This paper would concentrate on the theory of consumption, destruction of sign dimension in an expansive hyperreal mediation era in the contemporary world space. Deeply influenced by noted theorist Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Everyday Life in the Modern World’ (1962) eminent French poststructuralist Jean Baudrillard started believing that production no longer determines consumption or resultantly the social structure, transcending earlier dominant notion of modernization that mass production determines mass consumption [as we have heard from Prof Mihir Bhattacharya that half of the funds for making of Titanic spent in its promotion beyond the production]. But looking at the situationist movement in France in late sixties, which declared that modern societies ceased to produce any meaning and became passive reducing structural social [conventional, ritual, ethnographic, other socio-cultural matrices] language into consumption of sign or sign of consumerism, Jean Baudrillard proposed something unique in his theory of consumption. He distinguished the era of media commerciality as the inevitable phase of outright consumption beyond Marxist notion of capitalist commodification and even postmodernist consumerist fetishism, would now be the basis of social order in the coming time syntax. Though later felt the situationalist movement wrong, with a counter belief that capitalism, despite massive exploitation, does not still intercept participation but encourages it for further exploitation devaluating the dignity of labour at the same time. The problem, he located that people nowadays participate with [marketed] signs and sign networks and not with each other. Our interactions with one another are suppressed and displaced by external dominance of media commercialism. Here he transcended the traditional Marxist proposition of collective consumption approach [which was earlier derived solely in terms of production] and situationalists as well, saying that "Consumption [in a social periphery] even in the contemporary globe is sufficiently an active form of relationship, a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system".
‘Buying into a category of the market increase consumption, yet also begin to define the nature of the individual choice’. But the problem mounts in the contemporary globalist market expansion when choice, behind the consumption process, becomes the ideology of consumption which is often imposed on us, as given, like all other belief systems or ideologies and often appears very much dominant beyond all earlier fetishes of consumption. Fetish in his opinion is to belong to the postmodern consumer society. People however nowadays follow the choice given to them. In all facets of neo-capitalist development, i.e. growth in service sector, insurance boom, growing volatility in the stock market, substantial reduction in planned investment and saving, boom in jingoistic cinemas, dangling of all-round spectacle, mass people face unprecedented quantum of choice beyond all individuated spaces and senses of emancipation.
In this course media would doubtlessly be the social formulator. While mirroring the McLuhun’s proposition of Global Village, where explosion of technology is related to the implosion of understanding, into his theory of consumption Baudrillard has proposed that consumption [implosion] mirrors the explosion of information. In his words, it is true that we consume more products because of information, but it is more important to realize that we consume information. Consuming mere information creates an even greater illusion of technological explosion. However, when we consume information alone, we are consuming less and less meaning.
The above connotation grossly signifies the transformation of socio-political, socio-cultural orders into a hyperreal space [domain] where information rules over the basic information category of the product, ‘market’ and ‘self’, along with solitary but supreme identity, as ‘consumer’, that leads to generate a cognizant space for implosion [more about the information than buying product outright]. The ‘Shopping Malls’, ‘departmental stores’, amusement parks, water resorts, FM radios, ‘Best-Seller’ books and other new media mirror the explosion of technology and information and create a huge but hyperreal space for the self to implode something larger than the reality. In his words discussing Europe’s largest shopping mall PARLY-2, Jean Baudrillard said that, "Here we are at the heart of consumption as the total organization of everyday life, as a complete homogenization". In this process people become gradually engrossed into the information-mediation process where explosion of information neutralizes information and implosion of meaning starts immediately, therefore reveals 3rd - 4th…the infinite order of signification beyond classical social orders and all earlier state-oriented statistical denotivity of consumption and utility patterns.
The prime instrumental or driving langue pattern, here, what Baudrillard prefers, is ‘packaging’ because more information of the dominated information-order destroys ‘communication’ and ‘social’ as a ‘system’ and ceases producing meaning i.e. in Baudrillard’s version ‘staging of communication’. Thus packaging has become importantly the only morphology of the ‘produced’. Packaging naturally corrupts all earlier meaning making processes [communication] of information and meaningful mediation of sign dimension, thus leads to a complete destruction of meaning i.e. sign dimension, as he defines it, ‘catastrophe of meaning’. Such destruction leaves over only individual ‘fascination of choice’ [resulted from the neutralization of meaning] that reduces everything into some statements towards titillation, obscenity and pornography.
Thus as packaging of information explodes along with the explosion of media, it devours the traditional space of systemic derivation of meaning, and resultantly destroys public sphere and finally social structures. Media explode thus only packaging of the ‘produced’ that has a powerful branded [image making] effect on the individual consumer. Baudrillard while entitling it as ‘media invasion’ affirms that such media invasion would completely decompose both public and private spheres of life and produce something more real than the existing real e.g. fictions like, soap operas, reality shows, gambling programmes, even some of interviews etc. that let every individual simulate infinitely. Artlessness, worthlessness of such media contents hardly matter to any individual as he/she shows least interest to derive a systemic meaning while they watch them. Hyperreality dissolves the older oppositional [dialectical] systems of meaning. Fictions become more real to the individual privatized consumer and ‘real’ becomes fictitious. In this way the ‘mass’ in terms of mediation, as Baudrillard considers, makes no sense of culture; they get it from media to only become stimulated by it.
The most dangerous outcome of such hyperreal mediation, what Baudrillard considers, is that these consumers are not to be considered anyway the ‘victim’ of [classical Marxist notion of] commodification. Masses get a hyperreal meaningless image from media and it works immediately on the behavioural development but ultimately it again [further] frees the mass from being systemic in behaviour i.e. right-wrong-obscene, good-bad-evil-notorious etc. Therefore hyperreal mediation devours the classical distinction between every two class identities and a sense of class struggle.
So we live in a world, in which, prime relational aspect stands between mediated contents [advertisements, propagations] and individual self. We consume ad-meanings to ‘philosophize’ life; make social order, try to achieve optimum freedom of self beyond traditional social-democratic pattern or order and finally reject that mediated information for further information. Only job remains, is to get more and more information and less and less meaning. No freedom lies therefore beyond this act. We have become proletariatized regardless of our class existence and identity, even though such conclusive statement may appear quite pessimistic in terms of temporality.
Reference:
(1) Jean Baudrillard: The system of Objects, London, Verso;
(2) Jean Baudrillard: The Mirror of Production. St. Louis: Telos Press.
