produced is sacralized by the very fact of its being produced. Every article produced is positive, every measurable thing is positive."

Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is read sociologically.

Consumer Society, p. 42

"It is, precisely, by its hidden defects, its balancing forces, its nuisances, and what seem like vices when compared with a rational system, that the real system prospers. Mandeville was accused of cynicism: it is the social order, the order of production, which is objectively cynical."

Waste. The chapter's most-cited material. Waste is not residual madness but a positive social function, the site where existence is felt.

Consumer Society, p. 43

"All societies have always wasted, squandered, expended and consumed beyond what is strictly necessary for the simple reason that it is in the consumption of a surplus, of a superfluity that the individual — and society — feel not merely that they exist, but that they are alive."

Consumer Society, p. 43

"In potlatch, for example, it is the competitive destruction of precious goods which sets the seal on social organization. The Kwakiutl sacrifice blankets, canoes, etched 'coppers', which they burn or throw into the sea to 'maintain their rank,' to assert their value."

Baudrillard stages Valéry's economy of foresight against the Nietzsche–Bataille economy of expenditure, quoting both at length.

Consumer Society, p. 44

"When one contemplates piles of imperishable foodstuffs, is one not looking at time in hand and activity spared? A box of biscuits is a whole month of idleness and life. Pots of conserves and fibre baskets stuffed with seeds and nuts are a storehouse of quietude; a whole winter of tranquillity lies hoarded up in their aroma … Robinson Crusoe could smell the presence of the future in the coffers and chests in his store-room. His hoard radiated idleness." (Valéry)

Consumer Society, p. 44

"Physiologists should think again before positing the 'instinct of preservation' as the cardinal drive in an organic creature. A living thing wants above all to discharge its force: 'preservation' is only a consequence of this. Beware of superfluous teleological principles! The entire concept 'instinct of preservation' is one of them … The 'struggle for existence' — this formula refers to an exceptional situation; the rule is much rather the struggle for power, the ambition to have 'more' and 'better' and 'quicker' and 'more often'." (Nietzsche, The Will to Power [Fragment 650])

The structural question is posed through King Lear (II.iv): survival or meaning.

Consumer Society, p. 44

"one of the fundamental problems posed by consumption is the following: do human beings organize themselves for purposes of survival, or in terms of the individual or collective meaning they give to their lives? Now, this value of 'being', this structural value may involve the sacrifice of economic values. And this problem is not metaphysical. It is at the centre of consumption and may be expressed as follows: does not affluence ultimately only have meaning in wastage?"

The Soviet dacha names the "something more" of symbolic value that mere appropriation can carry when it is "extra" (pp.44–45). The hero of consumption (after Riesman and Morin) supplants the hero of production.

Consumer Society, pp. 45–46

"The great exemplary lives of self-made men and founders, pioneers, explorers and colonizers, which succeeded those of saints and historical figures, have today given way to the lives of movie stars, sporting or gambling heroes, of a handful of gilded princes or globe-trotting barons — in a word, the lives of great wastrels (even if the imperative is often that they be shown, by contrast, in their daily 'simplicity', doing their shopping, etc.). With all these great dinosaurs who fill the magazines and TV programmes, it is always the excessiveness of their lives, the potential for outrageous expenditure that is exalted. Their superhuman quality is the whiff of potlatch that attaches to them."

Consumer Society, p. 46

"Like them, indeed, they are never so great as when, like James Dean, they pay for this elevated position with their lives."

Modern wastage has lost potlatch's symbolic and collective significance; the star's gown is caricatured by "disposable panties," and production itself is oriented toward death.

Consumer Society, p. 46

"The caricature of the magnificent dress which the star wears for just one evening are the 'disposable panties' which, 80 per cent viscose and 20 per cent non-woven acrylic, can be put on in the morning and thrown away at night, and need no washing."

Consumer Society, p. 46

"What is produced today is not produced for its use-value or its possible durability, but rather with an eye to its death, and the increase in the speed with which that death comes about is equalled only by the speed of price rises. This alone would be sufficient to throw into question the 'rationalistic' postulates of the whole of economic science on utility, needs, etc. Now, we know that the order of production only survives by paying the price of this extermination, this perpetual calculated 'suicide' of the mass of objects, and that this operation is based on technological 'sabotage' or organized obsolescence under cover of fashion. Advertising achieves the marvellous feat of consuming a substantial budget with the sole aim not of adding to the use-value of objects, but of subtracting value from them, of detracting from their time-value by subordinating them to their fashion-value and to ever earlier replacement."

The chapter peaks on the Accident, then states the destruction thesis that the whole of Part I has been building toward.

Consumer Society, p. 47

"'Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!' Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but — without doubt much more deeply than this — by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic 'happening', the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation)."

Consumer Society, p. 47

"The consumer society needs its objects in order to be. More precisely, it needs to destroy them. The use of objects leads only to their dwindling disappearance. The value created is much more intense in violent loss. This is why destruction remains the fundamental alternative to production: consumption is merely an intermediate term between the two. There is a profound tendency within consumption for it to surpass itself, to transfigure itself in destruction. It is in destruction that it acquires its meaning. Most of the time in daily life today, it remains subordinate — as a managed consumptivity — to the order of productivity. This is why, most of the time, objects are present by their absence, and why their very abundance paradoxically signifies penury. Stock is the excessive expression of lack and a mark of anxiety. Only in destruction are objects there in excess and only then, in their disappearance, do they attest to wealth."