Hedonistic Consumerism: From Want-Satisfaction To Whim-Satisfaction
Andrea Migone
Department of Political Science
Simon Fraser University
Markets, Consumption And Consumerism Consumption is an integral part of social and biological life. Consumption is necessary for human beings to sustain themselves, to develop the skills and abilities that allow them to function in society, and is fundamental in the running of the economic system. In fact, markets developed, by and large, as a response to these needs: they constitute an efficient way of producing and allocating the goods and services that are required to satisfy them. Consumption aimed at the healthy development of the physical, intellectual and emotional spheres of human beings should be an inherent right for all persons. I propose that, for the purpose of our analysis, we define as human consumption the level of goods and services that are required to satisfy these needs.
A different aspect of consumption is its degeneration into consumerism: accepting that it is through the possession and/or consumption of increasing quantities of products that human beings can achieve self-development and self-fulfillment. It is a non-referential process, as Bauman notes: “Consumer society and consumerisms are not about satisfying needs not even the more sublime needs of identification or self-assurance as to the degree of ‘adequacy’. The spiritus movens of consumer activity is not a set of articulated, let alone fixed, needs, but desire” (2001: 13). Commodification is now, as noted by Lukács (1971), diffused across all classes and represents the defining moment of capitalist relations. Increasingly, the elements of human action are brought into the arena of consumption and reified as consumer goods (Hennessy 2000).
Even if we do not fully subscribe to the notion that the structure of consumer society dictates consumption patterns through the creation of cultural models that foster consumerism, while propagandizing ‘free consumer choice’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972; Marcuse 1964), even if we recognize that advertising is not an all powerful determinant of consumer behaviour, but only a party to the shaping of consumer attitudes (Bauman 2001; Ohmann1996) still we are returned to the question of why so much of societal interaction is expressed through consumption. There is, I argue, a tendency in capitalism to manipulate consciousness through culture and desire. This manipulation is not the final determinant of all consumption choices, but it cannot be dismissed out of hand, in the same way in which the material referents of consumerism cannot be explained away by assuming the irrelevance of socio-economic structure on micro-economic activity as is often the case in unsophisticated liberal economic thought.
